Essay on King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail"

I have to write an essay on King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail." Is this OK? Thanks!

King’s Parade

In 1963, while Martin Luther King, Jr. was in the Birmingham, Alabama jail for parading without a permit, eight white “religious leaders” wrote a paper condemning King’s march against injustice. Their paper, entitled “A Call for Unity,” demonstrated their passive acceptance of segregation, by urging the Negroes to wait and peacefully obey the court’s decisions. The paper stated that King’s march was “unwise and untimely” and that King was an “outsider.” Although history has shown that King’s march was overdue, his response, commonly known as “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” is brilliant.

King states in his introduction “Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas.” But the ignorance and apathy of the authors of “A Call for Unity” was exactly why King marched, they were condoning the legal acceptance of segregation. A response was necessary. Also in his introduction, King states his position as “patient and reasonable” and he maintains his temperament throughout the letter.

One concept that King uses is injustice, which is inherent in segregation. King states “Injustice anywhere is a threat to injustice everywhere.” Injustice is why King left Atlanta to march in Birmingham. He further relates his cause in a religious sense – “I am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my home town.” Although the eight religious leaders thought of King as an “outsider,” who had come from Atlanta to cause trouble, King demonstrated both logically and theologically that an injustice to one is an injustice to all, no matter where they lived.

After King defines his cause of action, he makes a direct attack on the agenda of the religious leaders. King writes:

"You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations."

Although a risky move, this statement was meant to show that even the white religious leaders were altogether too satisfied with the current position of the Negro in their community. King knew that if the white moderates, as he called them, would not support his non-violent march, they would never find any action by the Negroes wise or timely.

King also writes about timeliness. He explains that the time came to march according to the four basic steps of any non-violent campaign: collection of facts, negotiation, self-purification and direct action. The facts were plain - “racial injustice engulfs this community [Birmingham].” Negotiations were met with broken promises. Self-purification consisted of workshops on non-violence and questioning one’s self: “Are you able to endure the ordeals of jail?” – exactly where King was when he wrote his letter.

A powerful statement King wrote in his letter has been proven in history: “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor, it must be demanded by the oppressed.” Timeliness to the white moderates meant waiting, but to King, “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

King thoroughly proves he is not an outsider to the cause of desegregation in Birmingham. A battle against injustice may not always be timely, but waiting only supports the injustice. King tried negotiations, only to be met with broken promises by the white moderates, and he felt the only solution was a non-violent demonstration, similar to the one in Boston over two hundred years ago.

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