Textual Analysis Letter From Birmingham Jail

Comparative Textual Analysis: Avery and MLK Issues of social justice have affected our society since the beginning of civilization. In particular, issues of race and racial prejudice have had a massive impact on the cultural dynamics of society. In our world today, racial prejudice can still shape how people interact with one another, what opportunities individuals are given, and what we see on the news each night. When Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in the 1960s, racial prejudice was rampant. He wrote the letter to a group of clergymen about racial prejudice in society, discussing the impact of segregation and the details of his nonviolent methods to end it. In Melvin in the Sixth Grade by Dana Johnson, the main

King address how ugly and damaging racial prejudice is to the African American community. He writes that its members are “plagued with inner fears and outer resentments,...forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’,” (King 50). Segregation and its corresponding racial prejudice cause African Americans to feel inferior, damaging their perception of their self worth. He goes into detail describing what it is like to experience segregation, writing how painful it feels to have your child ask you “‘Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?’,” (King 50) when she is mistreated. This meanness can clearly be seen in Melvin in the Sixth Grade. Avery experiences prejudice on a daily basis at school. Her classmates judge her based off of her appearance. “Kids usually named me after my hairstyle. Like Minnie Mouse or Cocoa Puffs if I wore my hair in Afro puffs. Or Afro Sheen if my mother has greased my hair and pressed it into submission the night before,” (Johnson 158). They do not see her for who she is, only for how she looks. They judge her appearance, making fun of her hair and calling her “burnt toast”. In her story, we can see how these harsh words affect her. She the racial prejudice of her peers makes her feel like she must change who she is and that she is not good enough. Both texts show the ugliness of racial prejudice and how damaging it is to the people being discriminated

The struggle to participate in white culture can have the negative effect of causing the minority group to lose cultural identity. In Melvin in the Sixth Grade, Avery strives to fit in with her classmates. To be accepted, she tries to assimilate to their culture and begins to lose her cultural identity. She begins to edit how she speaks. “For the first time I really heard what the kids in school heard when I spoke,” (Johnson 167) she says when she heard her brother using her native dialect after spending a day at school listening to white kids. Avery begins to think of African American culture as inferior to white culture because she is bullied as a result of her appearance, speech, and clothes. In her struggle for acceptance, she begins to assimilate and lose her sense of cultural identity. Dr. King describes this phenomenon in Letter from Birmingham Jail when he writes “Segregation gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority,” (King 51). While Avery does not experience the Jim Crow law segregation Dr. King does, she experiences what it is like to be a pariah, unaccepted by her white peers. In Dr. King’s time, African Americans could not be served at lunch counters with white people and had to sit in the segregated back of the bus. Unlike Avery, Dr. King did not want to fit into white culture so he would be accepted, he wanted to be accepted so