Letter From Birmingham Jail Analysis

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Cornel West are both influential and significant scholars within the black community. The main concepts that they address, nonviolent campaigns and nihilism, while different in approach target the same issues of inequality within America. A non-violent campaign is made up of several steps, however, nihilism can be defined as a philosophical ideology of foundational skepticism and hopelessness, it defines the pessimistic beliefs of meaninglessness and despair. Both concepts that prevalent within many scholarly works, particularly when referring to oppressed minorities within society. Within this essay, I analyze West’s Nihilism and Black America and King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. I discuss the relationship

(1929–1968), well known for his non-violent activism in the African-American Civil Rights Movement, was imprisoned within Birmingham jail in 1963 for nonviolent demonstrations against segregation. While in prison King responded to a public statement of concern and caution issued by eight white religious leaders of the South, in the now-famous, Letter from Birmingham Jail. (King, 1963, p. 1) Within this letter, King refutes the accusations laid out against him, as well as provides a detailed account of his nonviolent campaign in action. The main allegations against him and his activism consisted of being classified an outsider, conducting unwise and untimely actions, lawbreaking, precipitating violence, and being extreme. Most allegations being biased were easy to refute, for example, King, who was invited to Birmingham, discusses how he is simply abiding by the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation. (King, 1963, p. 3) President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; King, using natural law and his Christian faith, places himself in the middle of cynic individuals and individuals calling for a violent revelation. Drawing upon past thinkers and illustrating events in which segregation has affected his daily life mentally; King acknowledges that while America has overcome slavery, the situation was still one in which African Americans are not treated like equal human beings. A form of injustice that any reasonable person can see; king’s non-violent campaign is made up of four stages, all of which were used in Birmingham: the collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive, negotiation, self-purification, and direct action. In the collection of facts, you get to understand the form of injustices that exist and the way they are carried out. Negotiation is trying to find a consensus or stable ground for the injustices. Self-purification is a vital step by which one acknowledges internally that