By the peculiar logic of racial politics, King raised a cry about restaurant courtesies while accepting death threats quietly as a hazard of his work.

King left his text altogether at this point—a departure that put him on a path to speaking words of American scripture, words as essential to the nation’s destiny in their way as those of Lincoln, before whose memorial King stood, and those of Jefferson, whose monument lay to the preacher’s right, toward the Potomac. The moments of ensuing oratory

“Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”