Martin Luther King's “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”

Martin Luther King's “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”

DESCRIBE THE BACKGROUND OF THIS LETTER.

Perhaps the most famous words of Martin Luther King are those of one known speech entitled "I have a dream" I have a dream. But there is a letter written by the great man who, though not so well known, infinitely better sums up all his ideas. He wrote it in 1963 while he was imprisoned in Birmingham, Alabama, as a result of their participation in protests against racial discrimination in shops in that city in South America.

The idea of the letter is a response to the public statement that some local religious made in urging an end to the demonstrations. The leader of the rights of blacks got out of jail his reply through his lawyers, who were responsible for the publication. In the letter, Martin Luther King - who was a pastor - gave a spectacular overview of the pastors, bishops and rabbis signed this public statement and of course, let a real treatise on tactics, strategy and theoretical foundations of the movement of civil rights struggle (Luther, 1963). There were no aspects of civil movements that the letter did not touch: the phases of nonviolent action, the need for peaceful provocation, the lethality of friendly fire, the response to accusations of extremism, the right to conscientious objection to laws, the attitude of the Church to social injustice. Martin Luther King used a prose full of logic and extremely powerful imagery to convey a basic message: injustice can not succeed if those who fight for justice are willing to suffer for defending.

It is a very long letter, but by reading it calmly, one can not help that come to mind at the cutting edge situations. There is good reason for this: the intrinsic nature of injustice and oppression varies throughout history, the only thing that changes are the excuses. Similarly, also varies throughout history the intrinsic nature of the mission that encourages those who fight against this oppression and the injustice. So the teachings of Martin Luther King are useful for anyone who will not settle for living in an unjust world (Luther, 1963).

HOW DID MARTIN LUTHER KING COME TO BE IMPRISONED?

In 1963, during the U.S. civil rights movement, the rigorous actions against racial segregation in public facilities in the city of Birmingham, Alabama were observed. The city council reached an injunction against the non-violent demonstrations. The demonstrations had been carried out anyway. There were many arrests. The prisons were filled. King had with his strong sense of symbolic acts chosen Good Friday, to get himself arrested. When the protest march was observed on the 12th of April, King himself was arrested, along with his friend Ralph Abernathy and about fifty other participants, as a measure to stop the protest. Overall, since the 3rd of April, four or five hundred people had already been arrested. King was more than 24 hours in solitary confinement, without any opportunity to communicate with ...