This article was downloaded by: [Umeå University Library]On: 21 November 2014, At: 00:01Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Quarterly Journal of SpeechPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rqjs20

“A Creative Psalm of Brotherhood”:The (De)constructive Play in MartinLuther King's “Letter from BirminghamJail”Mark GaipaPublished online: 20 Jul 2007.

To cite this article: Mark Gaipa (2007) “A Creative Psalm of Brotherhood”: The (De)constructivePlay in Martin Luther King's “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 93:3,279-307, DOI: 10.1080/00335630701426769

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00335630701426769

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

‘‘A Creative Psalm of Brotherhood’’:The (De)constructive Play in MartinLuther King’s ‘‘Letter fromBirmingham Jail’’Mark Gaipa

Scholars have celebrated the spoken word in King’s ‘‘Letter from Birmingham Jail,’’ but

they have overlooked the significance of the Letter’s writing. In this essay I closely read

King’s act of writing the Letter, along with the figures of speech he employs in it, and I

show how both*by enacting the mass media’s ability to cross contexts*are essential to

King’s political strategy of nonviolent direct action, as well as to the Letter’s argument

against segregation*an argument that, before the fact, follows the steps we have since

come to associate with deconstructive analysis.

Keywords: Civil Rights; Deconstruction; Writing; Figures of Speech; Mass Media

Deconstruction is always and from the first ‘‘institutionalized,’’ as it has no other

locus of practice, dissemination, or resistance than university literature depart-

ments.1

The great movement to secure civil liberties in the United States during the Cold

War arose out of a religious community, black Southern Baptists, and it was

founded on the belief that every individual has an inalienable right to those

freedoms by virtue of being human*precisely the individualism that Holmes and

Dewey felt they needed to discredit. Martin Luther King, Jr., was not a pragmatist, a

relativist, or a pluralist.2

Several speakers weighed in before Mr. [Henry Louis] Gates stood up. As far as he

could tell, he said, theory had never directly liberated anyone. ‘‘Maybe I’m too

Mark Gaipa is a lecturer in the American Studies Program at the University of Stuttgart. Correspondence to:

Institut fur Literaturwissenschaft Amerikanistik, Universitat Stuttgart, Keplerstrasse 17, 70174 Stuttgart,

Germany. Email: markgaipa@yahoo.com. The author would like to thank David Henry and the two anonymous

QJS reviewers for the extraordinary patience they extended toward this essay and for their wise, generous

comments.

ISSN 0033-5630 (print)/ISSN 1479-5779 (online) # 2007 National Communication Association

DOI: 10.1080/00335630701426769

Quarterly Journal of Speech

Vol. 93, No. 3, August 2007, pp. 279�307

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

young,’’ he said. ‘‘I really didn’t see it: the liberation of people of color because ofdeconstruction or poststructuralism.’’3

[T]he civil rights movement was no trope.4

Was Martin Luther King a deconstructionist? Such a question might have triggered

howls of protest a few years ago. But now that the furor about deconstruction has

passed away*along with, sadly, Jacques Derrida himself*readers may be content to

dismiss my question as a mere ploy for gaining attention. Certainly none of the

authors I have cited above would take this idea seriously, and why should they? Aside

from the obvious idea that King helped to dismantle Jim Crow, is there anything that

justifies putting him and deconstructionists together in the same sentence? They

come from two entirely different worlds, two distinct intellectual and cultural arenas,

and these differences are only heightened by the way they seem to mark two sharply

contrasting periods in American history since the end of the Second World War.

On the one hand, Martin Luther King has come to represent the idealism and

moral purposefulness of the 1950s and 1960s. Revered as the great champion of civil

rights, King embodies the promise of turning vision into action; in his dual roles as

preacher and social activist, he succeeded in translating his eloquence into tangible

social progress. Even King’s tragic assassination in 1968 is a measure of how

powerfully his words could affect others.

On the other hand, deconstruction seems to symbolize today (among other things)

the retreat from social activism that ensued in the 1970s and 1980s. Best remembered

as a self-indulgent game of academic one-up-manship, deconstruction demonstrated

our inability to control language by spinning a web of giddy self-contradiction,

assuring us that no positive assertion about the world could be left standing in the

end. Because deconstructionists made it seem impossible for us to act on our words,

critics on the left accused it of being a politically regressive tool for conserving the

ideological status quo. And because deconstructionists described their venture as

radically destabilizing the world of meaning, critics on the right assailed it as a

positive evil*as though the devil had walked the earth in the guise of Paul de Man.

From either perspective, deconstruction would seem to be one of the things that

King*before the fact*battled against when he summoned the ideals of Christian

humanism to overcome our national complacence about racial segregation.

A different perspective emerges, however, when we take a new look at one of King’s

landmark texts, his ‘‘Letter from Birmingham Jail.’’ King’s Letter*an earnest plea

addressed to fellow clergymen*is steeped in the 1960s ethos of civic activism, and at

first glance it seems worlds away from the philosophical gymnastics of post-

structuralism, especially when we acknowledge the substantial impact the Letter made

upon the political landscape of its day. After the success of the Birmingham campaign

in the spring of 1963, the Letter brought King national and international recognition

as America’s leading civil rights figure, and it also played a hand in pressuring the

Johnson administration to pass the Civil Rights Act the following year.5 King himself

claimed that ‘‘without the document and events in Alabama, the March on

Washington . . . would not have been possible.’’6 But unlike King’s ‘‘I Have a Dream’’

280 M. Gaipa

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

speech at the March, and so many of his other public addresses, King’s Letter is, from

start to finish, a piece of writing*according to S. Jonathan Bass, it is also ‘‘the most

important written document of the civil rights era.’’7 For most critics, the Letter’s

writing makes no real difference, since they read the text as a transcribed speech or

sermon. But when we stop ‘‘listening’’ to the Letter and start taking its writing

seriously, something surprising happens: King begins to sound (as it were) more and

more like Derrida.

By paying close attention to the writing and figures in King’s Letter, I intend to

show how King’s strategy in this text is to reverse and displace the racial binarism that

has confined blacks as outsiders in segregated American society*and thus show how

King, as author and activist, has adopted an argumentative stance that we have since

come to associate with deconstruction. Does that make King a deconstructionist? No.

But when King critiques the politics of exclusion and champions the socially

marginalized, he anticipates*in the Letter, and elsewhere*some of the key features

of deconstructive analysis, and that suggests the two may have more in common than

people generally admit. In this essay, I will try to show how King, like a

deconstructionist, demonstrates the inherent instability of exclusive systems, finds

liberating power in creative rhetorical play, and inverts center and margins to figure

forth (from the inside out) a less hierarchical or dominating order. In turn, I will also

try to show how deconstruction, like King, is not driven simply by the play of

difference but rather by concerns for justice and ethics, and how, in the instance of

civil rights at least, something like deconstruction may have made a real difference in

helping to desegregate American society.

Part 1

King began to compose his Letter some time after he was placed in solitary

confinement in Birmingham jail on Good Friday, April 12, 1963. In the Letter King

tells us that he was arrested for ‘‘parading without a permit’’;8 the city administration,

intent on stopping King’s demonstration, had issued a court injunction the day

before that prohibited his marching on City Hall.9 King and others from the

Southern Christian Leadership Conference had come to Birmingham in early April

determined to battle segregation at the place they perceived to be its greatest

stronghold in America (6); armed with their ‘‘nonviolent direct-action program’’ (2),

they sought to pressure segregated white businesses in Birmingham with boycotts, sit-

ins, and marches, while they also hoped their acts of civil disobedience would trigger

the city’s moral conscience. One hundred and sixty fellow protestors were arrested

and jailed in Birmingham before King spent his week in jail in mid-April, and many

hundreds more (a large majority of them children) were jailed during the protests

that exploded later in April and early May.10

Early in his imprisonment, King came across a public statement*written by eight

local white clergymen, and published in the Saturday (April 13) edition of one of the

town’s white newspapers*that criticized his campaign as being ‘‘unwise and

untimely’’ (1). Like many moderate whites and blacks in Birmingham, as well as

Letter from Birmingham Jail 281

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

the Kennedy administration at this time, these ministers placed their hopes in the

new, less adamantly segregationist city administration that had been elected into

office on April 2.11 King’s Letter is a direct response to these men and their

admonishment to go slow in the face of these recent events. In his address, King

defends himself against their multiple criticisms while trying to persuade them about

the need for direct action. He assures his audience that he is neither an extremist nor

an outside agitator, but rather their best hope for achieving racial harmony and

justice in the South. He also insists that the time has finally come to act on the ideal

of an integrated American society.

So what role does King’s writing play in all this? A clue appears in the very first

paragraph: after King opens the Letter by identifying himself as ‘‘confined here in the

Birmingham city jail’’ (1), he tells us that he would not be writing this Letter at all

were he not in prison, explaining that he seldom pauses ‘‘to answer criticism’’ and

that he ‘‘would have no time for constructive work’’ if he did. King here presents his

unfortunate confinement in jail as the precondition for his extraordinary act of

writing this Letter, and he further relates the two around the matter of time: only in

prison, where King is essentially ‘‘doing time,’’ does he have the occasion, divorced

from his audience and his ability to act, to explain in writing why his actions are not

untimely*although he also risks wasting his time by writing a letter that figures as

other than ‘‘constructive work.’’ Toward the end of the Letter King again links his

physical confinement, writing, and time when he speculates that he may also be

wasting his audience’s time and nearly apologizes for the Letter: ‘‘Never before have I

written so long a letter. I’m afraid it is much too long to take your precious

time . . . but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than

write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?’’ (48). The apparent

doubts King has here about the Letter*of its being ineffective and self-indulgent*reinforce the idea that his recourse to writing, like his time spent in jail, may be an

unhelpful detour from his important work on the Birmingham campaign. Such a

view gains support from some events of the time. By going to jail, King had decided

against a more action-oriented alternative*speaking in public to raise badly-needed

bail funds for fellow protesters;12 and as he worked on the Letter in jail, King could

not engage in the important business matters that his lawyers brought him.13 The

overall impression we get is that King’s writing is an unhappy departure from his

preferred method of ‘‘nonviolent direct action’’*for the Letter appears, in King’s

estimation, to be neither ‘‘direct’’ nor a form of ‘‘action.’’

