An early manuscript of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is up for sale at a book fair in New York City this week.

The typed manuscript copy that belonged to King’s literary agent, Joan Daves, will be on display from April 27-30 at The New York International Antiquarian Book Fair. The book fair, in its 63rd year, will be held at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City.

The antiquarian book fair features about 200 exhibitors.

James Cummins Bookseller will exhibit the newly rediscovered draft of King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

On April 16, 1963, after King was arrested for leading protests against segregation, he began writing the letter in his Birmingham Jail cell. The original document was handwritten on the margins of newspaper pages, on small scraps of paper and even on pieces of toilet paper, none of which have survived. The scraps of paper were given to King’s attorneys, who took them to the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, one of King’s lieutenants with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Walker and his secretary, Willie Pearl Mackey, compiled, edited and typed up the manuscript, which King was later able to finish using a legal pad furnished by his lawyers.

The pre-publication copy owned by his literary agent is one of the earliest obtainable copies in existence. It will be offered for sale for $225,000.

The letter is considered the foundational document of the civil rights movement.

King addressed the letter to eight clergy who had written a letter the day King was arrested, April 12, 1963, asking him to delay demonstrations in Birmingham.

The eight clergy were moderate religious leaders who worried that moving too fast on integration would unleash violence in the city. They wanted King to wait until newly elected Mayor Albert Boutwell had a chance to make changes. Boutwell had called King an “outside agitator,” which King refuted in his letter by noting that he was invited by local leaders.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” he wrote. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly…

“Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”

King’s letter eloquently stated the case for racial equality and the immediate need for social justice. “I had hoped,” King wrote at one point, “that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in non-violent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with.”

There would be no waiting for justice, King wrote. “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

King began writing his letter in the Birmingham jail, but it was finished and published later, with excerpts published in May and full texts appearing in magazines in June 1963, and in King’s 1964 book, “Why We Can’t Wait.”

See also: Civil rights leader Wyatt Tee Walker compiled, edited MLK’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’

In April 1963, eight clergy asked the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to delay demonstrations

Bishop Calvin Woods recalls lunch counter sit-in arrests of April 3, 1963