Both John Ball’s “In the Heat of the Night” and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” explore the theme of social progress. The protagonist of In the Heat of Night faces heavy prejudice and struggles to achieve any real social progress by the end of the play, while Dr. King’s letter takes a more direct approach by audaciously arguing for social progress in the racist south, and is eventually effective in doing so. The prejudice that was once so prevalent not only in the Deep South, but in many areas of the United States, is fictionally demonstrated in a small Alabama town in In the Heat of the Night. Here, town police and a few local southerners demonstrate prejudice toward a Negro detective Virgil Tibbs from California who …show more content…
wrote “Letter From Birmingham Jail”, in which he responds to white clergymen who were critical of his actions. While King calls for the social reform of Birmingham, Alabama, he essentially meant this to be a statement for universal reform, not just one town. He writes for a much greater audience than the clergymen that he is directly addressing in the piece. Although the letter focuses primarily on the acts of prejudice that King and his colleagues face while protesting, it is actually inherently optimistic. His initial explanation of what just took place in Birmingham quickly becomes a background to a lengthy argument against racial segregation. King believes that all men, most notably “moderate whites,” have a natural predisposition to know just from unjust, and that this natural sense of justice just needs to be directed in a proper manner. He essentially attempts to evoke emotion by describing some of the emotional suffering that Blacks have gone through due to segregation. Whites had told King and fellow civil rights leaders to “wait” for desegregation, that it would eventually come because society inevitably fixes itself with time. King attacks this theory by mentioning several hate crimes committed on blacks such as lynching and police brutality. He continues with this pathos approach by describing how segregation affects the youth deeply in the sense that they grow up being taught that they’re inferior to white people, and that this eventually leads to a build-up of hatred for those same white people. King then turns to attack the white moderate, as well as the Church. We learn King’s opinion that a white person doing nothing to stop segregation is essentially the same thing as being a proponent of segregation. There was a time when the Church had a much stronger leadership role on the public, when early Christians didn’t hesitate to condemn acts that were wrong in