Florence Darlington Technical College King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail Analysis Guidelines:View the color-coded PDF of King’s Letter on the June 1 D2L Co

Florence Darlington Technical College King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail Analysis Guidelines:View the color-coded PDF of King’s Letter on the June 1 D2L Content page.Summarize/paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr.’s main argument of the whole letter in your introduction.Develop a thesis statement making a claim about the most effective rhetorical appeal type in this letter- emotional? Logical? Argument from character/experience (ethos)?Use the rest of your paper to quote and explain several examples of that one type of argument from the letter, describing how those examples are adding to the persuasive power of the letter and/or what you think each of their intended effect(s) is on the letter’s audience(s) Color Coded Rhetorical Analysis of Letter from
Birmingham Jail
The text of this letter originally appeared at: The Nobel Prize Internet Archive
Text revised and corrected by
Laurel Lacroix, Ph.D.
Department of English
Houston Community College System — Southwest
Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail–a rhetorical analysis
In the following text, here is the color key:
Purple: the opposition’s arguments
Red: use of an emotional appeal or pathos
Green: use of appeal to authority or reputation or ethos
Blue: use of an appeal to logic or logos
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama (Bishop C. C.
J. Carpenter, Bishop Joseph A. Durick, Rabbi Hilton L. Grafman, Bishop Paul Hardin, Bishop Holan B. Harmon,
the Reverend George M. Murray. the Reverend Edward V. Ramage and the Reverend Earl Stallings) was composed
under somewhat constricting circumstance. Begun on the margins of the newspaper in which the statement appeared
while I was in jail, the letter was continued on scraps of writing paper supplied by a friendly Negro trusty, and
concluded on a pad my attorneys were eventually permitted to leave me. Although the text remains in substance
unaltered, I have indulged in the author’s prerogative of polishing it for publication.
April 16, 1963
MY DEAR FELLOW CLERGYMEN:
While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities
“unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the
criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in
the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine
good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statements in what I hope will
be patient and reasonable terms.
I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues
against “outsiders coming in.” I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some
eighty-five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for
Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago
the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct-action program if such were
deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with
several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here I am here because I have organizational ties here.
But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left
their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the
Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman
world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly
respond to the Macedonian call for aid.
Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and
not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are
caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly,
affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone
who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.
You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a
similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to
rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with
underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more
unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.
In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist;
negotiation; self-purification; and direct action. We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham. There can be
no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly
segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly
unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in
Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these
conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in
good-faith negotiation.
Then, last September, came the opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham’s economic community. In the
course of the negotiations, certain promises were made by the merchants — for example, to remove the stores’
humiliating racial signs. On the basis of these promises, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the
Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations. As the weeks and
months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned;
the others remained.
As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon
us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means
of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties
involved, we decided to undertake a process of self-purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence,
and we repeatedly asked ourselves: “Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?” “Are you able to endure the
ordeal of jail?” We decided to schedule our direct-action program for the Easter season, realizing that, except for
Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic withdrawal program would
be the by-product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the merchants
for the needed change.
Then it occurred to us that Birmingham’s mayoralty election was coming up in March, and we speedily decided to
postpone action until after election day. When we discovered that the Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull”
Connor, had piled up enough votes to be in the run-off we decided again to postpone action until the day after the
run-off so that the demonstrations could not be used to cloud the issues. Like many others, we waited to see Mr.
Connor defeated, and to this end we endured postponement after postponement. Having aided in this community
need, we felt that our direct-action program could be delayed no longer.
You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are
quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks
to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced
to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of
tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not
afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent
tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so
that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and
objective appraisal, we must see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will
help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and
brotherhood.
The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door
to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been
bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.
One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is
untimely. Some have asked: “Why didn’t you give the new city administration time to act?” The only answer that I
can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing
one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor will bring the
millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both
segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough
to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from devotees of
civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain civil rights without determined legal
and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges
voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold
Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded
by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of
those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It
rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must
come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa
are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace
toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dart
of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and
drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your
black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an
airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your
speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement
park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is
closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see
her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you
have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people
so mean?”; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable
corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by
nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes
“boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the
respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living
constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer
resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” then you will understand why we
find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to
be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.
You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern.
Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public
schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How
can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of
laws: just and unjust. I would be the last to advocate disobeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral
responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree
with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all”
Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is
a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony
with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in
eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality
is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It
gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use
the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I-it” relationship for an “I-thou”
relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically,
economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and awful. Paul Tillich said that sin is separation. Is
not segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness?
Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge
them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.
Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power
majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal.
By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow
itself. This is sameness made legal.
Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the
right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up
that state’s segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout Alabama all sorts of devious methods are used
to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties in which, even though Negroes
constitute a majority of the population, not a single Negro is registered. Can any law enacted under such
circumstances be considered democratically structured?
Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of
parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a
parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First
Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.
I hope you are able to make the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the
law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so
openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that
conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the
conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was
at stake. It waspracticed superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating
pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic
freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party
represented a massive act of civil disobedience.
We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian
freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even
so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If
today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would
openly advocate disobeying that country’s antireligious laws.
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the
past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable
conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler
or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a
negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly
says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who
paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of
time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from
people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm
acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice
and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social
progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary
phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to
a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually,
we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to th…
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