“Letter from Birmingham Jail” Rhetorical Analysis
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” goes one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most memorable passages in the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” King wrote the long letter following his arrest for taking part in the 1963 Birmingham campaign, which was a nonviolent protest against racial segregation perpetuated by city’s government as well as local retail stores. King’s letter was in response to a critical “Call For Unity” by eight white Alabama clergymen. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is a solid illustration of his reasoning and effective use of rhetorical strategies to convince his audience to make sense of the argument.
In the “Letter from Birmingham,” one of the most classic document of the American civil-rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. uses all appeals to logic, emotion, ethics as well as logical analogies.
Use of Logos in King’s Letter
Logos refers to an effort to appeal to the intellect or make a logical argument by employing reason, facts and documented evidence. King makes effective use of the logs appeal in his letter. He sets off with a logical explanation as to why the Negroes had to demonstrate. He states: “I began thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self-respect and a sense of “somebodiness” that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of a few middle class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best-known being Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro’s frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible “devil” (Jasinski, 2001).
He also employs the logos appeal in expressing the facts relating to the Negro situation in Birmingham which necessitated the nonviolent demonstrations following the refusal of the city fathers to engage in good-faith negotiation: “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” (Jasinski, 2001)
Use of Logical Analogies in King’s Letter
King draws on a number of logical analogies in his letter by referring to biblical stories. For instance, he deploys logical analogies to give explanation and provide feedback to his critics positing that he is an “outsider” in Birmingham. He states: “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 town, 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” (Jasinski, 2001).
In yet another instance of logical analogy, King makes a comparison of the actions who are in defiance of the unjust laws in the Jim Crow South with those who rendered “illegal aid and comfort to the Jews in Hitler’s Germany. To this, he invokes parallels to Jesus Christ, Luther King, Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson – comparisons that squarely denote the civil rights movement in not only a long tradition but also clearly distinguish between right and wrong in addition to responding to the “extremist” brand. He writes: “Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Was not Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.” And John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” And Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …” (Jasinski, 2001).
Thirdly, King uses logical analogy when he makes a case for bringing out in the open the misgivings of the Negro community pertaining the deep-rooted racial injustices. To this, King declares: “Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured” (Jasinski, 2001).
Uses of Pathos in King’s Letter
King employs emotional appeal by often using emotional and deeply person language in making his case. In paragraph 13, he responds to those who advise him to “Wait”: 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” (Jasinski, 2001).
Thereafter, he emotionally chronicles the long list of injustices ranging from the lynch mobs, far too many murders, the abject poverty in which twenty million Negro brothers have had to live in, to the pain of struggling to explain to his sobbing six-year-old daughter why she is not free to go a segregated amusement park. King elevates the ethos appeal by moving from the general aspect of racism and injustice to narrating his personal experiences of it: “…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” (Jasinski, 2001).
King also appeals to the emotions of the reader while registered his disappointment with white moderates, who, though sympathetic to his cause, appear “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice”. He proceeds to express his disappointments with both the white church and white Christian leaders who have been “more cautious than couragesous.” King does well to frame his criticisms as confessions of disappointment as he hoped the figures would have lived up to their ideals. He painfully denotes: “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” (Jasinski, 2001).
Uses of Ethos
King takes advantage of ethical appeal early on the letter by seeking to establish his reputation or authority. In explaining why he is in Birmingham he asserts that: “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” (Jasinski, 2001). This serves to establish credibility i.e. explaining the reason for doing the action and the goodness of the author’s character to the reader. The ethical appeal lends credence to the author’s argument by attesting that the author is indeed knowledgeable about the subject and has moral character and authority.
In another instance of ethical appeal, King concurring with a historical figures held in high esteem: “I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.” He also quotes another spiritual leader: 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,” … and a philosopher: “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” (Jasinski, 2001). All these serve to underscore the high moral values of Dr. King to the reader.
In the later part of the letter, King also does well to recognize that not all members of the white race are without sound moral standing. He states: I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers in the South have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still too few in quantity, but they are big in quality. Some – such as Ralph McGill, Lillian Smith, Harry Golden, James McBride Dabbs, Ann Braden and Sarah Patton Boyle – have written about our struggle in eloquent and prophetic terms” (Jasinski, 2001).
Conclusion
In conclusion, King makes expert use of rhetorical strategies and especially Aristotle’s three argumentative appeals of logic, emotions, and ethics. Use of rhetorical strategies in writing and speaking is very important due to its ability to persuade and inform the audience in the manner desired by the author or speaker. His rhetorical influence remains relevant today because it serves as reference point to tackling the problem of racial profiling and injustices that are still abound in America’s society.
Reference:
Jasinski, J. (2001). Sourcebook on rhetoric: : key concepts in contemporary rhetorical studies. Thousand Oaks (California: Sage.
