Dr. Martin Luther King's Letter From A Birmingham Jail

A Timeless Cruelty “People speak sometimes about the bestial cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.” Claims Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. On April 16, 1963, a letter was written to the clergy to alert them of what great injustices were taking place in Birmingham, Alabama. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail is a letter that illustrates oppression being a large battle fought in this generation and location. In different ways, Dr. King describes how to dismantle the walls of segregation portrayed with literary devices such as words with strong diction, parallelism, and juxtaposition. Throughout the text of “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” strong diction is implemented to emphasize the severity of the problems in the setting of the letter. Alluding to the reader's sense of sympathy, king uses words that help the reader understand the true injustice of segregation. An example of diction in this letter would be “... superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes.” (Paragraph 5, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”).Utilizing the word “grapple” conveys a negative tone throughout the …show more content…
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was an engaged civil rights activist who believed that the world could be changed for the better if the majority of people felt compelled to be a part of destroying segregation and cruelty. In recent shootings, oppression and racism still lives on today, Eric Garner and John Crawford recently lost their lives to the sick cruelties of today’s society and the barrel of a gun. Today's generation needs to stand up and fight this awful injustice, because if we don’t, who