MLK's Letter From Birmingham Jail: Newspaper Margins and Project C

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In 1962, Miles College students in Birmingham, Alabama, staged an eight week boycott that cut downtown retail sales by 40 percent. The Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights won a promise from the Senior Citizens Committee to remove whites only signs, but the signs stayed or returned within days, while city officials who had lost an election refused to leave office until 1965. With President John F. Kennedy moving slowly, Martin Luther King Jr. and his allies launched Project C, for confrontation, in early April 1963 to provoke a televised overreaction. When a judge issued an injunction against marching and picketing on April 10, King chose to defy it and was arrested on Good Friday, April 12, with Ralph Abernathy and Fred Shuttlesworth.

Held in solitary confinement with no mattress and no phone call, King read A Call for Unity, a statement by eight white Alabama clergymen who called the protests unwise and untimely and labeled him an outside agitator. He wrote his reply in the newspaper's margins, then on scraps passed by a trustee and finally a legal pad, and Wyatt T. Walker assembled the pieces. The letter argued for an inescapable network of mutuality, constructive tension, and the duty to break unjust laws openly and accept the penalty, drawing on Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. It named the white moderate who preferred order to justice as a greater obstacle than open segregationists.

• The Miles College boycott showed that Birmingham's white power structure was vulnerable through its cash registers.
• King rejected the idea that time alone would end segregation, arguing that time is neutral.
• Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers arranged the $160,000 needed for bail, and King was released on April 20, 1963.
• A major New York magazine initially turned the letter down.
• It spread through excerpts and pamphlets, including those by the American Friends Service Committee, over the summer of 1963.