King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

King’s letter from jail was a love letter in the broadest sense: it spoke of the need to be “extremists for love.” It was a letter of thanks to God and the Black church: “I am grateful to God that, through the Negro church, the dimension of nonviolence entered our struggle.” It offered a metaphor: It said America was a prison for Black people. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” he wrote. It proffered patriotism: Those protesters who “sat down at lunch counters … were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream” and “bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.” It called to the consciences of moderates and liberals: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s greatest stumbling block is not the White Citizens’ Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.” It held a warning: The question, he said, “is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be,” while reminding these ministers of the extremism of people like the prophet Amos, Jesus, Jefferson, and Lincoln. “I would agree with St. Augustine,” he wrote, “that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’”