Literary Devices In Letter From Birmingham Jail

Letter From Birmingham Jail
In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested for leading a nonviolent protest against Jim Crow Laws in Birmingham, Alabama. While in his jail cell, King wrote a letter to the Alabama clergymen defending and explaining his reason for nonviolent protesting and his involvement in protests outside his own town. Martin Luther King Jr. uses several literary devices such as, pathos, allusions, and parallelism to address the clergymen about nonviolent protesting, injustice within communities and the nation, and his disappointment in the church.
Although the Alabama clergymen disagree with his actions, King defends his use of nonviolent protesting by saying, “The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation,” (King 168). Throughout the entire text, King repeats his explanation for nonviolent protesting. He uses repetition on this idea to really create emphasis on it: in hopes that the clergymen would realize how nonviolent protesting is not bad. King later on in

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” (King 166). Even though the clergymen believe they are doing the right thing with segregation, they are damaging the community as a whole. King tells a story of a small girl who was not allowed to go to the public amusement park, “…and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing and unconscious bitterness towards white people…” (King 169). This story shows injustice and creates pathos. This little girl is not old enough to fully understand the bigger picture of what is really going on. She only knows that she was not allowed to play because of the color of her skin. King brings up the topic of just and unjust laws in the nation, relating it to segregation and how it is morally