King establishes an exhaustive list of the burdens African Americans face on a national scale, and the detrimental effects those policies and actions have on mental health. While racism and the policy of segregation was widespread throughout the South at this point in history, King calls Birmingham “the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States,” giving concrete examples of the need to protest and bring national attention to their desegregationist cause. He gives ample context for the protests he is leading, along with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, arguing that the city’s “white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.” King establishes beyond a shadow of a doubt that the protests are a necessary response to the city’s racist policies, as well as the only way to engage whites in substantive negotiations. King writes his letter from jail, as he and other African Americans have been arrested for protesting the segregation policies and overt racism in Birmingham those protests violated an injunction on parading, demonstrating, boycotting, trespassing, and picketing. Systemic racism throughout the American South is at the heart of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s letter, written in response to criticism of his nonviolent civil rights protest in Birmingham, Alabama.
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