Our impression is also that King, far from embracing a post-structuralist outlook,

may subscribe in the Letter to the critique of writing that deconstructionists like

Derrida have repeatedly called into question. When King presents his ‘‘correspon-

dence’’ as an unsatisfactory substitute for ‘‘constructive work,’’ his dismissal seems to

buy into the commonplace notion that writing is a poor alternative to speech and

action. Twice removed from the ideas it strives to re-present, writing lacks the

transparency of speech, which seems to say what we think. And set apart from the

audience it hopes to move, writing also lacks speech’s powerful immediacy*the way

it commands its hearers’ attention while affording the speaker an occasion to correct

282 M. Gaipa

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

any misunderstanding. This privileging of speech over writing is a symptom of what

Derrida has called the ‘‘metaphysics of presence’’*a.k.a. logocentrism and

phonocentrism*whereby we tend to position truth and value, along with the

word of God and the immediacy of voice, beyond the material contamination of

writing and the mediated deferrals it seems to embody. We may sense such a bias

against writing in the Letter when King claims, in his framing remarks, to write only

because he cannot speak and act; but we also sense it, throughout the text, as a

sustained tension between body and soul.14 The poignancy of the Letter arises, in no

small measure, from our hearing King so eloquently plead his case even as he

experiences bodily, in the solitary confinement of his jail cell, the oppressive effects of

social injustice. When we read King’s Letter, his voice/spirit seems to have broken free

of its material bonds; although King’s writing delivers his words to us, his act of

writing them somehow falls on the wrong side of this transcendence: like the jail cell

that confines him, writing appears to be a material constraint that King must

overcome in order to release his voice.

We might expect King to be dismissive of his own writing, given the decidedly oral

nature of both his black ministry and the civil rights movement, but King’s dismissal

is ultimately complicated by writing’s ambiguous standing in the Letter*the way it

is presented as a constraint while still managing to deliver its author’s spirit to us.

When deconstructionists take pains to focus on a text’s writing, they do so because

writing draws into the open, with its evident indirection and materiality, the way

speech and thought are (despite seeming otherwise) similarly mediated. Likewise, in

this essay I am closely following King’s act of writing because I believe that, more than

King’s voice or speech, it can reveal to us the political strategy that informs both the

Letter and the movement it represents.

If this outlook runs afoul of King’s apparent impatience with his writing in the

Letter, it also challenges the way most scholars have construed the Letter as essentially

an oral document or transcribed sermon. Hortense Spillers reads King’s Letter as a

‘‘black sermon in the oral tradition,’’ which she distinguishes from ‘‘the historical

tradition where . . . ideas are enclosed in and circumscribed by the written word.’’15

Malinda Snow describes the Letter as a sermon in which King assumes the stance of

an ‘‘extempore preacher’’ and his readers are transformed into ‘‘auditors’’ of and

‘‘participants’’ in his liturgy.16 Wesley Mott also sees King’s Letter as ‘‘essentially a

written sermon’’*one that ‘‘harnesse[s] the profound emotional power of the old

Negro sermon for purposes of social action, thus overcoming the historical

limitations of the [sermon] tradition.’’17 In each instance, the critic has subordinated

the writing in King’s Letter to the immediacy and religious authority of his speech.

For Spillers, King complements ‘‘the rhetorical style as he learned it in the academies’’

with ‘‘the poetic style of his fathers as he experienced it in the South’’;18 the written

word here fixes the oral utterance into a cerebral argument, but it is the spoken

word*‘‘the poetry, basic and inviolable to [King’s] message’’*that gives the Letter

its emotional authority and power. Snow also acknowledges the writing in King’s text

by pointing out the Letter’s relationship with Paul’s Epistles, but she argues that the

letters in both instances ‘‘are the written substitutes for a face-to-face meeting.’’19 For

Letter from Birmingham Jail 283

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

Snow, the value in King’s Letter lies in its liturgical ‘‘depend[ence] upon the presence

and participation of a group,’’ and King writes only so he may someday step beyond

his Letter and greet his audience.20 For other critics, the power of the Letter lies in

what King does with his voice to raise himself above his writing. For E. Culpepper

Clark, the authenticity of the Letter, along with its power to move us, is confirmed by

our hearing King’s voice in the Letter: ‘‘the rolling thunder of his majestic voice as

phrases and metaphors echo his Olympian oratorical power.’’21 For Taylor Branch,

‘‘King assumed a multitude of perspectives, often changing voice from one phrase to

the next. . . . By degrees, King established a kind of universal voice, beyond time,

beyond race.’’22

There is no disputing the importance that the oral sermonic tradition had for King

and for the power of his speeches, but we should not let King’s magisterial voice

distract us from the work that writing performs in his Letter. When King opens the

Letter by complaining that he is too busy to write, he is not simply conveying his low

regard for writing*he is also, very quietly, using writing to align himself with

Lincoln, which King makes clear in a 1965 interview: ‘‘As Lincoln said, ‘If I answered

all criticism, I’d have time for nothing else.’’’23 King’s complaint about his writing, in

other words, is a small citation, an allusion enabled by writing, and by making this

momentary detour*so Lincoln’s impatience may, as it were, speak through him*King positions himself to complete the work that the Great Emancipator had begun.

Similarly, something more is happening when King appears to apologize for his

writing such ‘‘long thoughts’’ in ‘‘so long a letter’’: for if his writing at first seemed

merely to be a consequence of his imprisonment, by the end of his address it has

additionally become a trope for it*the length of the Letter now measuring the

duration of King’s stay in jail, and even the contours of his narrow jail cell. With this

figurative turn, King gains a measure of control over his imprisonment, and what

before had oppressed him*his waiting, the deferral of action*has now become,

through the detour of this trope, a new method for seeking release. As these examples

suggest, I will be relating King’s writing of the Letter to his extensive use of figurative

language within it*the tropes and schemes that, like writing, mark King’s departure

from a more straightforward manner of communicating.24 Some readers may want to

regard King’s figures as merely the ornaments he uses to adorn his argument, but I

will argue that they, like his writing, in fact underwrite the general strategy for action

that King unfolds throughout the Letter.

We should also look further into King’s complaint that his confinement in jail*which forced him to resort to the pen*was a liability; in fact, it was a political

opportunity for King on a number of levels. Firstly, we know that the act of going to

jail was a deliberate strategy; King and other members of the SCLC aspired to create a

crisis in Birmingham by overloading the penal system, making it their goal in the

campaign to ‘‘fill the jails.’’25 More importantly, they sought the public attention that

their mass imprisonment*and, in particular, King’s going to jail*might bring.

Faced initially in Birmingham with fewer volunteers and less news coverage than they

had hoped for, King believed that his imprisonment might galvanize the campaign;26

Wyatt Walker, one of King’s trusted associates, sought to publicize the event as soon

284 M. Gaipa

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

as King was imprisoned, eventually getting President Kennedy to phone Coretta King

about her husband’s solitary confinement, which Walker immediately announced to

the news media.27 Even the choice of Easter Sunday as the period for King’s

imprisonment was quite deliberate (and thus well-timed, the ministers’ criticism

notwithstanding), since it lent symbolic value to King’s sufferings.28 Although bail

money was lacking on Good Friday when King was arrested, by Monday he could

have posted bail and regained his freedom*but he chose to stay on in jail until the

following Saturday.29

And just as jail was not a liability for King, neither was his writing. Branch

downplays the political impact of the Letter, pointing out that it went unrecognized

for at least a month and thus could not contribute to the success of the Birmingham

campaign.30 But Bass better gauges the text’s political significance when he describes

it as a sort of ‘‘press release’’ and ‘‘public relations tool’’ that gained momentum over

time.31 Precisely because it was one of the only written statements for a movement

that was overwhelmingly oral, the Letter attracted a lot of attention from the print

media and eventually became ‘‘an important rallying point of the movement.’’32 And

if we take Bass’s outlook one step further, I believe we can draw out the special

political significance of King’s text: not only did the Letter become a vehicle for

publicizing King’s actions, but the delay built into its writing*along with the

turnings of its figurative language*draws into the open the pivotal role that the

national media played for the civil rights movement as a whole. Had King’s acts of

civil disobedience in Birmingham gone uncovered by the press, they would probably

have had some local effect; but they assumed their tremendous power and value only

when they were broadcast*via the print media, radio, and especially television*to

the American public and the world at large. These mass-media broadcasts*which

could be played and replayed after the fact, far and wide, crossing into innumerable

new contexts*brought national opinion to bear upon the campaign, and they also

pressured the federal government to intervene in state politics in Alabama. By

deliberately playing to cameras and the larger audience they could reach, King and

the SCLC demonstrations were knowingly staging political theater in Birmingham*albeit theater of the utmost consequence, since the television cameras became a

conduit for justice.33 In a sense, King and his colleagues were acting at demonstrating,

for the national audience, even as they were in fact demonstrating in Birmingham.

And the far-flung communicative arc here, sustained by the national media, traces

out essentially the same detour that writing and figurative language perform in the

Letter: by leaving the literal, self-present King behind as they escort his words to new

contexts of reception, writing and figures help turn the event of King’s campaign into

a performance, even as their re-presentations (as post-structuralism helps us see)

prove essential for recursively constituting the original event on the ground.34 Put

another way, the writing and figures of King’s Letter are important because they

embody the indirection implicit in, and essential to, the success of his ‘‘direct action’’

program. Without the representations of the national media, as a kind of writing that

turns around and affects the scene it represents, King’s campaign would have had

little political impact.

Letter from Birmingham Jail 285

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

Anyone who doubts the centrality of writerly indirection in King’s Letter needs

only to consider how the address is structured. Most agree that King’s address is an

‘‘open letter’’;35 he literally addresses eight clergymen, but King also addresses a wider

national audience behind these men. Obviously, this communicative detour built into

the Letter’s address is not something King could have produced were he speaking

before an audience*unless, of course, that speech were televised or broadcast to a

wider audience. Scholars like Snow, who see the Letter as centered upon the prospect

of an actual meeting, can only regard King’s address to this wider audience as an

incidental concern, whereby writing relays King’s speech beyond its target audience.

