-
Essay / Martin Luther King's Use of Ethos, Pathos, and Logos in the Birmingham Jail Letter
Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter to the Birmingham Jail Clergymen, King Jr. uses the Rhetorical appeal of ethos to establish credibility that racial discrimination and injustice are occurring. King's letter begins, "My dear clergy," explaining that this attempts to say that as a person, all are equal to clergymen. King Jr's message is that he is not less than them and they are not better than him. King continues: “I'm here because I have organizational ties here. But more fundamentally, I am in Birmingham because the injustice is there.” King explains that he has credibility based on injustice, not because he is accepted by white privilege, but because King Jr is knowledgeable on the matter. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay King's Rhetorical Appeals through Ethos and PathosKing Jr wrote: “Was not Jesus an extremist for love...Was not Amos an extremist for justice...was- "He Paul was not an extremist for the Christian gospel... Wasn't Martin Luther an extremist... and John Bunyan... and Abraham Lincoln... and Thomas Jefferson." King Jr's appeal to logos in this quote effectively shows that it has an impact on his written audience, the clergy. King JR. Mention important historical and religious figures like Jesus Christ, Martin Luther, and Thomas Jefferson, emphasizing if these people were doing the right thing, then that's him. King Jr. shows that pathos appeals to human emotions and encourages clergy and citizens to end racism and hatred. King Jr. appeals to pathos by emphasizing the need for urgency by bringing the audience into the letter in the second person. King Jr's letter gives his opinion on the praise that some were giving to the Birmingham police by addressing directly to them what he saw of the situation. King continues, “I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating throughout the Southern states, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty-five affiliated organizations throughout the South, and one of them is the Christian Human Rights Movement of Alabama. Frequently, we share human, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. » King Jr's purpose in the introduction is to establish his credibility as a member of the United States of America, by trying to prove that he possesses just as much knowledge based on racial injustice and discrimination as that ecclesiastics, if not many more. King Jr appeals to pathos by showing the ordeals his people have gone through when it comes to injustice and racial discrimination. King Jr tries to make them feel what people have experienced in terms of injustice and racial discrimination. King shows this using lines: "When you've seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at will," "When you've seen hate-filled police officers curse, kicking and even killing your black brothers and sisters.” King Jr's lines use inflammatory language like "vicious mobs" and parallelism like "lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at will." Using this type of language and sentence structure, making you imagine, feel what King Jr must have seen his friends and family go through during these difficult times. Throughout King Jr's paragraph he shows us using this type of sentence structure and.