Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) wrote this letter on April 16, 1963, from a Birmingham jail to his “Fellow Clergymen” who criticized his involvement in a non-violent campaign against racial segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. King argued that African Americans could wait no longer to fulfill the Declaration of Independence’s assertion “that all men are created equal”: “We have waited for more than 340 years for our Constitutional and God Given Rights. . . .”