But the fact that the eight clergymen never received the Letter addressed to them

suggests*along with abundant references in the Letter to the national scene*that

King’s second audience, which he reaches only indirectly and eventually, was actually

his primary target all along.36 Thus the writing in the Letter plays essentially the same

role that television broadcasts played during the campaign: by quietly turning away

from King’s local audience in Birmingham, King’s writing allows the rest of the

nation (and the world, and posterity) to look in on, and in turn affect, this ongoing

drama of injustice.

Because of the indirection structured into King’s open letter, the clergymen that

King addresses actually constitute a figurative audience*and thus are not quite

‘‘there.’’ But if we follow King’s indirect address in the opposite direction, we can see

that King himself, as author, is also not entirely ‘‘there,’’ either. Clark and others have

raised the question of whether there was a ghostwriter for the Letter, or whether the

Letter was a collaborative effort, since it seems unlikely that King could have

composed its many thousands of words in the time available to him.37 Another

possibility is that King may be the Letter’s sole author but that he composed it at

some other time and place; he may have gone back later and substantially expanded

the Letter,38 or he may have largely composed the Letter before his arrest or merely

pieced together parts of other pre-composed speeches while in jail.39 Whatever the

truth of the Letter’s composition, it is important to recognize that these suspicions

can only arise within the space of uncertainty opened by writing: instead of a

‘‘genuine’’ expression of oral speech that derives from the immediacy of the moment,

the Letter as writing appears to be a contrivance, possibly assembled by various hands

at various times.

Readers who insist upon the priority of King’s voice in the Letter will undoubtedly

see any of these scenarios as diminishing the Letter’s authenticity and undercutting

King’s authority. However, just as the political canniness of the Letter hinges on its

absent audience, the fact that King himself is not all ‘‘there,’’ as author of the Letter,

actually underwrites his authority instead of undermining it. As a civil rights leader,

King literally presents himself in the Letter as a representative of black Americans and

their interests. However, by presenting himself as writing in a state of physical

constraint, King-in-bondage goes beyond representing the interests of other black

Americans to standing in, synecdochically, for their history of being oppressed. King’s

solitary confinement in Birmingham jail echoes the wider black experience of

segregation in America, and King exploits this allusion in the essay by invoking

286 M. Gaipa

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

images of physical confinement, similar to his own, to describe segregation: ‘‘twenty

million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty . . . [you] sleep night

after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile’’ (14). Surely one reason

King describes his jail cell*and his Letter*as ‘‘long’’ is because they both refer, by

their length, to the ‘‘long years of oppression’’ that African Americans have had to

suffer through (27). Synecdochically, their suffering becomes his, even as he lends his

writing to their cause.

As a symbol of black Americans’ confinement, King, the person in jail, has

essentially become a trope, a figure of speech in the Letter*much as King, before a

national audience, became a living symbol of the civil rights movement. This suggests

how the writing and figurative deviation in the Letter, far from posing a constraint

that King must overcome, provide him with the very tools he needs to advance his

ends, but I would argue that King has an even deeper investment in these matters in

the Letter. If we attend closely to his use of tropes and schemes, we can see that King

looks to figurative language to portray his own fortune and that of other blacks in

segregated America. To be black in Birmingham, in 1963, is to be repressed,

subordinated, called deviant. King is in jail because the city leaders see him as a

dangerous extremist; he is confined because he has violated their law; his actions are

called ‘‘unwise and untimely’’ because he has turned against the ‘‘common sense’’ of

the ministers who subordinate justice to ‘‘law and order.’’ In all these instances, King

and other blacks are the target of criticism that is commonly made about writing and

figurative language: each may also be accused of violating its proper place, and of

deviating from the linguistic norms of simplicity, directness, and common sense

embodied by speech and literal language. To the extent that blacks in segregated

America are confined and marginalized, their experience finds expression in the

constraints associated with writing*even though the civil rights movement worked

primarily through an oral culture. It seems appropriate, then, that King tells us, in the

‘‘Author’s Note’’ he appended to the Letter, that he began writing the Letter on the

only paper available to him* ‘‘the margins of the newspaper in which the

[ministers’] statement appeared.’’ Branch describes how the Letter must have

appeared to King’s lawyer: as ‘‘an indistinct jumble of biblical phrases wrapped

around pest control ads and garden club news.’’40 King’s writing in jail, much like

King himself, is constrained, cramped, belated*expressive of the marginal social

standing of blacks forced out of the mainstream. And since the newspaper on which

King wrote deliberately censored news about his campaign from its pages, it

represented the normalcy of segregation that King now challenged from the margin.

One might describe my analysis in this essay so far as trying to deconstruct King’s

Letter: despite King’s apparent allegiance to speech, voice, and presence (i.e.,

logocentrism), I have traced an undercurrent in the text that contradictorily affirms

writing and figures as essential to his reform efforts and even expressive of the

African-American condition in segregated society. By showing how King’s text

depends upon the very thing it has sought to devalue as an unfortunate impediment,

this analysis enacts the kind of conceptual reversal we have come to expect from a

deconstructive argument. But if we also expect that reversal to undermine an author,

Letter from Birmingham Jail 287

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

or to diminish the effect of his argument, we can hardly conclude that here. Indeed,

drawing out the writerly subtext of the Letter only clarifies for us how King’s Letter is

able to succeed; rather than submit King to deconstruction, my reading hopefully

shows how deconstruction, in a way, serves King. But to take that next step, we need

to look more closely at what I mean by deconstruction.

Readers of Derrida know of the many risks that come from trying to reduce

deconstruction to a formula, but Derrida himself has described deconstruction as ‘‘a

double gesture, a double scene, a double writing’’ that ‘‘put[s] into practice a reversal

of the classical opposition and a general displacement of the system.’’41 If we elaborate

on this a bit, we might describe deconstruction as a series of three steps.42 First, one

identifies in a text an apparently stable meaning that is held in place by a binary

opposition, whose privileged term has been granted priority and presence that the

subordinate term lacks. Next, one reveals a ‘‘double scene’’ or ‘‘double writing’’ in the

text by teasing out of it a contradictory strand of meaning that reverses the polarity of

its central binarism; here, a close reading of the text destabilizes its meaning and

exposes its aporia*its impasses and blind spots*by showing how the major term of

the opposition ironically relies upon the lesser term it sought to exclude. Finally, one

resists reinstating the metaphysical opposition*which would result if one simply

affirmed the reversed priority of the two opposed terms*by rewriting and displacing

the entire dyad, noting how neither term means quite what it meant before, even

though one cannot imagine either term completely apart from their former

hierarchical relationship. One thus settles for putting the terms, and their opposition,

‘‘under erasure.’’

Perhaps what is most startling about King’s Letter is the way his argument against

segregation travels a long way up this same road:

1. By presenting King in jail, the Letter begins by confirming the power and apparent

stability of a hierarchical social binarism*the imbalance between whites and

blacks in segregated American society. King came to the city of Birmingham*which he describes as ‘‘probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United

States’’ (6)*to dramatize this unequal relationship. And his confinement in

Birmingham jail further underscores his identification with the subordinated term

in this binary opposition: he self-consciously argues from the marginal position of

being oppressed, and he articulates the effects of oppression in the Letter. King

also structures his argument to respond to the Alabama clergymen’s charge that he

is ‘‘an outsider’’*a social deviant, a law-breaker, an extremist. He stands as

‘‘other’’ to their ‘‘common-sense,’’ ‘‘law and order’’ outlook which associates

moderation with gradualism.

2. Occupying this social and racial margin, King then pursues his argument by

reversing the hierarchy in segregationist society, demonstrating that what seems

extreme to whites in the segregated South is actually healthy and normative, and

that what appears lawful to them, as the status quo, is deviant and unjust. Here

King exercises the ironic power that writing carries, in Derridean deconstruction,

as the supplement or pharmakon. Although King has been excluded from the

288 M. Gaipa

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

center of Southern society, he shows how he is nonetheless proper to the American

society that both segregationists and the clergymen identify as their own, and he

further acts out the role of pharmakon (which figures as both poison and cure for

Derrida) by presenting his extreme actions as the remedy for America’s racial ills.43

By confronting the South with what it has shunted to the margins, King exposes its

cultural limitations and the many blind spots in the clergymen’s outlook: for

instance, how they have overlooked the ‘‘underlying causes’’ of the race

demonstrations (5), or have failed to understand the impatience blacks feel about

stalled reforms (14).44 Throughout the essay, King draws into the open, from the

margin, what those, at the center, are unable to see about themselves, asking his

moderate audience to see how immoderate and prejudicial their common sense

truly is.

3. King’s goal, of course, is not to have blacks and whites exchange places; rather, he

inverts margin and center in the Letter in order to displace the racial imbalance of

the segregationist system and to make room for a more equitable, racially

integrated society: to ‘‘transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm

of brotherhood’’ (26). King’s effort is, to the extent possible, to exclude exclusion

from the social system, and to open a space where differences between groups may

exist but where the hierarchical oppression of the minority group will end.

So what role does King’s writing play in all this? By helping him to cross

boundaries, writing and figures allow King to plot his escape from jail (as we will see

below); they also afford him the more encompassing perspective, identified with the

nation at large, needed to deconstruct segregation and the moderate white outlook

that tolerates it. King’s writing*full of figurative indirection*poses a challenge to

the literal state of affairs (or status quo) in the South. His ample use of figures in the

Letter (as in his other addresses) has the effect of naturalizing the space of figuration,

which becomes a platform for invoking a racially integrated society as the new

norm*while demoting the existing norm (the space of literalism and segregation in

the American South) to the status of historical anomaly. King shows his audience that

even as he is literally breaking laws on a local level, he is also*when seen from this

figurative perspective*upholding the principles and ideals behind the laws his

audience respect. And he shows them that even as they obey local laws and resist

desegregation, they are acting*when viewed from these same figurative heights*both immorally and unjustly. As we will see, the most straightforward way that King

can heed the call to act ‘‘now,’’ on behalf of his integrationist ideal of brotherhood, is

to embrace this deferral and indirection of writing, for it is through writing’s

deconstructive force that he may open the closed system of segregation to the reality

of difference.

