Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

£950 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A lovely copy of this community re-issue just four days after King’s assassination. The foreword states: “This letter is privately presented by a group of citizens in Andover in order to do honor to his memory and to make available to the people of the community the eloquent and succint statement of his convictions, his strategy, and purposes.” The civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham in 1963 were the largest since the expansion of the southern protest movement began in 1960. “King’s decision to intentionally allow himself to be arrested for leading a demonstration on 12 April prodded the Kennedy administration to intervene in the escalating protests. A widely quoted letter that King wrote while jailed displayed his distinctive ability to influence public opinion by appropriating ideas from the Bible, the Constitution, and other canonical texts” (ANB). While the New York Times declined to print it, excerpts were run in several other newspapers. It is widely regarded as “one of the most widely admired texts in the corpus of twentieth-century U.S. civic rhetoric” (McClish). Indeed, “ the ‘Letter’ transformed both King and the movement from a relatively regionalized action into a national and international cause “ (Patton). “Over the course of the letter’s 7,000 words, King turned the criticism back upon both the nation’s religious leaders and more moderate-minded White Americans, castigating them for sitting passively on the sidelines while King and others risked everythin

• Binding: Hardcover

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