The Ordeal of Jail
A study of Martin Luther King Jr.'s decision to stay in jail longer.
Introduction
The most important article I read this week was Francesca Block's article in The Free Press about Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech writers' assessment of America's progress.
I liked the article for several reasons. One reason I liked it is because it was written exceptionally well. But aside from being well written, one of the reasons I enjoyed reading it is that it revealed things about Martin Luther King Jr. that I didn't know.
I was not surprised to learn that MLK Jr. would disagree with the theory that America is irredeemably racist. I had a feeling he would have. This feeling came from my study of the final years of his life that revealed he refused to segregate his moral concerns about the three evils plaguing America. As the legend goes, he was going to give a speech titled "Why America May Go To Hell" in the days after his assassination. The key word was may. The undelivered speech would have been called “Why America Is Going To Hell” if he thought there was no path to redemption.
I was not surprised there would have been no Civil Rights Act of 1964 and no Voting Rights Act of 1965 had it not been for the coalition of blacks and the Jewish community. I’m currently reading Glenn Loury's writing on the topic; and before starting to read that article, I had intuited that these kinds of coalitions took place across communities in the 60s. The movie Judas and The Black Messiah influenced my thought pattern on this.
I was also not surprised at Francesca’s creative decision to link advocacy for support of the Jewish community with MLK Jr.’s legacy, nor was I surprised that MLK Jr.'s voice was connected with an accounting of why the unraveling relationship between the Jewish and black communities in America is counterintuitive to both communities’ pursuit of just treatment. I actually welcomed this perspective for many reasons.
One reason I welcomed it is that it wasn’t forced. It emerged naturally. The primary source of the perspective for reasons why the black community should advocate for Jews was highlighted by the author’s dynamic with the photographer. Marlena Sloss’ photography was inextricably linked to Francesca’s text in the same way that Jones’ assessment of America was intimately tied to MLK Jr.’s voice. In more ways than one, Francesca and Marlena have the same dynamic as MLK Jr. and Clarence Jones (MLK’s speechwriter). And they had to have that dynamic to make the piece work.1
Consider the narrative flow of the five pictures used in the article (I gathered them below for your convenience). Images 1 and 2 are used first. Image 1 opens the piece; and when used in connection with the title: “MLK’s Former Speechwriter: ‘We Are Trying to Save the Soul of America’,” it suggests that Clarence Jones’ words are all his own.
Image 2 is used after Francesca makes MLK Jr. and Clarence’s dynamic clear in the opening sentences. Clarence is in MLK Jr.’s head, and he is capable of channeling the leaders’ thoughts.
Then, after Francesca says:
“A black-and-white close-up of King sits directly above [Clarence’s] head, almost like a north star…”
Image #3 is used, showing that it is King who is in Clarence’s head now, insisting that he rely on the leaders’ views and the alliances formed during the Civil Rights movement.
Image #4 positions Jones as a peacemaking figure for the stance he takes on antisemitism by juxtaposing Marlena’s new photo (Image #5) with a photograph of a framed picture of the Dalai Lama, who also sits with a picture of King above his head like a North Star.
In between images 4 and 5, Francesca subtly parallels MLK with the gold mezuzah nailed on the outside of Jones’ apartment. This makes the thesis of the article clear:
Martin Luther King Jr. would give Jones his blessing to support the Jewish community in 2024.
The reason the article was one of the most important pieces I read this week is twofold:
One, I found this sober gaze at Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy refreshing.
Two, I was surprised to learn that King had a speechwriter. Actually, he had multiple! This may seem like a trivial fact. It isn't, for several reasons.
For one, it means that he was prolific because people understood his voice, not the other way around.
Second, it means that in a very tangible way, we can get in our producer bag and intuit what he would have to say about the times we live in.
Third, it hints at how we can be more empathetic.
Knowing MLK Jr. had speechwriters is extremely relevant to his legacy in a positive way. I may not be able to elaborate on all of the ways that it is relevant in this article alone, but I think this will set the foundation for a larger discussion.
First, I'd like to go back to discussing how prolific MLK Jr. was.
Did you ever stop to think about how he did it all?
The books. The speeches. The campaigning. The political advocacy.
We hold him on a pedestal and believe no one could rival his accomplishments. Is this the proper posture to hold?
