In this clearly written and cogently argued book, Jonathan Rieder provides a detailed account of the circumstances surrounding the production of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Gospel of Freedom is a thorough analysis of the key themes and political ideas developed in King’s famous text that simultaneously pays close attention to the historical context and political climate in which it was written and its subsequent significance.

Rieder keenly analyzes many of the main themes in the “Letter” and places it in relation to King’s other writings, particularly his speeches and sermons. The author successfully shows that the “Letter” was not an outlier in King’s political thought, and that there are important continuities between the positions King takes there and those outlined elsewhere. Indeed, one of the principal contributions of the book is its emphasis on the importance of performance and orality to an understanding of the evolution and nuances of King’s political thought. Rieder notes the ways in which the aural record gives an added insight into King’s state of mind, his emotions, and the way in which he adjusted his rhetoric to appeal to different audiences; he draws extensively on recordings of King’s speeches in his analysis, particularly those to black audiences. This book is clearly indebted to Rieder’s previous work on King’s style and performance, which informs his analysis of the “Letter” and raises interesting methodological questions for political theorists and intellectual historians about the nature of the archive and what constitutes a “text.” Rieder goes so far as to argue that “the ‘Letter’ was less formal rhetoric or a philosophical treatise than a transcribed form of oral culture. . . . [T]he ‘Letter’ was a mélange of riffs, samples, stories, gambits, and allusions, many of which came from his [King’s] addresses to black people” (pp. xvi–xvii).

One of Rieder’s principal claims is that while King often delivered different messages to black and white audiences, they were both part of a coherent approach to political activism centrally informed by a (Christian) notion of redemptive suffering. King preached a “gospel of freedom” aimed at African Americans, which “mixed responsibility, spiritual recovery, and racial solidarity” (p. 31). At the same time, the “Letter” encapsulates an equivalent moral charge to whites, particularly white moderates, that was focused less on the themes of racial reconciliation usually at the forefront of contemporary remembrances of King and more on the kind of radical empathy that would move whites to political action that matched the heroism of their black fellow citizens struggling to make the United States a true democracy.

The Martin Luther King of the Gospel of Freedom is squarely concerned with two forms of solidarity: among African Americans, on the one hand, because that is what the struggle for black freedom will require, and cross-racial solidarity, on the other hand, or rather its failures. The “Letter,” as Rieder correctly notes, focuses on the principal obstacle to cross-racial solidarity: whites’ investment in the benefits of white supremacy and their willful ignorance of what it entailed for blacks. It shows that King had a much more troubled reading of the ethical capacities of white liberals or moderates, and of their capacity to sustain hypocrisy where race was concerned, than is generally appreciated. The portrait of King that emerges in this book is thus one that emphasizes the complex nature of his politics, as well as his clear-eyed critique of U. S. racial politics. It works to dispel the popular myth of King as an untroubled believer in the idea of American exceptionalism and steadfast proponent of cross-racial solidarity above all else. Like other scholars (Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice, 2006; George Shulman, “Martin Luther King Jr.’s Theistic Prophecy: Love, Sacrifice and Democratic Politics,” in American Prophecy : Race and Redemption in American Political Culture, 2008), Rieder shows that King was in fact a more radical thinker than the popular conception of him allows, one who deployed nonviolence not simply out of conviction but also strategically. He did so because he viewed it as the only option that would allow progress on race while avoiding a full-blown race war that African Americans were likely to lose.

For all its strengths, however, this book is also somewhat disappointing, with some important missed opportunities. One of them is that it fails to place the “Letter” in the broader context of the philosophical tradition of African American political thought within which King is read and to which he was clearly indebted. In Bernard Boxill’s famous formulation, African American political thought vacillates between two poles, assimilationist and separatist; King would generally be placed squarely in the assimilationist camp (Boxill, “Two Traditions in African-American Political Philosophy,” Philosophical Forum 24 [nos. 1–3, 1992–93]: 119–135). But the more interesting question to pursue, and one raised by Rieder’s analysis of the “Letter,” is whether King’s placement along this spectrum is less obvious than we tend to think it is. Moreover, these difficulties are not simply a matter of the later King’s anti—Vietnam War activism or critique of economic injustice, since the “Letter” also contains themes usually associated with more radical African American critiques of U. S. racial politics. Another concrete example of the way in which this kind of comparative exercise would have enriched Rieder’s analysis is the juxtaposition of the “Letter” with Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the 4^th of July” speech, which famously uses many of the same rhetorical devices that King employs to such powerful effect, such as moving between the use of “we” and “you,” positioning himself (and African Americans in general) as part and not part of the U. S. polity.

Rieder is also generous to a fault in his reading of King, which results in certain important (albeit difficult) questions left insufficiently interrogated, such as the exigencies placed on black persons by King’s gospel of freedom. A place where this is clearly necessary is in the discussion of the funeral of the four little black girls who died in the bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, who risked being reduced solely to symbols and martyrs in King’s eulogy. His gospel of freedom exalted the need for black willingness to suffer for freedom, yet in asking African Americans to be exceptional citizens, King was demanding a kind of political sacrifice that was being borne extremely unequally. Moreover, what kinds of obligations ensue on the body politic when citizens undertake such heroic sacrifices, not just on their own behalf but in order to remake American democracy? King was subsequently honored with a national holiday and a monument on the National Mall, and, more importantly, the Civil Rights movement succeeded in abolishing de jure racial segregation, but the dream of racial justice has not yet been achieved. The issue of what post—Civil Rights era black politics should look like is inextricably connected to the particularly gendered and traditionally political conception of heroic action on which King’s gospel of freedom relied, however, and may continue to overshadow questions about what the pursuit of black freedom means now.

Does the gospel of freedom offer a guide for to the way to confront the disparities in the criminal justice system (exemplified by the death of Trayvon Martin) that threaten U. S. democracy? Can the “Letter” help us theorize the present moment of heightened white racial resentment? These are not Rieder’s questions, but it is striking that in addressing the contemporary relevance of the “Letter,” the examples he cites are all drawn from outside the United States. Is this because the “Letter” no longer seems to speak to the pressing problems of U. S. racial politics? If so, why not? Are there elements of King’s political thought that still do, and what are they? These are important questions that could have been fruitfully explored and would have enriched the analysis in this otherwise useful book.