40 Fun Facts About Letter From Birmingham Jail

With no writing paper in his cell, on what did King begin drafting the Letter from Birmingham Jail?

Newspaper margins were the only paper King had, so he started writing around the edges of the very page that printed the clergymen's criticism. He went on to scraps, then a pad left by his lawyers.

King's Birmingham arrest, which led to his jail letter, fell on which day of the Christian calendar?

Good Friday found crowds of Black residents, dressed for the holy day, lining the streets as King was led away to jail.

Which group does the Letter from Birmingham Jail fault for preferring order to justice?

White moderates, King wrote, were as great an obstacle as open segregationists, because their calls for patience and calm let injustice stand. The eight clergymen stood in for this wider audience.

In his Birmingham jail letter, King tells of his young daughter being barred from which place?

An amusement park advertised on television had caught his six-year-old's eye, and King describes her tears when he explained it was closed to Black families. He lists it among the reasons patience had run out.

To show that legal is not always just, the Letter from Birmingham Jail cites which regime's laws?

Nazi Germany made persecution lawful and sheltering its victims a crime, King observed, adding that he would have broken those laws to help Jews. Legality, he argued, is no proof of justice.

Which colonial-era protest does the Letter from Birmingham Jail cite as just law-breaking?

Boston Tea Party patriots broke the law and are remembered as heroes, which let King place his marchers in an American tradition the clergymen already honored. He set it beside biblical and ancient examples.

Which label does King first resist, then embrace, in the Letter from Birmingham Jail?

Extremist began as the clergymen's charge, but King turned it into a badge of honor, arguing that what matters is the cause a person is extreme about. Jesus and Lincoln, he wrote, were extremists too.

Which publication's magazine asked King for his Birmingham jail letter, then chose not to run it?

The New York Times had an editor, Harvey Shapiro, who requested the piece for its magazine, but the Times declined to print it. Long excerpts first reached a national audience in a rival tabloid, without King's consent.

Under what conditions was King held in the Birmingham jail when he began writing his famous letter?

Solitary confinement cut King off so completely that he was at first refused a phone call to his wife, who had just given birth to their fourth child. Alone in the cell, he started to write.

Weeks after King's Birmingham jail letter, which unexpected marchers were arrested by the hundreds?

Schoolchildren walked out of class in early May 1963 and marched downtown in waves, and images of dogs and fire hoses turned on them shocked the world. The outcry pushed the city's businesses to negotiate.

Which statement by eight Alabama clergymen provoked King's Letter from Birmingham Jail?

A Call for Unity appeared in the Birmingham News, urging Black residents to drop the demonstrations and press their case in the courts. An issue smuggled into King's cell set him writing.

In his Birmingham jail letter, King notes that the group he leads is based in which city?

Atlanta was home to his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, whose local affiliate had invited him to Birmingham. King used that invitation to answer the charge that he had no business in the city.

Which word for protest leaders like King does the Letter from Birmingham Jail rebut at its start?

Outsiders was the clergymen's word for those leading the marches, and King met it head on: he had been invited, and no citizen is a stranger anywhere in his own country.

Which saint does the Letter from Birmingham Jail cite for the view that an unjust law is no law?

St. Augustine supplied the maxim King leaned on to answer the charge of lawbreaking: a rule that degrades people has no claim on conscience. King added that just laws deserve full obedience.

Which Greek philosopher does the Letter from Birmingham Jail invoke as a model of useful tension?

Socrates unsettled Athenians with hard questions so they would examine their beliefs, and King claimed the same role for peaceful protest. He also notes that Athens put the philosopher to death for it.

Which Birmingham safety commissioner turned dogs and fire hoses on marchers after King's jail letter?

Bull Connor oversaw both the firefighters and the officers he sent against the marchers, and the televised scenes horrified viewers worldwide. The outrage became a catalyst for legal change across the South.

Which close ally was arrested beside King before he wrote the Letter from Birmingham Jail?

Ralph Abernathy marched beside King from a Baptist church straight into custody, a joint arrest meant to revive a campaign that was running short of volunteers and bail money.

In which book about the Birmingham campaign did King reprint a polished version of his jail letter?

Why We Can't Wait grew out of the letter itself, after New York publishers took an interest in it. King wrote that he polished the text for the book but left its substance unaltered.

In his Birmingham jail letter, which charge does King say he was arrested on, calling its use unjust?

Parading without a permit is a fair rule in itself, King conceded, but it turns unjust when used to keep citizens from peaceful assembly and protest. His own arrest showed how a sound law can be misapplied.

Whose administration did Coretta Scott King contact when her husband was denied a call from Birmingham's jail?

John F. Kennedy's administration heard her concern, and Birmingham officials then let King phone home. Supporters were also sending Washington telegrams about the arrest.

Which medieval thinker does the Letter from Birmingham Jail cite to define a just law?

