by Betsy Wehrwein
Recently, the Bible Study with Art group studied this photo:
As we read and contemplated Luke’s gospel (Chapter 21 verses 5-19) for that coming Sunday, we focused on how timely the image is, even though it was taken 62 years ago, and how it ought to be circulated today.
Some of us in the art group said the photo could have been taken yesterday: “At least they weren’t wearing masks back then.” One younger person said they had never seen it before.
We were able to relate it to the gospel reading, especially verses 9-13:
“When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified, for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.” Then he said to them, “Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes and in various places famines and plagues, and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven. But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. This will give you an opportunity to testify.“
And testify Dr Martin Luther King, Jr did! Including the famous line, Injustice anywhere is a threat of justice everywhere.
Time magazine had originally run this photo on April 16, 1963 with the caption Poorly Timed Protest. In 2015, it added this explanation:
In the spring of 1963, in Birmingham, Ala., it seemed like progress was finally being made on civil rights. The notoriously violent segregationist police commissioner “Bull” Connor had lost his run-off bid for mayor, and despite Martin Luther King Jr.’s declaration that the city was the most segregated in the nation, protests were starting to be met with quiet resignation rather than uproar.
At least that’s what TIME thought: in the April 19 issue of that year, under the headline “Poorly Timed Protest,” the magazine cast King as an outsider who did not consult the city’s local activists and leaders before making demands that set back Birmingham’s progress and drew Bull Connor’s ire. “Last week Connor and Police Chief Jamie Moore got an injunction against all demonstrations from a state court,” TIME reported. “King announced that he would ignore it, led some 1,000 Negroes toward the business district. Both King and one of his top aides, the Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy, were promptly thrown into jail.”
King was in jail for about a week before being released on bond, and it was clear that TIME’s editors weren’t the only group that thought he had made a misstep in Birmingham.
On the day of his arrest, a group of clergymen wrote an open letter in which they called for the community to renounce protest tactics that caused unrest in the community, to do so in court and “not in the streets.” It was that letter that prompted King to draft, on this day, April 16, the famous document known as Letter From a Birmingham Jail.
Please note the clergymen who wrote the open letter were all white.
Dr King’s complete letter can be read here.
As we move through the last week of our season after Pentecost into Advent, may we reflect on our difficult gospel reading from November 16, and be encouraged to endure and remain connected to the faith and action that Christ Jesus calls us to.