Letter From A Birmingham Jail

In 1963, strong opinions on black civil rights were being brought forth in Birmingham, Alabama and other southern states. Some of those strong opinions was from 8 clergymen, who spoke out against King and his ideas on desegregation and equality for all. King felt the need to defend his ideas of the men he thought were supportive of the civil rights cause. In King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, he uses rhetorical strategies such as appeals to ethos, logos, and pathos, as well as diction, syntax, allusions and imagery to strengthen his argument that equality for all should be fought for, and segregation should be hindered. These strategies also promote the purpose, which is to correct the misconceptions held by the clergy and to justify the
For example, King establishes credibility by writing, “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”(892). King is knowledgeable in the subject of racial discrimination and injustice from serving as the president of this organization, and by using ethos, he shows that he has the background to voice his argument and justify his protesting actions which put him into jail. Moreover, King starts the letter with “My dear fellow clergymen” (892) , using diction such as “dear” and “fellow” show that King is putting himself on the same level as the clergymen. He wants the men to know that he is no less than the men or no higher. They are all Christian ministers, and King uses this appeal to ethos to show that they should support his argument because the church does not support inequality. King is also knowledgeable in the subject of injustice and racial inequality, writing, “But more basically, I am here in Birmingham because injustice is here”. He was arrested because of protesting for racial equality and spent most of his life fighting for that cause. He is well versed on the subject and the appeal to ethos using
These logical facts that King writes such as “we have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights” (895) show that King is refuting the claim that they clergymen made saying that if the blacks wait, they will get their rights. King is showing that they have waited for almost 400 years and they still have not been given the rights promised in the Constitution because of their color. King uses logos to show that the time for action is now, not later and to show that there are facts to support why they are protesting. Also, King uses allusions to develop and achieve his appeal to logos. Allusions such as “... 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 I am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town” show how King is justifying his actions. King feels the need to spread the word through direct action and protests that blacks should have equal freedom just as the leaders of his religion did with the ideas of Jesus Christ. King’s use of logos shows the audience the logical reason behind the protesting happening by black people for their