To Herman Jackson
Author: King, Martin Luther, Jr.
Date: November 28, 1961
Location: Atlanta, Ga.?
Genre: Letter
Topic: Martin Luther King, Jr. - Career in Ministry
Details
Less than two months away from his scheduled execution, Jackson, a Florida convict, pleaded for King’s help in appealing his conviction for raping a thirteen-year-old white girl in February 1960.1 King explains that SCLC does not have a legal fund to cover such cases, suggesting Jackson contact the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. In closing, King offers Jackson solace as he faces death: “We know that we have a Father and Creator who cares for us, who forgives our sins and who promises us life with Him in His Kingdom.” Jackson was later retried and spent fifteen years in prison before being paroled in 1984.
Mr. Herman Jackson, Jr.
c/o Attorney I. C. Smith2
412 Rosemary Avenue
West Palm Beach, Florida
Dear Mr. Jackson:
This is to acknowledge receipt of your letter of recent date. While I am in no position to make any judgments as to your alledged crime, I am very much concerned about your well-being.
I regret so much that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization of which I am president, is not in a position to give you any legal aid. We do not have a legal department to handle cases such as yours. I would suggest that you contact the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Inc., 10 Columbus Circle, New York, New York with the hope that they may be of assistance to you. If your crime is clearly a result of lack of justice due to racial implications of the case, the U.S. Government, Department of Justice may offer some hope.
Yours is certainly not an unusual case, however. There are so many problems concerning the Negro’s ability to receive justice in our courts.3 These are not necessarily deliberate attempts to deprive us always, sometimes faulty identification or the anxiety to catch the criminal lead to the victimizing of one who happens to be in the vicinity. This is one reason that we are working so hard to do away with the patterns of life which make it unsafe for any Negro to walk the streets of our nation. This offers very little hope for those who are made to suffer in the meantime.
As a minister of the Christian church, however, I can offer you the hope which our Lord offered to us all, starting with the thief who was crucified with Him on Calvary.4 This is man’s only real hope. We know that we have a Father and Creator who cares for us, who forgives our sins and who promises us life with Him in His Kingdom. You are not alone as you face death. Many have innocently faced death before you, and many more choose to face death in this freedom struggle daily in order that we may make it possible that Liberty and Justice is attained for everyone in these United States. Our prayers are with you.
Sincerely yours,
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Km
1. Jackson to King, 7 November 1961. Herman Jackson, Jr. (1939–2001) worked as a laborer in West Palm Beach, Florida, before his rape conviction. After discovering that potentially exculpatory evidence had not been disclosed to the defense, Jackson appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court of Florida, which ruled the evidence “indefinite” and affirmed the death sentence on 6 September 1961 (Jackson v. State of Florida, 132 So. 2d 596). In Jackson v. L. L. Wainwright (390 F.2d 288 [1968]), the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the Florida Supreme Court’s decision, claiming that the prosecution had a duty to disclose the exculpatory evidence to the defense, and ordered that the state retry Jackson. Jackson was again found guilty in a 1969 trial, and resentenced to life imprisonment. He was paroled on 28 February 1984.
2. Isiah C. Smith (1922–2012) was a pioneering black attorney who played an instrumental role in the desegregation movement in Palm Beach County, Florida. After working as a lawyer for more than thirty years, he became a judge in 1986.
3. A week after King wrote Jackson, SCLC released a statement decrying a U.S. District Court judge’s denial of a motion for a stay of execution for Willie Seals, a black man convicted of raping a white woman in Alabama in 1958. The press release quoted King as saying: “We are distressed that Southern justice continues to penalize the Negro community. The Seals’ case, as so many others, underscores the violation of the ‘due process’ clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Negroes are systematically excluded from grand and petit juries. Mr. Seals was tried in a segregated courtroom and within the framework of a state-enforced segregated judicial system.” King went on to argue that “there has always been the practice of Southern juries and judges to sentence Negroes more heavily than whites for the same offense, as demonstrated here by the state of Alabama. SCLC sincerely feels that Mr. Seals has been denied a fair trial and the issues involved strike at the very heart of the constitutional guarantees of all Negroes” (SCLC, “SCLC charges injustice in Seals case,” 5 December 1961). Seals was granted an emergency stay of execution, and in 1962 the Alabama Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the exclusion of blacks from the jury rolls in Alabama was a violation of the Constitution. Seals was found guilty of the rape again in 1964 and sentenced to life in prison. He was released in 1971. Prior to the Seals case, King had protested the 1958 electrocution of Jeremiah Reeves, a seventeen-year-old black boy who was sent to death row after being convicted of raping a white woman in Montgomery. Shortly after Reeves’s electrocution, King told a crowd gathered at the Alabama capital: “The issue before us now is not the innocence or guilt of Jeremiah Reeves. Even if he were guilty, it is the severity and inequality of the penalty that constitutes the injustice” (King, Statement Delivered at the Prayer Pilgrimage Protesting the Electrocution of Jeremiah Reeves, 6 April 1958, in Papers 4:397).
4. Cf. Luke 23:39–43.
Source: MLKP-MBU, Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers, 1954–1968, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University, Boston, Mass.