WHEN MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. brought his campaign against segregation to Bull Connor’s Birmingham, he laid siege to the bastion of Jim Crow. Birmingham was among the most segregated cities in the country at the time; King called it a city whose fathers had apparently never heard of Abraham Lincoln. Birmingham had also been the site of a horrific series of bombings of black churches and homes. In April 1963 King answered the call to bring his cause to the city. When King landed in jail on Good Friday for violating an injunction prohibiting demonstrations, he used the time to meditate on the counsel of prudence with which Birmingham’s white ministers had greeted his campaign. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was the result.
Reading the letter 40 years later is a humbling experience. Perhaps most striking is King’s seething anger over the indignities of segregation:
As it happens, Birmingham’s Condoleezza Rice was 8-years-old when King wrote those words in the Birmingham jail. Her confirmation as United States secretary of State this past week closed a loop, even if no one seemed to notice.
Eight days after that Good Friday in 1963, King was released from jail. On May 10 he announced a historic desegregation agreement with Birmingham’s business community. On the strength of his victory in Birmingham he led the March on Washington on August 28 and gave his great “I have a dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Only 18 days later, however, amid the continuing tumult over what King called Birmingham’s “partial and grudging compliance” with the settlement terms he had secured, Birmingham was the scene of a bitter sequel to the events of that spring.
On September 15, 1963, Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was holding its annual Youth Day when a bomb exploded in the basement and killed four girls who had slipped out of Bible class early to lead the adult services later that morning. Among the four dead was Denise McNair. Had she lived, Denise McNair would be 53 today.
IN NUMEROUS FORMAL SPEECHES she gave and informal remarks she made while holding the position of National Security Advisor, Rice recalled her ties to Birmingham and to her “friend and playmate” Denise McNair. In the Vanderbilt University commencement speech she gave on May 17, 2004, for example, Rice said:
Rice added that “those fears were not propelled forward. Those terrorists failed.”
The bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church had been the handiwork of former members of the Ku Klux Klan–brothers under the hood to former Ku Klux Klan Grand Kleagle and current Democratic United States Senator Robert Byrd. Byrd of course opposed Rice’s confirmation as Secretary of State last week. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Byrd and 11 other Democratic senators in opposing Rice’s confirmation was Democratic senator Mark Dayton who is, oddly enough, the occupant of Hubert Humphrey’s seat in the Senate. History takes strange turns and politics makes strange bedfellows.
In ascending to the first among cabinet offices Rice becomes the first cabinet officer in the line of presidential succession. Rice’s ascent represents fulfillment of a “promise” that Martin Luther King offered in the form of his “dream” in the summer of 1963. The promise traced its roots back to the Emancipation Proclamation and, Lincoln and King both insisted, to the Declaration of Independence. In 1864 Lincoln wrote in response to prominent Democrats who urged him to rescind the Emancipation Proclamation: “The promise, being made, must be kept.” The fulfillment of the promise represented by Rice’s ascent is one in which all Americans can rightfully take pride.
Scott Johnson is a contributor to the blog Power Line and a contributing writer to The Daily Standard.
