Letter from Birmingham Jail

NY: Limited Editions Club, 2007. One of 420 copies, signed by the artist. . Hardcover. Fine. Folio. (vii), 54pp. Faith Ringgold's eight serigraph prints earnestly illustrate the painful complexities of the Civil Rights Movement. In color and line they are whimsical, casting a church, a field, and a fairground with vibrancy that clashes with further, darker details: shadowy silhouettes set behind the stained glass of a white chapel, dark bodies lost among the field of cotton, and a high fence with segregationist signs preventing African-American children from entering. The discomfort and anguish captured in Ringgold's images reflects those same emotions in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famed letter. Appended to the letter is a short essay from Dr. C. T. Vivian, "Martin Luther King, Jr.: 21st Century Man" Bound in full red cloth with a leather label inset on the front cover. Very fine in a cloth clamshell box.