Martin Luther King Jr.

It was 12 April 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama.

Two ministers had put on work clothes. They came out of the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church and marched down the street.

At the end of the march, a police wagon was waiting. They climbed in.

One of them was Ralph Abernathy. The other was Martin Luther King Jr.

He was being arrested for violating the Alabama law against demonstrations.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on 15 January 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia.

In Boston, he had met Coretta Scott, a music student. They married in 1953. They had four children.

Then he became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, in Montgomery, Alabama.

On 1 December 1955, in Montgomery, a Black woman, Rosa Parks, was arrested. She had refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger.

The city's activists formed the Montgomery Improvement Association, to boycott the buses. They chose a leader: the young pastor of Dexter Avenue.

"We have no alternative but to protest," he told them.

The boycott began on 2 December 1955. It lasted more than a year. His house was bombed. His family was threatened. He kept to the path of nonviolence.

In December 1956, the buses of Montgomery stopped being segregated.

Later, he led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 1963, he came to Birmingham.

The day after his arrest, eight members of the city's clergy published a statement in the Birmingham News. They called the demonstrations "unwise and untimely."

In his cell, King answered them.

He began writing on pieces of newspaper. Then on scraps of paper slipped to him by a Black inmate. He finished on writing pads left by his lawyers.

The letter was dated 16 April 1963. It began: "My Dear Fellow Clergymen."

In it he wrote that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. He also wrote this:

The letter left the jail. It circulated in copies, then in pamphlets and magazines.

In 1963, two hundred and fifty thousand people marched with him to the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington. That day, he said: "I have a dream."

The following year, a law banned racial discrimination.

In 1964, at thirty-five, he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent struggle for the civil rights of African Americans.

On 4 April 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

He came from the Baptist Christian tradition. His "network of mutuality" echoes Ubuntu without being the same thing: each of us is bound to the fate of others.

In a cell in Birmingham, there were pieces of newspaper covered in writing.

They became a letter that travelled far beyond those walls.