The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: ​“Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

On Martin Luther King Day, DPIC looks at the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King’s views on the death penal­ty.

Dr. King’s phi­los­o­phy of non-vio­lence had no room for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. In one of his most famous ser­mons, Loving Your Enemies, Dr. King preached: ​“Returning hate for hate mul­ti­plies hate, adding deep­er dark­ness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness can­not dri­ve out dark­ness; only light can do that. Hate can­not dri­ve out hate; only love can do that.” 

In 1952, Jeremiah Reeves, a 16-year-old African-American Montgomery, Alabama high school stu­dent was arrest­ed for alleged­ly rap­ing a white woman with whom he was hav­ing an affair. The teen was inter­ro­gat­ed for two days, deprived of sleep, strapped into an elec­tric chair, and told the only way to escape the death penal­ty was to con­fess. He did so, then recant­ed. The tri­al judge barred the defense from telling the all-white jury the cir­cum­stances of the ​“con­fes­sion,” and Reeves was sen­tenced to death. 

Six years lat­er, Alabama exe­cut­ed him. On Easter Sunday 1958, nine days after the exe­cu­tion, Dr. King preached to a crowd of 2,000 on the steps of the state capi­tol about the ​“trag­ic and unsavory injustice.” 

Dr. King said: ​“A young man, Jeremiah Reeves, who was lit­tle more than a child when he was first arrest­ed, died in the elec­tric chair for the charge of rape. Whether or not he was guilty of this crime is a ques­tion that none of us can answer. But 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. Full grown white men com­mit­ting com­pa­ra­ble crimes against Negro girls are rare ever pun­ished, and are nev­er giv­en the death penal­ty or even a life sentence.” 

Dr. King con­tin­ued: ​“But not only are we here to repent for the sin com­mit­ted against Jeremiah Reeves, but we are also here to repent for the con­stant mis­car­riage of jus­tice that we con­front every­day in our courts. The death of Jeremiah Reeves is only the pre­cip­i­tat­ing fac­tor for our protest, not the causal fac­tor. The causal fac­tor lies deep down in the dark and drea­ry past of our oppres­sion. The death of Jeremiah Reeves is but one inci­dent, yes a trag­ic inci­dent, in the long and des­o­late night of our court injus­tice. … Truth may be cru­ci­fied and jus­tice buried, but one day they will rise again. We must live and face death if nec­es­sary with that hope.” 

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 455 peo­ple were exe­cut­ed for rape in the United States between 1930 and the Supreme Court’s deci­sion declar­ing the nation’s death penal­ty statutes uncon­sti­tu­tion­al in 1972. 405 (89.1%) were black. The use of the death penal­ty for rape remained almost exclu­sive­ly a Southern phe­nom­e­non: 443 of the exe­cu­tions for rape (97.4%) occurred in for­mer Confederate states. Noting the dif­fer­ent pun­ish­ment of blacks and whites for alle­ga­tions of inter­ra­cial rape, Dr. King lat­er wrote in his mem­oir, Stride Toward Freedom, it was “[f]or good rea­son the Negroes of the South had learned to fear and mis­trust the white man’s justice.” 

In a November 1957 inter­view Ebony asked Dr. King: ​“Do you think God approves the death penal­ty for crimes like rape and mur­der?” He respond­ed, ​“I do not think that God approves the death penal­ty for any crime, rape and mur­der includ­ed.… Capital pun­ish­ment is against the bet­ter judg­ment of mod­ern crim­i­nol­o­gy, and, above all, against the high­est expres­sion of love in the nature of God.”

[Originally post­ed January 15, 2018]