Letter from Birmingham Jail
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40 free Letter From Birmingham Jail trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
In April 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. sat in a cell in Birmingham, Alabama, and answered a group of local clergymen who had criticized his protests as badly timed. The reply became one of the most widely read documents of the movement against segregation: a defense of nonviolent protest, an argument about when a law deserves obedience, and a rebuke to people who agreed with the goal but objected to the timing. This quiz covers the letter from several angles. Some questions deal with the events around it: the campaign in Birmingham, the arrest, the conditions in the jail and the people who helped the text reach the public. Others test the argument itself, including the thinkers and historical examples King draws on, the labels he rejects or accepts, and the groups he praises and criticizes. It suits students reading the letter for an English or history class, teachers who want a ready-made multiple choice review, and anyone revisiting a text they first met years ago. The opening questions are the most approachable, later ones reward close reading, and every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01With no writing paper in his cell, on what did King begin drafting the Letter from Birmingham Jail?
Newspaper margins
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.
Q 02King's Birmingham arrest, which led to his jail letter, fell on which day of the Christian calendar?
Good Friday
Good Friday found crowds of Black residents, dressed for the holy day, lining the streets as King was led away to jail.
Q 03Which group does the Letter from Birmingham Jail fault for preferring order to justice?
White moderates
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.
Q 04In his Birmingham jail letter, King tells of his young daughter being barred from which place?
An amusement park
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.
Q 05To show that legal is not always just, the Letter from Birmingham Jail cites which regime's laws?
Nazi Germany
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.
Q 06Which colonial-era protest does the Letter from Birmingham Jail cite as just law-breaking?
Boston Tea Party
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.
Q 07Which label does King first resist, then embrace, in the Letter from Birmingham Jail?
Extremist
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.
Q 08Which publication's magazine asked King for his Birmingham jail letter, then chose not to run it?
The New York Times
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.
Q 09Under what conditions was King held in the Birmingham jail when he began writing his famous letter?
Solitary confinement
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.
Q 10Weeks after King's Birmingham jail letter, which unexpected marchers were arrested by the hundreds?
Schoolchildren
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.
Q 11Which statement by eight Alabama clergymen provoked King's Letter from Birmingham Jail?
A Call for Unity
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.
Q 12In his Birmingham jail letter, King notes that the group he leads is based in which city?
Atlanta
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.
Q 13Which word for protest leaders like King does the Letter from Birmingham Jail rebut at its start?
Outsiders
Q 21Which medieval thinker does the Letter from Birmingham Jail cite to define a just law?
Thomas Aquinas
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.
Q 22From which Jewish philosopher does the Letter from Birmingham Jail borrow the terms I-It and I-Thou?
Martin Buber
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.
Q 23Which biblical trio does the Letter from Birmingham Jail praise for defying Nebuchadnezzar's laws?
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.
Q 14Which saint does the Letter from Birmingham Jail cite for the view that an unjust law is no law?
St. Augustine
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.
Q 15Which Greek philosopher does the Letter from Birmingham Jail invoke as a model of useful tension?
Socrates
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.
Q 16Which Birmingham safety commissioner turned dogs and fire hoses on marchers after King's jail letter?
Bull Connor
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.
Q 17Which close ally was arrested beside King before he wrote the Letter from Birmingham Jail?
Ralph Abernathy
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.
Q 18In which book about the Birmingham campaign did King reprint a polished version of his jail letter?
Why We Can't Wait
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.
Q 19In his Birmingham jail letter, which charge does King say he was arrested on, calling its use unjust?
Parading without a permit
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.
Q 20Whose administration did Coretta Scott King contact when her husband was denied a call from Birmingham's jail?
John F. Kennedy
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.
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego
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.
Q 24In his Birmingham jail letter, which of King's four steps tested volunteers' readiness for arrest?
Self-purification
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.
Q 25Which Birmingham pastor founded the local movement that invited King before his jail letter?
Fred Shuttlesworth
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.
Q 26Late in the Letter from Birmingham Jail, King rebukes the clergymen for praising which group?
The city police
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.
Q 27What did the C stand for in Project C, the planners' code name for the Birmingham campaign?
Confrontation
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.
Q 28Why did organizers delay the Birmingham campaign, a choice King defends in his jail letter?
A mayoral run-off
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.
Q 29Five bishops and two Protestant ministers were among King's eight clergymen critics in Birmingham; who was the eighth?
A rabbi
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.
Q 30What did King and a fellow minister wear on the Birmingham march that ended in their arrest?
Work clothes
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.