Emotion In Letter From Birmingham Jail

Patience, determination, demands, facts, hope, disappointment, and faith are all able to come as one to make a move for equality. Martin Luther King Junior wrote a letter from Birmingham Jail on April 16, 1963, which conveyed his stress on how little change is occurring in the peaceful fight for inequality. The letter was sent to clergymen to show how even if there is no physical aggression being done, people cannot just sit back and watch the injustices going on. This leads to the following question: how does a letter express specific emotions, without aggression? To develop this question, a dance was created to represent the letter’s emotions. The words mentioned earlier: patience, determination, demands, facts, hope, disappointment, and faith each played a role in the creation of the dance. First, creating a dance was the artistic choice because dance is a physical artistic method to

Specifically on page 52, “We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’…” and the movement was chosen to be stiff because facts are straight to the point and can not be swayed. Religion was another word that was chosen because it is seen throughout the letter, “Maybe I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual Church… as the true ecclesia and the hope of the world,” (58) and fluid movement was to represent the hope in the letter. There was also disappointment, depicted as small floor movement almost begging, “I’m afraid that it is much too long to take you precious time,” (60) which can be seen as begging the people to listen and making the big issue seem like a small thing to really catch people’s attention. Finally, “I hope this letter finds you strong in faith,” (60) this quote is in the last paragraph closing the letter with a strong message to call people into making the change, the word faith is seen with strong hopeful dance