Letter from Birmingham Jail | Martin Luther King Jr.

The "Letter from Birmingham Jail", also known as the "Letter from Birmingham City Jail" and "The Negro Is Your Brother", is an open letter written on April 16, 1963, by Martin Luther King Jr. It says that people have a moral responsibility to break unjust laws and to take direct action rather than waiting for justice to come through the courts. Responding to being referred to as an "outsider", King writes: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."    

The letter was widely published, and became an important text for the American Civil Rights Movement.  King wrote the first part of the letter on the margins of a newspaper, the only paper available to him. He then wrote more on bits  of paper given to him by a trusty, which were given to his lawyers and passed to the pastor Wyatt Tee Walker and his secretary Willie Pearl Mackey to began compiling and editing the literary jigsaw puzzle. He was eventually able to finish the letter on a pad of paper his lawyers were allowed to leave with him.  

The letter was anthologized and reprinted some 50 times in 325 editions of 58 readers published for college-level composition courses between 1964 and 1968.  U.S. Senator Doug Jones led an annual bipartisan reading of the letter in the U.S. Senate during his tenure in the United States Senate in 2019 and 2020.