Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King Jr.

Library of Congress.)ĭrawing on his vast pool of intellectual resources - from Socrates to St. Martin Luther King, Jr., 1964 (Photograph by Dick DeMarsico. The full text was eventually published as Letter from Birmingham City Jail ( public library) and became not only a foundational text of the American civil rights movement in the 1960s but an enduring manifesto for social justice and the human struggle for equality in every sense of the word, in every corner of the world. Major newspapers and magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Post, published excerpts. ( “Never before have I written a letter this long,” he marveled as he penned the final paragraphs.)Īware of the media’s power to incite the popular imagination, King and his team began distributing mimeographed copies to the clergy of Birmingham and eventually made their way to the press. The following day, while still in jail, he penned a remarkable book-length open letter. King had dedicated his life to eradicating - the hijacking of what should be “common sense” to all in the service of what is “common” and convenient to only those in power - that he felt compelled to respond. It was such a blatant example of the very injustice Dr. King’s arrest, eight male Alabama clergymen issued a public statement directed at him, titled “The Call for Unity,” following a letter penned a few months earlier under the title “An Appeal for Law and Order and Common Sense.” They accused him of being an “outsider” to the community’s cause, suggested that racial injustice in Alabama shouldn’t be his business, and claimed that the nonviolent resistance demonstrations he led were “unwise and untimely.” “We further strongly urge our own Negro community to withdraw support from these demonstrations,” they wrote. On April 12, he was violently arrested on the charge of parading without a permit, per an injunction against “parading, demonstrating, boycotting, trespassing and picketing” that a local circuit judge had issued two days earlier, a week into the protests. (January 15, 1929–April 4, 1968) began coordinating a series of sit-ins and nonviolent demonstrations against racial injustice in Birmingham, Alabama. On April 3, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King Jr.