Rhetorical Analysis Of Martin Luther King's Letter From A Birmingham Jail

Through Martin Luther King Jr.’s 39 years of life, he impacted millions across the globe with his letters and speeches. For most of his life, King used his strong ability with words to inspire and call people to action in many cases. King’s words were so moving because no matter black or white, King understood the issues people experienced daily. I believe Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was so impactful because of the way he persuaded people why civil disobedience was necessary and what caused him to break the law with his strong use of ethos, logos and pathos, and by answering the concerns of the people.
I felt King’s urgency and passion through his written words because of how he included references from the Bible. King portrays this passion many time in the letter like he does in paragraph three when he writes “just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their ‘thus saith the Lord’ far beyond the boundaries of their home towns... so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for help.” I related this quote to how King pursued the civil rights movement. King
King states that he broke the law because he believed that “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws” as stated in paragraph 12. King later adds that “any law that degrades human personality is unjust.” The laws that King protested were just that; they separated and degraded all African-Americans. While I cannot relate directly to this, I can imagine the anger sparked in all of the African-Americans. They knew the term “separate but equal” was a flat-out lie to make the white people feel better about themselves. I believe King and his followers had every right to be angry and disobey the laws posed against