Analysis Of Letter From Birmingham Jail By Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King

In “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and an excerpt from Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the authors carry contrasting religious views that result in differing approaches to their mutual dissatisfaction with the lack of a more perfect and just society in their relative modern America. Both Ta-Nehisi Coates and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King write in support of a Utopian motive for attempted societal perfection and they each have agreeing and varying perspectives on the topic. King, being a man of faith, turned to true Christianity as a guiding source of the way individuals should live in a moral fashion even if they are not of the faith. King also references the dream of freedom that the founding fathers

Dr. Martin Luther King, King discusses several actions the people must stop making and prejudices they must stop holding along with actions that individuals such as the observant white moderate must start taking for there to be a successful Utopian effort towards the improvement of societal relations. Although King considers what he has written as long for a letter, the content is concise and carries powerful relevance to the issue of societal segregation. By now, most of the civil right issues with the law have been resolved or improved, but many of the concerns from King are still applicable to current issues such as that of being defined as an outsider and what it takes to be considered an American by your neighbor. King’s large approval of nonviolent protest as a means to establish negotiation helps make efforts to achieve a more perfect society. Also, it is portrayed as a proper form of revolution that belongs in a Utopian society’s setup. Apart from the means by which King believe negotiation should be achieved, he also understood who was trying to be negotiated with and why it was made to be so difficult. King analyzes that “privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily” and that a majority force is very useful in abolishing what would be considered these undeserved privileges of the time. For example on the type of individuals who dodge the issues and do not wish to give up their privileges, in the letter

This results in a tone comprised more of encouragement and explanation. Coates writes about the importance of remembering the past generations and what they had to deal with in order to encourage those individuals to remain prideful of their roots and to carry an explanation or better understanding of the origins of injustice people of the African-American race will encounter throughout a lifetime. This can be considered Utopian thinking because the first step towards change or progress is understanding the issue and the origins. Unlike King, Coates does not refer to the Christian basis of morals as a reason for people to change their prejudice. He says that one must “resist common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law” because he disagrees that an all powerful moral law will reign supreme and solve everything in the end. While King spends time discussing throughout the letter ways in which steps towards a more perfect world can be achieved, Coates does not cover solutions as much as he does the issues. Other than there being an obvious desire for a more perfect world, there is little else that can be described as Utopian thinking within the