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Alienation In Letter From Birmingham Jail

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Seeing as how the years stretching from 1960 through 1969 encompass some of the most volatile in American history, it is only fitting that one of the most polarizing letters of all time finds its birthdate among them. Dr. Martin Luther King’s bluntly-titled “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is, on one scale, a tactful reply to public statements released by eight white religious leaders from the South who condemned the involvement and communal acceptance of “outsiders” in local civil rights protests; on another, it is an impeccably dense treatise regarding both the philosophical and biblical histories of human rights in the context of the 1960s decade.
Even within a piece meant to unite rather than divide, however, King bears both the risk of alienating …show more content…
For example, we see King qualifying his presence in Birmingham from the letter’s get-go in saying, “[j]ust as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their ‘thus saith the Lord’ far beyond the boundaries of their home towns… so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town.” One of the clergymen’s main complaints with the civil rights protests in their localities is regarding the unwanted chaos added to an already imbalanced situation by foreigners who know nothing of the nuances surrounding Birmingham’s …show more content…
Here, he but pokes a topic that could be tackled with a few words from the Bible in the name of using non-spiritual reasoning to maximize his mass appeal and relatability. Of course, King’s analogies would easily both envelop and develop this concept (perhaps his refusal to weigh in unequivocally was even pressed to a fault, as he misses out on the opportunity to entertain the latter possibility); Jesus himself, figurehead and namesake of the Christian religion, was subjugated to and subject of mob mentality, an evil which ended only with his death on the cross according to the

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