In April of 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. found himself in the public spotlight, as he and a group of supporters engaged in civil disobedience, protesting in downtown Birmingham, Alabama. King and the other protesters were jailed, and here it was that Martin Luther King Jr. crafted the text “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Kings letter was a response to the clergyman of Birmingham, who previously posted their own writing in the Birmingham newspaper denouncing the direct action of protesting as “untimely” amongst other complaints(King). By jailing King and publishing a criticism of the actions in which King led, the city leaders and clergyman created a platform for King to reach an audience much broader than to whom his letter is addressed. King uses the platform, to intelligently refute the claims of the clergymen, using the rhetorical devices of …show more content…
He constructs explicit images for the reader so that they understand exactly the point he is communicating. King argues that time “is neutral” and uses the following metaphor to explain why the supporters of civil rights must take advantage of time, in the passage,“We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels on inevitability.” Another angle which King adopts to dispute the remarks that blacks must wait for rights is to show the deplorable conditions in which the average black individual had to endure in society. King's metaphors jump to life in lines such as “...when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society...” as he portrays what life is like for african americans and why waiting is not an option. Martin Luther King Jr. does an excellent job, through the device of metaphors, of putting his thoughts into action for the reader to clearly see the purpose of immediate direct