Faith organizations to read ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’

The event is intended to inspire unity and reinforce the common values of the community, Nixon said. 

“There’s no message more salient today than MLK’s words. It’s a call to live from the highest human impulses,” she said. “It’s not saying here’s what we’re against, it’s saying, ‘here’s what we stand for: love and justice, inclusion, equity, naming truths, unmasking privileges.’” 

“Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was written by King during his imprisonment for leading a nonviolent protest against segregation. It’s directed to eight white clergymen who criticized the protests and its tactics. 

While it was written in 1963, a great majority of its message — an impassioned plea for racial equality, the need for action in the face of injustice and its articulate differentiation between just and unjust law — is deeply prescient for the present moment, the Rev. Jim Mitulski said. 

“His calling to account people of faith, in particular, to not be bystanders to injustice, but to engage actively in the work of justice, really speaks to the present moment,” he said. 

The reading is intended to be both a grounding activity as well as a call to action to follow in the footsteps of King and speak out when injustice is near, the Rev. Marlyn Bussey, co-director of the Peninsula Solidarity Cohort, said. 

“We just felt like it would be sort of a balancing, settling activity that would allow people who just want to come together [to] be one. Whether Republican, Democrat, minority, majority, none of that matters,” she said.  “Just come together to hear this letter read that sounds like it could have been written last week.” 

Having so many organizations sponsor the event — including the San Mateo Quaker Group, Peninsula Temple Sholom, West Region Antiracism group and the NAACP San Mateo Branch, among many others — makes the letter-reading all the more impactful, Bussey said. 

“It gives it power, it gives it validity, because there’s such a wide range of organizations that have said ‘you know what, we want to be a part of this,’” she said. “That’s just a really cool thing … the spirit of unity of the community.” 

The reading is first and foremost to honor King’s work and legacy, Mitulski said, but it is also a time to reemphasize positive values. For Mitulski, those are values that could need to be deployed when facing potential actions of the incoming Trump administration. 

“We have not achieved many of the things Dr. King talks about in the letter, yet we’ve already seen the incoming president has no qualms about stigmatizing undocumented people, threatening mass deportations,” he said. “We are trying to restate at this important juncture — we will not be bystanders.”