Martin Luther King faced criticism from clergy leaders in Birmingham Alabama for his direct actions in “their” town in April 1963. They saw him as an outsider (King was based in Atlanta, GA) and as an agitator. They asked him to refrain. He did not. He led a civil disobedience action against the businesses in downtown Birmingham and was arrested for it.
From jail, King wrote a letter explaining why an “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” It was a phrase he’d repeat many times. Letter From Birmingham Jail became one of the key texts of the Civil Rights Movement. Al Jazeera contends that the letter set the tone for the movement and paved the way for the March On Washington four months later, in August 1963.
In April, 1963, King wrote from jail:
“I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. 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. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”
Read the letter in full here.
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I did some internet digging and turned up these images of King’s 1963 arrest.
King and Rev. Ralph Abernathy (left) led a line of demonstrators into the business section of Birmingham, Alabama on April 12th, 1963.
Abernathy and King are taken by a policeman, Birmingham, Alabama, April 12, 1963.
And then at Montgomery County Jail, this mugshot. You can see the date 4.12.63 in the lower right.
And later in the jail.
1958 + 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama
Sometimes the image below is thought to be from the same day. But it is in fact from 1958. The same Montgomery County and likely the same jail.
King wore a white shirt on both occasions, in 1958 he also wore a tie, beige suit and hat. In 1963, King showed up (knowing he was going to be arrested) in jeans and a denim shirt over his white shirt.
As for the mugshot below, you’ve seen it … or at least versions of it. You may not be familiar with the exact version below which has been *vandalised* with a biro scrawl of the date of King’s death.
This image here is a copy of the original file that was kept at the Montgomery Sheriff’s Department. In 2004, a deputy rediscovered the files of King and his fellow protestors from 1958. Therefore, prior to 2004, only unscrawled versions of King’s mugshot circulated.
When one pauses to think about this, it’s quite curious. And it’s quite perverse. Who scrawled on MLK’s mugshot? Someone on the Montgomery County Sheriff’s staff returned to the archive, ten years after the photo was made, to write upon the mugshot that the subject was dead.
Was this standard practice? I doubt it. Say for example, someone gets in a fist-fight, in some year in the late ’50s, in some part of Montgomery County, and was booked into jail. Then suppose, for arguments sake, that that same person died a decade later in another state. It’s not likely the Montgomery Sheriff would even know, let alone direct her or his staff to doctor an archived booking photo. Which leads me to believe that an employee took it upon themselves to return to the file to annotate the photo.
What a strange and disturbing act. Was it born of self-directed stupidity; a procedure by a bureaucrat going the extra mile to fill-in all known information in the crudest of manners? Does the act reflect a disdain for King? Keep guessing; it’s likely we’ll never know who scrawled all over this significant photographic document of the Civil Rights era.
ONE MORE THING
On today, Martin Luther King Day, may I also recommend Wil Haygood’s piece Martin Luther King, Thurgood Marshall and the Way to Justice.
In considering these two visionaries, Haywood outlines who then, now and our future relate. Amidst the current Black Lives Matter movement–when debate about the effectiveness (and speed) of change brought about by protest vs. legal process–is at the forefront, it pays to consider the lives of MLK, a non-violent and civil disobedient leader, and Marshall the first African-American Supreme Court Justice.
Prison Photography 