Part 2

In the remainder of this essay, I will examine some of the more striking figurative

moments in the Letter*passages where King’s writing takes a decided turn*and try

Letter from Birmingham Jail 289

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

to show how his deconstructive argument works through them. We first witness how

fundamentally King relies on figurative language in the third paragraph of the Letter,

where he essentially employs the scheme of parallelism* ‘‘similarity of structure in a

pair or series of related words, phrases, or clauses’’45*to stage his escape from

prison. In the preceding paragraph, King responds to the charge that he is an outside

agitator by explaining the immediate reason why he is in Birmingham: as president of

the SCLC, he has been invited by its local affiliate to come to Birmingham and engage

in a nonviolent direct action program (2). This is a local explanation, and King

expresses it literally, with no apparent figural assistance. But toward the end of the

paragraph, King begins to heighten his tone with epanalepsis, repeating the word

‘‘here’’ at the start and end of successive sentences: ‘‘I . . . am here because I was

invited here . I am here because I have organizational ties here’’ (2, emphasis added).

King uses the urgency conveyed by this iteration as a bridge to the next paragraph,

where he justifies his presence in Birmingham on a higher scale of accountability:

‘‘But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here’’ (emphasis added).

And King’s perspective now swells, all at once, beyond the historical moment:

Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their‘‘thus saith the Lord’’ far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just asthe Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ tothe far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel offreedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to theMacedonian call for aid. (3)

This sudden expansion in perspective is all the more remarkable for the way it sharply

contrasts with King’s confinement in paragraph 1. By aligning himself with Paul and

the prophets*who authorize King’s alleged trespassing in Birmingham as an act of

missionary enthusiasm*King has lifted himself, rhetorically, out of his physical

imprisonment, dislodging himself from his constrained place in space and time. In

fact, by aligning himself with Paul*who also wrote his letters in jail*King manages

to reconfigure his confinement as the means for his liberation. Snow rightly notes

that King’s confinement and his writing in jail make him a modern counterpart to

Paul. However, we do not need a knowledge of Scripture to appreciate this resonance;

the strict parallelism of King’s sentence puts him in the place of those who preceded

him, and it refashions his identity to echo theirs: ‘‘Just as the prophets . . . left their

villages . . . and just as the Apostle Paul left his village . . . so am I compelled to carry

the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town.’’ This parallelism replaces King’s

jail cell with a new rhetorical container; housed now with Paul and the prophets, King

assumes a new persona by continuing the Biblical tradition of boundary-crossing. It

follows that when King crosses over into the figurative realm of paragraph 3, his use

of the word ‘‘here’’ at the top of the paragraph takes on new significance, for it is no

longer clear where in the world King is when he says ‘‘injustice is here’’ (emphasis

mine). As the present moment has become overscored with the past, his specific

lodging in Birmingham has crossed into the indeterminacy of the general.

When King defends himself against the charge that he is an outsider in

Birmingham, he has already begun to employ a deconstructive strategy to battle

290 M. Gaipa

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

the logic of segregation. Through the space of figuration, King steps out of the

historical moment and proceeds to collapse the cultural binarism that would hold

him apart as the outsider*or Other*to the local segregated community. In ‘‘Plato’s

Pharmacy,’’ Derrida shows how writing in the Phaedrus *which Socrates has

characterized as an outsider or stranger to memory*is essential to the logos from

which it has been excluded.46 In a similar manner, King argues that he, the alleged

contaminant in Birmingham, is proper to the city; he belongs ‘‘here’’ in Birmingham,

even as his home literally lies elsewhere, in Atlanta, and he is compelled by the right

of this figurative residency to cross unlawful boundaries erected by segregation and

provincialism. The entirety of the next paragraph elaborates on this:

I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sitidly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham.Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapablenetwork of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects onedirectly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow,provincial ‘‘outside agitator’’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States cannever be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds. (4)

Building on his turn away from the literal in paragraph 3, King refigures his argument

here to meet transcendent ethical imperatives; even particulars* like ‘‘anywhere,’’

‘‘one,’’ ‘‘anyone’’*are generalized. We might construe this new field to be the

universal that stands beyond all contexts, but King’s universal is actually an expanded,

undefined rhetorical field, and he draws upon its indeterminacy to weave a double

argument into the garment of a single text. On the one hand, the universal in this

paragraph includes the nation as a whole, so King’s effort here to subject the

particular (‘‘anywhere’’) to the universal (‘‘everywhere’’) involves a tacit criticism of

federalism and an assertion of the national government’s precedence over individual

states’ rights. In this vision of America, King’s confinement in Birmingham jail

cannot be decided by the citizens of Birmingham, precisely because ‘‘here’’ is also a

part of the nation, ‘‘caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied to a single

garment of destiny.’’ As an American, King asserts that he is at home in Birmingham

as he is anywhere within the United States. On the other hand, the nation as a whole

includes all of its people*so King’s picture of a unified United States in this

paragraph looks hopefully ahead in time, to a vision of the racial integration he is

laboring to bring about. Because we cannot decide between these two readings, King’s

faith in ‘‘the interrelatedness of all communities and states’’ not only warrants his

coming to assist other blacks in Birmingham*it also makes it the responsibility of

his white audience to help bring about his ideal of an integrated nation. It’s no

accident that the pronoun ‘‘we’’ in this paragraph (e.g., ‘‘we are caught in an

inescapable network of mutuality’’) is left undefined; like ‘‘all’’ and ‘‘everywhere,’’

‘‘we’’ accommodates*by its lack of literal precision*what segregation has sectored

off.

King’s deconstructive challenge to segregation in paragraph 4 also shows up in the

idea of border-crossing. Behind King’s assertion that ‘‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to

justice everywhere,’’ we would do well to hear Derrida’s famous slogan, ‘‘There is

Letter from Birmingham Jail 291

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

nothing outside the text.’’47 We might think that Derrida and King are working at

cross purposes here if we construe Derrida’s quote as simply affirming a postmodern,

relativistic view of truth and value*so that in the absence of a transcendent

perspective or metadiscourse to stabilize meaning, we cannot judge one outlook to be

better than another. But as Jonathan Culler has pointed out, Derrida’s quote

presumes two key ideas: all meaning depends on context, and no context is ever

final.48 Derrida tilts here not against the possibility of meaning and value but rather

against the idea that a meaning can be fixed by submitting it to a proper context; as

semiosis is unlimited and universal, all meaning and all experience*like writing*is

determined by a possible infinity of relational differences.49 Derrida’s claim is thus a

transcendental (and universal) statement that insists upon the possible transcendence

of any limited context that presumes to be final and self-present, immune from

contamination from without. King makes a strikingly similar claim when he insists

on our necessary participation in a universal network of relational differences: ‘‘I am

cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states’’; ‘‘We are caught in an

inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny’’ (emphasis

added). The infinity of relations that this implies requires the possible transgression

of any local context which would present itself as proper unto itself: ‘‘Whatever affects

one directly, affects all indirectly.’’ Indeed, if injustice anywhere is a threat to justice

everywhere, the proper context for ‘‘anywhere’’ must be open to the infinity of

contexts implied by ‘‘everywhere.’’ It is just this premise that allows deconstructive

literary analysis to operate: a footnote or off-hand remark ‘‘anywhere’’ in the text is

ultimately relatable to, and thus may threaten, the stability of meaning at the center of

the text or in the text as a whole: ‘‘everywhere.’’50

King essentially conducts a fight over context in paragraph 4 to repudiate the white

ministers’ ‘‘narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea’’ that racial strife in Birmingham

is a local problem requiring a local solution.51 The ministers’ proprietary outlook

may smack of white paternalism (‘‘We further strongly urge our own Negro

community to withdraw support from these demonstrations’’), but they are also

subscribing here to a common-sense notion that draws on the ‘‘metaphysics of

presence’’: the people of Birmingham know Birmingham best, so they are best

positioned to solve their segregation problem themselves. Not coincidentally, the

ministers’ language also hinges on the trope of ‘‘facing’’ their problem themselves.

Now that the old segregationist (and obstructionist) administration has been voted

out, the authors see ‘‘days of new hope’’ in which ‘‘we all have opportunity for a new

constructive and realistic approach to racial problems,’’ as though the prospect of

transparency and direct communication between the races has finally arrived:

We agree . . . with certain local Negro leadership which has called for honest andopen negotiation of racial issues in our area. And we believe this kind of facing of

issues can best be accomplished by citizens of our own metropolitan area, white

and Negro, meeting with their knowledge and experience of the local situation.52

The clergymen here attempt to restrict the context of negotiation by insisting

that only insiders like themselves*who know the history and experience of the

292 M. Gaipa

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

town*can fix the problem. King in turn explodes these contextual restrictions by

insisting upon ‘‘the interrelatedness of all communities and states,’’ contesting their

observance of a proper context. King’s response reveals how the clergymen’s

‘‘common-sense,’’ ‘‘law and order’’ outlook is literally not ‘‘common’’ at all; it is

divisive and narrow, a segregationist solution to the problem of segregation. The goal

of integration, when allied with Derrida’s notion that there is nothing outside the

text, proves more consistent with the ideals of democracy than a segregated order,

precisely because it is open to differences, from within and without, and acknowl-

edges the continuing reality of contextual reinscription.

We may discern something else behind King’s claim about ‘‘the interrelatedness of

all communities and states.’’ This may sound like a timeless ideal, but it actually

describes the experience of millions of Americans in 1963 who were*as never before

in the history of the country*technologically interconnected through the mass

media, and especially the national television networks. As I suggested earlier, the

national media, with their ability to range across numerous regional contexts,

provided the communication infrastructure for the SCLC’s strategy of turning local

protests in Alabama into a national drama played out in family rooms across

America. Tapping into this great resource, the SCLC was able to persuade the nation

at large of the unjustness of segregation with graphic pictures from the Birmingham

campaign*for instance, pictures of Walter Gadsden being bitten in the stomach by

police dogs, or black children pinned against a wall by high-powered hoses.

