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Rasmussen 1 Heather Rasmussen English 102 Kathy Newport February 18, 2009 Just Laws Know No Color Martin Luther King’s “Letter From A Birmingham Jail” is King’s direct response to eight white clergymen who publicly declared that King should not have come to Birmingham to protest the segregation laws of the time. While addressed specifically to these particular men, King’s letter was, in reality, addressing all of mankind. King’s primary claim, that “an unjust law is no law at all” is at the root of his visit to Birmingham. He declares that all people have a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws because laws are made to protect the people not degrade and punish. King’s response is ever respectful of the clergymen he addresses, even though he feels that these white religious leaders of Birmingham have failed in their responsibilities as men of God by not doing more to advance the desegregation laws. King’s claim that “all segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality” is the perfect appeal to logos. It is only logical that separating people based on their skin color does damage to the soul and personality of those excluded. It would follow then that the laws requiring such segregation are unjust laws. The best appeal to pathos in this document is when King writes of seeing in his daughter “ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky” and of watching “her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people.” Those words surely invoke a heartbreaking image in all but the most uncaring people.

Rasmussen 2 None of us want to imagine a child having those feelings of unworthiness just because of the color of her skin. When King argues that he would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all,” he is very effectively using pathos to support his position. Using St. Augustine, one of the most respected religious figures in ancient Western religion, to further his argument with other religious leaders should be very persuasive to that particular group. King’s comparison of Asia and Africa moving with a “jetlike speed toward gaining political independence” while the laws in the United States “stiff creep at horse and buggy pace…” is an argument in kairos. King is declaring with a sense of urgency that we, in the US, need to act more quickly in changing the segregation laws. Entire continents are moving more quickly in gaining complete political independence than we are moving in providing equality for all United States citizens. Asserting that nonviolent direct action is the way to force a community, which has refused to negotiate, to confront an issue is King utilizing praxis. The King-led demonstation in Birmingham is an application of the theory that nonviolent direct action, sit-in’s and marches, forces an issue to the forefront so that it can no longer be ignored. King’s incarceration in a Birmingham jail certainly forced the community, and the world, to take a closer look at Birmingham’s segregation laws.

Works Cited Jan Zlotnik Schmidt, Lynne Crockett, and Carley Rees Borarad. Legacies. Mason, OH: Cengage Learning, 2008. 1458-80.