I do not believe that MLK Jr.'s accomplishments are an anomaly. Instead, I think that if we believe they are, it ruins his legacy. If they are an anomaly, it is only because we view them as such. This is not a slight at MLK Jr. at all, but a testimony to the way that he led.
The Ordeal
Reflecting on MLK Jr.'s legacy, I can't help but think of a clip I saw on Instagram of Simon Sinek speaking about burnout:
"Burnout happens when you're attempting to do all of the things you see other people do, without realizing that they have deep, meaningful relationships that you can't see, and you think, falsely, that you have to do it alone."
And maybe that's what I mean when I highlight that MLK Jr. was prolific. He wasn't trying to do it alone. He led by leaning on others, and in this way, he sidestepped burnout.
MLK Jr. was 26 at the time of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. He was low-key pushed into leading the Civil Rights movement. His friends called him repeatedly in an attempt to get him to join the cause. They also wanted permission to use his church for meetings.
They called him so much that he eventually said, verbatim: "I'll go along with it."
But even this response was significant. The momentum of the movement was sustained by even the nonchalant. Passive support was extremely powerful.
King wasn’t necessarily immune to burnout; it was just that his resolve strengthened as he searched for help. He sought strength from the heavens and the earth, praying until he literally heard the voice of God and showing up at the feet of human beings, humbling himself when he was at his wit’s end. In this dissertation, I’m specifically talking about the doorstep of Clarence Jones' California home.
King was attempting to convince Clarence to move to Alabama and defend him from a tax evasion case. As Francesca writes in her Free Press article, Jones wasn't interested; but this disinterest didn't last long. Jones eventually moved down to Alabama, where he helped free King of all charges and quickly became one of the leader's closest confidants and, ultimately, his key speechwriter.
Jones eventually reached a point where he could write words that accurately reflected the way MLK Jr. spoke, Francesca writes. And it's this dynamic that I want to talk about today. The ordeal of freeing someone’s voice, and what that even means.
The first time I read “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” I was in college. Professor Mark James assigned my College Composition class the book They Say, I Say, which used MLK Jr.’s words as a quintessential example of the lesson that he and the book were trying to teach.
The lesson was that in academic writing, our comments (I Say) must always be stated in response to other people’s comments (They Say). This stylistic choice is important for a pretty basic reason. If you don’t follow this format, your argument won’t have a point. If you don’t identify the “they say” you’re responding to, people will wonder why what you’re saying is relevant or even why it needs to be said.
This template, and the reason for using it was liberating for me because I was introduced to it at a time when I was starting to become a voracious reader. I had ideas about how I could connect all of the things that I was reading, but my writing was messy. Dozens of notebooks filled with ideas that I wasn't skilled enough to manifest.
I pulled up King’s letter to see how he used the They Say, I Say template, and his writing stopped me in my tracks.
"He wrote this from a jail cell?!" I thought.
Professor Mark James' class was so impactful, and the lesson so transformative that I didn’t return the book to Amazon. I purchased it. I still have it to this day.
I don't bring up this search for my writing voice to celebrate my efforts. I tried my best to delete it from this post altogether, but instead, I decided to keep it because the article requires it. This article requires it because the dynamic contained in Professor James’ ultimate lesson was the dynamic that birthed MLK Jr.’s famous letter.
In the first few classes, I was skeptical of Professor James’ choice of a textbook. I didn’t want to end up writing like an academic, but he had clearly thought of everything before assigning it. The book calmed that anxiety too:
“…your initial response to templates may be skepticism. At first, many of our students complain that using templates will take away their originality and creativity and make them all sound the same. ‘They’ll turn us into writing robots,’ one of our students insisted. ‘I’m in college now,’ another student asserted. ‘This is third-grade-level stuff.’ In our view, however, the templates in this book, far from being ‘third-grade-level stuff,’ represent the stock-in-trade of sophisticated thinking and writing, and they often require a great deal of practice and instruction to use successfully. As for the belief that preestablished forms undermine creativity, we think it rests on a very limited vision of what creativity is all about. In our view, the templates in this book will actually help your writing become more original and creative, not less. After all, even the most creative forms of expression depend on established patterns and structures. Most songwriters, for instance, rely on a time-honored verse-chorus-verse pattern, and few people would call Shakespeare uncreative because he didn’t invent the sonnet or the dramatic forms that he used to such dazzling effect. Even the most avant-garde, cutting-edge artists like improvisational jazz musicians need to master the basic forms that their work improvises on, departs from, and goes beyond, or else their work will come across as uneducated child’s play. Ultimately, then, creativity and originality lie not in the avoidance of established forms but in the imaginative use of them.
