Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous essay, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” lives not only as a publication of a watershed moment in civil rights history, but as a masterclass in opinion writing.
Unpacked, it is a record of truths, a testament to human rights and a composition of one of the largest social movements ever orchestrated in the United States.
One of my favorite passages reads: “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 we 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.”
What’s notable about the eloquence and precision of this letter — as I read it again for the third time since high school — is that King offers us a transcendent source of moral reckoning and history of struggle we all belong to.
Reading the letter again doesn’t simply transport us back to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, but it immediately drops us in front of our own political volatility.
Today marks a disturbing reprise.
It almost feels unbearable to write about the luminous ideas of democracy and freedom and have them starkly contrasted against the violence concocted in this nation and elsewhere.
What marks the “tension” in our era of outrage and bludgeoned spirits is not just state violence or unchecked authority, but that we exist in a language that fundamentally shapes our worldview and houses social tensions so overwhelming that the word itself feels like an understatement. Yet, echoing Socrates, King reminds us they are necessary.
A conversation is a basic example of tension.
Language can be used for regurgitating shallow conversations, meaning that inherently difficult topics as of late are being flattened across ideological lines and buried. Supposedly no one is at fault and therefore no one can be held accountable. Just as language can be used as a spear, it can also be used as a shovel, making us our own gravediggers.
Our words can cover up or even justify atrocities if we become careless.
When we omit hard conversations in fear of tension and make our words more emotionally digestible, we use language to cover up and pretend as if acts of violence committed towards protestors are made in a vacuum. In caking over and concealing the trauma and pain felt, therein lies the greatest injustice a writer can commit.
To gloss over the tensions between the government and the masses who have to endure para-military cruelty is itself an injustice. King specifically addressed his letter to the moderate clergymen, who objected to civil disobedience while sitting idly by. This is equivalent to condemning any and all tension but refusing to speak up while injustice spreads like mold.
We must know how to hold good tensions and feel their value so that it is possible to reach “the majestic heights of understanding.”
So what can writers do? As King suggests, on a macroscale we must endure a fight to free ourselves from “the bondage of myths” instead of fleeing. Our history must be contemplated by diverse writers, and multiple perspectives must be taken to provide the people with a fuller understanding of the world. Sure opinion writers are the arbiters of media commentary but more so, writers assume world-changing power.
Next, how do you “fight” with a pen and a pad? King gives us lighting in a bottle: We work out action plans in our immediate communities.
King’s basic thesis is that we ought to engage. Ideas of freedom don’t sit on top of clouds, but are formed through engaging with on the ground conflict. For King, that place was the jail cell. Like an alchemist’s ability to transform lead into gold, writers, too, possess a very similar ability and words, a similar quality: We foster meaning.
King was a masterful orator and was able to make his beliefs accessible to the public by addressing with great detail the attitudes of complacency. He decried the inaction of white moderates in a segregated America and the brutality that followed.
A succeeding wave of brutalization follows in reaction to Pro-Palestine protests, ‘No Kings’ marches, and anti-ICE demonstrations festers and crescendos. The letter makes us think: Did we learn our lesson?
King reminded his contemporaries — and now us — that we cannot escape the problems that plague the human condition: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
King rebuked the lack of humility displayed by Christian moderates when their Southern neighbors were being confronted with violence at the ballot box. That segregationist policy instituted violence, not the other way around. Through this, he mobilized the efforts of his constituents not only in Alabama, but across the U.S. Much like King, writers share the same kind of obligation: Become the pestering gadfly.
Writers can offer their readership an oyster knife and awaken a hunger for changing the world. We are all endowed with the power to write something so good and impactful, it can alter the coursing rivers of history.
Sure, this depiction of opinion writing may seem grandiose and even self-congratulatory. However, this tradition puts into perspective the significance of writing about ideas. For King, that idea was civil disobedience, and he engaged others through exceptional argumentation and poetic style. These are the ingredients for any mindful piece of public-facing value.
A good essay and a powerful voice can mobilize.
A well-written opinion doesn’t have to pretend to proselytize or persecute others if a reader is not convinced. Rather, the point is to offer insight in such a way that the reader can not only be aware, but feel responsible for this world.
We learn how we must live similarly to how we must write. Writing takes on the same ethos of non-violent protest as is couched in our First Amendment rights: Endure the suffering and discomfort to hold the line.
Sidney Uy is a philosophy junior and opinion columnist for The Battalion.