A similar dramatic strategy informs King’s writing in paragraph 4, for his bold

claims in this passage are sustained less by evidence than by their delivery. How can

King persuade his audience that now is the time to act? Blending present with future,

he invokes a compelling metaphorical vision of the nation as a single fabric, and even

more powerfully, he constructs this figurative vision upon the scheme of antithesis,

‘‘the juxtaposition of contrasting ideas, often in parallel structure’’53* ‘‘Injustice

anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere’’; ‘‘Anyone who lives inside the United

States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds’’; ‘‘Whatever

affects one directly, affects all indirectly.’’ This last example of antithesis is especially

telling, for even as King’s assertion here justifies his efforts to draw the entire nation

to bear upon local matters in Birmingham, his expression performs on behalf of that

ideal*by lending it aphoristic urgency, and by conveying, through antithesis, a

vision of ‘‘the interrelatedness of all communities and states.’’ What antithesis offers

King in this paragraph is a powerful tool for bringing together, within the common

frame of a single balanced sentence, a series of opposites: justice and injustice,

anywhere and everywhere, one and all, directly and indirectly, inside[r] and

outsider*but also, implicitly, state and nation, black and white.

Later in the essay, I will have more to say about antithesis and the central role it

plays in King’s argument. But first we need to appreciate how King takes a further

deconstructive step when he insists in paragraph 4 that marginalized blacks

are essentially involved in the fabric of American life, proper to the indefinite ‘‘we’’

that is centered upon the nation as a whole. Later in the Letter, King uses

epistrophe* ‘‘repetition of the same word or group of words at the ends of successive

Letter from Birmingham Jail 293

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

clauses’’54*to bring the point home: ‘‘Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we

were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of

Independence across the pages of history, we were here’’ (44).55 Here King again relies

upon the deconstructive strategy of returning to the center what has been repressed to

the margins, although his argument now plays out across time instead of space. By

placing blacks in America prior to white settlement, King attempts to recuperate the

minority as original to the constitution of the nation; this revisionary account of the

past deconstructs the customary retelling of American history by exposing its blind

spots and revealing how Americans have whitewashed racial ‘‘contamination’’ from

their national identity. In much the same way, however, King’s direct action program

deconstructs the idea of segregation*which hinges on the historical and political

priority of whites over blacks*by expressing the logical tension within the

segregationist perspective, a tension that the country’s white majority has either

tolerated or repressed: ‘‘[D]irect action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a

tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to

confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored’’

(10). As with any act of deconstruction, the tension King produces through his

demonstrations is not external to the system but rather comes from within: ‘‘We

merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in

the open, where it can be seen and dealt with’’ (24).

King’s Letter can help produce the same political effect by dismantling the

difference between words and actions. When King makes his argument hinge on

figurative performances, he is able to do indirectly with words what he aspires to do

through direct action: ‘‘to foster such a tension’’ in readers that they are ‘‘forced to

confront the issue.’’ Nowhere in the Letter is this more evident than in paragraph 14,

which contains both the longest and the most stylistically-heightened sentence in

King’s text. I will quote only a portion of this sentence below, but that should be

enough to convey its extraordinary power. King is responding here to the demand

that he and other black Americans should wait or slow down their push for reform:

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-givenrights. . . . Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts ofsegregation to say, ‘‘Wait.’’ But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch yourmothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when youhave seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers andsisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brotherssmothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluentsociety; . . . when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact thatyou are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what toexpect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you areforever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘‘nobodiness’’*then you will understandwhy we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runsover, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope,sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

If we listen to what this sentence says , we hear King justifying the ‘‘unavoidable

impatience’’ of black Americans like himself; his many examples suggest how, for

294 M. Gaipa

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

black Americans, the time has finally come ‘‘when the cup of endurance runs over.’’

But we miss what King is doing with this sentence if we merely read it as an

expression of his extreme pain and frustration. Anyone who reads the entirety of this

long periodic sentence knows one thing: King has made you wait. As we read, King

sends us through a gauntlet of ten successive subordinate clauses; although he finally

offers us rest in the form of a disproportionately stubby main clause at the end*‘‘then you will understand’’ (emphasis added)*this main clause is repeatedly

deferred, so we remain insecure and vulnerable as we read, half-expecting the ground

to fall out beneath our feet.

Clearly, King is not simply confronting his readers with his otherness here, and

telling them what it is like to be black in America. He is also allowing his white

readers to experience that sense of otherness*to cross over and identify with the

Other who stands across from them*by making them experience, in their own

frustration as readers, a small instance of the impatience that black Americans have

experienced routinely and seemingly without end. The length of this sentence, then,

is not only warranted, but absolutely essential: it has to be too long if King is to

convey to his white audience what it feels like to wait too long. As the longest

sentence in the Letter, this is surely one of the ‘‘long thoughts’’ King alludes to at

the end of his address; however, if King apologizes there for the Letter’s length

(‘‘Never before have I written such a long letter’’), we can see here that the extremes

to which he takes his language*King’s long thoughts in his long letter*play a

critical role in his argument. Because this passage tests our patience and

understanding, what King is doing with words here is just as important as what

his words say. King may begin the Letter opposing action to writing, but through

the figurative indirection of his writing he has collapsed that opposition and staged

an event with words.

We might regard the enforced delay that King has structured into paragraph 14 as

an instance of the creative use of time that he discusses, later in the Letter, for

bringing about major social change. In countering the idea that change will come

about on its own, King argues:

[T]ime itself is neutral. . . . Human Progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability;

it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers withGod. . . . We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe

to do right. (26)

And he uses time creatively in paragraph 14 by making his readers ‘‘do time’’*for

King has created a rhetorical holding cell for his white readers, where they are to wait

until he releases them with the main clause at the end. In this way, King’s writing in

paragraph 14 continues, with its creative use of time, the Letter’s (de)constructive

play: whereas King earlier placed the marginal at the center when he used the scheme

of parallelism to escape his confinement and consort with the most respected of

company, now he has followed through on that reversal by turning the tables on his

audience and giving those at the center of society a taste of his own confinement.

There is poetic justice here, with outsider and insider momentarily switching

Letter from Birmingham Jail 295

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

positions*although readers need only look away from the page for things to revert

to ‘‘normal.’’

Between these two moments in his argument, King orchestrates an inversion of

values that he addresses explicitly in the middle of the Letter: in paragraphs 15�22, he

discusses the difference between just and unjust laws; and in paragraphs 23�32, he

discusses the difference between moderation and extremism. Echoing his double

maneuver above, King contends that his alleged extremism amounts to quite

normative behavior, and that the social norms of his day*represented by the ‘‘white

moderate’’ who has so ‘‘gravely disappointed’’ him in tolerating segregation (23)*are in fact out of step with the nation’s historical progress. King thus answers his

critics’ charge that he is an extremist by presenting himself as a moderate, telling us

that he stands ‘‘in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community’’

(27)*between the complacency of ‘‘do-nothingism’’ and the destructive hatred of

black nationalism (28). At the same time, he presents the perceived social norm of

moderation as a form of extremism, claiming that moderation is even more of a

problem than the open hatred of hard-core segregationists: ‘‘Shallow understanding

from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from

people of ill will’’ (23).

In this part of his argument, King works to rehabilitate his supposedly dangerous,

outsider views by shifting the social margins toward the center and the former center

toward the margins. But in paragraph 31, he jeopardizes the new centrality he has

secured for himself when he appears to reverse himself and agree with his critics that

he is indeed an extremist:

[T]hough I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist . . . Igradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus anextremist for love: ‘‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to themthat hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.’’Was not Amos an extremist for justice: ‘‘Let justice roll down like waters andrighteousness like an ever-flowing stream.’’ Was not Paul an extremist for theChristian gospel: ‘‘I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.’’ Was not MartinLuther an extremist: ‘‘Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.’’ AndJohn Bunyan: ‘‘I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery ofmy conscience.’’ And Abraham Lincoln: ‘‘This nation cannot survive half slave andhalf free.’’ And Thomas Jefferson: ‘‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that allmen are created equal. . . .’’ So the question is not whether we will be extremists, butwhat kind of extremists we will be.

An irony of course runs through this passage: as King cites one so-called extremist

after another, this mounting testimony redefines extremism as necessary to historical

greatness, even though King persists in calling this higher historical norm extremism .

In terms of its content, this sentence does what paragraph 3 does by aligning King

with authoritative figures who have been labeled ‘‘extreme’’ during their lifetime. But

in terms of structure, this paragraph resembles the long sentence from paragraph 14:

King uses anaphora to connect a series of rhetorical questions* ‘‘Was not . . . an

extremist . . . [?]’’; he also marks the sentence’s progress by using the scheme of

ellipsis to quicken his pace* ‘‘And John Bunyan. . . . And Abraham Lincoln.’’ And to

296 M. Gaipa

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

signal the sentence’s climax, King invokes a new scheme*antimetabole, or

‘‘repetition of words, in successive clauses, in reverse grammatical order.’’56 This

scheme*one of the most impressive in King’s arsenal of figures*is an apt

conclusion for this passage: not only has King reversed positions with his audience,

and enabled us to see from his perspective, but he has also presented himself as doing

one thing (citing his credentials as an extremist) even as he has done another

(redefined extremism as essential to the production of mainstream values).

