The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was, in his profoundly respected August 1963 letter to a gathering of white ministry who addressed and condemned his exercises in Birmingham, Alabama, looking for, from the vantage purpose of his correctional facility cell, to both right the confusions held by those pastorate, and to legitimize the strategies of peaceful common rebellion to which he subscribed. Why was King in Birmingham in any case? As he states right off the bat in his paper, "I am in Birmingham