So I had to start with the templates the book offered.
I had to adopt the academic writing style that King’s letter was the hallmark of.
That template: “They Say X, but I disagree, I think Y” was the beginning of my process of learning to post bail. In many ways, the academic writing style was my Clarence Jones. The book They Say, I Say was a way for me to get my voice out of solitary confinement in the same way King did.
The book describes who MLK Jr.’s letter was addressed to. It was a response to criticisms from religious leaders in Birmingham, who believed that time would solve the country's racial issues.
The chapter introducing the academic writing style proceeded to study - in great detail - how the letter was rooted in criticisms from the clergy. What the book was missing, however, was an explanation of how the speechwriter’s process of working with King, was a culmination of the principles in the book.
MLK Jr. began the process of writing the “Letter From Birmingham Jail” by jotting down notes in the margins of newspapers. Running out of newspapers, he then filled rolls of toilet paper. Next, he gave these pieces of paper to Clarence Jones, who helped smuggle the notes out of the jail by stuffing them into his pants. From my readings, Clarence Jones and Wyatt Walker worked together to string the scrawled notes into the compelling response that “Letter From Birmingham Jail” stands as today. 2
The dynamic between King and his speechwriters was a conversation; not just of words, but of actions. Of spirit.
“I would deliver four strong walls and he would use his God-given abilities to furnish the place so it felt like home;” Jones writes about their speech-writing dynamic.
When I hear Jones talk about the strong walls that he would deliver to King, I think back to that College Composition class:
“Finding relevant quotations is only part of your job;” said the book, “you also need to present them in a way that makes their relevance and meaning clear to your readers. Since quotations do not speak for themselves, you need to build a frame around them in which you do that speaking for them.”
In many ways, Jones was speaking for King.
For example, he raised sufficient money from Nelson Rockefeller to release King and the other young protesters from jail. But this release would only come when the time was right. In the meantime, Clarence, Wyatt, and King were deeply engaged in the writing and revising process. And while the letter was crafted, King had to stay in jail.
When I speak of King staying in jail, I of course, mean literally but also metaphorically.
From a literal standpoint, the letter would not go viral if King was outside of the four walls of the Birmingham Jail when it was published; “Letter From Outside Birmingham Jail” isn’t as potent as the actual title.
From a metaphorical standpoint, Clarence and Wyatt had to constantly supply King with four strong walls. Framing King’s notes. Surrounding King’s views with the clergy’s criticisms. Presenting the work in progress to King and reminding him that both this literal jail and the metaphorical one were the gateway to his freedom. Reminding the clergy why they couldn’t sit back and wait. Reminding readers of why the situation in Birmingham was important. Reminding the country that King wasn’t in jail by accident; it was because of the harsh tactics of “Bull” Connor. This was the path to posting bail.
Jail
“Letter From Birmingham Jail” was too deep for me in college. It’s too deep for me today, to be honest. But the reason I say it was too deep for me in college was that I just couldn’t get past the part that was quoted in that book from my English class:
“You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations.”
Every time I read that, I shook my head in amazement.
It wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic and the protests seeking justice for George Floyd that I was no longer intimidated by King’s letter. I suddenly had the courage to read more of it:
“In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps” said King, “collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action.”
King continues, describing how the movement in Birmingham followed all of the steps before they organized the protests that landed him in jail.3
Self-purification, which takes place before protest, is a meditation. It demands you to ask yourself questions and think on them like Zen koans.
When King talked about self-purification, there was a phrase that stood out to me:
“Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?”
I thought about what that meant for me, in the year 2020, and was immediately struck by an interesting parallel. From the news coverage of the protest, I couldn’t see many people being jailed. Also, ironically, the United States was on lockdown because of COVID-19. So enduring the ordeal of jail meant:
Could I sit in my room and wait longer than I felt was necessary, for the facts about George Floyd’s death to come out?
Could I accept the possibility that I would not be able to accurately string together my ideas, opinions, and political views in a way that would compel the country to put aside its emotions and recognize that negotiation might be a possibility?
