When I taught at the University of Birmingham at Alabama, I always assigned Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to the students. It hit close to home, and it was a good example of rhetorical method. I try to take a moment to read it every year on the King Holiday. It’s a stark reminder of the role some so-called Christian churches played during the civil rights movement, and it’s a beautiful piece of writing. I guess sitting in jail on behalf of a just cause can prove inspirational.
Here it is if you want to give it a read …
As I read it again this year, I was struck by the parallelism he uses so often in his speeches and writing. Very similar to Whitman. And very Biblical, too. Parallelism is such a great device here, signalling an equality of sentence structure and thought as he argues for equality and human rights:
“Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you no forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”