46 pages • 1 hour read
Martin Luther King Jr.Letter From Birmingham Jail
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1963A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Literary Devices
Persuasive Appeals
King uses multiple persuasive appeals to establish his credibility and to engage his audience. The three central persuasive appeals include the appeal to emotion (pathos), the appeal to character or authority (ethos), and the appeal to reason (logos).
When King uses the example of a little girl with “tears welling up in her eyes” (92) as her parent explains to her that racism prevents her from attending an amusement park, the idea of an innocent child bearing the psychological burden of rejection pulls at the heart strings of the reader and thus makes the reader more sympathetic to the abused humanity of African-Americans.
King uses ethos to establish his authority with his primary audience of eight Alabama clergymen. King consistently relies on sources and examples drawn from Christianity. For example, when he responds to the clergymen’s criticism that he is an outsider, he responds by highlighting the example of “prophets of the eighth century B.C. [who] left their villages and carried their ‘thus saith the Lord’ far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, [and]…the Apostle Paul [, who]left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world” as a precedent for his own work outside of his hometown (86).
King also uses reason, in the form of facts and logic, to persuade his audience that now is the time for action. To counter the clergymen’s argument that the protests are ill-timed, King describes the steps involved in a nonviolent,direct-action campaign and provides evidence that he and his cohort followed each of these steps (87-88).
Almost every paragraph of the essay includes some form of persuasive appeal. King’s skillful use of multiple appeals makes his argument convincing to the multiple audiences he addresses.
Metaphor
A metaphor is defined as the implied comparison of two unlike things. King uses metaphor throughout the essay to communicate emotion and make abstract ideas more concrete.
For example, King asks the reader to imagine the impact of seeing “the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society” (92). The metaphor “airtight cage” implicitly compares seemingly abstract structures that create racism, including class and institutions, to a cage, in order to help the reader understand that African-Americans feel completely trapped by systemic racism. Imagining life in America as living in a cage also has an emotional impact.
King also uses metaphor to create a mood in specific moments in the essay. For example, King closes the letter with the hope that:
the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty (112).
This system of metaphors is drawn from the weather, with bad weather equated with prejudice and misunderstanding and clear weather associated with love and equality. By placing the vision of a sky full of “radiant love and brotherhood” before the readers, King emphasizes the hopefulness at the center of his message and lightens the mood produced by his denunciation of Christian complacency in the previous paragraph.
King’s use of metaphors not only makes for an engaging read that captures the audience’s imagination, but it also serves as support for his attempts to persuade his readers of his position.
Simile
A simile is a direct comparison between two unlike things to show a similarity. King uses similes to dramatize ideas in the essay. For example, King uses this simile to describe the pace of change in the US and abroad: “The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter” (91-92). The contrast between a horse and buggy and a jet is stark; such a comparison would be particularly galling to most American readers, who tended during the period to associate the U.S. with technological progress and nations on other continents with backwardness. By using comparisons between modes of transportation that are so radically different, King helps to show that the U.S. is far behind in terms of achieving racial equality and unlikely to make up the distance.
Anaphora
Anaphora is the repetition of a phrase at the start of a series of sentences to emphasize an important idea. King uses this device multiple times throughout the essay. The most potent example of this device is in the series of sentences that begin with “when you have seen”/ “when you see,” starting on page 92. King’s use of anaphora in this instance provides an overwhelming catalogue of the many ways African-Americans are reminded of their inferiority in a segregated society. The presence of the repeated phrases is used to counter the argument that African-Americans have somehow been too hasty in protesting in 1963.
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