Letter from Birmingham City Jail

Newly reopened after some emergency roof repairs, Mixed Magic Theatre is once again staging its annual performance of Rev. Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham City Jail. Ricardo Pitts-Wiley plays King in a performance directed by his son Jonathan. (In February they’ll switch roles – Jonathan will play Dr. King in a staging directed by his father.) Locked up for non-violent protests that the civil right leader organized in April 1963, King wrote the open letter in response to a critical newspaper editorial co-signed by eight Alabama clergymen. Originally scrawled in the margins of the newspaper itself, King’s letter quickly became one of the foundational texts of the civil rights movement.