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¶ … Martin Luther King's "Letter to a Birmingham Jail"
In rhetoric, antithesis is defined as a "figure of speech in which sharply contrasting ideas are juxtaposed in a balanced or parallel phrase or grammatical structure. In his 1963 "Letter to a Birmingham Jail," the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. addresses white ministers of the Birmingham community who had criticized the stridency of King's leadership of nonviolent actions of civil disobedience, actions aimed at seeking civil rights for all African-American peoples. He wrote from jail, after being imprisoned for his actions: "You may well ask: 'Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?' You are quite right in calling, for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored." Although the ministers called for words, not acts, King states that without actions no words in the form of negotiation will be possible.
The antithetical paralleling of words and deeds structures not only this particular rhetorical use of antithesis, but also provides the intellectual impetus for King's entire argument, over the course of his letter. King explains to the critiquing ministers that African-Americans cannot wait for their rights in a state of inaction, because African-Americans have been waiting for far too long already. He stresses that although African-Americans are acting rather than talking, they are not acting in a violent fashion, and no 'talks' had ever occurred over the course of African-American history without positive and proactive measures upon the parts of Blacks.
An example of a contrast between actions and words is common in many works of literature. No one wishes to be 'all talk, no action.' However, this is exactly what was expected of King and the African-Americans of the 1960s. Hence King's rhetorical, antithetical use of pairing words against deeds, and his stress that real actions are necessary before words can have real meaning.
Works Cited
"Antithesis. "The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000.
King, Martin Luther. "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." 1963. http://almaz.com/nobel/peace/MLK-jail.html[23 Feb 2005]
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