Rhetorical Analysis of Letter From Birmingham Jail By Rev. Dr. M. L. King Jr.

Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. portrays himself not only as a fellow clergyman, but also as the President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He qualifies the conference as “an organization operating in every southern state”, which makes it sound omni-present in southern society. He goes on to qualify it as having “some eighty-five affiliated organizations across the south”, and identifies one of them as “The Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights”. This one he says invited him to Birmingham, Alabama, because of ties with the larger parent organization.

The audience is, I am guessing, are the white clergymen of the Birmingham, Alabama, area who apparently challenged his authority and involvement in nonviolent direct action in their city. Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. first attempts to qualify himself as a fellow clergyman. Then trumps them as a civic leader of a great organization by referring to himself “as President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference” attempting to show he wields more authority than his “fellow clergymen”. This is intended to instill awe in his “fellow clergymen”.


The purpose of the text, in my opinion, is to instill in the local population that his way of direct nonviolent action should be preferable to the alternatives.

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. tries to gain support for his actions through this letter to the clergy of Birmingham, Alabama with the basic idea that non-violent direct action is preferable to the alternative. In the text “…it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.” He tries to get the idea across that there was no hope for the negro community to keep the status quo.

His logic for their support of his non-violent direct action is that it could be much worse if the black community adopted “…black nationalist ideologies—“by this he means violent out breaks during peaceful protests. In this statement he makes a hasty generalization relying on the fear of the white community that the black community will in some way rise up and take control forcefully creating “…a frightening racial nightmare.”

He establishes most of his credibility at the beginning of the letter, as the President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He also states “Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas…,my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence…” this is intended both to establish his importance and make him seam a busy man to the community thereby making his being there in Birmingham all the more significant.


Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. plays on the fears of the white community in this letter. The white community’s fear is of a violent uprising of the black population of the south. They would prefer to keep the south as is at the time but, the fear of a violent black uprising has been lingering over the south since the first slave owning plantation uprising where white masters were killed. For the white community keeping the Negro in his place has been the ongoing theme of the southern culture since the first slaves were brought to the south. Again and again King plays on these fears with statements like “The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must let them out.” This plays on the fears of every southerner owing to the repercussions for the last two hundred years of persecution brought on by them against the black community.

Dr. King Jr. first establishes himself as a great social leader fighting for all oppressed people. Then all the way through the letter he uses the basic fear of violent civil conflict throughout the south as a means to get them to accept, or at least tolerate, his vision of the right way to conduct social reform. He uses many fallacies in this letter, mostly sentimental appeals, scare tactics, and hasty generalizations to attempt to sway his audience’s acuity of the issues at hand. The Letter from Birmingham Jail is a masterpiece of creative writing in an attempt to sway the thought of the day to come to terms with the equal rights movement in the United States of America.