The Woman Behind Dr. King’s ‘Letter’ Is Getting Her Due

More than six decades after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. composed his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” the young Black woman who helped transform scattered notes on smuggled scraps of paper into one of history’s greatest writings is finally receiving greater recognition.

Willie Pearl Mackey King worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)  from 1962 to 1966, serving on King’s executive staff and working directly for the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, his chief of staff. In April 1963, she spent two nights and three days piecing together and typing the fragments that became King’s celebrated defense of nonviolent resistance — arguably the most monumental documents of the Civil Rights Movement.

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Now, Maryland educator and scholar Donna Sweeting is helping establish a foundation to preserve Willie King’s legacy, document her civil rights work and create scholarships for young people.

The effort grew from the recent discovery of an early draft of the letter in the African American Episcopal Historical Collection at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria. The draft was found among the papers of the late Bishop John M. Burgess and his wife, Esther. A University of Maryland intern, Nick Gentry, discovered the document while cataloging the collection, the seminary said.

Preserving Her Legacy

Sweeting, a VTS graduate and director of its Faith-Filled Families initiative, was approached about helping develop the foundation and raise money for its work.

“The main thing is to preserve the legacy of the work she has done,” Sweeting said. “We want to create opportunities for people to actually begin to understand the movement from the perspective of someone whose name may not be so well known as Dr. King and many of the others.”

The foundation is being incorporated in Maryland, and an application for federal nonprofit status is underway. Its plans include a “freedom ride,” retracing parts of Willie King’s own journey and recordings of her memories in her own voice.

Her recollections reveal the human labor behind a Dr. King’s “Letter,” a document often discussed as though it arrived in history fully formed.

Dr. King was arrested April 12, 1963, during demonstrations against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. From his jail cell, he began responding to eight white clergymen who had characterized the demonstrations as “unwise and untimely.”

Without a notepad or a pen, Dr. King began writing with a pencil stub on whatever paper he could find. Clarence Jones, his attorney, personally smuggled the handwritten fragments out of the jail.

“Dr. King would be writing on the edges of the newspaper, toilet paper, greasy sandwich bags, greasy napkins,” Willie King recalled. “Clarence Jones would put those pieces of paper under his suit jacket.”

‘We’ve Got a Tough One’

Jones delivered the fragments to the SCLC office, where Walker and Willie King waited.

“Miss Willie, we’ve got a tough one,” she remembered Walker telling her. “The leader (Dr. King) would like this to get out as soon as possible.”

She did not immediately recognize that the assignment —written in what she called the reverend’s “chicken scratch” — would make history.

“Honestly, I thought it was just an ordinary letter,” she said.

The pieces were neither numbered nor arranged. Willie King — working in a skirt, because women in pants was forbidden— knelt  on the floor, assembling the scraps into order before typing them on an IBM Selectric typewriter.

“I had to get down on my knees with Scotch tape and try to put those pieces of paper together because they were in no order,” she said. “It was terrible trying to read — looked like sometimes what he had drawn as opposed to had written.”

Walker helped her interpret Dr. King’s theological language. Andrew Young, one of Dr. King’s top aides, occasionally assisted when Walker left the room. Willie King was not allowed to leave the office until the work was finished.

“I wanted to cry, but I was not going to give him the satisfaction of seeing me cry,” she said. “But I went in that bathroom again. It was my favorite crying place.”

Demand Soared After Protests

Once a draft was completed, Jones returned it to Dr. King for review and signature. Willie King and a local woman, Betty Hill, reproduced copies, addressed envelopes and carried them to the post office. Willie King searched a telephone book and called the library to locate addresses for the eight clergymen.

Initially, demand for the letter was modest. That changed after Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor unleashed police dogs and high-pressure fire hoses on children demonstrating in Kelly Ingram Park.

“People started saying, ‘What is going on in Birmingham?’” Willie King said. “Everybody wanted a copy of the Birmingham jail letter. I could hardly make enough copies. Things just blew up all of a sudden.”

After leaving SCLC, Willie King joined the newly established Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Her presence helped build trust among Black workers who were hesitant to file discrimination complaints with a federal agency.

“People who saw me in that office and knew that I had worked with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, they had a relationship with me,” she said. “They said, ‘Oh, maybe it’s OK.’ So they filed their complaints.”

‘It Was All God’

Sweeting, the VTS scholar creating the foundation for Willie King,  sees that work as part of the same legacy — a Black woman carrying the movement from demonstrations into the federal offices charged with enforcing civil rights law.

The foundation will also connect Willie King’s history to Sweeting’s work with children and families. Sweeting, who earned a Master of Divinity from Virginia Theological Seminary, is in the inaugural cohort of Hampton University’s doctoral program in public theology and community engagement.

“How do families pass faith? How do they pass courage, memory, justice and the stories of faithful Black witnesses from one generation to the next?” Sweeting asked. “We need to tell the stories. If we don’t do that, then all of that is lost.”

For Willie King, preserving the story is not about personal acclaim. It is about the “beloved community” Dr. King envisioned — one grounded in love, dignity and respect.

“I don’t care what you are, what you look like,” she said. “I just want you to respect the person because I truly believe that we are all made in God’s image, and we didn’t make ourselves.”

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Looking back on the unlikely path that carried her from Vidalia, Georgia, to the center of the Civil Rights Movement, Willie King offers a simple explanation.

“It was all God,” she said. “I had no connections. I didn’t know anybody. I didn’t have anything. But I’m obedient. So I followed God’s leading.”