MLK 1963 Premium Cotton T-Shirt
Mugshot Story
On Good Friday, 12 April 1963, 34-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. marched through downtown Birmingham in open defiance of a court injunction that barred protests without a permit. Police chief “Bull” Connor’s officers seized him and booked him on parading without a permit. Inside the Birmingham City Jail the camera captured the two-frame photograph above, the slate reading POLICE DEPT BIRMINGHAM ALA • 118593 • 4-12-63—a number that would soon appear on placards, posters and T-shirts the world over.
Denied phone calls and placed in solitary, King spent eight days behind bars until supporters raised bail and freed him on 20 April 1963. During that confinement he drafted his classic “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” a 7,000-word defence of non-violent civil disobedience that transformed both the civil-rights struggle and his own national stature.
Today the mugshot stands as more than a record of arrest; it is a visual shorthand for moral courage—proof that the movement’s most powerful words were born behind a cell door bearing the number 118593.
