Nation: LETTER FROM A BIRMINGHAM JAIL

While Martin Luther King Jr. was in Birmingham's city jail last April, a group of white clergymen wrote a public statement criticizing him for "unwise and untimely" demonstrations. King wrote a reply—on pieces of toilet paper, the margins of newspapers, and anything else he could get his hands on—and smuggled it out to an aide in bits and pieces. Although in the tumble of events then and since, it never got the notice it deserved, it may yet live as a classic expression of the Negro revolution of 1963. Excerpts from the letter, which...

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