With today being Martin Luther King, Jr. Day observed my blog post is about his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” written on April 16, 1963.
It was fascinating to read “King wrote the letter on the margins of a newspaper, which was the only paper available to him, and then gave bits and pieces of the letter to his lawyers to take back to movement headquarters, where the Reverend Wyatt Walker began compiling and editing the literary jigsaw puzzle.
“Letter from Birmingham Jail”
“The Letter from Birmingham Jail (also known as “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” and “The Negro Is Your Brother”) is an open letter written on April 16, 1963, by Martin Luther King, Jr. The letter defends the strategy of nonviolent resistance to racism. It says that people have a moral responsibility to break unjust laws, and to take direct action rather than waiting potentially forever for justice to come through the courts. Responding to being referred to as an “outsider”, he wrote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere“ The letter was widely published and became an important text for the American Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s.
… King included a version of the full text in his 1964 book Why We Can’t Wait. A 1999 study found that the essay was highly anthologized in that it was reprinted 50 times in 325 editions of 58 readers published between 1964 and 1996 that were intended for use in college-level composition courses.”
The “Letter from Birmingham Jail” was written before The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963 with Dr. King delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech. At The King Center web site the archives have the entire letter, and here is a link to an mp3 of it in his voice.
This is a link to the text of the typed letter in a pdf from the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute. On the first page it includes the names for “My dear fellow Clergymen”. In front of it is a copy of the mailing label for one of the letters mailed to: Reverend Joe C. Higginbotham, a Birmingham minister which is contained in a special collection library. The last page of that pdf contains a Correction Control Sheet of the Birmingham Jail Treatise.
“Never before have I written so long a letter. I’m afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?”
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail
There is an article today in USA Today about “MLK Day: Why on Monday and what was Stevie Wonder’s role?” – the article reports how in the early 1980s Stevie Wonder worked with Coretta Scott King to gain support for the national holiday. That article had me recalling seeing Stevie Wonder in concert in Houston and during the concert him talking about efforts to make the national holiday a reality – this was back in 1980!
Anchors Aweigh,
Helen
Attribution & Thank you to the following who are referenced today —
Image shown upper left of U.S. Stamp from 1979 15c Martin Luther King Jr. part of the Black Heritage Series, as shown on Mystic Stamp Company
Wikipedia Letter from Birmingham Jail
mp3 audio recording of “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr. April 16, 1963 The King Center
Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King and his Dream January 18, 2008 by Amy Chen The University of Alabama Libraries
USAToday article “MLK Day: Why on Monday and what was Stevie Wonder’s role?” January 18, 2016 written by Mary Bowerman
