Letter From Birmingham Jail Analysis

Sabah Hasan 12.12.14

Shaun Adams English 1010

ESSAY #3

In the 1960’s discrimination was a major issue, and thought times have change now it is also a very prominent issue. This problem should have been abolished s along with slavery. It is a problem that is very difficult to solve because it is instilled in people from the time they are born. There are many sides to discrimination; there is racial, economical, and institutional discrimination, segregation, etc. The essays, Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin and Letter From Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King contain many similarities as well as differences. Even though they were both written during the same time period(WHAT TIME PERIOD) you will notice that Kings Letter From Birmingham

It is mainly about his relationship with his father and how after his father passed away he realized how his anger and rage, which was depicted as a disease, was legitimate. His father was a paranoid, bitter old man who had a very profound hatred of white people. He used to warn his son that they were “not to be trusted.” Baldwin never understood his father’s hatred for white people; he did not understand that because his father was of the first generation of African Americans to be free that he faced a lot of racism growing up. They never understood why this bitter old man hated the white race so much; all they knew was that his hatred consumed him so much that in the end it was what killed him. Only after his move to New Jersey did Baldwin begin to understand why his father’s hatred towards the whites was so great. He came to realize why his father was consumed with anger and rage, why he pushed his beliefs on his children so much that they began to hate him. He was only preparing them for the real world. That move made Baldwin begin to understand his father, made him become like his father. During his stay in New Jersey, he practically became his father and what he realized was that his father had so much anger and hatred inside of him that it consumed him and ended his life; he realized that that was not how he wanted his life to end. It was a disease of the mind. He says in the essay, “When he died I have been away

Segregation is the act of separating. In this essay, King is writing to the clergymen from jail that segregation is an unjust law. He went on to explain the difference between just and unjust laws. A just law is a “man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God.” Simply put, a just law is a law that is universally practiced. An unjust law is “a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.” So any law that degrades human personality is unjust. King was put into jail for protesting the treatment of blacks in Birmingham, Alabama. Everything in Alabama was segregated, whether in schools, bathrooms, churches, or buses the blacks were always separated from the whites. Blacks faced a lot of discrimination during that time and they went about trying to solve this injustice the nonviolent way by protesting. Yet they were arrested, this essay was written to try to make an unjust law just. "I am here because injustice is here," he wrote. "I would agree with Saint Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all.'" All he wanted to do was create equality among all people. It was not fair that equality only existed between the white people. King believed that using violence in order to get what you want is unjust and would be against God, that it would lessen the chance of getting what they wanted. He thought that the way to do things was through nonviolence, which is why he was protesting. He was