Birmingham on a Sunday morning, but the good news was "mob murders have declined"; indeed, the paper reported, "...in the last ten years there have only been four lynchings" in Alabama. And on July 26, 1947, The New York Times quoted the Tuskegee Institute's data that "six out of every seven potential lynchings have been prevented" over the past ten years in the south.
             Between the years 1937 and 1947, the Times' story continued, "there have been 273 prevented lynchings, against forty-three cases in which a mob succeeded" in hanging black men in the South. "Alert public officials" and ordinary citizens have been the heroes in the 273 cases of attempted but failed lynching incidents. That having been said, a total of 4,717 black men had been lynched since 1882, an appalling statistic and part of urgency for the push for civil rights justice in 1963.
             In the Letter, King wishes that the clergy – who "deplored the demonstrations" – would express "a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations." The Letter specifically rejects a "superficial kind of social analysis" that addresses "effects" and not "causes." One cause clearly on King's mind was the injustice in education; indeed, a month after King was imprisoned, the New York Times (Lewis, 1963) reported that
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