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Letters From A Birmingham Jail

Julie Jenkins
English 1203
Paper 2: Summary-critique

Letter From a Birmingham Jail

Letter From a Birmingham Jail written by Martin Luther King Jr. is a great insight to how the black community was treated and degraded by the white community. Black people in Birmingham were brutally beaten, degraded by the signs in the community separating whites and blacks, and white people refused to give up some of their privileges to the black community which left them in poverty.
King stated in the article that Birmingham had one of the highest brutality rates. Even though the police in Birmingham declared in public to be peaceful, they were not. They beat nonviolent black activists just to do it. They refused to solve the bombing of blacks houses and churches. The court system refused to help innocent black persons, and sent them to jail for a crime they did not commit.
Signs such as “whites” and “colored” degraded the black community because the white people’s were always nicer. The black people’s fountains and restaurants were old and falling apart. The white community also degraded the black community by taking away their right to vote, and not giving them a place to help evaluate the law themselves.
King historically proved that privileged groups will seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. He proved that individuals will usually see the morals and give up their privileges, where a group will not. Reinhold Niebuhr proved that groups tend to be immoral rather than the individual.
King wanted to show the white community that the black community had equal rights as them, and prove they had the means to do it.
“A Letter from Birmingham Jail" was penned as a response to a letter that criticized Martin Luther King Jr. written by eight high ranking clergymen. Although King's letter was addressed as a reply to these clergymen, the real audience was the "white moderate" - otherwise known as middle class America. By gaining the support of this majority...