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These demonstrations had the objective of awakening America to an injustice that was occurring all over the south, and they would do this through the means of non-violent movements which included coordinated marches ND sit-ins all over the city of Birmingham. A week into the campaign a circuit Judge by the name of W. A. Jenkins put into play a blanket injunction against the protestors that barred “parading, demonstrating, boycotting, trespassing, and picketing”. Leaders of the movement firmly rejected to obey this injunction and they, along with all those who were a part of this campaign continued on.
On April 12, at the peak of the campaign, Martin Luther King Jar. Was arrested In a somewhat violent manner along with some notable other such as Ralph Abernathy and Fred Southwester. He old then spend time In the harsh confinements and conditions of the Birmingham Jail, where he would right arguably the most powerful letter of all time involving Civil Rights. An ally of Dry. King managed to sneak in a newspaper from April 12, in which it contained an article that made a “Call to Unity’. This article was made based on the statements Lizard 2 of eight white Alabama clergymen that opposed Dry.
King and his perspective influenced methods. This, along with what Dry. King described as being alone in a “narrow Jail cell, thinking long thoughts and praying long prayers”, is what drove him o manifest such a powerful and Influential piece of writing. It Is clear In my pollen that Mr.. King was very disturbed by the accusations of the white clergymen on his actions, seeing as the letter Is filled with very many statements of disappointment and frustration from him. But it is also my opinion that Dry.
King’s intentions of this letter were not to lash out or ridicule their tainted perspective on Civil Rights or colored people for that matter, but to offer a bridge of peace between two societies divided by color, class, and ideology by providing the perspective and point of view of the colored man. I can understand from this that King wanted to try a different approach of getting his message and ideals across towards the segregationists by comparing the Civil Rights era to other supremacist over inferior situations and conveying a feeling of “you have nothing to lose by thinking about It” and “we will love you even If you hate us”.
Many times in this letter he referred to other historical and religious examples of inferior races but none other most Impacting then that of the Mans and the Jews. He talks about the actions of the Third Reich toward the Jewish race and what I got from this is that he lions of Jewish people that they did, but he does connect it. In a sense he gives you the feeling that the same mentality and animosity that the Third Reich had towards the Jews, could be seen in the way that white supremacists in the south directed themselves towards the African American people.
In my opinion he was very smart to bring this example up because he sort of won over any Jewish white people that perhaps at the time viewed black people Lizard 3 through a supremacist’s mentality or that evaded from having anything to do with the Civil Rights Movement at the time, and I saw that he attempts to make a personal injection with the Jewish people by calling them his Jewish brothers. He played a sympathy card, for better or less words, which probably also convinced anyone that had special ties with the holocaust or had certain feelings about the holocaust to see the situation at hand through an inferior’s eyes.
Now in this letter Dry. King also brings up the clergyman’s allegations that these Civil Rights demonstrations and sit-ins provoke and precipitate violence. He argues these claims by stating that this is Just another one of the issues and injustices being done all over the south which need to be brought out to light ND need to be exposed to the human conscience. He argues that these movements are not being carried out through violence but are rather fulfilling their goals in a rather peaceful manner. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? ” He argues that the demonstrations proceeding in Birmingham are going peacefully and that the oppressors know that these marches and sit-ins are serving heir purpose which to raise awareness to the country over these issues but at the same time raises the tension within the people against it.
Fear that the Civil Rights activists are succeeding and fear of change appear to be what drives not Just the police but the public against these ideals to aggression. I think what he means by this question that I very much consider rhetorical is that the people against African American rights are not in a state of logic but rather in a state of hard-headed hate led by a great desire and need to keep the Status Quo unchanged. Lizard 4 Dry. King also brings up a very interesting argument over Just and unjust laws, that actually takes up a lot of the letter.
In this argument he explains why he and the other leaders made the choice of disobeying the injunction issued by Judge Jenkins. He feel complied to give this explanation because he does not want other people to view him or his ideas as hypocritical, meaning that he doesn’t want to be seen as the guy who breaks laws but then follows other certain ones. He advocates that there are two types of laws in this world and in our society, which are Just laws and unjust laws.
He eels that a person has not only a legal but also a moral obligation to follow Just laws, quotes SST. Augustine in that “an unjust law is no law at all. Then he distinguishes the difference between the two, “A Just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. ” What caught my attention the most when he made these comparisons is that he later said that any law that degrades someone as a human is unjust but that a law that exalts human personality is a law that is Just.
I find myself in a bit of introverts because of the unjust law statement because if he is saying that if a law uplifts one’s self is Just then, what about laws that have to do with gambling, drugs and corruption, things that arguably lead to a human feeling good. It’s Just something that I question but that ultimately it probably has little or nothing to do with Civil Rights, and that it is a separate topic within its own. Then he makes another good comparison on Just and unjust laws concerning majority groups that impose laws that are enforceable to minority groups but do not take it above themselves to bind it to majority groups as well.
