MARTIN LUTHER KING "LETTER FROM A BIRMINGHAM JAIL" DRAFT WITH PENCIL CORRECTIONS.
Item Description
This offering consists of 14 8.5x11" mimeographed pages stapled at top left corner. Top right of first page reads "Martin Luther King Jr./Birmingham City Jail/April 16, 1963" with a list of eight religious leaders at top left whom King was responding to. Holed along left edge for a three-ring binder with fabric tape circle reinforcements around each hole of the first page. Small loss along bottom right edge and moisture marks affecting first three pages. Otherwise, pages have scattered pencil corrections, moderate handling, trivial edge chips and scattered foxing. VG. From a private collection outside of Chicago in South Holland, IL.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." -Martin Luther King Jr.
On April 12, 1963 while defying an injunction on demonstrations in Birmingham, AL, issued in response to ongoing protests led by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) against discriminatory practices of local merchants, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested and booked in the City Jail. It was Good Friday, the Civil Rights leader had been arrested for a thirteenth time and he had just ushered in a newborn child on March 28. A newspaper, smuggled into his cell, had published an open letter titled "A Call For Unity" written by eight local religious leaders that took aim at the direct action methods of civil disobedience employed by "outsiders," a thinly veiled reference to King and SCLC. He was compelled to begin a response using the only space then available to him, the edges of the newsprint. When he was finally allowed to receive SCLC lawyers, they provided him a pad to continue his work and helped shuttle the scraps to pastor Wyatt Tee Walker and secretary Willie Pearl Mackey, who began to piece together King's open letter response that is now counted among the most important documents of the American Civil Rights movement. After King's release on April 20, SCLC's Birmingham campaign continued and though the letter was distributed to news outlets it wasn't immediately published, fading into the background as footage of Sheriff Bull Conner's deputies turning fire hoses on children and using dogs to disband peaceful protestors was airing nightly on national TV. The nation recoiled at the violence, ushering in a wave of support that helped elevate King's leadership stature accentuated by the announcement on May 10 of the "The Birmingham Truce Agreement" that formed a biracial committee to monitor progress on integrating lunch counters, the removal of "White Only" signs and a program for African American employment. Despite this victory the letter remained relatively obscure. The New York Times requested an example for publication in late April, 1963 but it was never published. King delivered a fiery sermon at Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church on April 22 that contained, nearly verbatim, some of the lines in the letter. Rumors of a May circulation in African American churches in Birmingham are not confirmed. An unauthorized version was published in the May 19 New York Post Sunday Magazine. Its first printing under the title "Letter From A Birmingham Jail" did not come until June 12 in "Liberation" magazine followed by other religious and liberal publications. Larger circulation publications did not publish until late summer. King included the text in his 1964 book "Why We Can't Wait".
The exact textual history of Letter From A Birmingham Jail remains something of a mystery as the scraps on which King began the process are lost and a typescript of those writings has never been discovered. Different drafts are known to have been produced by two SCLC teams with some pre-publication drafts numbering over 20 pages and others with different formatting and subtle differences in language. This draft is an incredible time capsule, taking the reader into the back rooms of the process with differing text from the final printed edition too numerous to mention (see images of each page online). Having a litany of pencil corrections and minor typos this example was likely intended for the purposes of editing and was probably among the final drafts distributed. The now famed manifesto on civil disobedience captures King's thinking at a critical point and served as a guide for the civil rights movement. The text continues to inspire oppressed people around the world to use non-violent methods to defeat injustice and oppression. Thus, the historical importance of Letter From A Birmingham Jail cannot be overstated and with interest in material related to King, the movement's most iconic figure, seemingly at a constant fever pitch this offering represents an important opportunity to obtain a cornerstone artifact for a museum, private or institutional collection.
