According to Jonathan Rieder, Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” addressed four key ends: 1) explaining to white moderates the necessity of direct action, 2) defending the urgency of direct action, 3) illuminating to white audiences the daily injustices faced by blacks in a fundamentally racist country, and 4) explaining to white audiences in general why racism itself—not just Jim Crow laws and segregation—was the enemy.

Rieder’s interpretation of the “Letter” provides detail about the Birmingham campaign, a nonviolent movement that sought to desegregate commercial and government institutions, oversee the desegregation of public schools, and end workplace discrimination against African Americans. Rieder also highlights the depth and gravity of the struggle for Civil Rights while giving readers a sense of King’s own internal struggles in his march toward justice. Above all things, he emphasizes King’s insistence on black self-sufficiency, the urgent need for justice, and his critique of those who attempted to impose a “‘timetable for another man’s freedom’” (p. 77).

Rieder’s analysis illuminates references to King’s own speeches and writings, as well as the many philosophical and biblical references King makes throughout the “Letter.” Rieder’s key contribution is demonstrating the pivotal role of the “Letter” as a document that reveals much about King, the United States, racism, and black activism—then and now. Gospel of Freedom is certainly essential reading for students of contemporary American history and African American history, and it will also interest students of the Civil Rights movement as well as social movements in general. I focus here on one tension that arises out of the book: the agency of one versus the power of many in social movements.

Rieder’s book is a hopeful one. It celebrates King’s moral clarity, leadership, and strategic vision, while demonstrating the impact that the “Letter” has had on movements for justice worldwide. The key story is that when oppressed people decide to rise up against their oppressors, change is inevitable. Fundamentally, the book celebrates the power of agency, as with this passage citing Reverend James Bevel, a leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who says: “‘I thought white folks were keeping me from being free . . . [but] white folks can’t keep us from being free. Oh no! White folks don’t control freedom. . . . You decide’” (p. 110).

Yet Rieder’s analysis possesses a tragic irony by implying that a spokesman of King’s ability, rapport, and popularity is essential in a social movement. Here, there is an important tension between the thrust of King’s letter—the urgency of now—and the reality faced by many social movements—that a charismatic and unifying leader has not yet arrived. While King constantly exhorted blacks and reprimanded whites for their lack of appreciation that “the time is always right to do right” (p. 79), Rieder’s take on King’s unmatched influence on the Civil Rights movement would have us believe that the time is always right to do right—as long as there is someone at the helm leading us in that direction.

Rieder gives credit at various points to the highly skilled organizers involved in the Civil Rights movement, but his emphasis is really on King—his leadership, his suffering, and his eventual martyrdom. This is an important point because King’s own suffering and assassination is often conceived as evidence that nonviolent movements rarely succeed if such martyrs do not volunteer themselves, and that once such leaders are gone the movements tend to collapse. Rieder does little to debunk this popular notion, downplaying the important role played by ordinary people and local and national leaders in seeing through the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In fact, the Civil Rights movement was exceedingly grassroots oriented, a function of massive support under the leadership of the black church, seminaries, and universities, as well as some activists from northern states who came to help organize (Morris Reference Morris1986). Many of the reforms ushered in by the movement came to pass because continued adherence to Jim Crow laws became too costly, rather than because of King’s initial hope that nonviolence would change those without a conscience.

In fact, movements rarely succeed unless they have very large numbers of followers who are willing to commit risky actions of civil disobedience (Chenoweth and Stephan Reference Chenoweth and Stephan2011). And, indeed, prior scholarship is somewhat cynical about the effects of revolutionary leadership on the effectiveness of a struggle (for a helpful review, see Aminzade, Goldstone, and Perry 2001).

One downside of possessing singular leaders as figureheads is opposition from within the movement—a tendency to distrust authority, especially if leaders are seen as movement “outsiders.” Readers get a glimpse of this tension in Rieder’s account of how Emory Jackson, a Birmingham journalist who ran a black newspaper, maintained a news blackout of the Birmingham campaign because of King’s “‘glossy personality’” (p. 29). Another potential downside is that the leader might make strategic miscalculations, as King appears to have done in the Birmingham case when he overestimated the degree to which his arrest would encourage more civil disobedience (p. 103). We know from prior research that social movements often survive the assassination of their leaders under four conditions: The leadership structure is administrative rather than prophetic, the movement has a martyrdom ideology, the leader shares the group’s guiding identity, and the movement was unified prior to repression (Bob and Nepstad Reference Bob and Nepstad2007). In the case of the U.S. Civil Rights movement, the first three conditions were present; the fourth condition is questionable.

As such, the size, unity, and structure of a social movement may be more important to its endurance and success than the presence of a charismatic leader. From a movement’s perspective, waiting for a “great leader” to arrive may lead to stalling when action is imperative. Ironically, Rieder’s emphasis on King contradicts the urgency of action that King’s “Letter” so strongly advocates.

In fairness, Rieder’s self-admitted aim is not to recount the Birmingham movement, nor the civil rights movement itself. Instead, his interest is in laying out the context of the “Letter” itself—the conditions that led King to jail, the reasons why the letter so exemplifies the “distinctive brand of prophetic Christianity that animated him and his colleagues,” and the aftermath of the letter (p. xvii). The “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is indeed a monumental text. It is as inspiring as it is revealing of an historical era whose resonances persist. Rieder achieves his objective skillfully, while illuminating a number of important tensions that endured then and now.

If we were to accept its interpretation, however, Gospel of Freedom leaves us with some fundamental uncertainties as to how such a contemporary American movement for justice could develop in the absence of a leader like King who could unite and inspire such a movement. Historical evidence suggests that this is possible—that people power and nonviolent action can often emerge and succeed even in highly unlikely contexts (Chenoweth and Stephan Reference Chenoweth and Stephan2011). But taking Rieder’s interpretation on its own terms, in the absence of leadership, unity, and creative inspiration, the urgency of now may not be enough.