In 1963, black civil rights activists called for a march in the streets of Birmingham to protest racial discrimination. The movement’s leaders applied for permission and security for the march on Easter Sunday, but the local police chief, Conor, refused. The city authorities then asked the court to issue a ban on the march on the grounds of public safety and order. But the leaders of the march defied the court’s order to stop the march. This action led to the arrest of eight of the leaders of the march, including Martin Luther King. While in prison, King received letters from seven prominent church figures demanding that he call off the demonstrations and rely on negotiations and the courts to resolve the matter. King wrote his famous “Birmingham Jail Letter” on the edge of the newspaper.
As an outstanding black leader in the African-American civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, Jr., guided by the theological idea of nonviolence, led the blacks in their struggle for citizenship, against racial discrimination and oppression. The city of Atlanta discriminated against blacks and segregated them. In this environment, Christian theology had a strong influence on King. Compared with Atlanta, Birmingham was also full of racial discrimination and racial oppression, which formed a strong contrast with the ideas of freedom, equality, and fraternity advocated by Christian theology, and became the main motivation of King’s struggle.
King, based on Christian theology, advocated fraternity and against blacks who, dissatisfied with the status quo, resorted to violent means of protest. Some people view nonviolent resistance as negative, but in King’s view, it is a positive act of religious faith as opposed to the collective silence of the church. The flipside of King’s vision of nonviolent struggle, moreover, was an affirmation of American values. In King’s view, the American spirit and the Christian spirit were always one and went hand in hand, which objectively won him the support of the federal government. In the midst of the Birmingham black protest movement, President Kennedy even announced the deployment of 3,000 federal troops to the outskirts of Birmingham to safeguard agreements in favor of blacks.
Information from：
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_rights_movement#Birmingham_campaign,_1963
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. had an incredible impact on the racial injustice movement and his impact lives on way past his death. His teachings are still being used by activists today. His work is not over and the things he fought for back then are still being fought for right now. I like that you broke the letter down. It made it easier to understand and brought attention to parts I would have most likely missed if not.