"Letter from Birmingham Jail"

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his famous, "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," on April 16, 1963, after his arrest for violating Alabama’s law against mass public demonstrations. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) joined with Fred Shuttlesworth’s Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) for the Birmingham Campaign in April 1963 with the hopes of disrupting the system of segregation in the city by putting pressure on Birmingham merchants during the Easter season. The campaign began on April 3, 1963, with lunch counter sit-ins, boycotts, marches, and mass meetings. On April 10, 1963, the city’s Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene "Bull" Connor, obtained an injunction against the protests. Two days later, after much deliberation, King decided to defy the injunction and marched with supporters. He, along with Ralph David Abernathy and fifty other supporters, was arrested and taken to the Birmingham jail, where he was subject to solitary confinement and denied access to his lawyers. While in jail, a friend smuggled King a copy of the Birmingham News, which contained a statement from eight white Alabama clergymen critical of King’s methods, favoring the electoral process to societal change. King began writing his response in the margins of the newspaper and continued on scraps of paper until he received a legal pad from his lawyers. The letter defends his presence in Birmingham and his dedication to the civil rights movement through direct action and nonviolence. This iteration is a copy transcribed and then sent to various clergymen in Birmingham, Alabama, including Rev. Joe C. Higginbotham, and includes the original envelope and transcription control sheet.