Abstract

This paper serves as a letter from Birmingham jail analysis essay.  It first gives background information on the Birmingham Campaign and why King was there in the first place.  Then it proceeds to discuss the reason he wrote his letter, which was a public response to public criticism he received from eight white Southern preachers.  The analysis examines the letter itself and shows how King used various arguments and persuasive techniques to convince the reader that right was on his side.  Finally, it concludes with a list of relevant and important quotes from King’s letter.

Introduction

While Martin Luther King, Jr., is today recognized as one of the most important leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, at the time—and especially at the beginning—he was very much criticized by his confreres for his participation in rallies and protests.  His arrest in Birmingham and his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” was written in an effort not only to silence his critics but also to motivate and mobilize them and get them over to his side.  MLK, Jr., recognized that their criticisms of his actions stemmed more from fear of rocking the boat than from a sense of justice. 

This paper will provide an analysis of King’s “Letter,” which was a response to the public attack of eight white Southern religious leaders who urged King to quit his shenanigans and get back to leading a flock quietly in a chapel far away.  King, of course, had no intention of going quietly into the night and, in his letter from the jail cell where he had been placed for exercising civil disobedience in Birmingham on behalf of his brothers and sisters of the African-American community, he let his confreres know it in no uncertain terms.  King was in it to win it.

Summary

The “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is a persuasive piece of rhetoric by a master rhetorician.  It uses personal experience, theological arguments, and religious allegory to bring the reader to the conclusion that King’s position is the only defensible one—i.e., that non-violent protest against segregation was in 1963 a moral imperative for all, not just for African-Americans.  King especially focused on the lessons of history and in particularly on the teachings of the Old and New Testaments to reinforce his point.  He used this approach because the letter was, after all, written to his “fellow clergyman” (King, Jr., 1963).  It was not King’s religion that the white ministers of the South objected to; rather, it was the fact that he was inserting himself into an issue that they felt was particularly regional, particularly sensitive, and only exacerbated by the practice of civil disobedience ala the sort King and his followers were implementing.

To make his case for the use of Civil Disobedience—a concept promoted by Henry David Thoreau, the 19th American philosopher—King focused on dissecting the argument of his fellow clergyman; particularly, he focused on why they objected to the demonstrations but not to the issues that made the demonstrations necessary in the first place.  To prove just cause for the demonstrations, King showed how the African-Americans of Birmingham were suffering unjustly; how the negotiation process had broken down between the community and the authorities; and how there was really no choice but to follow the example of Thoreau.  King does not mention the name of Thoreau in his letter—but the concept is certainly there.  Thoreau (1849) stated:  “Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them.  They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil.  But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil.”  Thoreau added that “all men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.”   This “right” which Thoreau identified was embraced by King and made into an imperative during the Birmingham campaign. 

King’s letter goes on to examine the meaning of justice.  He provides historical context of how great leaders of the past have always approached the subject of injustice:  he touches on Socrates, heroes of the Old Testament, Roman history, and American history.  He explains that non-violent protest does not lead to violence but rather that racism and tyranny are what lead to violence.  In the end, he concludes that racism and tyranny are an assault on the Body of Christ—the Church of Christ—and that every Christian has a moral duty to stand up against a system that allows such an assault and has a moral duty to stand shoulder to shoulder with the community of Birmingham, as he has done.

Background

Birmingham had been one of the most segregated cities in the U.S. and for that reason it came to the attention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  African-Americans were underrepresented in the police force (in a city where 40% of the inhabitants were African-American, 0% of the police force was African-American);  unemployment was more than twice as high for African-Americans as it was for whites in the city (Garrow, 1989).  Whites were routinely paid twice as much as African-Americans in Birmingham.  Black churches were targeted by racist groups and some fifty bombings in Birmingham occurred from the 1940s into the 1960s (Branch, 1988).

Because of the violence and unfairness in the city, the African-American community began to push back.  When the NAACP was banned in the state of Alabama, pastor Fred Shuttlesworth founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights to support the community.  Shuttlesworth’s home and church were bombed in retaliation and he himself was imprisoned for daring to break Birmingham’s... So I am here, along with several members of my staff, because we were invited here. I am here because I have basic organizational ties here” (King, Jr., 1963).  Thus, in one fell swoop, King demolished the notion that he was an “outsider” with no direct connection or ties to the place or its issues.
King then proceeded to justify his presence on a greater and more transcendental scale—the scale of moral justice:  “Beyond this, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here” (King, Jr., 1963).  He likened his actions to those actions of Biblical prophets who “left their little villages and carried their ‘thus saith the Lord’ far beyond the boundaries of their hometowns” (King, Jr., 1963).  He likened himself to St. Paul the Apostle, who “left his little village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to practically every hamlet and city of the Greco-Roman world” (King, Jr., 1963).  By putting himself on the same level as these Old and New Testament heroes of Christian culture, King firmly established himself as one of their righteous descendents, whose mission went beyond that mandated by his role as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  His mission, he implied, came from God Himself.

King’s letter was not hostile by any means.  Indeed, he addressed his audience as “men of genuine good will” (King, Jr., 1963).  Though they criticized him, he would not do the same in return but would give them the benefit of the doubt by assuming that their criticisms were made sincerely and out of genuine concern for their people.  By acknowledging them as men of good will, moreover, King took the sting out of their attack and showed that he was in no wise swayed by their condemnations.

To make his point more persuasively, King took aim at the “white power structure” in Birmingham (King Jr., 1963), showing that had the community taken to the courts they would have lost every time because the courts were in the pockets of the white elites.  The only recourse of the unjustly served African-Americans was to take to the streets in protest.  King methodically takes his reader through the steps in his thought processes:  he shows that before he took any action whatsoever he first determined that there was just cause.  He then made certain that negotiations had failed and that the local merchants had failed to keep their end of the bargain that they had made with the community.  Then King insists on purifying the process so that those involved are motivated out of a spirit of God rather than a spirit of hate.  Finally, demonstrations were ordered.  Demonstrations were not emotional but rather logical and that was important for King to show.  He did not want to be represented as an agitator or an anarchist.

King’s letter then goes on to show how creating tension in society is a time-honored tactic that even the greatest philosopher of the West—Socrates—practiced and encouraged as a means of getting at the truth.  King shows that the campaign in Birmingham was rational.  He also shows it was religious in the sense that it aligned with all the campaigns for justice that one could find in the Old Testament, whenever the oppressed people of God needed a leader to save them.  King gave the letter a New Testament bump as well by reminding his readers that the African-American community in Birmingham was part of the Body of Christ—that these were Christian people who simply wanted to be treated like Christians by their fellow…