Antimetabole has the feel of a paradox, and it may signal how King’s argument has

taken the third step of deconstruction. After he reverses the cultural priority that

moderation typically holds over extremism, King displaces the hierarchical opposi-

tion of these two terms, putting them under erasure so neither ‘‘extreme’’ nor

‘‘moderate’’ means quite what it meant before: King presents himself as a creative

extremist whose values are anything but extreme, and also as a moderate who presses

for immoderate, immediate change. But in light of deconstruction’s reputation for

confusion and dithering, we might wonder if King has taken a wrong step here by

trying to have it both ways:57 for he seems to have reached the point in his argument

where deconstructive analysis typically outwits itself and makes decisive action

impossible. Once King has exposed and then reversed the hierarchical biases of his

white audience, perhaps all that is left for deconstruction to do is to lead him into a

morass of self-contradiction. How then, in the end, does King reconcile deconstruc-

tion’s embrace of indeterminacy with his need to take determinate action?

It is this very question that King addresses when, toward the end of the Letter, he

reflects back upon the extended signifier he has created and begins to issue an

apology. Instead of spending our time*and his own*constructively, might King’s

Letter, and all its figurative indirection, merely be a diversion for passing the time? He

gives us his answer in the paragraph that follows:

If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates anunreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that

understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for

anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me. (49)

Here again King presents himself in the middle, caught between two contradictory

ways of measuring his writing: where his explicit audience (the white clergymen) will

probably judge his long Letter to be all too impatient and extreme, his implicit

audience (the figurative, national, godly third party overlooking his address) will

probably judge it to be all too patient, moderate, and short. The double perspective

recalls the inversion and indeterminacy of paragraph 31, since King has once more

brought about an exchange between ‘‘moderate’’ and ‘‘extreme’’ positions: when he

moves from one sentence to the next, he shifts from a local (literal) perspective to an

immortal (figurative) one, and his signifier doubles (‘‘I beg you to forgive me. . . .

I beg God to forgive me’’) while becoming Other to itself. With his text split in half,

King again seems caught in an impossible situation, straddling two unbridgeable

positions. But despite this apparent indeterminacy, King’s priorities are never in

doubt: he must answer to God first.

Letter from Birmingham Jail 297

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

King’s quiet resolve here indicates how his double gesture*in paragraph 49, as

throughout the Letter*may lead not to political stasis but rather toward a new era,

where we may reach beyond the merely negative efforts of desegregation and lay the

groundwork for a racially integrated society. In his speech ‘‘The American Dream’’

(1961), King affirms the need to push his deconstructive strategy beyond the

inversion of existing social hierarchies: ‘‘[T]he problem [of segregation] never will be

solved by substituting one tyranny for another. Black supremacy is as dangerous as

white supremacy.’’58 King knows that reversal, while necessary, is not a sufficient

political step, much as he must have known that his political strategy of direct

action*using national outrage to pressure local intransigence*is at once necessary

and insufficient for overcoming the white majority’s resistance to his proposed

reforms.

What King’s deconstruction*his inversion and displacement*of white supre-

macy in the Letter succeeds in doing is to establish the preconditions for social

change by constructing a space*much like the space in paragraph 14*for ethical

recognition between the races. Simon Critchley, writing in 1992, claims that

deconstruction’s social value comes primarily from its ethical implications; by

presenting the Self with the Other that it has sought to exclude or reduce to the Same,

deconstruction opens a space of non-hierarchical difference*what King calls

‘‘brotherhood’’*in which I may assume ethical responsibility for ‘‘a singular, other

person who calls me into question.’’59 Such recognition or responsibility for the

Other is of course what whites in a segregated society have failed to accord to blacks;

it is also an essential ingredient for any genuine democracy*an egalitarian political

formation that Critchley describes (in contrast to totalitarianism) as continuously

resisting closure: ‘‘The community remains an open community in so far as it is

based on the recognition of difference, of the difference of the Other to the Same:

community as differance affirmed through Yes-saying to the stranger.’’60 Critchley

believes that deconstruction offers the destabilization needed to keep democratic

society open to essential difference, but he also thinks Derrida’s writings fall short of

explaining how deconstructive indeterminacy is compatible with the need for

political decision.61 By reading Derrida through Emmanuel Levinas, Critchley offers a

‘‘political supplement’’ for deconstruction*one that makes ethics the necessary

precursor to politics. Significantly, Levinas ‘‘attempts to build a bridge from ethics,

understood as a responsible, non-totalizing relation with the Other, to politics,

conceived as a relation to the third party (le tiers), to all the others, to the plurality of

beings that make up the community.’’62

Regardless of whether Critchley is right about Derrida, I would like to think that

his political supplement to deconstruction is already at work in paragraph 49 of

King’s Letter, as well as in the Letter’s open address: configured between two

audiences*one, literal and individual; the other, figurative and communal*King’s

address opens an ethical relationship with the singular Other (King’s ‘‘thou,’’ his

fellow ministers) even as it reaches out to a transcendent third party (nation, God,

‘‘all the others’’) in order to provide that ethical relation with a political foundation.

Critchley elaborates on Levinas’ notion that ethics ‘‘is ethical for the sake of politics’’

298 M. Gaipa

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

when he writes: ‘‘Peace, or responsibility, to the near one, the neighbor, is peace to the

one far off, the third party, or human plurality.’’63 The subtext for Levinas’ idea is

Isaiah 57:19: ‘‘Peace, peace to him that is far off, and to him that is near, saith the

Lord.’’64 Or as King writes in paragraph 4 of his Letter, resolving the standoff in

paragraph 49: ‘‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’’

+++In paragraph 49 of the Letter, King also offers his ultimate justification for the writing

in it: when judged by godly standards, his Letter is probably not long enough. This

might sound backwards if we think that King, weighing divine truth here against

political expediency, risks being all too patient by writing so long a letter. But King

could not afford merely to write literally and act directly. By languishing in jail, he

expeditiously inspired national interest in his cause. By turning to the figurative, he

powerfully dramatized and catalyzed his campaign. And through his ‘‘long,’’ oblique

writing*which allowed him to address an absent, figurative audience behind his

literal one*King enacted in the Letter the SCLC’s political strategy of bringing the

entire nation to bear upon his local struggle in Birmingham.

Such is the view of King’s Letter that is afforded us, I believe, when we read it

alongside the counter-intuitive insights of deconstruction. If readers find this an

unlikely pairing, impossible to reconcile with what they know King’s Letter is about,

they should recall how strongly King, in turning back the clergymen’s appeal for ‘‘law

and order and common sense,’’ was himself contravening the prevailing wisdom of

his time. But the civil rights movement and deconstructionist analysis also come

together in another important way: they both show us how common sense is

constructed by what it excludes. Each is intent, then, in its own manner, to expose the

politics of segregation and to champion the rights of those who have been forced

outside.

In light of these commonalities, how does our understanding of deconstruction

change when paired up with King? In its heyday, deconstruction was often eyed

suspiciously in America*like King was, in Alabama*as a foreign import, with its

intellectual roots in Continental phenomenology, estranged from our native culture

and literary traditions. My argument suggests, by contrast, how deconstruction may

have played a key strategic role in what was arguably the most important domestic

event in the U.S. during the last century. How can that be? We might trace out an

underappreciated continuity between the civil rights movement in America and the

anti-establishment counter-culture in 1960s France, out of which Derrida’s thinking

emerged, or we might try to show how Derrida’s background, as an Algerian and

Jewish outsider in France, resonates sympathetically with the marginal social position

of African descendents in America. But perhaps the best explanation for why

something like deconstruction shows up ‘‘here’’*before the fact, in America, in

King’s writing in 1963, as well as in the Birmingham campaign*is because (as King

says) ‘‘injustice is here,’’ and (as Derrida says) ‘‘deconstruction is justice .’’65 Critics have

acknowledged how Derrida’s later writings increasingly address issues of social and

ethical responsibility, but Derrida insisted that ethical concerns have always been

Letter from Birmingham Jail 299

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

quietly at work in deconstruction, even in his earliest work. King’s Letter may bear

that out.

My reading of King’s Letter also challenges another major criticism of

deconstruction*that it is confined to an academic context. By bringing deconstruc-

tion out of the classroom and into the streets, King’s Letter suggests what serious

business deconstructive play can be. And even though deconstruction may appear to

be the ultimate insider’s discourse, by working on behalf of outsiders it speaks

especially to America’s ongoing experiment in democracy. Derrida insisted that

deconstruction is not a philosophy, and that it has no message to convey*but by

affirming the inevitability of border-crossing and the irrepressible indeterminacy of

writing and figurative performance, deconstruction seems to work on behalf of what

Derrida has called the ‘‘classical emancipatory ideal’’66 and to support King’s

commitment to opening up, and keeping open, economies that have been closed.

But how, then, does deconstruction in turn affect our understanding of King? It

certainly reminds us that King’s Letter, in addition to being a stirring call to action, is

(despite Derrida’s demurral) a philosophical treatise for the civil rights movement, as

Bass has noted. And because deconstruction sees textual meaning extending out into

the world at large, it helps us account for the way King was able to stage events with

words, and turn his words into action, even as it reminds us how the SCLC’s direct

action program required a great deal of indirect mediation. Lest we think that King

could have achieved his political successes through religious commitment alone, or

simply by speaking truth to power, deconstruction reminds us how the civil rights

movement achieved its successes by availing itself of the various tools of rhetoric,

theater, and performance. Among other things, the civil rights movement was

certainly a trope, and it had to be one to have any chance at political success.

Perhaps deconstruction can help us understand not only how the civil rights

movement was able to succeed, but also why we have had such trouble realizing

King’s dream of an integrated society.67 When deconstruction insists that there is

nothing outside the text, it reminds us*unlike most messianic political creeds of the

twentieth century*that there is no alternative to working toward justice in this

world from the inside out. This precisely describes what King did, with such grace

and dignity, when he practiced nonviolent civil disobedience, respecting the laws he

violated and accepting (as his imprisonment attests) the consequences of his

actions.68 But as deconstruction also makes clear, there is no final way, from where

we stand, to transcend exclusion: we may deconstruct one hierarchy, only to wind up

reinforcing another, and we may outlaw racial segregation in the public square, even

as the supremacist impulse that fuels it may resurface in other guises, in other places.

This makes radical change difficult to bring about, but Derrida (and Critchley) would

remind us that the persistence of exclusion simply means there is no end to politics,

and that deconstruction*instead of justifying inaction*underscores the need for

sustained political commitment. We need to be ever vigilant in exposing exclusion,

and keep pushing it back, even if we cannot see what else we are backing into.

