MLK - Injustice Anywhere

Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, on April 12, 1963, during the campaign against segregation in the city. That day's newspaper carried a statement by eight white Alabama clergymen, 'A Call for Unity,' which King's reply described as calling his activities 'unwise and untimely.' It had also described the demonstrations as led in part by outsiders.

He answered from his cell. King began writing in the margins of that newspaper, continued on scraps of paper a jail trusty supplied, and finished on a pad his attorneys were eventually allowed to leave with him. The letter is dated April 16. In it he explains why a man from Atlanta had a stake 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.'

The full letter was first published in May 1963 by the American Friends Service Committee.

The picture is a poster in red, teal and cream: a man in a dark suit and tie, mid-speech, one finger raised, in front of a sunburst of rays fanning out behind his head. Beneath him a rust-red band carries the sentence in cream capitals, with his name below it.