Letter from Birmingham Jail

Written in the margins of a newspaper, in a cell, in answer to clergymen who called his protest untimely. King's reply is the moral center of the whole tradition of conscientious resistance: the distinction between a just law, which one obeys, and an unjust law, which one has a duty to break openly and to accept the penalty for. There is no more patient or more devastating answer to the demand that the oppressed wait. Read it slowly, and quote it sparingly, as it deserves.

The minister who fused the Black church, Gandhi's method, and the American founding promise into the moral argument of the civil rights movement. The Letter from Birmingham Jail, written in the margins of a newspaper, answers the charge that his protest was untimely with the distinction between just and unjust law that anchors the whole tradition of conscientious resistance. He was killed at thirty-nine. The argument he made has only grown harder to answer.