Such are the challenges that lie ahead of King when he calls for ‘‘brotherhood’’ at

the end of the Letter. King tells his fellow clergymen:

300 M. Gaipa

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

I hope . . . that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you,not as an integrationist or a civil-rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and aChristian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soonpass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars oflove and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillatingbeauty. (50, emphasis added)

Some of the clergymen King addresses here felt that his appeal was disingenuous since

he made no effort to meet them afterwards.69 But to have such an expectation is to

read the Letter too literally, too locally*as though King were promising here to step

beyond the mediation of his letter and have a face-to-face talk with these men. Had

King visited them, there would be no real ‘‘meeting’’ so long as segregationist society

held sway*and King, we already know, was not willing ‘‘to settle for anything less

than brotherhood.’’ Even if King were alive today, he might only be able to cross the

racial divide between himself and the clergymen figuratively, as America continues to

work toward his integrationist dream of ‘‘brotherhood’’*difference without

subordination.

That King’s final invocation of brotherhood is painted in heavily metaphorical

language (e.g., the lifting of the ‘‘dark clouds of racial prejudice’’) suggests once again

how King’s figurative language, instead of being something he will side-step in the

end, remains an essential medium for bringing brotherhood about. Any face-to-face

meeting must pass through the obliqueness of figurative writing: it is through ‘‘long’’

writing, as a creative use of time, that King accesses the plural third, the community

that can provide the ground for his political reforms. Put another way, King’s ideal of

brotherhood is, in the end, mediated*a point I can best make by returning to his

use of antithesis. In paragraph 49, and throughout the Letter, King turns to

antithesis*along with other schemes of reversal, like antimetabole and chiasmus*to express key ideas in his argument: ‘‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice

everywhere’’ (4); ‘‘[Segregation] gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and

the segregated a false sense of inferiority’’ (16); ‘‘[W]hen these disinherited children

of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in

the American dream’’ (47). I count at least 50 instances of antithesis in the Letter,

which far exceeds King’s use of parallelism, anaphora, or even metaphor. These many

expressions may well indicate how antithesis offers King a template for putting

deconstruction into action. As Critchley notes, chiasmus is the figure that ‘‘best

describes the double gesture of deconstructive reading’’: ‘‘the belonging together or

interlacing of these two moments, or paths, of reading*repetition and alterity’’.70 As

a form of deconstructive double writing, antithesis* like chiasmus*always per-

forms, in language, a repetition with a difference; it marks an intimate relationship

between opposites, contrasting two things that are necessarily linked. Often these

contrasting items share the same syntax (‘‘the means we use must be as pure as the

ends we seek,’’ 46); they may also wear the same alliterative clothing (‘‘when you are

harried by day and haunted by night,’’ 14) or*with the help of polyptoton*share

the same root word (‘‘society must protect the robbed and punish the robber,’’ 25);

Letter from Birmingham Jail 301

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

they may even be framed by a common metaphor (‘‘now is the time to lift our

national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human

dignity,’’ 26). In all these instances, identity transforms, over the course of the

sentence, into its opposite; as our eyes sweep across the page, we see the Same

transform into the Other: ‘‘Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.’’

Antithesis articulates difference, but the force and value of this difference emerges

only because it is presented, through parallelism, against a background of likeness.71

Through the double writing of antithesis, King harnesses deconstruction for

political action by performing his vision of brotherhood and democracy in the Letter.

Like the act of deconstruction, the scheme of antithesis may appear static, a hopeless

stalemate between two contradictory terms. But antithesis actually draws change out

of continuity, just as deconstruction draws difference out of a text’s apparent

sameness, and this double gesture may indicate how King can draw racial contrasts

and reverse social norms in the Letter while still maintaining the democratic

structures inherited from the past. Through the figure of antithesis, the oppressed

may finally find the means for meeting*and facing*their oppressors on an equal

footing. The two opposing parties will appear perfectly balanced in such a scheme,

but that balance*instead of reflecting the social reality of the moment* looks ahead

to an egalitarian future, even as it performs the political work needed to correct the

imbalance, between Same and Other, at the heart of segregation. Earlier in the essay I

said that antithesis offered King a common frame for bringing black and white

together, but surely that frame, in King’s writing, is also the one home, or one nation,

that both parties occupy. As such, it is King’s vision of what America might someday,

if it has not already, become.

Notes

[1] John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1993), 242.

[2] Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 441.

[3] Emily Eakin, ‘‘The Latest Theory Is That Theory Doesn’t Matter,’’ The New York Times , April

19, 2003, Art & Ideas/Cultural Desk, 9.

[4] William Finnegan, ‘‘The Fire Last Time’’ (review of Reporting Civil Rights, Part One:

American Journalism 1941�1963 ), The New York Times , March 23, 2003, Book Reviews, 7�8.

[5] James A. Colaiaco writes that King’s Letter

exerted great influence in winning broad support for the civil rights movement.

As King asserted in an interview with Alex Haley in 1965: ‘‘The letter helped to

focus greater international attention upon what was happening in Birmingham.’’

And it was this worldwide attention that furthered the civil rights cause.

See ‘‘The American Dream Unfulfilled: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the ‘Letter From

Birmingham Jail,’’’ Phylon 45, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 2; reprinted in Martin Luther King, Jr. and

the Civil Rights Movement , ed. David J. Garrow, vol. 1 (Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1989),

171�88. S. Jonathan Bass writes that the Letter ‘‘set forth the philosophical justification for

the civil rights movement’’ and that it helped provide ‘‘a new image for King, restore the

power of nonviolence, and bring in some much-needed cash.’’ See ‘‘Blessed Are the

302 M. Gaipa

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

Peacemakers’’: Martin Luther King Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the ‘‘Letter from

Birmingham Jail ’’ (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 146, 98.

[6] Bass, 146.

[7] Bass, 145.

[8] ‘‘Letter from Birmingham Jail,’’ reprinted in Edward P. J. Corbett, Classical Rhetoric for the

Modern Student , 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 348, paragraph 19.

Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from King’s Letter in my essay come from this text,

and all parenthetical citation references to this text in the body of the essay will hereafter refer

to paragraph rather than page number.

[9] See David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian

Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1986), 240; Taylor Branch,

Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954�1963 (New York: Simon and Schuster,

1988), 727.

[10] Garrow, 241, 249.

[11] In their statement, these clergymen urged both blacks and whites in the local community to

‘‘observe the principles of law and order and common sense’’ and to ‘‘withdraw support from

[the] demonstrations’’ that the SCLC had sought to stage in Birmingham; see C. C. J.

Carpenter et al., ‘‘Letter to Dr. King’’ (April 12, 1963), reprinted in The New Leader 46, no.

13 (June 24, 1963), 5. In addition to calling the demonstrations ‘‘unwise and untimely,’’ the

authors characterized King’s actions as unjustified ‘‘extreme measures’’ that incite ‘‘hatred

and violence’’; the alternative they endorsed* ‘‘a new constructive and realistic approach to

racial problems’’*was for the people of Birmingham to obey the law peacefully as they

waited for ‘‘racial matters’’ to be ‘‘properly . . . pursued in the courts.’’

[12] Bass, 109.

[13] Branch, 742.

[14] If King indeed found writing to be inadequate, his bias was probably inflected by the

African-American partiality to oral discourse; from this perspective, the written word would

probably appear to be a culturally privileged mode of address* the powerful tool of the elite,

learned classes*rather than a marginal form of expression. But King’s religious faith may

also have disposed him to take for granted the ‘‘metaphysics of presence,’’ while his general

participation in contemporary culture probably caused him to view writing, in certain

contexts, as lacking the power of speech: e.g., the commonplace idea*held by blacks and

whites alike, elite and poor*that the best way to settle a dispute is in person.

[15] Hortense J. Spillers, ‘‘Martin Luther King and the Style of the Black Sermon,’’ The Black

Scholar (September 1971): 15; reprinted in Garrow (ed.), vol. 3, 876�89.

[16] Malinda Snow, ‘‘Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ as Pauline Epistle,’’

Quarterly Journal of Speech 71 (1985): 327, 328, 331; reprinted in Garrow (ed.), vol. 3,

857�73.

[17] Wesley T. Mott, ‘‘The Rhetoric of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Letter from Birmingham Jail ,’’

Phylon 36, no. 12 (1975): 413, 421; reprinted in Garrow (ed.), vol. 3, 679�89.

[18] Spillers, 16.

[19] Snow, 331.

[20] Snow, 331.

[21] E. Culpepper Clark, ‘‘The American Dilemma in King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail,’’’ in

Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Sermonic Power of Public Discourse , ed. Carolyn Calloway-

Thomas and John Louis Lucaites (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 36.

[22] Branch, 739�40.

[23] A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James

M. Washington (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1986), 348.

[24] By relating King’s writing to the figures he uses, I do not want to minimize their differences.

Whereas writing (like speaking) is a medium of address, figures are a matter of style*or a

manner of address; we thus may use a plain style while writing and an ornate style while

Letter from Birmingham Jail 303

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

speaking. I also do not want to suggest that figures of speech (!) are somehow more at home

in writing than in speech, or that the figures that appear in King’s Letter are necessarily

different from the ones he used when preaching from the pulpit. I do want to suggest,

however, that figures resemble writing in the way they wear their materiality on their sleeve

and are commonly defined against more immediate forms of expression: just as writing

deviates from the seeming immediacy of speech, figurative language deviates (or turns, as the

word trope suggests) from the seeming immediacy of literal language, crossing from one

meaning to another. I also want to suggest that figures, in some contexts, are criticized, as

writing is, for being mediated: e.g., as codified recipes for triggering emotion, figures (it can

be said) allow authors to fake sentiments they don’t actually have, and they also allow

authors to indulge in circuitous linguistic detours instead of just saying what they mean.

When King seems to apologize for his writing "so long a letter," I believe he is addressing not

only his writing but also his generous use of figures in the Letter.

