The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” written 61 years ago this month, will be read aloud this week at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

The reading will be on Friday at 10 a.m. on the grand staircase at the institute.

King. wrote the 6,500-word “Letter from Birmingham Jail” on April 16, 1963, while incarcerated at the Birmingham City Jail for marching without a permit. The letter became world famous for its summary of the fight for human rights.

The live reading is among a series of events highlighting the importance of the months of April and May of 1963 in the chronology of global human rights.

April marks the anniversary of the 1963 Birmingham Campaign, also known as the Birmingham movement. Organized by Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), the two-month Campaign targeted the city’s segregation system by putting pressure on local businesses.

“The Birmingham Campaign placed our city in the national spotlight and made us arguably the birthplace of the modern global human rights movement,” said BCRI President and CEO DeJuana Thompson.

King was arrested on Good Friday, April 12, 1963, and wrote the Letter from Birmingham Jail four days later in response to criticism of the peaceful demonstrations. “Evoking the spirit of Dr. King, the upcoming BCRI reading will be a moving reminder of the responsibility each of us has to the advancement and preservation of human and civil rights,” Thompson said.

The BCRI will highlight other events in April and May to commemorate the Birmingham Campaign, including the Birmingham Civil Rights Conference on April 15-16, the re-enactment of the 1963 Children’s March on May 2, and the 70th anniversary on May 17 of the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court ruling that outlawed public school segregation.

Community leaders and members of the public will read King’s letter, and the reading is open to the public.

“Whether one wants to read or just take in these powerful words from the audience, we hope the public will join us along the way during ‘Letter from the Birmingham Jail’ recitation event,” Thompson said.

An early manuscript of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” was auctioned at a book fair in New York City last year.

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.

King directed his letter to eight clergy who were considered moderate religious leaders. His epic response still echoes through American history.

For more information, visit www.bcri.org.