The following blog post comes from Pat Anderson, editor of Christian Ethics Today and former interim executive coordinator of Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
April 16, 2013, marked the 50th anniversary of the famous “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King, Jr. in response to a public statement by several Birmingham clergy criticizing his presence in the city during racial discord. King’s response, written in the margins of a newspaper and on smuggled note paper, secreted out of the jail in bits and pieces, remains as an eloquent statement for the obligation Christians have to stand for justice and for the imperative of non-violent protest.
This past week, I attended a two-day event sponsored by Christian Churches Together in Birmingham, on behalf of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and signed, 50 years later, a carefully crafted response to Dr. King’s letter. I was honored to be there, to be in the company of strong Christian leaders of many communions and denominations, and to walk through the events of 50 years ago with kindred souls. You can see information about the event and the letter on the CCT website at www.christianchurchestogether.org
As I reflect on the events in Birmingham during that tumultuous time in the 1960s, I have tried to put myself in place on April 16, 1963. I was a student at Furman University then, and was pretty unaware politically. I was an athlete on Furman’s track team, the best collegiate track team in the South at that time, and I know my thoughts that April revolved around upcoming events…the Penn Relays, the Southern Conference Championships, the South Carolina State Collegiate Meet to name a few. Final exams were not too far off. It was a busy time and I was living in a bubble. Furman had not yet matriculated its first black student. The local newspaper did not carry news of Civil Rights events; cable television had not yet been dreamed up, and I had no time for television or news anyway. If you are close to my age, where were you in 1963?
I do not remember the publication of Dr. King’s letter in April, 1963. I feel today that I missed out on something important. Somehow I wish I had been in jail with Dr. King and the others, although I acknowledge that it is easy to imagine that 50 years later. The dogs and fire hoses unleashed by Bull Conner, the bellicose language spewed from too many white Christian pulpits, and the incredible social pressures all around, would have no doubt intimidated me just as thoroughly as they did virtually all my peers at the time.
A few years later, after graduation and after Carolyn and I were married, we became very sensitized to the racial and other social issues which burst into our consciousness in the 1960s. But I am ashamed of us Baptists in the South during the 1960s. I repented, not for the first time, with the others at the event at the Saint Paul’s Methodist Church this week and resolved to be less timid in the face of injustice, to be more forthright in speaking for justice, to be a better member of the family of God the rest of my life.