Then he expresses that the biggest problem with Just and unjust laws is not the Judicial unfair treatment that was happening in Alabama and other parts in the south, nor was it the Lizard 5 influence of the White Citizen’s Council or the UK Klux Klan but that in fact it was the general moderate white man. He claims that the white moderate thinks that it is more important to maintain order than it is to maintain Justice, the man who constantly says: “l agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action. He uses Germany as an example that they according to their laws were performing gal acts and that it was illegal to help or to take in a Jewish person. He also takes into account the examples of the Hungarian freedom fighters, and the persecution of Christianity within communist countries, but the most interesting comparison that he makes in my opinion, is the biblical comparison of the three young men. The three young men, Starch, Messiah and Obtained lived in a town ruled by the king named Nebuchadnezzar and this when Christianity was spreading throughout the world.
King Nebuchadnezzar had a statue of himself built in the center of town and very Sunday he would make the entire town worship that statue, and of course Sunday is a sacred day in Christianity in which it is a day of rest and worship to God. Because of this these men defied his law and they did not bow down to his statue. It is interesting that Dry. King would use this analogy because in this story the King executes these men by putting them in a big oven so they can burn, but according to the story they come out alive without the slightest burn.
It is interesting that he then proceeds to talking about the Christian people and relates Christianity to Civil Rights cause in the story it is the Great Angel Michael who is said to have protected these men as they prayed while walking in to the inferno that was the oven. I sort of get an insight to his state of mind through this comparison and I think that he knew that the colored people were going to be alright and that sooner or later they would achieve what they set out to do many years before, which was to achieve rights for all colored people.
Lizard 6 It is my opinion that the media played a crucial part in the ultimately victorious Civil and the rest of the supporters and those involved with being active in the Civil Rights era would eave never been able to get their message out to the country over Civil Rights issues. Even as a result of the tragedy that was the holocaust, a good part of the United States in the sass’s was still pretty racist. But it did lighten the level of racism that existed in the country at the time, and laws that were put out by the government that limited African American rights were secretly being rejected by Americans with publicly racist views.
It is a great coincidence that the uprising in attention of African American rights happened after the holocaust because the holocaust had a great affect in the shift of white’s attitudes in America. So conveniently when all of these events went down in Alabama and the south, the media coverage that it got was very awakening to the rest of the nation. Such brutalities and suppression could not have gone unnoticed for long and it changed the opinion of most Americans over the issues of African American rights and the media gave it importance.
Even though there were some in the United States who harbored racism, very little outside the south wanted to deny African Americans the right to vote and other civil rights. In an age where television was very much on the rise and most American homes had TV’s, access to what was going on in the south was not hard. Many Americans saw the brutality that was going on and they were terrified with the murders, beatings, and other wrongs that were being exposed by the media.
Although newspapers, magazines, and other forms of printed media were also covering the national topic of the fight for Civil Rights in the south, most of the sources that informed the American public of what was going on came from television. Yet there are three categories that could possibly split the types of media that covered the Civil Rights Lizard 7 movement in the south. Those were the Television Media, the Newspaper Media, and Hollywood. Surprisingly enough Hollywood also played a major contribution to rights of African Americans. Before World War II racism was widely spread in America in a manner that some could say was very cruel.
After the holocaust the American perspective on racism changed quite a lot but not enough for whites to accept black people with open arms. Hollywood did lend a hand to change that because in 1962 the first movie addressed the issues of Civil Rights and it was a hit. The movie is called To Kill a Mockingbird and it presented Civil Rights to the big screen and to the American pop culture. In today’s world it is hard to argue that media does not contribute to Civil Rights. We hardly go a day without seeing a piece on the news about racial profiling and how it is against the law to profile someone based on the color of their skin.
In music a lot of the R&B and Hip Hop genre is dominated by African Americans, they even have a successful music network by the name of Black Entertainment Television. Now granted that BET came about because of racial issues with then Music Television now MET in the sass’s, Michael Jackson influenced a big part of BET’s creation in that they deed a platform for African Americans. Today BET is a very successful network that predominant factor and we see hundreds of black actors in the industry.
When it comes to the News Media today, I think it is safe to say that the news that African Americans get equal coverage, if not more, than the typical White, and racism has grown to be an extremely sensitive topic in our media, Just look at the Trenton/ Zimmerman case which put raised the awareness of racism to the next level and really named up the awareness for hate crimes. Lizard 8 My reaction from reading the “Letter From Birmingham Jail” is that it offered a nine perspective of what African Americans were going through at the time.
It also gave me new insight to things that I didn’t know about the Civil Rights movement throughout all of grade school. This letter was written so that not Just the clergymen but the entire nation could see things through the eyes of those that were on the other side of that unjust law. I extremely rejected Dry. Kings method of not being an aggressor even after they have taken a blow. It leaves me confounded because it takes a brave person to go into a march like that knowing what is at stake and knowing that you are robbery going to get hurt, arrested, or maybe even killed.
This letter, I felt took me back in time to an age where the world was very different then it is now and it gave me perspective on the political issues that were at hand in the sass’s. As well as how open politicians allowed themselves to be on big political topics such as Governor Wallace. His view on the church was very relatable at least on the Catholic side seeing as that was a time when the Vatican really wanted to stay out of racial issues because it did not want to compromise its influence for peace in the rising Cold War teen the United States and the communist Soviet Union.