He refused to post bail, instead drawing the media's attention on the injustices of segregation. King was taken to Birmingham jail and separated from his supporters. King was arrested along with his top lieutenant, Ralph Abernathy, and about 50 other African American protesters for parading without a permit. On April 12, 1963, Good Friday, King marched with his supporters from the steps of the Sixth Avenue Zion Hill Baptist Church toward City Hall and the Birmingham central business district in direct violation of an injunction prohibiting the protest It's hard to put a price on such an important piece of history. The draft will be featured at the The New York International Antiquarian Book at Manhattan's Park Avenue Armory from April 27 through April 30. It is also being offered for sale ― for $225,000. But one of the earliest drafts of the letter, which fell into the possession of King's literary agent, Joan Daves, was recently discovered, and will be exhibited this week at a New York book fair. King, who was isolated from the rest of the protesters, wrote the original manuscript in the margins of a newspaper, on pieces of toilet paper on small scraps of paper smuggled from the jail by King's lawyers. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?" "So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. "I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice," King wrote.
Without a light or even a mattress on the bedsprings, King wrote what would become the classic "Letter From Birmingham Jail," an intellectual and philosophical treatise that challenged white moderates for decades to come. Martin Luther King Jr., jailed with about 50 other peaceful protesters, wrote a response to local clergy members who had chastised him for upsetting Alabama's status quo. Months before the March on Washington, where he delivered his spellbinding "I Have a Dream" speech, the Rev.
Sixty years ago, a Baptist minister sat in a southern jail cell and penned the most important written statement of the civil rights movement.
0 kommentar(er)
