As Harrison Salisbury wrote in The New York Times, “the streets, the water supply, and the sewer system” were the only public facilities shared by both races. When King spent his nine days in the Birmingham jail, it was one of the most rigidly segregated cities in the South, although African Americans made up 40 percent of the population. Throughout the 1960s the very word “Birmingham” conjured up haunting images of church bombings and the brutality of Eugene “Bull” Connor’s police, snarling dogs and high-powered fire hoses. King was able to mold a modern manifesto of nonviolent resistance out of the teachings of Jesus and Gandhi.

King’s letter had to be smuggled out of the jail in installments by his attorneys, arriving thought by thought at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s makeshift nerve center at the Gaston Motel. King’s nonviolent protest in the Birmingham News, demanding an end to the demonstrations for desegregation of lunch counters, restrooms and stores. “ Letter From Birmingham City Jail,” now considered a classic of world literature, was crafted as a response to eight local white clergymen who had denounced Dr. So it’s hard to conjure up the 34-year-old in a narrow cell in Birmingham City Jail, hunkered down alone at sunset, using the margins of newspapers and the backs of legal papers to articulate the philosophical foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. King of “ I Have a Dream,” delivered more than 50 years ago in Washington, D.C. The image burnished into national memory is the Dr. “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” St. “There are two types of laws, just and unjust,” wrote Dr. How Martin Luther King's 'Letter From Birmingham City Jail' Inspired the World Close

Mlk jr letter from birmingham jail