Civil rights activist, Martin Luther King Jr., in his letter from Birmingham jail, recounts the inexplicable horror of racial discrimination and its depressing effects on the African-American community in the United States. King’s purpose is to convince the clergymen that there is an infinite amount of reasons to why immediate action is necessary for this civil rights movement to work and to justify his actions. He adopts a disappointed and dismal tone in order to illustrate the specific inequity and prejudice against African Americans and to emphasize a call to action to the clergymen and anyone who reads the letter.
King begins his justification for his unwillingness to wait by acknowledging the extent of the problem of segregation and by
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Furthermore, this comparison conveys a disappointed and shocked tone that makes the US citizens aware of this humiliating fact and urges them to take action to change it. Later in the paragraph, King uses several anecdotes, such as “see[ing] vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim.” He provides these anecdotes to illustrate the specific horror that segregation has thrust upon the African American community. Moreover, these anecdotes evoke a melancholy and somewhat irate tone that announces to the clergymen the absolute necessity for these horrors and injustices to come to an end and that it has gone too far. Additionally, King appeals to the sympathetic emotions of the audience, the clergymen and the US population in general, by describing the “tears welling up in [a child’s] eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and [seeing] ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and [seeing] her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people” and by admitting that they “are forever fighting