LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM JAIL

“Letter from Birmingham Jail”



“Letter from Birmingham Jail”

Introduction

The "Letter from Birmingham Jail," now a classic of world literature, written in response to eight white pastors who had denounced the nonviolent protest of Martin Luther King in the local newspaper, the Birmingham News, and required the late events to eliminate desegregation in restaurants, toilets and shops. His letter, his lawyers made her smuggled out piece by piece, one thought at a time, and so she came to Gaston Motel, where the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had set up a makeshift headquarters. Christian discipline faultless, Martin Luther King was able to formulate a modern manifesto of nonviolent resistance from the teachings of Jesus and Gandhi.Discussion

In early January 1963, the Conference of Southern States (SCLC), the organization for civil rights led by the Reverend Martin Luther King, took targeted the city of Birmingham, Alabama, to carry a campaign of nonviolent direct action. Such campaigns held for several years in the southern United States, and included rallies, marches, boycotts, sit-ins and other similar tactics designed to protest and ultimately eliminate racial segregation and other forms of discrimination. Birmingham was a particularly valuable target. It was not just one of the largest cities in the south, but also a bastion of opposition to racial integration. The city has a long history of often brutal repression of its black citizens.

The story is long and tragic illustration of the fact that privileged seldom groups that gives the privileges without any compel. Sometimes individuals affected by the light of morality and of themselves give up their discriminatory attitudes, but the groups rarely have as much character as individuals. We have painfully learned that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, he never engaged in direct action movement at a time deemed "appropriate," according to the schedule for those who have not suffered unduly from the evils of segregation (Washington, 1986).

Throughout the 1960s, the only name of the city, "Birmingham," evoked the haunting image of bombings in churches and brutality of the police under the command of Eugene "Bull" Connor, with the dogs that showed their fangs and fire hoses. At the time, of Martin Luther King spent nine days in jail in Birmingham was one of the southern cities where segregation was strict, even though blacks made up 40% of the population. To borrow the words of Harrison Salisbury in ...