Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘Letter From Birmingham Jail’
“We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.”
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Don Cravens / The Life Images Collection / Getty; Bettmann / Getty Martin Luther King Jr.’s Call For a Poor People’s Campaign
In early 1968, the activist planned a massive protest in the nation’s capital.
Jim Peppler / Alabama Department of Archives and History Martin Luther King Jr.’s Protest Against a Racist Court System
On Easter Sunday in 1958, the civil-rights leader led a “prayer pilgrimage” in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest the inequality of a young man's death sentence.
'Birmingham World' / Alabama Department of Archives and History The Crisis in America’s Cities
Martin Luther King Jr. on what sparked the violent urban riots of the “long hot summer” of 1967
Three Lions / Getty Read Martin Luther King Jr. on White America’s Delusions
In 1967, the civil-rights leader foresaw that white resistance to racial equality would stiffen as activists’ economic agenda grew more ambitious.
Steve Schapiro / Corbis / Getty ‘Let My People Vote’
In June 1965, the Voting Rights Act languished in the House Rules Committee after passage in the Senate. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote this letter to the New York Amsterdam News urging its passage as the first step in ensuring access to the ballot.
Bettman / Getty Martin Luther King Jr. on the Vietnam War
“The greatest irony and tragedy of all is that our nation, which initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world, is now cast in the mold of being an arch anti-revolutionary.”
Bettmann / Getty How Much Had Schools Really Been Desegregated by 1964?
Ten years after Brown v. Board of Education, Martin Luther King Jr. condemned how little had changed in the nation's classrooms.
Flip Schulke / Corbis / Getty Martin Luther King Jr. Saw Three Evils in the World
Racism was only the first.
Santi Visalli / Getty The Negro Is Your Brother
From the Birmingham jail, where he was imprisoned as a participant in nonviolent demonstrations against segregation, DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., wrote in longhand the letter which follows. It was his response to a public statement of concern and caution issued by eight white religious leaders of the South. Dr. King, who was born in 1929, did his undergraduate work at Morehouse College; attended the integrated Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, one of six Negroes among a hundred students, and the president of his class; and won a fellowship to Boston University for his Ph.D.
