Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Art of Persuasion
For at least two reasons, readers should familiarize themselves with Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (also known as “The Negro Is Your Brother”).
Most significantly, King’s letter was written during “a critical turning point in the struggle for African American civil rights” and is, therefore, generally considered “the most important written document of the modern civil rights movement and a classic text on civil disobedience” (Milestone Documents).
But also, the letter is a brilliant example of the art of persuasion as it masterfully analyzes its dual audience: the eight clergymen who reacted to King’s nonviolent activities, and King’s fellow demonstrators. And like all well-crafted persuasive writing, the letter employs all of the rhetorical methods of appeal (116–140):
the appeal to reason, character, emotion, and style.
Look at this passage, for example, to see how King’s letter appeals to his audience via style, or those choices a writer makes at the level of words, phrases, and sentences:
First, along with creating in the readers a sense of outrage, King’s concrete examples, personal experiences, metaphors/similes, sharp contrasts/comparsions, and sentence rhythm paint a picture; they appeal to sight.
For example, the jailed preacher contrasts the phrase jetlike speed, the pace at which Africa was overcoming colonialism, with the phrase horse-and-buggy pace, the unfortunate rate at which America was attempting to do the same. See also stinging darts of segregation, clouds of inferiority, little mental sky, and the other picturesque phrases in blue above.
Second, even when read silently, King’s words here also possess sound, a variation of sentence length, a use of rhythmic patterns, and repetition for emphasis.
Regarding the latter, see his use of the phrase when you. Through the repetition of these two words (marked in red above), the writer “piles up examples of racial discrimination” that he and the black community have experienced, driving home his point about the need for racial equality.
King also makes use of parallelism in this portion of the letter, employing similar words phrases to reiterate a point: lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim (green above).
Finally, King’s fondness for alliteration is also evident here when he describes the police’s horrific actions: “curse, kick, and kill” (pink above). As the authors of Aims of Argument point out, the repetition of this hard “K” sound, “especially in words of one syllable, suggest the violence of the acts themselves.”
The next time you read Martin Luther King Jr.’s writings — be it his “I Have a Dream” or “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” — I hope you’ll notice the clergyman’s/activist’s/rhetorician’s appeal to style as well as his art of persuasion alongside his many other monumental accomplishments for this country.