In light of this parallel, my interpretation was that the definition of enduring the ordeal of jail had taken on new meaning, but I believe the correct way to view this parallel is that I was going through the process of understanding what King intended it to mean.
As I alluded to in the questions posed in the earlier two bullet points, in some ways, the tension between (1) me being able to write and publish this article and (2) me needing to write and publish this article during 2020 is an example of the jail that King was describing. He was gazing into the soul of 2020 America and asking, how long can you be patient?
I picture King constantly asking himself these questions while sitting in solitary confinement:
Can I endure the ordeal of jail?
Can I maintain my sanity long enough for Clarence to raise the funds to post the bail of everyone who was arrested, not just mine?
Can I endure the jail of trusting that Clarence and Wyatt could take my scraps and transform them into a piece that accurately reflects my voice quickly enough to make the protests successful?
In some ways, this jail began when King was 26 and was pressured into joining the cause.4 He had to ask himself:
Do I have the patience to reconcile myself with this writing dynamic for decades because I will be too busy to answer all of the criticisms that cross my desk?
Patience is jail, and in a larger sense, this morphed into not just the jail of being too busy to respond to criticisms, but the jail of being too busy to deal with all of the evils plaguing America on a meaningful time horizon when everybody else was staying silent.
I remember listening to a discussion between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ezra Klein in June of 2020 where they discussed why the protests for justice for George Floyd felt different from the Civil Rights Movement.
“This is the first time that I think a lot of us have felt that the battle was legitimately joined, not just by white people but other people of color.” said Coates, “When I hear that brother in Minneapolis talk about how his store was burned down and him saying, ‘Let it burn.’ That’s a very different world. It’s a very, very different situation. It’s not a great one. It’s not the one we want. But it’s not ‘68.”
Why is it not ‘68…at least in America?
The issue of our current time is that self-purification and jail are intertwined, not only with themselves but with direct action; and it takes empathy of the same ilk that Clarence Jones showed when collaborating with MLK Jr. for us to help others post bail and evade their metaphorical solitary confinement.
I mean this in the most sincere and kindest way possible. By definition, the international protests in favor of George Floyd were viral because they were not “jailed off.” They were universal in the same way that the realization that cogito doesn’t have a sex, led to the majority of Rene Descartes’ supporters being women. This means that the fervor with which some of those who did not have black phenotypical features supported the phrase “Black Lives Matter” was indicative of a desire to protect their fragility as well, which is completely understandable. This shouldn’t be a repulsive statement. Dare I say, “Black Lives Matter” is as inclusive as “All Lives Matter”.
If we acknowledge that, we see that COVID-19 cannot be ignored as a variable in the international support of justice for George Floyd.
And even with that being said, I’m saddened that it is possible steps were skipped, and collectively, we could have done better in following MLK Jr.’s advice on how to carry out a nonviolent campaign. More time should have been spent on collecting facts, negotiation, and self-purification.
Posting Bail
It’s possible I spend too much time on Twitter, but I don’t really think so. I keep finding gems like this tweet from Aella.
In this thread, she talks about the challenges she has had being satisfied by her romantic partners. The whole quote captures the punchline of this article:
“I was talking to some of my friends,” she said “complaining how hard it was to find a partner who seemed actively, genuinely curious about me, [I] realized this seems to be a really gendered thing. . .when im in relationships i love asking careful questions, cause im super curious about my partner, i want to know about them, how their mind works, how they feel about the world. but its rare to find someone who wants to do it to me. . . it makes me feel sad. . .it feels really painful to just 'accept' low curiosity from a man. it feels like not being loved”
I don’t think this kind of deep curiosity is an unreasonably high standard. I think all human beings need it, and people with a lot of ideas and little time - like MLK Jr. yearn for it.
Remember what I was saying about how prolific King was? He had multiple speech writers. But it wasn’t because King couldn’t write a speech. As Francesca wrote in The Free Press, Jones helped write many of King’s most iconic speeches, not because King wasn’t capable of doing it; he just didn’t have the time.
We’re in an interesting moment. Everybody is salivating at the chance to plug Artificial Intelligence into their workflows. Mainly because it promises to give us time back so we could, you know, enjoy life.5
I want to push back on the current use cases of A.I. A lot of people are using it to generate ideas. This is a distraction. You shouldn’t be jumping to use A.I. at the beginning of your workflow; it should only be used at significant bottlenecks. What I mean by that is that unless you can meaningfully articulate how and why you are a power user, A.I. may be more trouble than it is worth.
