Pathos In Letter To Birmingham Jail

An avid supporter of civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, Jr. touched the lives of many with his passion, eloquent speech, and drive to improve the lives of the downtrodden. King was the leader of countless protests calling for countless people’s dreams for equality to be put into action. Because the government deemed King too radical, King was arrested. Despite this, King continued to spread his influence through his “Letter to Birmingham Jail,” in which he addresses the issue of racial discrimination against the African American population as well as his motivations and justification for actively breaking the law. In order to make his arguments persuasive, King relies on three primary tactics: pathos to build a more personal appeal

In his description of the issue of segregation, King describes one’s “black brothers and sisters” being lynched by “vicious mobs” and being cursed, kicked, or even killed by “hate-filled policemen.” This phrase encourages King’s audience to picture their own family members going through the situation that King describes. This ultimately makes King’s argument effective because he makes a more personal appeal to the audience, especially for “those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation.” The fact that King forces his audience to imagine their own family being ruthlessly beaten and killed is important because his target audience is primarily white people who do not support the cause or are not well-versed in the issue. Additionally, King strengthens his emotional appeal by describing the the problems that black people face through the perspective of children. Some examples that King provides are “ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in [a six-year-old girl’s] mental sky, and… developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people” and a five-year-old son who asks “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”. By using children as examples of the ramifications of segregation, King makes an effective appeal to the audience’s anger, especially to people with children of their own. Because children are symbols of innocence, purity, and vulnerability, the fact that people are

uses logos throughout his letter to strengthen his argument. He reasons that while people should obey just laws, “one [also] has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws”. His reasoning makes it clear that he believes laws that discriminate against African Americans are unjust, which justifies his public protests. King’s reasoning is used to persuade the audience into siding with him because it is shows his logical and reasonable line of thought. In addition, King continues to explain the injustice of segregation laws by stating that those laws “give the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority”. He argues that these discriminating laws toward African Americans are damaging to their soul and personality. King’s reasonings are both logical and persuasive in the sense that laws that are that damaging are unjust which supports his demonstrations against those laws. King consistently uses logos throughout his letter to make his argument more