Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail remains one of the most famous essays written by Dr. King, and demonstrates his mastery of rhetoric as well as ethics. Dr. Martin Luther King penned the letter while in jail for protesting segregation and Jim Crow laws in the South, and for equality and over all civil rights for African Americans in the rest of the United States. King has always been considered the most important of the civil rights leaders of that period, and the eloquence and his masterful use of rhetoric and other persuasive techniques on display in the letter help to explain why. Written in August of 1963, the letter recounts the specific non-violent protest which landed him and his fellow freedom fighters in jail, while at the same time reconstructing the entire history of the civil rights struggle for African Americans. This is a pattern that is on display throughout the entire letter, as King keeps connecting the specific moment to the general cause, and the individual experience to the universal truth. Likewise, throughout the letter, King keeps finding common ground which connects him to his audience, and which overcomes the separation and division which segregation attempts to force upon people. He transcends difference, and finds the universal which connects all men and women. In doing so, he is able to make the case both for the undeniable justice of his cause, and the very American nature of his demands. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail makes an appeal to both a higher, universal law, and to the universal nature of humanity, and he is able to depict both as being completely American.
It was important for King to demonstrate how connected his calls for freedom and equality are to the overall American dream. After all, he implies, what is more American that fighting for one’s freedom and liberty. As King so powerfully questions, “Was not Thomas Jefferson an extremist? -- We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
Equal (King 4). By invoking Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, King is invoking the common bond that all Americans share: a belief in the equality of all men and a belief in liberty. Thus, King is making his struggle for freedom and equality part of the overall struggle of America for freedom and equality. He is making the history of the struggle for civil rights not a separate history, but part of the overall, common American history shared by all citizens. Mentioning the Founding Fathers and the founding documents of the nation allow King to transcend the individual, temporary division or difference between people, and focus on the much greater universal that unites people, the fact that we are all Americans. At the same time, King is also able to justify the African American struggle for civil rights with the same justification used to justify the founding of America.
This is part of the reason why King mentions Abraham Lincoln in the same paragraph. Martin Luther King writes, “was not Abraham Lincoln an extremistthis nation cannot survive half slave and half free” (King 4). President Lincoln, who fought the Civil War to preserve the United States of America, and to free the enslaved people, and who wrote the Emancipation Proclamation freeing them, is another figure which unites King’s personal struggle and history with the overall struggle and history of America. Lincoln often said that freeing the slaves was keeping the promise of the Declaration of Independence. King is thus able to make the same argument by invoking President Lincoln. The struggle for civil rights is part of the long American struggle to make the promise of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution come true for all Americans. And the quote he includes from President Lincoln is one which highlights what unites people over what divides them. Just as President Lincoln and the Americans who supported him knew that their cause was righteous, King is saying that his cause is righteous. And he is also pointing out that segregation and Jim Crow laws are keeping the nation separate and not united. Thus, just as the struggle for civil rights was continuing the fight began in the Revolutionary War, it is also continuing the fight of the Civil War. The ultimate goal of all three, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the struggle for civil rights, was the same: liberty and justice for all.
Another strategy Martin Luther King uses to both connect his particular struggle to a greater, universal struggle, and then to use that universal connection as a way to highlight the common humanity of all people is his reference to Christianity. King makes mention of Christ and Christianity many times throughout the Letter from a Birmingham Jail. One of the most interesting, and powerful, rhetorical uses of Christianity occurs in the third paragraph of the essay. Many segregationists charged King and the freedom fighters with being outsiders, or people who didn’t belong in Birmingham or have any right to get involved in the city’s politics.
In response to this charge from segregationists, he replies:
I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the eighth-century prophets left their little villages and carried their "thus saith the Lord" far beyond the boundaries of their hometowns; and just as the Apostle Paul left his little village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to practically every hamlet and city of the Greco-Roman world, I too am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my particular hometown (King 1)
King makes several powerful arguments here. First he points out that the Bible, the holy book of the Christians is full of examples of people caring about and getting involved in the problems of others, in order to help them. In a sense, this is one of the central teachings of Christianity; you help those who cannot help themselves. King’s passage also carries an implied question which destroys the ‘outsider’ argument. King implicitly asks the reader, what would have happened to Christianity if the apostles has not brought it to places where they didn’t belong?
As King hints, it is because the early church leaders went to these places that he and all his readers are Christians, and this fact that they are all Christians becomes another universal truth that King can employ to prove that humans are not divided like the segregationists say, but united, as both Jesus and Thomas Jefferson said. King brilliantly makes this point at the start of the next paragraph. He writes, “I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and statesinjustice anywhere is a thread to justice anywhere” (King 1). King now marshals all of these arguments to prove how wrong the segregationist position is. It is wrong on the level of morality and ethic; segregation is un-American; segregation in unjust; segregation is unchristian, and segregation denies the ultimate spiritual and political truth that all humans are not only equal, as the Declaration of Independence says, but also interconnected, as so many spiritual and humanist traditions say. He continues, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly” (King 1). King drives home the point; people are more similar than they are different. And in addition to being similar, they are interconnected, which means that we are effected by, and responsible for the people around us. As King concludes this first section of the Letter from a Birmingham Jail “anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider” (King 1). It is a beautiful, yet simple phrase which states a simple, but important truth. Americans are free to go where ever they wish in America because everyone in America is equal, and everywhere in America is free. Thus, at the end of the introductory section of the letter, King has reversed positions. It is segregation which is un-American; it is segregation which is outside the morality and norms or American life and history. And, it makes the audience picture exactly what segregation is; an attempt to tell Americans where they can and cannot go.
King knows that he must also address the charge that, although his cause is just, he is breaking the law to protest segregation. He knows that some people who might otherwise support him will get hung up on this point. Thus, King comes up with a brilliant strategy to argue this point. First he reminds people that the Supreme Court found segregation of schools unconstitutional, implying the rest of segregation is unconstitutional as well. However, he then moves on to a stronger, moral argument. He makes the case that he is breaking an immoral (and possibly unconstitutional law) because he is obeying a higher law and the founding documents of America.
The higher law he invokes is the moral law, or the law of God. King again uses his strategy of connecting the particular to the universal, and the individual to the collective. He mentions how St. Augustine defined an unjust law as any law which is not in harmony with universal moral law, or god’s law (King 3). For King, this is the exact definition of segregation and Jim Crow. They are particular laws, which, although they are the local ‘law’, are in truth unjust, and in reality illegal, when judged by the higher, moral universal law, whether this higher, universal law is defined as god’s law or America’s original and ideal intentions. After setting up this argument, King writes, “all segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority” (King 3).
Thus, by both the highest ideals of spirituality and of America, segregation is an unjust law, even if it happens to be on the books in some local community. King continues to demonstrate how segregation is economically, politically, and sociologically illegal, but above all “it is morally wrong and sinful” (King 3). Thus, King has proven that obeying the law of segregation is the true immoral, unethical, and illegal act, and that disobeying the so called law of segregation is in reality the ethical, moral, and truly legal course of action.
Works Cited
King, Martin Luther. Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
