According to Diane McWhorter’s Carry Me Home: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, [New York Times Magazine Editor Walter] Shapiro phoned the offices of King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, in July 1962. King was doing jail time in Albany, Georgia, on charges of disturbing the peace while protesting the segregation of public facilities. Shapiro suggested that King write a “letter from prison” modeled on those of early Christian saints; Shapiro may also have been thinking about another 20th century political martyr and Christian minister, Dietrich Bonhoeffer…
…The following May, King was once again in jail for staging a nonviolent protest, this time in Birmingham, Alabama. King remembered Shapiro’s offer… King scribbled a response in the margins of the newspaper, on toilet paper, and and on other scraps that his lawyers sneaked out to the SCLC’s executive director, Wyatt Walker, who got it transcribed. Walker passed drafts back and forth through the lawyers until King was satisfied.
Up north at the Times Magazine, Shapiro was eager to publish, but (according to McWhorter) he “could not get the letter past his bosses at the Times.” Way to go, Gray Lady!
The Times, S. Jonathan Bass reports in Blessed Are The Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Eight White Religious Leaders, and the ‘Letter From Birmingham Jail,’ initially scheduled the letter for publication in late May. But first it wanted (in the recollection of King adviser Stanley Levison) a “little introduction setting forth the circumstances of the piece.” Then it decided, no, what it really wanted was for King to “write a feature article based on the letter.” Or, possibly, it wanted both. Before King had a chance to jump through these hoops, the New York Post (in those distant days a plausible rival to the Times) got a copy of the letter and published unauthorized excerpts, killing the Times’s interest.
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Australia Adds New Weather Map Colors to Accommodate Extreme Heat
With temperatures reaching near-record levels and forest fires raging, Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology has added pink and deep purple to its heat index to extend its temperature range past 50 degrees celsius (122 fahrenheit).
Via The Sydney Morning Herald:
The range now extends to 54 degrees [129.2 fahrenheit] – well above the all-time record temperature of 50.7 degrees reached on January 2, 1960 at Oodnadatta Airport in South Australia – and, perhaps worringly, the forecast outlook is starting to deploy the new colours.
“The scale has just been increased today and I would anticipate it is because the forecast coming from the bureau’s model is showing temperatures in excess of 50 degrees,” David Jones, head of the bureau’s climate monitoring and prediction unit, said.
While recent days have seen Australian temperature maps displaying maximums ranging from 40 degrees to 48 degrees - depicted in the colour scheme as burnt orange to black – both Sunday and Monday are now showing regions likely to hit 50 degrees or more, coloured purple.
As the SMH points out: “Australia’s first six days of 2013 were all among the hottest 20 days on record in terms of average maximums, with January 7 and today likely to add to the list of peaks. That would make it four of the top 10 in a little over a week.”
Meantime, there’s rash of wildfires breaking out (map) with some small towns being “warned that it is too late to try to flee the incoming flames,” according to the Telegraph. In 2009, 173 people in Australia died during one particular period of wildfires.
In the United States, 2012 was the hottest year on record, breaking the previous yearly high by 1 degree fahrenheit, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Image: Screenshot, Australian Bureau of Meteorology interactive weather map. Select to embiggen.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/d601774da9b49b58674b4809959740a5/tumblr_mgdkxqIJZf1qedj2ho1_r1_250.png)
