WHEN MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. brought his campaign against segregation to Bull Connor’s Birmingham, he laid siege to the bastion of Jim Crow. Birmingham was among the most segregated cities in the country at the time; King called it a city whose fathers had apparently never heard of Abraham Lincoln. Birmingham had also been the site of a horrific series of bombings of black churches and homes. In April 1963 King answered the call to bring his cause to the city. When King landed in jail on Good Friday for violating an injunction prohibiting demonstrations, he used the time to meditate on the counsel of prudence with which Birmingham’s white ministers had greeted his campaign. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was the result.

Reading the letter 40 years later is a humbling experience. Perhaps most striking is King’s seething anger over the indignities of segregation: