‘All that my life had brought me to be’
Forty-five years ago, this is how Martin Luther King spent Easter (an excerpt from his autobiography):
[O]n April 10 . . . the city government obtained a court injunction directing us to cease our activities . . . [W]e did an audacious thing, something we had never done in any other crusade. We disobeyed a court order.
. . . We decided that, because of its symbolic significance, April 12 [1963], Good Friday, would be the day that Ralph Abernathy and I would present our bodies as personal witness in this crusade.
Soon after we announced our intention to lead a demonstration on April 12 and submit to arrest, we received a message so distressing that it threatened to ruin the movement. Late Thursday night, the bondsman who had been furnishing bail for the demonstrators notified us that he would be unable to continue. . .
It was a serious blow. . . We had a moral responsibility for our people in jail. Fifty more were to go in with Ralph and me. This would be the largest single group to be arrested to date. Without bail facilities, how could we guarantee their eventual release?
Good Friday morning, early, I sat in Room 30 of the Gaston Motel discussing this crisis with twenty-four key people. As we talked, a sense of doom began to pervade the room. I looked about me and saw that for the first time our most dedicated and devoted leaders were overwhelmed by a feeling of hopelessness. No one knew what to say, for no one knew what to do. Finally someone spoke up and, as he spoke, I could see that he was giving voice to what was on everyone’s mind.
“Martin,” he said, “this means you can’t go to jail. We need money. We need a lot of money. We need it now. You are the only one who has the contacts to get it. If you go to jail, we are lost. The battle of Birmingham is lost.”
I sat there, conscious of twenty-four pairs of eyes. I thought about the people in the jail. I thought about the Birmingham Negroes already lining the streets of the city, waiting to see me put into practice what I had so passionately preached. How could my failure now to submit to arrest be explained to the local community? What would be the verdict of the country about a man who had encouraged hundreds of people to make a stunning sacrifice and then excused himself?
Then my mind began to race in the opposite direction. Suppose I went to jail? What would happen to the three hundred? Where would the money come from to assure their release? What would happen to our campaign? Who would be willing to follow us into jail, not knowing when or whether he would ever walk out once more into the Birmingham sunshine?
I sat in the midst of the deepest quiet I have ever felt, with two dozen others in the room. There comes a time in the atmosphere of leadership when a man surrounded by loyal friends and allies realizes he has come face-to-face with himself and with ruthless reality. I was alone in that crowded room.
I walked to another room in the back of the suite, and I stood in the center of the floor. I thought I was standing at the center of all that my life had brought me to be. I thought of the twenty-four people, waiting in the next room. I thought of the three hundred, waiting in prison. I thought of the Birmingham Negro community, waiting. Then my tortured mind leaped beyond the Gaston Motel, past the city jail, past the city and state lines, and I thought of the twenty million black people who dreamed that someday they might be able to cross the Red Sea of injustice and find their way into the promised land of integration and freedom. There was no more room for doubt.
I whispered to myself, “I must go.”
The doubt, the fear, the hesitation was gone. I pulled off my shirt and pants, got into work clothes, and went back to the other room. “Friends,” I said, “I’ve made my decision. I have to make a faith act. I don’t know what will happen or what the outcome will be. I don’t know where the money will come from.”
I turned to Ralph Abernathy. “I know you have a need to be in your pulpit on Easter Sunday, Ralph. But I am asking you to take this faith act with me.”
As Ralph stood up, unquestioningly, without hesitation, we all linked hands involuntarily, almost as if there had been some divine signal, and twenty-five voices in Room 30 at the Gaston Motel in Birmingham, Alabama, chanted the battle hymn of our movement, “We Shall Overcome.”
King was arrested that Good Friday, for the thirteenth time. He was held in solitary confinement and initially incommunicado: "the longest, most frustrating and bewildering hours I have lived."
On Easter Monday he received a visit from his lawyer advising him: "Harry Belafonte has been able to raise fifty thousand dollars of bail bonds. It is available immediately. And he says that whatever else you need, he will raise it."
King later recalled that, "Once again I could see the light."
The next day, the Birmingham News published criticism of King and his nonviolent human rights movement by eight white Alabama clergymen. In his cell, with nothing to hand but toilet paper and the newspaper itself, King wrote a response known as ‘Letter from [a] Birmingham Jail‘. It has been called "the most eloquent and learned expression of the goals and philosophy of the nonviolent movement ever written”.
