Making outline(brain stoming) and add work cited

Resistance

1963 was a crucial time for the civil rights movement in the United States. That year, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which he founded, led many public demonstrations against racial segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. The demonstrations were, at least on the part of the demonstrators, nonviolent and carefully planned to ensure they were handled according to the principles of nonviolent resistance. As a result of leading and participating in these protests, King was held in a Birmingham jail. While in jail, a group of eight white clergymen publicly published an open letter criticizing the demonstrations and actively urging black people in the community not to support them. King responded to this letter with his own, now known as “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” makes three major points, and structuring his argument as he does seamlessly serves dual purposes: to reply directly to and refute the clergy’s statements and to lay out for all readers the argument for when, how, and why the movement must be as it is.

The first major point King makes is in response to the clergymen’s claim that the protests are not timely, and it makes clear why the right time for the movement is now. Firstly, King explains how carefully they considered timing when planning their actions. He notes that they postponed action several times when to go ahead would have been counterproductive. He then explains why, aside from the few events that made postponement a good idea, waiting is not an option. He notes how long the movement has been due, writing “we have waited more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights” (King 429). When one considers the degree of progress that took place over all those years, and how short of equality it remains, it is clear that change not demanded can move very slowly. In fact, King criticizes the idea that time on its own can make any change at all, which he calls “a tragic misconception of time” coming from “the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills” (433). Things change over time only if people act to create change. That they must act now to utilize time in order to create change is justified by the unacceptable abuse of black people, both social and physical, that continues every single day. Thus, every day they wait is another day that black people are oppressed, hurt, and killed, so waiting is not an option.

Another criticism the clergymen made was that King and the demonstrators were breaking laws, and King responds to this, thereby explaining to all who may share this concern why they do in fact break laws. As King explains, it all comes down to justice. Some laws are just, and some laws are unjust, and unjust laws not only can be broken but must be broken so that they can be changed. He connects the justice of laws to religious morality, explaining that just laws are those that match up with the “law of God” while unjust laws are those “out of harmony with the moral law” (King 430). It is clear here how King uses the religious beliefs of the clergy to effectively argue for the righteousness of the protestors’ intentional law-breaking. As the United States has a high Christian population in general, this argument would reach most of the common citizens similarly.

Finally, King addresses the characterization of his and the movement’s actions as extreme in two different ways. At first, he refutes the idea that they are acting like extremists by highlighting what he feels are the true extreme positions. On one hand, there are those who choose to do absolutely nothing, either because they actually benefit from segregation and don’t want to lose their position in society or because oppression has completely broken their sense of self-respect. On the other hand, there are those who fight with anger and hatred and “come perilously close to advocating violence,” such as those in black nationalist groups (King 434). As non-violent protestors, King argues, they fall between such extremes, and are actually the moderates. Later, however, he addresses the idea again, this time arguing that extremism is not necessarily bad. He again appeals to religious examples, quoting Jesus and Martin Luther as examples of extremists who were right to be extreme among those who needed extreme change. He also appeals to American heroes like Abraham Lincoln, who would be nearly universally admired by Americans regardless of religion. In this way, he both refutes the charge of extremism and makes it clear that if they are extreme, it is rightly because good people at trying times must be so.

Work Cited

King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” ​Reading the World: Ideas That

Matter​, edited by Michael Austin, W. W. Norton & Company, 2015, pp. 425-40.