Letters From Birmingham Jail

“Letters from Birmingham Jail” is an astonishing piece of literature with all forms of Rhetoric overflowing from its pages. In this letter written to his fellow white clergyman, Martin Luther King Jr. takes his understanding of moral and human rights to powerfully write a persuasive letter in order to correct the ways of others. He goes on to use ethos, pathos, and logos to construct a strong argument.

Martin Luther King Jr. is a very passionate human rights activist, and a clergyman. He understands that the equality of Blacks and Whites are clearly out of balance, when they should be the same. In order to fix this, he uses his God sent gift to persuade those who read this letter that they need to rethink what they are doing and what other whites are doing.

In this letter, the bulk of what King says is not only in his defense for why he has broken the law to support black human rights, but also to show his colleague that everything that isn’t being done by whites in regards to the subject stated above, is morally incorrect. He gives a brilliant example of how the things that Hitler did were legal, yet we all know that the illegal freedom fighters were in the right, and Hitler in the wrong.

King does a fantastic job at including strong points of rhetoric throughout his letter. His argument was so forward; pointing out how wrong and incorrect the ideals of the government in relation to the blacks. He used mostly pathos to create the foundation of his argument; being able to heavily rely on Christian ideals and morals to back up his forward approach. I absolutely loved his call to repentance as he invited everyone to join God in a cause to do what is right: “Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”