Remembering Martin Luther King Jr.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. began writing the “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” in the margins of newspapers, on scraps of paper, paper towels and slips of yellow legal paper smuggled into his cell, where he was kept in solitary confinement after being arrested April 12, 1963, on charges of violating Alabama’s law against mass public demonstrations.

As the nation celebrates King's national holiday Monday, it's easy to freeze-frame him as the benevolent dreamer carved in stone on the Washington Mall. Yet the platitudes that frame many King holiday events often fail to mention the most radical aspects of his legacy, says Jeanne Theoharis, a political science professor at Brooklyn College and author of several books on the civil rights movement.