Summary Of King Letter From Birmingham Jail

In his letter Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. sought to elaborate on the criticism that eight fellow clergymen had about his work and ideas. The letter was written when King was imprisoned in a Birmingham city jail cell for parading without permit. King was a prominent leader of the African-American civil rights movement, “Nobel Peace Prize” recipient(Fairclough, 1995, p.1), and served as the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. A close analysis of King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail revealed that clarifying the criticism of African-American civil rights movement was not the only purpose of King. The civil rights movement originated as a campaign to combat injustice and attain civil rights for oppressed

The eight clergyman criticise the motives of the African-American civil rights movement, in their piece A Call for Unity that had been published in a newspaper. The eight clergyman judge King’s “nonviolent direct-action program”(King, 1963, p.738) as an outsider agitating the local community. King’s nonviolent program sought to create tension in order to bring light to the injustice that the African-American community was facing. According to King freedom is never given, it must be demanded by those oppressed; justice delayed is justice denied(King, 1963, p.741). Birmingham was a segregated city known for “unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches… than in any other city in the nation”(King, 1963, p.739). In Letter from Birmingham Jail, King explains and justifies his motives to the eight clergyman , “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere… anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds”(King, 1963,

In the quote, the author uses his belief to try and make an emotional appeal to the reader to support the movement of justice whether or not, they themselves are African-American, because any injustice threatens justice everywhere indirectly.

King states that “Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths”(King, 1963, p. 740), he borrows Socrates’s logic to justify and advocate tension that the freedom movement has created. King feels the need to bring light to the benefits of tension, because the opposition only possess a pessimistic view of it. Many of the opposition, question the timeliness of the campaign that King participated in. King responded with a personal belief that “freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed”(King, 1963, p.741). King realized that word wait that the oppressed hear is essentially equivalent to the word never. King agrees with William Gladstone that action must be done, because “justice...delayed is justice denied”(King, 1963,