Summary Of Martin Luther King Letter From Birmingham Jail

In 1963, Martin Luther King wrote a response to clergymen who criticized his actions while he was stuck in the Birmingham city jail. This letter, titled “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, was written on the side of a newspaper and secretly taken out of jail by King’s lawyer. The goal of this letter was to address and confront concerns that were brought up in the clergymen’s letter titled, “A Call for Unity”. In “A Letter from Birmingham Jail”, Martin Luther King asserts a strong emotional appeal on the clergymen who oppose his actions by placing guilt on them when he inserts Biblical references periodically throughout his letter.
Martin Luther King guilts the clergymen for the first time when he brings up their moral wrongness. King says that he has a “moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws” (4). He summarizes why laws are just or unjust by stating, “A just law is a man-made code that

squares with the moral law or the law of God” (King 4). In other words, just laws are those that agree with the ideas of God’s morality. King uses the God-fearing side of the clergymen by bringing morality and how God reacts to our immoral actions into the picture. Here he is also indirectly questioning these men’s allegiance and faith to the Lord. A statement like this would have been said to make a clergyman feel guilty about supporting and promoting actions that are immoral according to God against people of color. It would be in hopes of getting this group of men to rethink the mistreatment of colored people, and to hopefully come to their aid.
After establishing a sense of moral guilt within the clergymen, King refers to a similar situation from the Bible that involves civil disobedience. King remarks, “Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians” (5). The rhetorically strategic idea of referencing this event brings to light that as clergymen who are familiar with this story they should have learned from this story. He makes them feel guilty about their role as clergymen because they should know better, and should understand that civil disobedience has to happen to progress. King is also acknowledging that oppression has occurred in history many times before, and we as a society should know how to handle it by now. The fact that a situation of oppression is included in the Bible reinforces King’s statement that the clergymen should know and understand they are wrong.
King’s most powerful statement that stirs up guilt within the clergymen does not deal with individual morality at all, but deals with the church as a whole.

He remarks on his surprise and disappointment with the church and white Christians in general when he says, “I felt we would be supported by the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests, and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders” (King 9). This statement is incredibly powerful because he and other colored people have been hurt by the very system that is supposed to be accepting of all people. King thought that people of the church would act as an ally and support the colored people, but they did exactly the opposite. By saying this, King places guilt on the clergymen that hits deeper than individual guilt but on the church as a whole. Clergymen typically have an attitude where they want people to think highly of them and think they are good people, and this opposes that

wish.
The goal of Martin Luther King’s “A Letter to Birmingham Jail” was to attempt to convince the clergymen to revoke their statement about his actions that was made in “A Call for Unity”, and to have them understand his interpretation and reasoning for the situation. He does this by establishing guilt in them as they read through his many Biblical and Christian references throughout the letter. Since Martin Luther King was writing to clergymen in the South during the 1960s, a setting where religion was known to be of utmost importance, it makes sense for King to have used this appeal.