DALLAS (AP) – Willie Pearl Mackey knew how to decipher the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s writing. She was used to his sloppy cursive and large vocabulary.
But his notes – smuggled from a Birmingham, Alabama, jail on napkins, toilet paper, newspapers and a greasy paper bag – were nearly impossible to read.
The Dallas Morning News (http://bit.ly/1GjmhAq ) reports the young secretary scattered the smudged scraps across her desk. She worked with King’s chief of staff, the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, to turn the notes into a cohesive reply to white clergymen who called King’s civil rights demonstrations “unwise and untimely” in a full-page newspaper ad.
King, alone in a jail cell in April 1963, needed Mackey and Walker’s help.
“It was so difficult,” Mackey recalled last week from her home in Silver Spring, Md. “You’re piecing together toilet paper. You’re piecing together newspaper edges. I didn’t know what went first.”