Letter From Birmingham Jail Thesis

The Letter from Birmingham Jail was a letter written in April of 1963 by Martin Luther King Jr. to discuss civil disobedience and the reasoning for resistance to racism. The letter covers how people have the right to break unjust laws and do something about it rather than waiting for justice to come, if it will ever come. Dr. King’s letter was a response to local, white religious leaders’ criticisms of the Birmingham Campaign. The purpose of the letter was to defend the strategy of nonviolent opposition to racial injustice and to defend that the people have the right to oppose such unjust laws.
Birmingham was known for being one of the worst cities for racism in America during this time period. The KKK was strong there, and members put up

King states in his letter that he was first disappointed that fellow clergymen would see his nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. He says the he is in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community and that he has tried to balance the forces. He implies that he is a nonviolent protestor and he does not agree that he was being extreme in his actions.
King believed that nonviolence was the way to show what you are resisting. He did not believe that violence would get the message across like nonviolence would. He stated that the goal of nonviolent resistance was not to defeat the enemy but to get them to think in another perspective. He wanted to defeat the injustice, not the people. He thought that this would work in gaining social justice, and in the end, it very well did.
Martin Luther King Jr. believed that the black nationalists expressed violence and hatred; he said that there was a more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. King thought that if there were only the black nationalist, then “the streets of the South would be flowing with floods of blood.”. I agree with King entirely because if there were only violent protestors, then everything would go up in flames. Like MLK said, the black nationalist ideologies would lead to a frightening racial nightmare, in which no one would