“Our purpose when practicing civil disobedience is to call attention to the injustice or to an unjust law which we seek to change,” he wrote-and going to jail, and eloquently explaining why, would do just that. The decision prompted King to write, in a statement, that though he believed the Supreme Court decision set a dangerous precedent, he would accept the consequences willingly. City of Birmingham that they were in fact in contempt of court because they could not test the constitutionality of the injunction without going through the motions of applying for the parade permit that the city had announced they would not receive if they did apply for one. In 1967, King ended up spending another five days in jail in Birmingham, along with three others, after their appeals of their contempt convictions failed. On the day of his arrest, a group of clergymen wrote an open letter in which they called for the community to renounce protest tactics that caused unrest in the community, to do so in court and “not in the streets.” It was that letter that prompted King to draft, on this day, April 16, the famous document known as Letter From a Birmingham Jail.
King was in jail for about a week before being released on bond, and it was clear that TIME’s editors weren’t the only group that thought he had made a misstep in Birmingham. Abernathy, were promptly thrown into jail.” Both King and one of his top aides, the Rev. “King announced that he would ignore it, led some 1,000 Negroes toward the business district.
“Last week Connor and Police Chief Jamie Moore got an injunction against all demonstrations from a state court,” TIME reported.
The notoriously violent segregationist police commissioner “Bull” Connor had lost his run-off bid for mayor, and despite Martin Luther King Jr.’s declaration that the city was the most segregated in the nation, protests were starting to be met with quiet resignation rather than uproar.Īt least that’s what TIME thought: in the April 19 issue of that year, under the headline “ Poorly Timed Protest,” the magazine cast King as an outsider who did not consult the city’s local activists and leaders before making demands that set back Birmingham’s progress and drew Bull Connor’s ire. In the spring of 1963, in Birmingham, Ala., it seemed like progress was finally being made on civil rights.