However, in the months that followed, King’s powerful words were distributed to the public through civil right’s committees, the press, and was even read in testimony before Congress (‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’), taking the country by storm. The audience of Letter From Birmingham Jail was initially the eight clergymen of Birmingham, all white and in positions of religious leadership. These circumstances lead us to our next rhetorical focus: audience. This exigence is rhetorical because it can be improved if enough people are socially cognizant, whether that be in legislature or the streets of Birmingham, through creation and enforcement of equitable laws and social attitudes.
This protest, his subsequent arrest, and the clergymen’s public statement ostensibly make up the rhetorical exigence, but it truly stems from a much larger and dangerous situation at hand: the overwhelming state of anti-black prejudice spread socially, systematically, and legislatively in America since the country’s implementation of slavery in Jamestown, 1619. The eight clergymen in Birmingham released a public statement of caution regarding the protesters actions as “unwise and untimely” (King 1), to which Martin’s letter is a direct response. Martin Luther found himself arrested on the twelfth of April 1963 after leading a peaceful protest throughout Birmingham, Alabama “after he defied a state court’s injunction and led a march of black protesters without a permit, urging an Easter boycott of white-owned stores” (Jr., Martin Luther King). King was the figurehead of the Civil Rights movement, infamous for his “I Have a Dream” speech and substantially impactful rhetoric promoting social and political change, peaceful indignation, and calls to awareness. While the Civil Rights movement superseded the dismantling of Jim Crow, the social ideologies and lackadaisical legislature behind anti-black prejudice continued to rack the country far into the 1960’s. However, the racial divide was legislated in 1877 with the implementation of Jim Crow laws, which lasted until 1950. In Letter From Birmingham Jail, the exigence is the continued condemnation, segregation, and prejudice afflicted against African Americans since the emancipation of the slaves in 1863. All of these factors influence each other to shape rhetoric, which Bitzer describes as, “pragmatic it comes into existence for the sake of something beyond itself” (3), with Martin Luther King’s Letter From Birmingham Jail being a shining example. Lastly, the exigence of a rhetorical piece is the external issue, situation, or event in which the rhetoric is responding to. The audience of a rhetorical piece will shape the rhetoric the author uses in order to appeal, brazen, or educate whoever is exposed. and may encompass the audience, as seen while analysing Letter From Birmingham Jail.
Constraints bring light to the obstacles this rhetoric may face, whether it be social, political, economical, etc. There are three main considerations to make while analysing a rhetorical situation: the constraints, the exigence, and the audience. Analysing a rhetorical situation clarifies why a text was created, the purpose in which it was written, and why the author made specific choices while writing it. In sum, all rhetoric has an external situation in which it is responding to. Lloyd Bitzer describes rhetorical situation as, “a complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action to bring about the significant modification of the exigence” (6). Martin Luther leading peaceful Birmingham protest, AP News While this fight had been raging for nearly 10 years, the release in 1963 was shortly followed by the Civil Rights Act in 1964. In Letter From Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King responds to the subjectivity of law and the issue he paramounts by using precise and impactful rhetoric from inside of his jail cell. had, perhaps, the most encompassing and personal rhetorical situation to face in American history. As the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s unfolded, Martin Luther King Jr.
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