Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter From a Birmingham Jail Term Paper

Martin Luther King's "Letter to a Birmingham Jail"

In rhetoric, antithesis is defined as a "figure of speech in which sharply contrasting ideas are juxtaposed in a balanced or parallel phrase or grammatical structure. In his 1963 "Letter to a Birmingham Jail," the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. addresses white ministers of the Birmingham community who had criticized the stridency of King's leadership of nonviolent actions of civil disobedience, actions aimed at seeking civil rights for all African-American peoples. He wrote from jail, after being imprisoned for his actions: "You may well ask: 'Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?' You are quite right in calling, for negotiation.Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored." Although the ministers called for words, not acts, King states that without actions no words in the form of negotiation will be possible.

The antithetical paralleling….....