listen: A LETTER TO MLK

BY TRACY SCHLAPP

Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all of their scintillating beauty.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

April 16, 1963 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a letter to his fellow clergy addressing a statement they released calling his nonviolent campaign “unwise and untimely.” According to Swann Auction Galleries (which sold an early typed draft of the document for $150,000), the letter started as “jumbled notes on scraps of paper smuggled to King by a prison guard, and as King and the SCLC staff recognized its power, it went through various revisions and was distributed locally to churches before making its first partial print appearance on 19 May 1963.” The document like whispers in the wind circulated through different fingers on keyboards.

The strength of the civil rights movement comes from the power of collaboration. We need the faces of the movement — and equally we need the people who put the plan into motion. We are all welcome to put our hearts, and minds, and bodies in service of a greater good. In 1968, Dr. King urged his congregation from the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia to remember: “He who is greatest among you shall be a servant that’s the new definition of greatness. This morning the thing that I like about it, by given that definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great.”

Le’Var Howard wrote A Letter to MLK from his own cell. We recorded this reading over a musical track that Le’Var produced to accompany this piece. | TDS

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