Thomas Aquinas gave King his test: a human law is just only when it agrees with a higher moral law, so a statute that degrades people is unjust. Every segregation law, King concluded, fails that test.

From which Jewish philosopher does the Letter from Birmingham Jail borrow the terms I-It and I-Thou?

Martin Buber argued that people can treat one another as persons or as objects, and King used the idea to say segregation turns human beings into things. That, he wrote, is why such laws are morally wrong.

Which biblical trio does the Letter from Birmingham Jail praise for defying Nebuchadnezzar's laws?

Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego chose a fiery furnace over bowing to a royal decree, and King held them up as proof that civil disobedience is as old as scripture. A higher moral law was at stake, he wrote.

In his Birmingham jail letter, which of King's four steps tested volunteers' readiness for arrest?

Self-purification came third, after gathering the facts and trying to negotiate, and it took the form of workshops where volunteers asked themselves whether they could take blows and jail without striking back.

Which Birmingham pastor founded the local movement that invited King before his jail letter?

Fred Shuttlesworth had fought Birmingham's segregation since 1956, surviving repeated bombings of his home and his church. He was arrested on the same march as King.

Late in the Letter from Birmingham Jail, King rebukes the clergymen for praising which group?

The city police had kept order in public, King granted, but he wrote that calm methods used to protect segregation deserve no praise. He wished the clergymen had commended the peaceful demonstrators instead.

What did the C stand for in Project C, the planners' code name for the Birmingham campaign?

Confrontation was the plan from the start: organizers meant to fill the jails and force a crisis the city could not ignore. King defends that deliberate tension at length in his letter.

Why did organizers delay the Birmingham campaign, a choice King defends in his jail letter?

A mayoral run-off between a hard-line segregationist and a milder rival was pending, and organizers held back so the marches would not sway the vote. Critics then said the winner deserved time, which King rejected.

Five bishops and two Protestant ministers were among King's eight clergymen critics in Birmingham; who was the eighth?

A rabbi, Milton Grafman of Birmingham's Temple Emanu-El, signed beside Catholic, Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian and Baptist leaders. King's reply cites Jewish as well as Christian thinkers.

What did King and a fellow minister wear on the Birmingham march that ended in their arrest?

Work clothes were what the two ministers put on before walking from a Baptist church into custody, knowing the march would end in a cell. The arrest was meant to revive a flagging campaign.

Whose movement does the Letter from Birmingham Jail name as the voice of Black nationalist bitterness?

Elijah Muhammad led the Nation of Islam, which King cited as the bitter alternative that would gain ground if peaceful protest were spurned. He placed himself between that despair and the complacency of the comfortable.

Whose view that sin is separation does the Letter from Birmingham Jail use to condemn segregation?

Paul Tillich, a leading Protestant thinker, had been a subject of King's doctoral dissertation, and King returned to this idea of his for years. If sin is estrangement, he reasoned, laws that divide people enact it.

Which aide pieced together King's smuggled scraps into the finished Letter from Birmingham Jail?

Wyatt Tee Walker and his secretary Willie Pearl Mackey compiled and edited the fragments at movement headquarters as lawyers carried them out a few at a time. The typed essay ran to 21 double-spaced pages.

Which of his eight critics does King's Birmingham jail letter praise for welcoming Black worshippers?

Earl Stallings, pastor of First Baptist Church, had opened its doors to Black worshippers, a step that angered members of his own congregation. He was the only one of the eight King thanked by name.

Which magazine reprinted the Letter from Birmingham Jail as The Negro Is Your Brother?

The Atlantic Monthly gave the letter that headline as its fame spread through the summer of 1963, months after it first circulated in Birmingham. Several smaller journals had already printed it.

Which organization first published the complete Letter from Birmingham Jail, as a pamphlet?

American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker-founded peace group, issued the full text in May 1963 under the title Letter from Birmingham City Jail. Magazines picked it up over the following weeks.

Never mailed to the clergymen, how was the Letter from Birmingham Jail first circulated?

As mimeographed copies it passed from hand to hand in Birmingham, since the movement treated it as a public statement for a far wider audience than the men it addresses. National publication followed weeks later.

What did Birmingham's city government obtain against the protests two days before King's arrest?

A blanket injunction barred demonstrating, picketing and boycotting, and campaign leaders announced they would defy it. King had concluded that obeying such an order in an earlier Georgia campaign was a mistake.

For which college subject did the Letter from Birmingham Jail become a staple of course readers?

Composition courses made it a classroom fixture: a 1999 study of 58 long-running college readers counted 50 reprintings of the letter, ranking King among the ten most reprinted essayists.

The National Civil Rights Museum, home to a replica of King's Birmingham cell, is in which city?

Memphis built the museum around the Lorraine Motel, where King was assassinated in 1968, five years after he wrote his letter in the cell the exhibit recreates.