Thoughts on the “Letter from Birmingham Jail”

I am not told this, but I am convinced that Dr. King was a man – a human one - and that his unquestionable talent for rhetoric was due more to raw passion than it was to any natural-born abilities he may have been endowed with. He is practically worshipped every January, and I am sure that he would have something to say about that if he could. Of course he appears to be a great rhetor now – he is dead, and for the most part our society supports his cause. Or, at least, our society is at the point where it can hear the hard truths Dr. King laid out and not be offended by them. What I found most intriguing about Dr. King’s letter from the jail is that he makes a prophecy and is correct – he unknowingly describes the destruction of Detroit in the sixties during the “great white flight” (when white families left the city and populated the surrounding metro area) when he says, “I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as "rabble-rousers" and "outside agitators" those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black-nationalist ideologies a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.”
I lived in metro Detroit for eight years – and I went to an unofficially segregated school in a suburb ironically called Birmingham. Dr. King was writing from Alabama, I’m writing of the nation’s second-richest county up in the north where racism is supposedly vanished. White people fled, like spooked horses, to the safety of the suburbs where they could live with their white neighbors, be in more comfortable surroundings. Dr. King was right – violence on the part of exasperated black nationalist groups in the city made its white inhabitants so miserable that they left. In turn, though, rather than solve anything, the city of Detroit was left populated largely by whoever didn’t leave - either extremely radical or extremely poor people. To this day the busiest night for the Detroit police and fire departments is Devil’s Night, when abandoned buildings (there are a lot of them) are set on fire all over the city.
Part of Dr. King’s effective use of rhetoric, then, is the warning – he gives the moderate white a reason to act; unfortunately he wasn’t listened to for a long time. That part of the letter is what I hear clearly now, and perhaps it is partly due to that warning, that prophesy, that Dr. King is put in such good standing now as a rhetor. Were Dr. King to write a letter solely of complaint perhaps the letter wouldn’t have been acknowledged at all, but he spells out the problem, gives a reason to acknowledge it, and provides an argument for his stance on it. He does not simply philosophize; he lands in jail and writes about it. And that action, the fact that the letter is coming from a jail, that makes Dr. King’s letter so persuasive.