At one time in the late 1970s, I was working as a reporter for The Birmingham News and the phone rang. The caller had a big story: Martin Luther King was a fraud, and his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail wasn’t actually written from the jail. 
To a lot of people, that might seem significant, but I just shrugged. Whether King wrote it from the jail or from the Holiday Inn had nothing to do with its significance. Reflecting on that episode of Birmingham’s history reminds me that our shorthand references to history almost never give us a real grasp of what happened, but they create an illusion that we know something.
In the case of the Letter from Birmingham Jail, the place where it was composed was a mere footnote. Rather, it was King’s response to white Birmingham ministers, who had published two documents calling on civil rights leaders to slow down and work within the system. The first document was pretty mild, blandly calling on people to work for change “without advocating defiance, anarchy and subversion.” The date of its publication may be more significant than the content: The ministers published it four days after George Wallace’s “segregation forever” speech. (Thanks to BhamWiki.com for making that easy to look up.)
It was the ministers’ second letter, “A Call for Unity,” that provoked King’s passionate response. The clergy pointed to “evidence of increased forbearance and a willingness to face facts” among Alabama leaders, and they argued that the civil rights demonstrations were making things worse.
In their own words, the ministers said: “we are now confronted by a series of demonstrations by some of our Negro citizens, directed and led in part by outsiders. We recognize the natural impatience of people who feel that their hopes are slow in being realized. But we are convinced that these demonstrations are unwise and untimely.”
That was too much for King, who sat down and wrote his answer. I doubt very seriously that anyone reading Birmingham Raw has ever read it, but you should. I’m not even going to quote from it, because its power is in the reasoning and eloquence that one can only find in its entirety.
It is no less than a manifesto of the entire civil rights movement, and I encourage you to read every word of it.
