Patient and Reasonable Terms: The Rhetoric of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The air is musty, smelling of sweat and dirt and waste. There are no windows, just cinder blocks and bars. It’s dark, the cells are full of people who have been threatened and abused, and the walls echo sounds of muttering, crying, and praying. One man in particular, the protest leader, has been placed in solitary confinement without a mattress, little lighting, and no access to anyone in the outside world (Reider). It is 1963, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. has just been jailed for demonstrating without a permit in Birmingham, Alabama. He will spend the next eleven days in jail, isolated but still committed to his push for civil rights for African Americans, especially in the deeply antagonistic and segregated southern states in the U.S. And while he waits, King crafts one of the most moving and rhetorically elegant documents in U.S. history, his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Knowing his audience includes his followers, his critics, and those who are ambivalent about the civil rights movement, King employed pathos, ethos, and logos to address his audience in order to establish his credibility; to explain the legitimacy and urgency of his movement; and to appeal to his audiences’ sense of fairness, rightness, and universal justice that he believed was necessary for equality.

King’s primary audience whom he responds to in his letter is a group of white religious leaders who issued a statement calling for an end to the demonstrations and withdrawing support from “outsiders” such as King who have come to organize the protests (Carpenter et al.). They seek to make King seem like a foreign member of the community and to decrease the legitimacy of the protests by saying they are unproductive. They call for more dialogue between groups and for King and other protestors from outside Birmingham to leave (Carpenter et al.). These are the main points to which King responds to in his letter. He must make himself seem more legitimate and also must appeal to reason and emotion to show why his method is correct and the clergymen, though perhaps meaning well, are wrong in their understanding of the challenges and issues facing African Americans. King also realizes that people who are both more sympathetic to his cause and more hateful toward it will also be paying attention to his response.

In order to make himself seem more legitimate; King first uses pathos. His address begins with “my fellow clergymen” and later “my brothers,” which is meant to address the men according to their spirituality and to include himself in their midst (King). He calls them “men of genuine good will” and phrases his letter as more of a continuing conversation among colleagues rather than a defensive response by using the words “answer”—which conveys that a question has been asked—and “patient and reasonable terms,” in an effort to set the tone for this letter (King). He also lets known the context of the letter in its conclusion, reminding his audience that their letter was written in jail. This should evoke both sympathy in the reader and respect for how eloquent, patient, and reasonable the letter is.

King then uses ethos to establish himself to his audience. He gives his background as a leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which shows his importance and capability, and then he invokes a tone like a sermon and compares himself to Paul, “Just as the prophets… left their villages and carried their ‘thus saith the Lord,’… and just as the Apostle Paul… carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town” (King). This rhetoric gives King legitimacy as a secular and religious leader. He later states that nobody in America can be an outsider, drawing upon patriotism to further make himself credible (King).

King then uses logos and pathos to explain, define, and support his strategy of nonviolent direct action, moving between the two for emotional and logical impact. He begins by defining the conditions and “hard, brutal facts” of Birmingham, including church and home bombings (King). This is both logos and pathos because it is emotionally charged but presented in a logical rather than emotional way. From there, King defines direct action, writing articulately and precisely to enhance the logical and rational impact.

After reporting more of the facts surrounding Birmingham in a neutral style, King switches again to the sermon style and invokes pathos through the description of the injustices faced by African Americans. The language is repetitive, using “when” to begin phrases, and that repetition causes the images King describes to build on each other. He describes lynching, drownings, poverty, and the heartbreak of a six-year-old who lives in a society that tells her she is inferior because she is black (King). King’s language is vivid and moving. The buildup of logic followed by the use of emotion creates a body argument for direct action that is both rational and also emotionally necessary.

King also needed to confront the issue of the illegality of his actions in order to make the direct action seem credible. He does this through the use of logos and ethos similar to establishing his credibility. First King uses logic and ethos to define just and unjust laws, “A just law is a manmade code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law” (King). The morality of the definition builds King’s ethos, while his use of justness and unjustness in theoretical and concrete examples shows the logic of his argument. King then relies on ethos, comparing himself to righteous men in the Bible who broke laws to follow God’s will and sympathizers for Jewish people fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany. King relies on his religious credentials to overshadow the fact that he is technically breaking a law. Finally, King invokes the Boston Tea Party to again make a patriotic comparison to the Civil Rights Movement and the American Revolution (King).

Because King believed direct action was necessary, his rhetorical strategy was also one of urgency. As Jean Strouse notes, “The law… does not initiate social change but does respond—slowly—to demands and pressures from the people it is supposed to serve…. It legitimizes or ‘guarantees’ specific rights only after those right have been won on another battlefield” (20). King must have realized that the call for action in the courtroom instead of the street, as urged by the audience he addresses in his letter, would be pointless. The street is the “battlefield” where King and other demonstrated for their rights, and his call to action was not theoretical, but practical and urgent. The rights he was seeking for African Americans would not be protected in the courts before they were won in protests and dialogues with those in power.

Having established his case and call for direct action, King turns to his audience. He begins with a repudiation of the “white moderate” built upon logic, not making a direct attack but also explaining how the actions of the white moderates do not make sense in pursuit of goals such as social progress. The tone is elevated, presenting a challenge to the white moderate that the argument for direct action is logical and considered. King uses recent examples such as the actions of Alabama Governor George Wallace, famous for saying, “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” (Wallace). By calling upon examples such as Wallace, King underscores what he and other African Americans are facing.

King then uses his ethos to repeatedly express his disappointment in white moderates and especially church leaders in the South for their lack of support and action. He reminds his audience of the actions of the early Christian Church and how it was considered to disrupt the communities where it appeared (King). This admonishment was so effective that a coalition of churches drafted a letter in 2013 in response to King’s letter, including this section: “Like Dr. King, we balance a deep love for the church and belief in its potential with a critique of its failings” (Christian Churches Together). CCT’s summary aptly expresses King’s attitude toward white moderates, and in particular the spiritual leaders.

King them moves toward a more friendly and soothing approach, using his mastery of language to evoke pathos through imagery:Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty. (King)

Even if in disagreement of the action, it is difficult to reject how powerful the imagery is here, creating an emotionally charged image and a benediction for his letter. In this way, he moves his condemnation of his fellow religious leaders into a prayer for progress and justice.

In the decades since the Civil Rights Movement, it becomes easy for young people to underestimate the power of rhetoric and charisma that someone like King had. Reading “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is moving. Understanding it in the context from which it was written is amazing. However, through an analysis of the logos, ethos, and pathos, the essay is illuminated, and King’s ability to make a persuasive case for both hearts and minds is revealed. One wonders if perhaps the Civil Rights Movement in the United States would have progressed as quickly if it lacked a statesman, orator, and leader that it found in Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Works Cited

Carpenter, C., Durick, D., Grafman, M., Hardin, P., Harmon, N., Murray, G., et. al. “Statement by Alabama Clergymen.” 12 April 1963. Web. 14 Oct. 2013.

Christian Churches Together in the U.S.A. “A Response to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail.’” 16 April 2013. Web. 14 October 2013.

King, M.L. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” 1963. Web. 14 Oct. 2013.

Rieder, Jonathan. Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013.

Strouse, Jean. Up Against the Law: The Legal Rights of People Under Twenty-One. New York: Signet, 1970, 20.

Wallace, George. “Wallace Quotes” n.d. Web. 14 Oct. 2013.