Most famously, in April 1963, Eugene Bull Connor, the police commissioner of Birmingham, Alabama, had King arrested. In the letter, King refers to himself as “the son, the grandson, and the greatgrandson of preachers,” and contextualizes his protest within the history of Christianity, noting that the early Christians practiced civil disobedience as well and were “willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire.” King’s vast biblical knowledge and rhetorical skills are clear in this letter: despite being written in the margins of a newspaper in a Birmingham jail cell, King’s letter is one of the most important works of the Civil Rights Era. I n the course of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. We revere the man and revile the strategy, but King knew what he was doing.

With entire families in attendance, city police turned dogs and fire hoses on demonstrators.

was a Baptist minister, a leader of the Civil Rights movement, and the author of “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Responding to an open letter known as “A Call for Unity,” written by ei ght white clergymen, King answers their criticism of his racial activism and defends civil disobedience as necessary in the face of the injustice African Americans experienced at the time. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Perilous Power of Respectability. In the spring of 1963, King organized a demonstration in downtown Birmingham, Alabama.

Martin luther king jr in jail