This is an opinion column.

Welcome back to class, students. This is gonna be an exciting day. You may notice some of your classmates aren’t here. Not many. Just a few. Their parents decided they shouldn’t partake in today’s lesson. Too bad. It’s their right, though.

Too bad.

Let’s get started.

It’s April. Black History Month was two months ago, but altogether, class, what do we say?

Black history is American history!

That’s right. So today we’re going to talk about Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”.

What’s with the blank stares? You heard me say Dr. King and went right to “I Have A Dream,” didn’t you?

Of course, you did, because that’s almost all you were taught about him—before my class.

Don’t blame your former teachers. Blame your white-washed—oops, you didn’t hear that—history books and skittish lawmakers who think history is a “divisive concept” that might make their kids feel bad. That’s ridiculous. Let me stop before they come after me.

Never feel bad, or guilty, about any history you’re taught. It happened. It’s the truth—the good, bad, and the horrific. By learning it, all of it, you have a chance to make us do better today and tomorrow.

RELATED: Time to teach our children the full breadth of our history, from glorious to sordid

Now, King’s letter. We’ll talk about it throughout the semester. There’s so much there to discuss, debate, and digest—too much for one day. We’re starting today because he wrote it on April 16, 1963, sixty years ago next Monday. All 7,00 words of it. On scraps of paper sneaked to his cell, then given to and pieced together by Rev. Wyatt T. Walker, a colleague in the struggle.

The letter was a response to an article published in the local newspaper, the Birmingham News (Y’all have no clue what a newspaper is, do you? Sigh). It was co-signed by eight white religious leaders in the city who chastised King, Birmingham pastor Rev Fred Shuttlesworth, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, and other Black leaders for organizing a march to disrupt legal segregation in the city.

To disrupt the “whites only” policies and placards in storefronts downtown. To do it preceding Easter, one of the biggest shopping weeks of the year.

And to do it without a permit, which they never would have received anyway, of course. Not from Bull Conner, the city’s racist commissioner of public safety. We’ve already talked about Bull, so let’s move on. Back to the letter.

The religious leaders demanded King and the others be more patient, that they negotiate, and that they give a newly elected mayor time. In essence, they told the Black folks to sit the hell down. In the back of the bus.

King was in the cell for four days, following his arrest, along with Abernathy, on April 12, 1963. The white men stirred him, even more than the police who hauled him to jail.

… Seldom, if ever, do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all of the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would be engaged in little else in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work…

You gotta love this. Let me translate and update: King is essentially saying, “I don’t have time for this mess, but you’re gonna get this smoke.”

The men wrote that King and other protest leaders were “outsiders coming in”.

… [W]e were invited here. I am here because I have basic organizational ties here… Beyond this, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here … Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider.

King was just warming up, displaying his gift for prose, even on scraps of paper.

… You deplore the demonstrations that are presently taking place in Birmingham. But I am sorry that your statement did not express a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being…

Ouch.

Feast on these lyrical nuggets:

… freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed….

… For years now I have heard the word “wait.” It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This “wait” has almost always meant “never.” It has been a tranquilizing thalidomide, relieving the emotional stress for a moment, only to give birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration. …[See the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos, “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?…

… One may well ask, “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “An unjust law is no law at all.”…

.. .. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust….

Oh, that our lawmakers would measure every bill they pursue by this standard. Sorry, I digress.

… Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in the tragic attempt to live in monologue rather than dialogue…

… There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair. …

And yet King was hopeful—and clear that the movement would not sit the hell down.

… I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are presently misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation because the goal of America is freedom….

… out of a bottomless vitality our people continue to thrive and develop… If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail.

… The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations. He has to get them out. So let him march sometime; let him have his prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; understand why he must have sitins and freedom rides. If his repressed emotions do not come out in these nonviolent ways, they will come out in ominous expressions of violence.

… This is not a threat; it is a fact of history. …

I’ll stop there, for today. Read the rest of the letter on your own, and perhaps you’ll see why I believe it deserves to stand alongside the Dream –a duet of King’s greatest works.

Even though we can’t see it like we see the Dream—there were no cameras in King’s cell.

Even though we can’t hear it like we hear the Dream —no crowd, no stage.

But we can feel it. With each dynamic paragraph, with sentences that pierce our consciousness, with truths that anchor our resolve.

“…it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else is there to do when you are alone for days in the dull monotony of a narrow jail cell other than write long letters, think strange thoughts, and pray long prayers?”

Prayers many of us still pray. Prayers that, with homage to King’s dream, “one day little black boys and girls” and “little white boys and girls” in our classrooms will digest, discuss, and debate the important letter.

And embrace its lessons—lessons some of us still must learn.

Class dismissed.

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Roy S. Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary and winner of the Edward R. Murrow prize for podcasts: “Unjustifiable,” co-hosted with John Archibald. His column appears in AL.com, as well as the Lede. Subscribe to his free weekly newsletter, The Barbershop, here. Reach him at [email protected], follow him at twitter.com/roysj, or on Instagram @roysj