Letter from a Birmingham Jail

On Good Friday of nineteen sixty-three, April twelfth, Martin Luther King was arrested on the streets of Birmingham for marching without a permit. He was placed in solitary confinement at the Birmingham City Jail, a cell without a mattress or books.

A few days into his imprisonment, someone smuggled him a newspaper. In the margins and white spaces of that newspaper, and then on scraps of paper supplied by a sympathetic Black trusty, and finally on legal pads his lawyers were eventually allowed to bring in, King wrote a response to a letter that had been published by eight white Alabama clergymen. Those eight men, who included Catholics, Protestants, and a rabbi, had published a statement that agreed segregation was unjust but argued the civil rights demonstrations were unwise and untimely, and that the matter should be left to the courts.

King's response, dated April sixteenth, nineteen sixty-three, ran to more than six thousand words. He wrote, responding to the clergymen's call for patience: "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." He wrote that he had "almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate."

The letter circulated first through religious and civil rights networks, then was published in Liberation magazine in June of nineteen sixty-three. It is now studied in schools and universities across the country and is considered one of the most important documents in American political writing.

King spent about eight days in the Birmingham jail. The letter outlasted everything.