Rhetorical Analysis Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”, published in 1964 in his own book Why We Can’t Wait, addresses and explains his current situation to the clergymen of Alabama. On April 12, 1963 Dr. King was arrested in the streets of Birmingham, Alabama for contempt of court and parading without a permit during a protest. He composed this letter while he sat in the Birmingham Jail. Dr. King begins his letter by addressing the clergymen’s statements of his actions as “unwise and untimely”. He informs the clergymen of his views and the reasons for his “direct action” on the issue of desegregation.
Some of these groups and people included ‘Malcolm X’, Rosa Parks, and ‘The Black Panthers’. Malcolm X saw King’s campaign as trying to persuade the African American citizens to forget the days of slavery, and forget what the white men had done to their people. His stance was passive/aggressive and wanted equality by any means, including violence. Malcolm X was assassinated by a white supremacist during a speech and died of bullet wounds. Also, ‘The Black Panthers’ were a very violent group and saw King’s campaign as time consuming and feared it being forgotten in the process.
This movement was just tired of seeing their people being treated violently when they were demonstrating peacefully. They were tired of their people being sprayed with fire hoses, and beaten with clubs and then being arrested for causing trouble. This time period know as the Civil Rights Movement came to a close with two acts. One was the civil rights act of 1964 and the other was the voting rights act of
Martin Luther King is a African American civil rights activist that uses numerous techniques of peaceful protest to imrove the human rights of African americans. In 1954, he became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where Rosa Parks was famously arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a bus. After Parks' arrest, King came to national prominence in the US. He was a leading figure in organising the boycott by African Americans of buses in Montgomery. Tutelage from Bayard Rustin, a prominent civil rights campaigner, helped King to commit to a principle of non-violent action heavily influenced by Mahatma Gandhi's success in opposing the British in India.
The idea of using non-violence as a technique in the civil rights movement was the idea of Martin Luther King which branched from Ghandi’s belief of non-violence from the time he spent in India and his own Christian beliefs. A range of non-violent methods were used by the protestors. In 1955, the Montgomery Busy Boycott was the biggest protest to date and was the first major time that so many people had come together to overturn the Jim Crow laws. The Greensboro sit-ins were a series of non-violent protests in 1960 which led to the Woolworths department store chain reversing its policy of racial segregation in southern US as well as segregation in public areas being largely abandoned in Florida, Texas etc. The freedom rides were when civil rights activists rode interstate buses into the southern US in 1961 to test the supreme courts decision of ruling segregation on interstate transport illegal.
The images that were broadcasted all over America did not please the public and before long riots and protests were being held in the streets to end the war. This was because hundreds of American soldiers had died in a war they thought was coming to an end. The Tet Offensive proved otherwise and caused a major disagreement between the public and the American government. Many people believe that this almost forced the government to end the war because without the moral support from their own country there would be no chance in another. On the other hand, the Americans actually won the fight and in doing so managed to kill thousands of Vietcong’s, unmasked Vietcong’s, which they had not been able to do very well until this point.
These are choices we each have to make. They teach us that no one can make us into bystanders without our consent.” A bystander, as defined in the dictionary is: one present but not taking part in a situation or event. President Obama is asking us to take part, to open our eyes and see what is happening around us and stand up against evil. I think the individual belief that there is nothing we can do hinders us as individuals to open our eyes to the evil that is happening, but if each
King writes in Birmingham, Alabama during the Civil rights era. Similar to Thoreau's, King's occasion was in a jail cell. King was arrested for marching without a permit and he was arrested for that because the police couldn't arrest him for anything else. I mean how could they, he created a peaceful protest, so there couldn't be nothing to really charge him with. An even though King and Thoreau didn't go to jail for the exact same reason they were portraying the same general message.
He and members of his organization joined The Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and organized non-violent protests against racial segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. Because of these nonviolent protests, all these people were put into jail. While in jail, eight Alabama clergymen published a statement in the paper stating blacks should withdraw their support from Martin
MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” In August of 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. was imprisoned for refusing to wait for racial justice in Birmingham, Alabama. While King was in the Birmingham jail, a public statement was issued by eight white religious leaders of the south. This statement was a letter named “A Call for Unity”. In this letter, the clergymen urged activists to engage in local negotiations and use the courts if rights were being denied rather than protest. King knew that sometimes waiting makes things worse and by taking these inequality issues to the court, they would just have to wait even longer.