The 'Letter from Birmingham Jail' created the moral
blueprint for the civil rights movement. In April 1963, Clarence Jones, the legal counsel for Martin Luther King Jr, took scribbled bits of
newspaper and toilet paper he had smuggled out
of King's Birmingham jail cell and passed them to
Wyatt Tee Walker, King's chief of staff. In turn,
Walker handed them to his secretary, Willie Pearl
Mackey King, so she could type them up. By the time she was 22, Mackey had seen racial
prejudice at its worst. According to historian S
Jonathan Bass' account in "Blessed Are the
Peacemakers", she had quit her job as a counter
waitress at a popular Emory University lunch spot
after a group of white students in blackface took a photograph inside the eatery. She later quit another
job in the food-service department of an Atlanta
hospital after an elderly black coworker was
denied treatment for a heart attack because it went
against hospital policy to treat blacks. Now she was typing up a letter that would
challenge the cultural acceptability of racial
prejudice - even if the greater meaning of the task
had yet to dawn on her. "[King] was so anxious to get a response to [the
clergymen]", Mackey King says. "If you have a story
you really need to get out and the boss needs you
to get it out, you work hard to get it out. The
importance of the letter didn't mean anything to
me. Something needed to be done." The result? Letter From Birmingham Jail, the guiding
force of the civil rights movement, celebrated this
month on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. "There is a need for us to understand and
appreciate what it took to get the letter, to get the
words out of jail and make them available to the
public," says Democrat John Lewis, who represents
Georgia's 5th District in the US Congress - and is
the last surviving speaker from the March on Washington. "And for it to be written, typed and
sent out, it is a powerful, powerful message not just
to the American religious committee but to the
world religious committee and community at large
for them to understand that there comes a time
when someone like Martin Luther King Jr is moved by what I call the spirit of history." The process of turning scraps of jailhouse
newspaper and toilet paper into Letter From
Birmingham Jail remains, in itself, a seminal
achievement. The decision for King and the movement to go to
Birmingham in early April 1963 to initiate civil
disobedience was no accident. After more than a
year trying to desegregate public facilities in
Albany, Georgia, little had changed in the city's
schools and parks. The New York Herald Tribune called the Albany campaign "one of the most
stunning defeats of King's career". The movement
needed to be repositioned. But in Birmingham, King was served with an
injunction that forbade him from organising
nonviolent protests pushing for desegregation. Bull
Connor, the infamous Birmingham commissioner
for public safety, contended that the continued
protests would "cause incidents of violence and bloodshed" as well as "irreparable injury to
persons and property". Leading a nonviolent
protest, King was promptly arrested, ending up in
jail during what was an uneasy time for the
movement. The uneasy mood in Birmingham took its toll on
King's staff. "I didn't think I'd see my wife or
children anymore," Walker says. "I didn't see how I
could get out of there alive." With hundreds of teenagers in jail for peacefully
protesting segregation, Jones, as King's legal
counsel, had to deal with angry parents who
demanded to know when their children would be
bailed out. In King, Jones knew he had an ace in
the hole who could be a powerful fundraising tool for bail money. But when Jones went to raise the issue with King in
his dark jail cell devoid of a mattress, something
else happened. Almost dismissive of what Jones
needed at the time, King revealed that there was an
even more pressing issue on his mind. "Martin, do you understand what I just told you?"
