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Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation
Bloomsbury Press
April 2013
On Sale: April 9, 2013
240 pages
ISBN: 1620400588
EAN: 9781620400586
Kindle: B009SJZPHM
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
"I am in Birmingham because injustice is here," declared
Martin Luther King, Jr. He had come to that city of racist
terror convinced that massive protest could topple Jim Crow.
But the insurgency faltered. To revive it, King made a
sacrificial act on Good Friday, April 12, 1963: he was
arrested. Alone in his cell, reading a newspaper, he found a
statement from eight "moderate" clergymen who branded the
protests extremist and "untimely."
King drafted a
furious rebuttal that emerged as the "Letter from Birmingham
Jail"-a work that would take its place among the
masterpieces of American moral argument alongside those of
Thoreau and Lincoln. His insistence on the urgency of
"Freedom Now" would inspire not just the marchers of
Birmingham and Selma, but peaceful insurgents from Tiananmen
to Tahrir Squares.
Scholar Jonathan Rieder delves
deeper than anyone before into the Letter-illuminating both
its timeless message and its crucial position in the history
of civil rights. Rieder has interviewed King's surviving
colleagues, and located rare audiotapes of King speaking in
the mass meetings of 1963. Gospel of Freedom gives us
a startling perspective on the Letter and the man who wrote
it: an angry prophet who chastised American whites, found
solace in the faith and resilience of the slaves, and knew
that moral appeal without struggle never brings justice.
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