Martin Luther King Jr.

Works

• 1958Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story

  Account of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56; the chapter “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” traces his path through Thoreau, Rauschenbusch, Marx and Nietzsche to Gandhi, then to Niebuhr’s objections and his Boston teachers, and sets out six principles of nonviolent resistance.

• 1963Letter from Birmingham Jail

  Written in jail in April 1963 in reply to eight white clergymen who had called the protests “unwise and untimely”: a defence of nonviolent direct action, of the distinction between just and unjust laws, and a reproach to the “white moderate” who prefers order to justice.

• 1967Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

  His last full-length book, written amid the debate over Black Power: it rejects separatism and violence, Fanon’s included, and calls for a guaranteed income, economic justice and a coalition of the poor across racial lines.

Position

King is on the map as a leading theorist and practitioner of nonviolent resistance after Gandhi. In “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” he traced his path: Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience, the social gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch, a reading of Marx whose materialism he rejected and Nietzsche’s attack on Christian love, until Gandhi, whose ideas he took up after a lecture by Mordecai Johnson in 1950, showed him how love could become a social force; Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism about collective sin then became an objection he had to answer, and in Boston he studied Hegel’s dialectic and the personalism of his teachers. The “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963) draws on Socrates, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Martin Buber: a just law squares with the moral law, segregation degrades persons into things, and whoever breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly and willing to accept the penalty, in order to rouse the conscience of the community – thereby showing the highest respect for law. King distinguished such action both from passivity and from violence; in “Where Do We Go from Here” (1967) he discussed Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth” and rejected its defence of violence. In his last years he described racism, poverty and militarism as connected evils and called for a guaranteed income; in February 1968, at the centenary of W. E. B. Du Bois’s birth, he honoured Du Bois in a speech at Carnegie Hall. Rawls’s theory of civil disobedience in “A Theory of Justice” (1971) is commonly read with the letter as its model case, and Rawls later held that King’s religiously grounded appeals accorded with public reason (“The Idea of Public Reason Revisited”, 1997); Martha Nussbaum reads “I Have a Dream” as turning anger away from retribution towards a shared future (“Anger and Forgiveness”, 2016).

Life & context

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on 15 January 1929 in Atlanta, the son and grandson of Baptist ministers. He studied sociology at Morehouse College (BA 1948), theology at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania (1951) and systematic theology at Boston University, where he took his doctorate in 1955 with a dissertation comparing the conceptions of God of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman. In 1954 he became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, and in 1955–56 led the bus boycott that followed the arrest of Rosa Parks. In 1957 he co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which he led until his death. The campaign in Birmingham in 1963, during which he wrote his letter from jail, the March on Washington with the speech “I Have a Dream” (28 August 1963) and the marches from Selma (1965) contributed to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. From 1967 he publicly opposed the Vietnam War and prepared a Poor People’s Campaign. On 4 April 1968 he was shot in Memphis, where he had come to support striking sanitation workers.

Further main works

• Strength to Love (sermons, 1963)
• I Have a Dream (speech, 1963)
• The Trumpet of Conscience (1968)

Appears in

• Debate ‘War and Peace: When Is Armed Force Justified?’