Reflection of "A Letter from Birmingham Jail" by Martin Luther King jr.

For our honors portfolio this quarter we were required to read three documents. We, then, were quizzed over each of the readings. First, we read “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King, Jr., then, we read the transcript of President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, and last but not least, we read “Millennial Makeover” by Morley Winograd and Michael Hais. Furthermore, we had to read and analyze the documents because the quizzes required us to think deeper than the written words on the paper. I believe these documents are critical because they have shaped the government and our society today. My favorite of these three documents, if I had to pick, would be “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, not only because I admire Martin Luther King Jr., but also because this letter is a very powerful and inspiring piece of work. Luther wrote while being confined in a jail in Birmingham, Alabama, for participating in civil rights demonstrations. His letter states that he will continue resisting nonviolently against racial discrimination and pleads the readers to see segregation from a different point of view. Moreover, I noticed that he quoted many people including Apostle Paul, St. Augustine, Reinhold Niebuhr and many others. This made me realize that he most likely had the quotations memorized since he didn’t have access to those sources while imprisoned. He mentions that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” and that “an unjust law is no law at all” (Luther). This means that an unjust law causes harm; for example, if it is lawful to torture a certain group of people, then that is not a law whatsoever. This idea of injustice affects many directly, but also affects everyone else indirectly in the fact that prejudice is occurring around them. Furthermore, his words describe in detail what segregation was like and what people like him had to go through. This impacted me because now, the idea of racial discrimination is completely frowned upon,