[25] Garrow, 250.

[26] Branch, 726; Bass, 109.

[27] Garrow, 243�5.

[28] Bass, 108.

[29] Branch, 729, 735; Bass, 115.

[30] Branch, 744.

[31] Bass, 134.

[32] Bass, 146.

[33] King himself seemed to make this point when he described the need for drama in his

demonstrations: in the Letter, he claims that nonviolent direct action "seeks . . . to dramatize

the issue" (10), and he later uses the same phrase to describe the March on Washington ("as a

means of dramatizing the issue") and the Selma campaign ("in a crisis we must have a sense

of drama") (Garrow, 272, 386). Anthony Marx, in Making Race and Nation (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1998), writes that the SCLC carefully selected protest sites

where the authorities would respond violently, preferably in front of cameras.

Birmingham, Alabama, with its vociferously segregationist and states’-rights

Sheriff Bull Connor, was perfect for furnishing an opportunity for the movement

to dramatize itself before the national media. Connor responded with dogs and

hoses, provoking national dismay and federal intervention. (231)

Sasha Torres, in Black, White, and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2003), argues that the fortunes of the black civil rights movement

and network television news were intertwined in the 1950s and 1960s, and that each

advanced itself with the help of the other.

[34] Writing is ever crossing boundaries and reaching into new contexts, addressing an audience

that is absent, standing in another place or time; figures of speech are ever crossing from a

local (literal) meaning to another (figurative) meaning, perhaps activated by a change in

context as well. Here we can sense what is indispensable about the indirection foregrounded

by writing and figures: it has the capacity to change the meaning and value of the events they

represent.

[35] See Mott, 413, and Richard P. Fulkerson, ‘‘The Public Letter as a Rhetorical Form: Structure,

Logic, and Style in King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail,’’’ The Quarterly Journal of Speech 65,

no. 2 (April 1979): 122�3; reprinted in Garrow (ed.), vol. 2, 379�94.

[36] For the Letter not reaching its explicit audience, see Clark (40) and Bass (137). For evidence

that King was using the Letter to reach a national audience and appeal to the nation’s

conscience, see paragraphs 8, 24, 26, 31, 37, 43, 44, 47, and 50 of the Letter.

[37] Clark, 34�5.

304 M. Gaipa

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

[38] In the ‘‘Author’s Note’’ to the Letter, King admits that the text underwent some slight

revision (‘‘polishing’’) afterward, but he claims that the Letter was substantially completed in

jail.

[39] This last possibility is suggested by the way a great many passages in King’s Letter*as in his

other writings*appear in slightly different form in addresses he gave before and after

writing it.

[40] Branch, 738.

[41] Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc . (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 21.

[42] I am hardly the first to do this. For other summary accounts of the deconstructive process,

see J. Douglas Kneale, ‘‘Deconstruction,’’ in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and

Criticism , 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 235; ‘‘Poststructur-

alism and Deconstruction,’’ in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism , ed. Vincent B.

Leitch et al. (New York: Norton, 2001), 22; Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 132�3.

[43] See, for instance, paragraphs 4, 44, and 31 of the Letter, which I address in part 2.

[44] King also reveals how the ministers have betrayed the ideals of morality and justice that press

the demonstrators forward (15); how they have unwittingly contributed to the problem,

along with other white moderates and members of the white church (23, 33); and how they

have applauded the Birmingham police for ‘‘keeping ‘order’ and ‘preventing violence’’’ while

remaining silent about the ‘‘sublime courage’’ that black demonstrators have shown in the

face of police brutality (45, 47).

[45] Corbett, 463.

[46] Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Plato’s Pharmacy,’’ in Dissemination , trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1981), 75, 102 (original work published 1968).

[47] See Derrida’s Limited , 136, 148, and Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 158.

[48] Jonathan Culler, in On Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), writes: ‘‘One

could . . . identify deconstruction with the twin principles of the contextual determination of

meaning and the infinite extendability of context’’ (215); ‘‘Meaning is context-bound, but

context is boundless. Derrida declares, ‘This is my starting point: no meaning can be

determined out of context, but no context permits saturation’’’ (123).

[49] In response to speech-act philosopher John Austin, who tries to guarantee the ordinary

language uses of performatives (like promises) by excluding all citation (e.g., theatrical

performances) as exceptional and non-serious, Derrida shows how the risk of infection

represented by citation lies not outside speech acts but is rather constitutive of their very

possibility*which means that context here, by necessity, cannot be absolutely fixed or

closed; see Limited , 16�17.

[50] See Derrida, Dissemination , 130. That King’s stance here is philosophical and not just

pragmatic we know from another essay, ‘‘The Ethical Demands for Integration’’ (1962/63),

where he writes:

[T]he universe is so structured that things do not quite work out rightly if men

are not diligent in their concern for others. The self cannot be self without other

selves. I cannot reach fulfillment without thou. Social psychologists tell us that we

cannot truly be persons unless we interact with other persons. All life is

interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a

single garment of destiny. This is what John Donne meant. (i.e., that no man is

an island; Testament , 122)

[51] The word local is mentioned five times in their very short text, and it is further implied by

the clergymen’s many proprietary references to our and our own :

Letter from Birmingham Jail 305

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

We agree rather with certain local Negro leadership which has called for honest

and open negotiation of racial issues in our area. . . . We believe this kind of

facing of issues can best be accomplished by citizens of our own metropolitan

area, white and Negro, meeting with their knowledge and experience of the local

situation. . . . Just as we formerly pointed out that ‘‘hatred and violence have no

sanction in our religious and political traditions,’’ we also point out that such

actions as incite to hatred and violence, however technically peaceful those

actions may be, have not contributed to the resolution of our local prob-

lems. . . . We further strongly urge our own Negro community to withdraw

support from these demonstrations, and to unite locally in working peacefully for

a better Birmingham. . . . A cause should be pressed in the courts and in

negotiations among local leaders, and not in the streets. (Carpenter, ‘‘Letter to

Dr. King,’’ emphasis added)

[52] Carpenter, ‘‘Letter to Dr. King.’’

[53] Corbett, 464.

[54] Corbett, 473.

[55] Paragraph 44 in my version of the Letter begins with the words, ‘‘I hope the church as a

whole . . . ’’

[56] Corbett, 477.

[57] This question becomes all the more urgent once we acknowledge that Barry Goldwater, who

campaigned against civil rights during his 1964 Republican presidential nomination,

proclaimed in his party’s acceptance speech that ‘‘extremism in the defense of liberty is no

vice. . . . moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue’’; see http://www.washingtonpost.

com/wp-srv/politics/daily/may98/goldwaterspeech.htm

[58] King, Testament , 215.

[59] Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford: Blackwell,

1992), 48.

[60] Critchley, 219. Critchley also writes:

The political wisdom of democratic societies consists in their service to love, to

the irreducibility of ethical difference. The political responsibility of the citizen of

a democracy consists in the questioning of the axioms and foundations of

democratic society, a questioning which has its horizon in responsibility for the

Other. Democracy is the form of society committed to the political equality of all

its citizens and the ethical inequality of myself faced with the Other. . . . Democ-

racy is a political form characterized by incompletion and deferral, which is to

say that democracy has a differantial structure. (239�40)

[61] Critchley, 199.

[62] Critchley, 220; he goes on to write:

The passage from ethics to politics is synonymous with the move . . . from the

proximity of the one-for-the-other to a relation with all the others whereby I feel

myself to be an other like the others and where the question of justice can be

raised. (220)

[63] Critchley, 223.

[64] The King James Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Bible Publishers, 1984).

[65] Derrida, ‘‘Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’’’ in Acts of Religion , ed. Gil

Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 243. In this essay, Derrida distinguishes (man’s) law

from (transcendent) justice, much as King does:

306 M. Gaipa

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

[L]aw is essentially deconstructible . . . [in part] because its ultimate foundation is

by definition unfounded . . . [but] it is this deconstructible structure of law or, if

you prefer, of justice as law, that also ensures the possibility of deconstruction.

Justice in itself, if such a thing exist[s], outside or beyond law, is not

deconstructible. . . . Deconstruction is justice . (242�3)

This formulation also speaks to black Americans’ long wait to see justice brought into law:

Deconstruction takes place in the interval that separates the undeconstructibility

of justice from the deconstructibility of law. Deconstruction is possible as an

experience of the impossible, there where, even if it does not exist, if it is not

present , not yet or never, there is justice. (243)

[66] Derrida, ‘‘Force of Law,’’ 258.

[67] Since the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, this country has witnessed the

dramatic expansion of the black middle class, as well as the rise of individual African

Americans to just about every important post in the country, which was hardly imaginable in

King’s time. But over the same period, the country has also seen black Americans continue to

get shortchanged in the prosperous American economy, the bankruptcy of the stable family

structure in numerous black households, de facto re-segregation (e.g. with white flight into

suburban America), and*sadly parodying King’s own time spent in jail*ridiculous

numbers of young black men languishing in prison.

[68] In ‘‘The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, in Admiration,’’ Derrida explores how

Mandela, like King, maintained a respect for the law through his persecution and long

imprisonment while protesting apartheid; see For Nelson Mandela (New York: Henry Holt,

1987).

[69] Bass, 164.

[70] Critchley, 28.

[71] Antithesis also happens to be the scheme that best describes the structure of this essay, which

has sought to bring two seeming opposites*civil rights and deconstruction* together. And

one thing that my two subjects may have in common is an investment in chiasmus: just as

Critchley associates deconstruction with this scheme, so does Henry Louis Gates, in The

Signifying Monkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), suggest the importance that

chiasmus has had to African-American discourse, noting that it is ‘‘the central trope of slave

narration, in which a slave-object writes himself or herself into a human-subject through the

act of writing,’’ whereas ‘‘repetition of a form and then inversion of the same through a

process of variation is [also] central to jazz’’ (172, 104). (My thanks to the anonymous reader

at QJS who called this to my attention.)

Letter from Birmingham Jail 307

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Um

eå U

nive

rsity

Lib

rary

] at

00:

01 2

1 N

ovem

ber

2014