Language in King’s Letter

Directions: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” includes many
examples of figurative language meant to persuade people to take action. Read the
lines from the letter and identify ONE type of figurative language (some excerpts may
contain more than one), its meaning, its effect on mood and tone, and its effect on
audience. An example has been completed for you. Then, answer the analysis question.

Example:
This movement is nourished by the contemporary frustration over the continued
existence of racial discrimination.
• Type of figurative language: Personification
• Meaning of figurative language: It means the movement grows because its fed by
people’s frustration with racial discrimination
• Effect on tone and mood: It creates a factual tone and an urgent mood.
• Effect on audience: Audience will see the civil rights movement as a living thing,
which would make it more meaningful.

1.           … when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as
you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public
amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see the 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…

• Type of figurative language:

• Meaning of figurative language:

• Effect on tone and mood:

• Effect on audience:

2. Like a boil that can never be cured as long as it is covered up but must be
opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice
must likewise be exposed, with all of the tension its exposing creates, to the light of
human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

• Type of figurative language:

• Meaning of figurative language:

• Effect on tone and mood:

• Effect on audience:

3. Over and over again I have found myself asking: "Who worships here? Who is
their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with
words of interposition and nullification? Where were their voices of support when tired,
bruised, and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of
complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?"

• Type of figurative language:

• Meaning of figurative language:

• Effect on tone and mood:

• Effect on audience:

4. In those days the Church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas
and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of
society.

• Type of figurative language:

• Meaning of figurative language:

• Effect on tone and mood:

• Effect on audience:

5. It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. But I am sure that, if
I had lived in Germany during that time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish
brothers even though it was illegal.
 • Type of figurative language:

• Meaning of figurative language:

• Effect on tone and mood:

• Effect on audience:

Analysis Question: How does Dr. King use figurative language to support his feelings
about equal civil rights for African-Americans?