Letter from Birmingham

In Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, “Letter from Birmingham Jail, he uses multiple tools. He uses ethos, an appeal to his own credibility, pathos, an appeal to emotion, and logos, an appeal to logic. I wish to point out one example from each category. First, ethos, King uses ethos at the very beginning of the piece when he explains that he is not an outsider. Explaining that he is part of an organization that has rights to protest gives him credibility. It could also be argued that King is arguing his credibility when he states why he was so willing to break an unjust law. Second, pathos, Martin uses an appeal to emotion in a long paragraph on page one-hundred and ninety eight, where he speaks about oppression. He states some pretty explicit things such as, “when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim;” The way that King writes this appeals to your emotions, because it makes you feel bad for the “Negro” and envision all that they have gone through. Last, logos, an appeal to logic, King does this in a rather clever way. King talks a lot about what a just and an unjust law is. Stating that it is okay to willingly break an unjust law. For example, King says, “ I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.” Here King uses the logic that if a law is unjust it is meant to be broken.