Dr. Martin Luther King, Letter from Birmingham City Jail.  1963.  A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr.  Ed. James Melvin Washington.  San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986.  289-302.

My dear Fellow Clergymen,

            While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling our present activities “unwise and untimely.”  Seldom, if ever, do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. . . .  But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I would like to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms. . . .

            In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: (1) collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive, (2) negotiation, (3) self-purification, and (4) direct action.  We have gone through all of these steps on Birmingham. . . .

            You may well ask, “Why direct action?  Why sit-ins, marches, etc.?  Isn’t negotiation a better path?”  You are exactly right in your call for negotiation.  Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action.  Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.  It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. . . .   Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. . . .

            You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws.  This is certainly a legitimate concern.  Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, it is rather strange and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws.  One may well ask, “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?”  The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just and there are unjust laws.  I would agree with Saint Augustine that “ An unjust law is no law at all.”

            Now what is the difference between the two?  How does one determine when a law is just or unjust?  A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God.  An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.  To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.  Any law that uplifts human personality is just.  Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.  All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.  It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority, and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. . . .

            [M]aybe the South, the nation, and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

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