Letter From A Birmingham Jail

“J.F.K., Civil Rights, and the Cold War.” This was how one of my friends responded when I asked her what she thought of when I said, ‘the 1960s’. Indeed, all of these coincided in a time of great social and political turmoil in the United States, and also around the world. Although each is significant, the civil rights movement spearheaded much of the change during this decade and during those to come. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. serves as one of the hallmarks of the civil rights movement that followed the corruption and segregation that was still commonplace in white, Southern Baptist America. His Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963) is eager to discuss many of these issues that others would not pay mind to when it was (sparingly) brought up in discussion. This text helps bring its readers into King’s thought

DuBois contrasts the 19th century ideas of author Booker T. Washington with the results they yielded, and various topics are consistent with the ideology in King’s letter. DuBois states that Washington said the black population had to give up political power, the insistence on civil rights, and a higher education of black youth in order to survive. To disprove that claim, his rebuttal was that it resulted in the “1. The disfranchisement of the Negro, 2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro. 3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro.” DuBois quotes Washington earlier on in the text. “‘In all things purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers, and yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.’” This aids his claim that more action was needed by both white and black citizens in order to achieve real progress, instead of yielding the same results time and time again. These fundamental ideas work with King’s thought processes, specifically the idea of taking immediate action and fighting for civil