who was letter from birmingham jail written to
King was met with unusually harsh conditions in the Birmingham jail. An ally smuggled in a newspaper from April 12, which contained A Call for Unity, a statement by eight white Alabama clergymen against King and his methods. The letter provoked King, and he began to write a response on the newspaper itself. King writes in Why We Can't Wait: "Begun on the margins of the newspaper in which the statement appeared while I was in jail, the letter was continued on scraps of writing paper supplied by a friendly black trusty, and concluded on a pad my attorneys were eventually permitted to leave me."