Letter from Birmingham Jail

16 April 1963

My Dear Fellow Clergymen:
While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work.

This is the beginning of Martin Luther King's "Letter From  Birmingham Jail."  I was twelve years old when it was written and lived a very sheltered living in Bensenville, Illinois.  Through high school there were no black students in any of my classes and none in other District 2 or District 100 schools. 

According to 2010 Census figures Bensenville has a population of about 18,000 and about 3.5% is African American.

On Good Friday, April 12, 1963, King violated a court injunction prohibiting public civil rights demonstrations in the city.

Local police officers arrested King and a handful of protestors, including Reverend Ralph Abernathy, and transported them to the Birmingham city jail, where 40 years earlier, a prisoner had penned a mournful folk ballad about the place that included the line "write me a letter; send it by mail; send it in care of Birmingham jail." 

On June 16, 2010 after the death of George Floyd, Senator Doug Jones of Alabama organized the 2nd Annual reading of " Letter From Birmingham Jail".

Jones prosecuted Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry, two members of the Ku Klux Klan, for their roles in the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.

Tim Scott of South Carolina spoke, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, Mitt Romney of Utah, Doug Jones of Alabama, James Lankford of Oklahoma and Sharrod Brown all read portions of  the "Letter From Birmingham Jail".  It was replayed on CSPAN on Saturday Afternoon

It was surprising for me to hear a bipartisan group of United States Senators read such a historical document about the 1960's struggle for civil rights.  In some ways not much has changed but then again a lot has changed, Tim Scott an African American Senator from South Carolina, President Barrack Obama, Kamela Harris of California and others would never have been elected to office without the civil rights laws passed in the 1960's.  This reading might have been a safe show pony exercise, but these kinds of exercises can bring others along and effect change.

Progress needs both strength of commitment along with a sense of humillity.

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