This is NOT English 495 related, but I had a few thoughts on an assignment for my English 406 Advanced Composition for Teachers course. We were to analyze some of the rhetorical strategies in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail. I remember once briefly reading an excerpt in high school. Now, with Dr. Clark's Rhetoric, Literacy and Culture class in mind, Dr. King's work revealed itself to be a beautiful force of persuasive argumentation. I loved it.
Dr. M. Jimmie Killingsworth discusses a specific argumentative structure in his book, Appeals in Modern Rhetoric. It's a triangle: in one corner is the audience, and in another is the speaker or author of the argument. What closes the triangle together and connects the first two points is shared values between (we'll go with) author and audience (I like alliteration). Enclosed within the triangle is the purpose of the speech, the call to action that the body of the persuasive speech is built towards.
I noticed immediately that Dr. King uses the same structure to appeal to his audience and call them to action. Specifically, Dr. King addresses eight congregational leaders who published a statement in support of the police officers who arrested King and subdued the anti-segregation movement. He addresses and admonishes them directly at least eight times in the course of the letter, and he has the credibility to do so. He opens his letter with a statement of his ethos: like his audience, he is part of the clergy; and he's the president of the Southern Christian Christian Leadership Conference. He expects to be addressing his equals in rights, understanding and knowledge.
Dr. King heavily relies on the idea of shared values with these men to turn their heads toward his purpose. He repeatedly uses the name of Jesus Christ and aligns himself with Paul the apostle, who wrote half of the New Testament from various cramped jail cells. Without that shared value, the credibility of King's logos wavers; were he writing to an wholly atheistic audience, he would have had to change his tack.
Because of the shared values, pathos in the argument should be already understood - if the audience (clergymen) have been fully convicted by King's reminders of what is already in their own knowledge (the commands and demands of humility, justice and equality in the Christian faith), then they would have no choice but to feel the compassion they must feel to Dr. King's mission. When Dr. King does bring in his pathos argument, it reads as if the only reason someone could not feel for the plight of the black American was if they had put their own humanity away. As clergymen, it is their job to be beholden to their flock, and their flock is everyone. Dr. King's audience is a group of highly educated, distinguished community leaders; they shouldn't need a man in jail to tell them what their job is, but in the early 1960's, they apparently did.
I want to say that the United States has gotten better at appreciating each others' differences and holding up the values of equality, but the residue of hundreds of years of racism and classism still remain, especially in the church. As a Believer myself, it's painful to see members of the church scoff at, or worse, ignore and deplore someone's struggle.
I see one of our current challenges as a faith is what to do with homosexuality and the rights of a homosexual couple to marry and raise a family. We're not lynching people in the streets for being gay, but so many young people have taken their own lives because of a lack of acceptance and love from their families and communities for being broken or wrong. Our complacency as a church is just as much of a wrong as the complacency of the church Dr. King addresses during the Civil Rights Movement.
I don't know who we need to throw in jail to shake this system awake again, but it has to be soon. I'm tired of the church abandoning its own instead of fulfilling its first mission to love.
