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 11th 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.
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