King wrote the first part of the letter on the margins of a newspaper, which was the only paper available to him. He then wrote more on bits and pieces of paper given to him by a trusty, which were given to his lawyers to take back to movement headquarters. Pastor Wyatt Tee Walker and his secretary Willie Pearl Mackey then began compiling and editing the literary jigsaw puzzle.[30] He was eventually able to finish the letter on a pad of paper his lawyers were allowed to leave with him.
An editor at The New York Times Magazine, Harvey Shapiro, asked King to write his letter for publication in the magazine, but the Times chose not to publish it.[31] Extensive excerpts from the letter were published, without King's consent, on May 19, 1963, in the New York Post Sunday Magazine.[32] The complete letter was first published as "Letter from Birmingham City Jail" by the American Friends Service Committee in May 1963[33][34] and subsequently in the June 1963 issue of Liberation,[35] the June 12, 1963, edition of The Christian Century,[36] and the June 24, 1963, edition of The New Leader. The letter gained more popularity as summer went on, and was reprinted in the July 1963 edition of The Progressive under the headline "Tears of Love" and the August 1963 edition[37] of The Atlantic Monthly under the headline "The Negro Is Your Brother".[38] King included a version of the full text in his 1964 book Why We Can't Wait.[a]
The letter was anthologized and reprinted around 50 times in 325 editions of 58 readers. These readers were published for college-level composition courses between 1964 and 1968.[39]
U.S. Senator Doug Jones (D-Alabama) led an annual bipartisan reading of the letter in the Senate during his tenure there in 2019 and 2020,[40][41] and passed the obligation to lead the reading to Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) upon Jones' election defeat.
