Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter From Birmingham Jail

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There once was a man who had a dream. He dreamed of an integrated, peaceful world. This man was Martin Luther King Jr. In his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, he wrote to the clergymen in Birmingham that had criticized his actions. In the letter he wrote a sentence that could have been a paragraph. King used ethos, pathos, and logos to compel the readers to agree.
Rhetoric is necessary for a strong argument. It utilizes credibility, logic, and emotion or ethos, logos, and pathos, respectively. Martin Luther King Jr. uses all three in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. King was a civil rights activist in the 1960’s. Around 1962-1963, a civil rights leader in Birmingham, Alabama called for King’s help in organizing a peaceful protest. As a result, King and several others got thrown in jail, which is where King wrote a famous letter to the clergymen that had criticized his actions. Without ethos a reader has no reason to pay attention. Therefore, a writer has a responsibility to give readers a reason to pay attention. In the Letter from Birmingham Jail, King writes, “when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you”. Though king does not come out and say this happened to him, it evokes strong ethos because it is detailed and uses those …show more content…
was a civil rights activist who died on the fourth of April in 1985. (Assassination) Before he died, he wrote a letter to the clergymen in Birmingham. He spoke of the injustice that African Americans faced in the time. King created such a strong argument throughout his letter that anyone would be compelled to agree. Ethos, logos, pathos, pen, and paper were his tools to get people to pay attention, and it worked. The Letter from Birmingham Jail is being studied to this day in high schools all over the country for its’ spectacular use of rhetoric, even in small, southern towns like Marshall,
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