While imprisoned for a peaceful civil rights demonstration in Alabama, Martin Luther King, Jr. penned the Letter From Birmingham Jail in response to a published statement by 8 Alabaman clergymen that urged civil rights protestors to make their claims in the courts, not the streets. In it King declared that this kind of "wait" talk from apparently sympathetic members of the white community often meant "never," and that sometimes the only way to achieve justice was through civil disobedience. Here Rev. King reads an excerpt from his letter.