MLK Birmingham Jail Letter Display

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" is considered to be one of the most important texts of the Civil Rights Movement.  In observance of Black History Month, and in celebration of Samford University's 50th anniversary of integration, the library is proud to display this letter in its entirety on the 1st floor of the library near the Circulation Desk now through February 25th.

This display incorporates enlarged reproductions of an original copy of the letter which is housed in the library's Special Collection.  This copy was given to the library as part of the papers of Dr. George Bagley.  It is not known how Dr. Bagley obtained the letter.  However, at the time of the Birmingham Campaign in 1963, Dr. Bagley was the Executive Secretary-Treasurer of the Alabama Baptist State Convention so it is likely he received it while he was serving in this role.

Dr. King began writing the letter on the edges of a newspaper while in the Birmingham jail.  The notes were smuggled out to Wyatt Tee Walker, Executive Director for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and his secretary, Willie Pearl Mackey.  It was Mackey that took the scraps of notes and typed the first drafts of the letter.  The typed copy concludes with the initials of  MLK:WM noting the letter's author and the woman who typed it.

The library's copy of the letter will also be featured as part of an interview with Ms. Mackey in "Martin Luther King Jr.: One Man and His Dream," a new BBC documentary on Dr. King observing the 50th anniversary of his assassination.  This documentary is scheduled to air in the U.S. on the Reelz network on April 1st at 9pm ET/ 6pm PT.

Throwback Thursday - Filming in Reid Chapel

Image courtesy of the Samford University Library Special Collection.

On this date in 1961, the half-hour documentary Who Speaks for Birmingham? aired on CBS.  Parts of the documentary were filmed in our own Reid Chapel where Howard College students were interviewed.

Scottsboro Boys Photo Exhibit -- Now Through March 3rd

The Samford University Library invites you to experience “Scottsboro Boys: Outside the Protective Circle of Humanity” -- a traveling exhibit chronicling what many consider to be the very beginning of the civil rights movement in the United States.  This exhibit comes to us courtesy of the Morgan County Archives and is on display on the second floor of the library in our Main Reading Room now through March 3rd.

The Scottsboro Boys were nine African-American men, ages thirteen to twenty-one, charged with the rape of two white women in March of 1931.  Their names were Willie Roberson, Olen Montgomery, Eugene Williams, Roy Wright, Haywood Patterson, Clarence Norris, Andy Wright, Ozie Powell and Charlie Weems. Within two weeks, an all-white jury found the men guilty and sentenced them to death.

The case made national news.  The Communist-backed International Labor Defense (ILD) took up the case and appealed to the Alabama Supreme Court. The ILD also organized protests across the country against the racist verdict.  Labor organizations around the nation rallied for a new trial.  The Alabama Supreme Court upheld the convictions, but in November 1932, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a new trial.

The new trials began in March 1933. Samuel Liebowitz, an eminent criminal lawyer recruited by the ILD, defended the accused.  Judge James Edwin Horton oversaw the first trial which was that of Haywood Patterson.  In spite of lack of evidence and a victim recanting her story, the jury convicted Patterson to death.

The defense moved for a retrial and, believing the defendants innocent, Judge James Edwin Horton agreed to set aside the guilty verdict for Patterson. Horton ruled the rest of defendants could not get a fair trial at that time and postponed the rest of the trials.  This decision cost him his job when he ran for re-election.

The trials moved to another court and continued. This third set of trials was completed and again all men were sentenced to death. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed this set of convictions April 1, 1935, because African-Americans were excluded from the juries in Alabama at that time. This practice denied the defendants due process.

In 1936-1937, five of the defendants were again tried and found guilty. Willie Roberson, Olen Montgomery, Eugene Williams, and Roy Wright, who had already been in prison for six years, had their cases dismissed.  Haywood Patterson, Clarence Norris, Andy Wright, Ozie Powell and Charlie Weems were sentenced to long prison terms.

Patterson escaped in 1949 and fled to Michigan where the governor refused to extradite him.  He was convicted in an assault case there in 1951 and died in 1952.

Charlie Weems was paroled in 1943.  Andy Wright was paroled in New York State in 1950. Clarence Norris was pardoned in 1976 by Governor George Wallace.  Ozie Powell was paroled in 1946.

On November 21, 2013, the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles granted posthumous pardons to Weems, Wright and Patterson, the only Scottsboro Boys who had neither had their convictions overturned nor received a pardon.