2 - Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Politics of Disobedient Civility

Summary

In the popular imagination of civil disobedience, few figures loom as large as Martin Luther King, Jr. His “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is considered essential reading for any student of civil disobedience; it regularly features on high school and college syllabi covering the topic. Whenever new civil disobedience erupts, particularly in the United States, journalists and political commentators routinely reach for King and the familiar refrains contained within the “Letter” in order to interpret (and sometimes scold) rising movements and their tactics.¹ Yet, much like the broader reception of King within political philosophy, his centrality to civil disobedience obscures the fact that, until quite recently, his political thought was strikingly marginal to academic philosophizing about civil disobedience. Scholarly debates too often have rested on a combination of what Brandon Terry and Tommie Shelby call “ritual celebration” and “intellectual marginalization” that served to diminish King’s contributions as “derivative of long-standing American ideals.”² To be sure, King and the “Letter” make regular appearances in theories of civil disobedience from the 1960s onward, as they do in popular discourse.