Letter from a Birmingham Jail

LINK TO LETTER

As I was “stumbling” across the Internet, procrastinating and wasting what was left of my day away, I arrived at a familiar text. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was assigned to my 11^th grade English class and was used as a model for interpreting AP exam texts. It provided accessible and potent examples of the holy triumvirate of rhetoric: pathos, ethos, and logos. Quick English lesson for those that haven’t studied this: Aristotle himself penned the three keys as being the ultimate tools for a persuasive argument. Pathos, ethos, and logos, involve appealing to the audience’s emotion, building the author’s credibility, and creating a logical argument, respectively. Martin Luther King blended the three in such a proficient and effective way that his letter, beyond its impact on subsequent civil rights legislation and freedom literature, has been used for classes like the one I took in high school as a grail of rhetorical prose.

King’s letter was written on the margins of a daily paper, which was the only writing surface he had available while being confined for his role as a leader of the Birmingham campaign. His intended audience was much greater than the eight Alabama clergyman that the letter is formally addressed to, but for the purposes of analyzing the letter, the latter proves more pertinent. One of the themes of the letter that has gripped me from the first time I read it until now is the way in which King turns down any hint of aggressiveness in his argument, to the point at which it seems like he is being snide or facetious in suggesting that the clergymen are his “brothers.” King is in jail for planning a non-violent protest of racial segregation within the city, yet he has the foresight to use textually based, Christian examples of reactions against injustice in order to play to the ethos of the men that are suppressing the civil rights movement.

Looking back, I wonder if the very people who most revered King for his speeches (that is, black men and women fighting for equality in the South) were ever intended to read King’s letter. Obviously MLK had well thought-out reasons for writing “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in the style that he did. But, when you are experiencing prejudice on the level that blacks were in that era, and as we discussed in class this was inescapable in its intention of creating a black inferiority, would you want to give those clergymen any neutral reaction at all, no matter how synthetic? What about seeing your leader bow his head writing to the men responsible for their problems as if they were his brothers? I am interested in finding out whether or not King felt contradiction in the manner in which he addressed his different audiences, and whether or not it caused