Rhetorical Analysis Of Letter From Birmingham Jail

In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a letter to the eight Alabama clergymen under the confines of a jail cell in a Birmingham, Alabama prison. The letter stated his thoughts and opinions on the racial tension between the white and the black communities of Alabama. Martin Luther King’s letter was written as a rebuttal to the letter he received from the Alabama clergymen that stated the demonstrations, protests, and acts of civil disobedience of the Negro community were unlawful and should be put to a stop immediately. Martin Luther King replied by indicating that the blacks had a right to peaceful protests; they were simply trying to educate the community about the prejudices present in Alabama and to motivate a change. King incorporated the tree rhetorical strategies of ethos, logos, and pathos throughout his letter. In Martin Luther
King’s letter to the eight Alabama clergymen he used a valuable balance of ethos, logos and pathos, which allowed him to convey his message of the need for racial equality. Martin Luther King established himself with the audience and effectively portrayed his opinions through his numerous uses of the rhetorical strategy ethos. The ethos appeal is used to determine or demonstrate a character’s trustworthiness and credibility. One way that Martin Luther King portrayed his dependability was when he established a connection with the audience and associated himself with the people of the black community. He writes, “As weeks and months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise.” (King 47-48) King created the feelings of unity and equality through his multiple uses of words such as “we”, “us” and “our.” Martin Luther King also utilized the ethos appeal in his letter when he referenced a famous person or event; this positively informed the reader of King’s intelligence on worldly subjects. King does this when he says, “Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding brotherhood.” (King 73-77) Not only did King effectively use the ethos appeal in this sentence, but by referencing a famous person, such as Socrates, King utilized the rhetorical strategy of allusion as well. Martin Luther King had a strong ethos appeal in his letter because of the numerous times that he fought for and supported an end to racial segregation. The Alabama clergymen were aware of King’s devotion to civil rights, and they also ad knowledge of the fact that King was a trustworthy, credible person not only from the application of ethos in the letter, but also from King’s everyday actions. An equally important and effective rhetorical strategy applied by Martin Luther King in his letter was the logos appeal.
Throughout the letter, King made many arguments that were refutations to accusations made by the clergymen in their letter to him. King recognized the arguments made by the clergymen and for each argument he provided a strong counterargument. One of King’s counterarguments
is:
“You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches, and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, that is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.” (King 66-70)

In this quote King acknowledged the clergymen’s argument and then he stated a solid counterargument to prove his point.
King also practiced logos throughout the letter by commanding the clergymen or black community to make a change, in doing sot King was able to state his desired value of the letter. He writes, “Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.” (King 205) This sentence logically appeals to the audience and states an obvious fact. King refers to the black community as “the robbed” and the white community as “the robber” in his letter. Not only is this an appeal of logos, but this is also an example of an imperative sentence in which King urged and/or commanded the reader to “punish the robber and protect the
robbed”. Another rhetorical strategy used by Martin Luther King was the pathos appeal. Pathos is the appeal to emotion. This usually includes a vivid, concrete description and figurative language. One way that King appealed to the emotion of the clergymen was by stating different instances in which the white community physically or emotionally abused the black community. He argued, “But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mother and father at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society;” (King 103-107) In this entire paragraph Martin Luther King appealed to the emotions of the clergymen by trying to make them feel some signs of remorse or regret for the horrible actions to which the black community was susceptible to. In the above quote, Martin Luther King also used the rhetorical strategy of anaphora. In this paragraph, King repeated the phrase “when you have seen” in order to emphasis the complete paradoxical lives of the blacks and the whites. Martin Luther King’s balance of the pathos appeal was what also helped to strengthen his argument. The pathos appeal can weaken an argument if it is all that is present, but Martin Luther King successfully incorporated appeals of pathos as well as ethos and logos throughout his letter. The “Letter From Birmingham” was a letter written by Martin Luther King in 1963 to the eight Alabama clergymen in order to express his views on racial segregation in Alabama. King used the ethos appeal throughout his letter where he established a connection with the audience and to prove his credibility. King’s uses of logos was evident in the letter through his effective counterarguments and from his bidding to the clergymen and the Alabama community to change their ways and move towards a better future. Throughout the letter King also incorporated appeals to emotion, known as pathos, in which he stated the hardships faced by the majority of the black community. Martin Luther King assimilated the three rhetorical strategies of ethos, logos and pathos throughout his letter in order to persuade and inform the clergymen of the social injustices of racial segregation.