Using Time Creatively

A reporter called to talk about Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and suddenly there we were on the phone marveling at the strange circumstances of how the letter came to be written and published — drawing details from Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters, which I reread last fall in anticipation of a conversation with Branch at Georgetown (and with an eye on the university’s many observations of the King holiday in the days to come).

What strange circumstances? That King, prompted to set out his views after reading a newspaper article in which white liberal clergymen denounced nonviolence as an incitement to “violence and hatred,” started to write the letter in the margins of the newspaper.

That he developed his argument (Branch reports) among “pest control ads and garden club news,” drawing arrows and loops to connect one insight to another — such as the point that “time is neutral” and so “we must use time creatively.”

That once he got some note paper from his SCLC associate Clarence Jones, he crafted a three-hundred-word sentence explaining “why we find it so difficult to wait” for justice.

That the SCLC’s Wyatt Walker dictated the scribbled letter to his secretary for typing, and then brought the typed draft back into the jail for King to read and mark up – and when the weary secretary fell asleep over the draft, he lifted her out of her chair and “sat down at the typewriter himself.”

That “not a single mention of the letter reached white or Negro news media for a month.”

That the New York Times Magazine arranged to publish the letter and went so far as to set it up in type – but then killed the piece after the New York Post published a scoop summarizing its contents.

That the piece was then published or excerpted in half a dozen religious journals, but officially in the Atlantic Monthly, which paid $600 for the rights.

That a New York publisher suggested that an expression from the letter, simplified, should be the title of a book, King’s third: Why We Can’t Wait.

• 17 January 2014
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