"A critique of a Letter from a Birmingham Jail"
...good analogy argument, this one seeks to establish as many relevant similarities as possible between King’s case to the presumably acceptable cases of moral acts of the prophets of the 8th century, and to the apostle Paul (Ess 2). King effectively conveys that he too came to spread unto others the message of an injustice, and to carry the gospel of freedom beyond his particular hometown. He expresses his disappointment with the leaders of the white church, whom he believed to be the movement’s natural allies, for failing to “see the injustice of our cause and, with deep moral concern…serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure.” Having put the eight clergymen on the defensive, he then suggested that they were as bad as, if not worse then, the “rabid segregationist.” King said he had “almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order than to justice.’ (Eskew 245) Tightly woven and rhetorically appealing, the “Letter” operated on several levels as it addressed not only the critics of the Birmingham campaign but the nation’s consciousness as well. Logically sound, King’s sermon refuted the position of the eight clergymen and demanded that they-and the lay reader-act on the truths he presented. With the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King justified nonviolent direct action while expressing the righteousness of the civil rights movement (Eskew 245). As a nation “Whatever affects one directly, affects us all directly,” said King seeking a response for the nation to act as one unified body, not as separate entities working at inequality. One of King’s most crucial arguments of the letter deals with making the distinction between just and unjust laws. King criticizes how can it possibly be fair for the general black population to be condemned to punishment for breaking laws when they too also were breaking the laws of desegregation. The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: laws that are just and there are laws that are unjust (King 2). King calls upon Saint Augustine’s credo that “An unjust law is no law at all.” One ha...