Jones asked. King responded, "Yes, but did you see this?" Pulling out a copy of the April 13 edition of the
Birmingham News, an apoplectic King pointed to
the full-page ad from eight white clergymen,
essentially telling King, the outside agitator who
refused to put a halt to the protests, to leave. To
them, King's "unwise and untimely" campaign had no place in Birmingham. They went on to praise the
calm nature of the city's law enforcement in the
ironically - and tragically - titled "Call for Unity". "I have to answer this," King told Jones. It was then that Jones realised that King had
already begun to respond to the clergymen. "I look around and see every blank space and
edge of every old newspaper there had been
written on, including paper towels," Jones says. Making the most of the little sunlight that trickled
through the bars of his cell, King wrote furiously
from his encyclopaedic memory, quoting the Bible,
Shakespeare, Voltaire and theologians, on any
scrap of paper he could find. The tide of indignation
that came from the clarity of his thinking those few days in jail produced what amounted to the black
community's declaration of independence. King needed more paper, and he also needed what
he had written to be transcribed. Jones, who visited
King twice a day in one of his tailored suits, would
smuggle paper in and out using the inside pocket
of his jacket. Since the jail personnel saw him every
day, they didn't feel the need to pat him down. How Mackey King found her spot in this important
history is all the more curious, given that she was,
by her own admission, a terrible typist. "I'm still not the greatest typist in the world," she
says with a quiet laugh. "Working for Walker, you
had to get it right, even if it killed you. He was not
easy to work with. I was scared to death of the
man." A strategist and mediator in King's inner circle at the
time, Andrew Young was still relatively green on
the campaign front. Like others in King's inner circle
who were working on the letter's production,
Young was solely focused on the transcription. To
him, nothing else mattered. "I sat there and watched her do it," Young says.
"She would call me over and ask: 'Andy, what is this
word?' She'd say: 'Dr King can talk, but he sure can't
write.' "We were so focused on the translation and getting
what he said right that we forgot the importance of
the paper." King's less-than-stellar handwriting was a real
challenge for Mackey King, who was racing against
the clock. "It was not clear. It was almost like
chicken scratch. My vocabulary was certainly not
something that could have helped me figure out
what [King] was saying. I typed what I thought I saw. Sometimes that would be right, and other
times it wasn't right. His handwriting was terrible.
You just couldn't figure it out." Some of the scribbled notes from King were in such
bad shape that several of them were thrown in the
trash. At the time, King's staff didn't make it a habit
of keeping or archiving his material, so for Mackey
King, the act of tossing the illegible, beat-up notes
wasn't to be second-guessed. "I tell you what," Mackey King says, "after looking
at them for so long, I had no reservation in
throwing them away whatsoever... To me, it would
have made no sense to keep [those scraps].
Everybody wants to criticise, but [those scraps]
didn't have the same meaning." In the days and weeks during the letter's
construction, Mackey King would work deep into
the night to transcribe King's writings. After not
sleeping for two days and two nights, physically
and mentally spent, she passed out with her head
on her typewriter. Walker moved Mackey to a nearby couch, sat at the typewriter and finished
typing the letter himself. Later, historians began to
wonder whether Walker, whose own fiery, verbose
sermons became legend, had any individual
influence on the letter's wording. "I was just doing a job," says Walker. "I didn't edit
so much as I translated it. Dr King's thoughts were
clear." The mood in Birmingham, along with the increasing
anger among parents of the jailed teens, had a
couple of members of his inner circle questioning
why King spent so much time responding to the
clergymen. "I didn't really pay attention to the letter until
almost a week later," says Jones. "When I was
reading it quietly somewhere, I said to myself: 'Oh,
my God, this is unbelievable.'" The letter had something of a barbed quality and
did not help curb the violence by Birmingham
police during the protests. But King and his inner
circle were patient. Then on May 2 of that year, Birmingham's version
of D-Day happened, with Birmingham police
wielding water hoses and unleashing German
shepherds on nonviolent protesters. The disturbing
images of black men and women being doused
with water, and of dogs viciously attacking young protesters, were soon disseminated worldwide.
The media coverage surrounding the photos
brought attention to the letter and helped push the
movement toward Washington, DC. In the summer
of 1963, about 250,000 people would join the
March on Washington. King was front and centre, representing the grander scope of civil rights, and
that's how those who helped produce and support
Letter From Birmingham Jail preferred it. "Social-change agents function better when they're
under the radar," Young says. "Everybody could be
under the radar, but Dr King. I think we saw
ourselves as supporting his vision and his mission.
Nobody needed to know who we were."