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Rhetorical Analysis Of Letter From Birmingham Jail

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Letter from Birmingham Jail Rhetorical Analysis In the Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr demonstrates his fury with the delay of the civil rights promised in U.S. Constitution. In a specific passage in the letter, Dr. King addresses that his actions are timely, and that change must be put in order. Dr. King makes the reader feel mournful, uses strategic repetition, and syntax through the use of a periodic sentence in the Letter from Birmingham Jail to convey that integration cannot be postponed any longer. Dr. King uses strategic repetition to illustrate the long lived feeling of “waiting” for a change. In King’s letter he declares: “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity” (158). Repetition is used to emphasize how long blacks have been waiting to put an end to segregation. He draws attention to the pain that every Negro has gone through to seek …show more content…

Through the use of imagery, King illustrates to what it was like to tell his daughter that she could not go to the amusement park. He explains to his own personal struggle to explain to his daughter why she cannot go to the public amusement park due to the color of her skin. Dr. King writes about telling his daughter that “… Funtown is closed to form to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people…”. Dr. King makes the reader feel sorrow for black children who did not do anything wrong but were punished. He draws attention how his own children were starting to hate white people which builds up tension in the reader. He uses vivid imagery through the use descriptive words, such as “ominous clouds” and “mental sky” to intensify his message. King uses pathos to explain the challenges of segregation, and make the reader fully understand how his injustice is affecting

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