Fifty years ago this month, Martin Luther King Jr. drafted a letter from a cramped cell in Birmingham, Alabama. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Jonathan Rieder says in his new book Gospel of Freedom, reveals a more complex King, tough and tender, in equal measure. Rieder’s narrative reflects a major shift in the way many historians now understand the African American freedom struggle. The new scholarship challenges the division of black activism into integrationism and separatism, blurring the previously sharp lines between non-violence and violence, civil rights and black power. Rieder aims to replace the “sunny view of King” as a quixotic champion of the American dream and interracial brotherhood with a fiercer and more uncompromising King, a man who consistently preached a doctrine of black self-sufficiency. Martin, in other words, wasn’t that far from Malcolm. While Rieder succeeds in showing us a more multifaceted King, he neglects the long history of African American rhetorical dissent that shaped King’s message.

King went to Birmingham in early 1963 to help lead a campaign to integrate the water fountains, lunch counters, and restrooms of the downtown. Birmingham, or “Bombingham” as it was known to many of its black residents, was widely recognized as one of the South’s most segregated cities, a “notorious bastion of racist terror.” The pugnacious Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor oversaw the city with a police force packed with Klansmen and their sympathizers.

Attempting to reenergize a flagging boycott campaign, King successfully courted arrest on Good Friday by violating a court injunction against marches. Instead of placing King in a cell with his colleagues, Connor put him in solitary confinement, prompting King to remark, “He’s a smart old cracker.” Over the weekend, King’s attorney passed him a copy of the Birmingham News, which featured an open letter signed by eight of Alabama’s leading white clergymen under the heading, “A Call for Unity.” Branding King an outsider who favored “extreme measures,” the eight “moderate” clergymen derided the campaign as “unwise and untimely.” The letter jolted an otherwise despondent King, and he began to craft a response by writing in the margins of the paper itself. When the margins filled up, he wrote on the coarse prison-grade toilet paper.

King’s initial notes were ferried out of the jail by his lawyer and brought to King’s headquarters at a local motel, where a secretary struggled to make sense of King’s “chicken scratch scrawl.” That commenced several days of drafts shuttling back and forth surreptitiously between King’s cell and the makeshift motel office. Nobody had any inkling of the “Letter’s” future significance, and King’s original handwritten drafts were consigned to the dustbin.

"Bombingham” as it was known to many of its black residents, was widely recognized as a “notorious bastion of racist terror."

Deeply informed by his knowledge of King’s speeches and other writings, Rieder’s meticulous reading of the “Letter” is invigorating. The title of Rieder’s book comes from a section of the “Letter” where King compares himself to the Apostle Paul, who carried the gospel of Christ to the world’s farthest corners. “So am I compelled,” King says, “to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town.” Rieder transforms this “gospel of freedom” phrase into a powerful organizing idea, which runs through the whole book like a live current. Designed to appeal to both the free and unfree, as Rieder explains, the “gospel of freedom” combines argument and action. For whites, this meant it was not sufficient to recognize that blacks were God’s children, too, and thus deserving of freedom; they had an obligation to act on this knowledge. For blacks, this meant facing up to the fact that freedom is “never voluntarily given,” as King declares. “It must be demanded by the oppressed."