What you need is to connect with people whose seriousness, curiosity, or whatever you want to call it, is outpacing their environment. Such that they might even be discouraged by the prospect of not realizing their own visions, this pace of curiosity is what Aella was talking about.
One of the most frustrating things about being an entrepreneur is the amount of waiting. People talk about how long it takes for a business to be built, but the more I study transformative companies, the more I realize that the time scales that Silicon Valley seems to signal are a necessity, might be bullshit. Why?
I think most human beings, in general, aren’t serious/earnest, and so they default to saying that things take time. The really serious people realize that the only reason that things take a long time is because people adjacent to the problem are not serious. This makes me angry in ways that I can’t even begin to describe, and as a founder, it feels like sometimes the people who say they want to help aren’t serious about building a better world or about helping me. As a result, I just go at it alone.
I’m trying to be better at posting bail, but it’s hard to figure out who is serious. I think I’m getting better at it, but it irritated me when I was younger because I kept bumping into people that weren’t serious. That is a big reason why I became an entrepreneur.
Conclusion
If someone isn’t putting in the effort to get context, it’s not that their opinion doesn’t matter; it’s that they shouldn’t be forming one at all. And I think this frustration that I have with lazy people who are adjacent to the really hard problems that need to be solved is the same frustration King had with the clergy. It’s why I was in awe of his very calm and dispassionate letter that carried all of the weight of the Civil Rights movement behind it.
I want to spend some more time talking about the empathy/curiosity/earnestness that I discussed earlier because I think this is the type of character trait that will enable us to do things like travel to other galaxies. I’m being for real.
Can you confidently say that you know the people in your life well enough to string together their scrawled notes into a coherent message that they would be perfectly okay with you publishing/building from? Like Jones did with "Letter From Birmingham Jail"? How accepting do you think they would be of what you put together?
60%?
70%?
This is why I disagree with a lot of posthumous albums put out by the estates of musicians. What makes them so sure that this is how the artist wanted the music organized and released? How do they know that this is the title they would have chosen?
How confident are you that you could string together the scrawled notes of a stranger?
Maybe you can for well-known figures or pop icons that you follow. What makes this possible is the dynamic at play. A lot of times, being close to icons is like being too close to the sun. Their presence is too bright in your eyes (to quote NO ID), and you can’t look at them objectively. In that sense, maybe it is better to begin the process of understanding them from afar and then gradually move closer. I mean, that’s basically the arc of all relationships, isn’t it?
Supporters can admire creative works but have enough distance to critique or comment without being afraid that they will get called out for their opinions. This obstruction of objectivity isn’t always there. Some people can be kind without the fear of retaliation, and some people absorb kindness without feeling the need to throw some unrelated criticism in that person’s direction. This personality trait is gold. It can be developed with practice.
But back to being able to perform the feat that Jones did for King. Can we do this for absolute strangers whom we have no intent of building a relationship with? The answer seems to be no. And this is the reason why our discourse is broken. I'd argue that we could do for strangers what Jones did for MLK Jr. if we became more empathetic.
And I don't just mean a tad more empathetic; I mean a lot more.
Like 1,000 X more.
That’s how we endure the ordeal of jail. By increasing our empathy. By trusting the people around us and by reminding each other about the reasons why we insist upon going about the things we do the way that we do.
That’s why MLK Jr. was prolific.
That’s why he never burned out.
From all of those books. All of those speeches. All of that campaigning.
That’s his legacy.
Appendix
Quotes that Didn’t Make the Cut
“The teacher is as needle, the disciple is as thread…If the foreman knows and deploys his men well the finished work will be good. The foreman should take into account the abilities and limitations of his men, circulating among them and asking nothing unreasonable. He should know their morale and spirit, and encourage them when necessary” - The Book of Five Rings
Substack Cover Image
Copyright Notice
All rights reserved (C) 2024 Lance T. Mason
Footnotes
I’d be shocked if Marlena and Francesca didn’t work together more on future reporting.
https://www.history.com/news/kings-letter-from-birmingham-jail-50-years-later
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
https://moores.samaltman.com/