Yesterday in class, while you were composing your midterm reflections, I distributed a sample student analysis for you to read and an exercise on the analysis for you to complete for Wednesday’s class. An additional copy of the directions for the exercise are included below.
Directions
Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is his response to the eight white clergymen who had drafted an open letter that addressed King’s involvement in the civil rights movement and urged him to seek justice in the courts rather than in the streets.
- Read the excerpt from King’s letter (included below), then read the student analysis “Wait Means Never.” Make notes on the text and in the margins of “Wait Means Never,” indicating any changes you would make and posing any questions you have.
- Answer question two and the questions that follow with a minimum of one complete sentence. What indicates to the reader that the introductory paragraph does or does not begin with a summary?
- How could the writer refine his thesis and narrow the scope of his analysis? (What specifically in the letter—rather than the letter as a whole—might serve as his focus?)
- The paragraph of King’s letter that the student examines in detail, the one that is included on this handout, is not the first paragraph of the letter. What does that fact tell you about the parenthetical citations in the student’s analysis?
If you were absent of Monday, or misplaced your copy of the sample analysis and exercise, email me a request for a copy.
From “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct-action movement that was “well timed” according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “wait.” It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This “wait” has almost always meant “never.” It has been a tranquilizing thalidomide, relieving the emotional stress for a moment, only to give birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration. We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our God-given and constitutional rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say “wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she cannot go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos, “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger” and your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodyness”—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.
Work Cited
King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” California state University, Chico. https://www.csuchico.edu/iege/_assets/documents/susi-letter-from-birmingham-jail.pdf.
Next Up
In class tomorrow, we will examine the sample student analysis “Wait Means Never” and the accompanying exercise. Afterward, I will return your analysis drafts with my notes, and you will have the remainder of the class period to devote to revision work.
Jane Lucas 