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“I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.”
This quote in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” develops King’s argument that an individual’s conscience might be more binding than the law. Here, King stresses the overriding importance of remaining true to one’s conscience. Not only is this necessary to the individual, but abiding one’s conscience can also benefit the community. King explains that an unjust punishment can lead others to reflect on what justice should mean. While King’s critics argued that ignoring laws leads to a culture of disrespect and disdain, King insists the very opposite is the case. It is only the person who truly values what law should do for a community who is willing and able to take risks for its perfection.
“Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.”
The resonant images of quicksand versus solid rock that King uses in this passage reveal the key difference between justice and injustice. Racial injustice is like quicksand because it sucks people to the bottom. The more a single person struggles against quicksand, the deeper that person sinks. There is no sense of a bottom nor anything to grasp, just a powerful force pulling one downward. National policy built on injustice obviously lacks the necessary grounding. Human dignity, by contrast, is like a rock because it offers a solid and enduring base on which to build policies that can guide a nation. Anything constructed on injustice will crumble and collapse, the images establish, while that which is placed upon solid rock will pass the test of time.
“An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself. This is difference made legal. On the other hand, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow, and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.”
King approaches the challenge of differentiating between justice and injustice in several ways, a refrain that helps him to reach as many members of his audience as possible. In this passage, King uses “difference” and “sameness” to underscore why injustice inflicts harms on society as well as individuals. While the Constitution insists that people should be afforded equal protection by the legal system, laws still exist that institutionalize difference by allowing the powerful to exempt themselves from compliance. A just law, however, does the exact opposite. It is written so that everyone is equally obligated to obey it. As King stresses elsewhere, attempts to codify and then punish differences in people are very often examples of unjust laws that may conflict with an individual’s conscience or moral precepts.
“Beyond this, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the eighth-century prophets left their little villages and carried their ‘thus saith the Lord’ far beyond the boundaries of their hometowns…I too am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my particular hometown.”
This passage ties together two of King’s most important concepts in “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which are religion and justice. Defending his presence against charges that he is an outsider who has traveled from Atlanta unbidden, King compares his trip to the work of prophets who spread Christianity around the Mediterranean and across Europe. They voyaged far from their homes so that people could find salvation in the gospel. They might not have been invited, but they went nonetheless. King’s work is similar as he too hopes to bring salvation to people suffering injustice. In both cases, the travelers identify their work with freedom, either in the present moment or across eternity. Wherever injustice or bondage exists, King argues, people are “compelled” to spread the message of liberation.
