"Letter from a Birmingham Jail Living Life Morally and Constructively".
In 1963, in defiance of a state court order forbidding further demonstrations against racial segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested. The act of civil disobedience immediately evoked a reaction from eight white clergymen, who, in a statement printed in the local newspaper, called King "an outsider" and deemed his actions in Birmingham "unwise and untimely." Mentally challenged and with nothing but time, King responded by composing a letter that came to be known as "The Letter from a Birmingham Jail." Emphasizing philosophy and Judeo-Christian sources, King's letter appealed to the moral values and laws cherished by all citizens.
Just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the Greco-Roman world, King has come to Birmingham to assist blacks in the fight for freedom. After going through the four basic steps in a non-violent campaign it has been decided that direct action is necessary for the whites have left blacks with no other alternative. This direct action will be a way of bringing tension that already exists to the surface. King says "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" to illustrate why he must expose this tension so that we will leave behind racism and prejudice, move toward understanding, and come together as sisters and brothers. .
King and his followers are seen as being absurd for consciously breaking laws. To understand this, one must know there are two types of laws, just and unjust. While obeying just laws is agreeable, obeying unjust laws is immoral. King encourages this point using St. Augustine's statement "an unjust law is no law at all.
