Letter From Birmingham Jail

King uses multiple persuasive appeals to establish his credibility and to engage his audience. The three central persuasive appeals include the appeal to emotion (pathos), the appeal to character or authority (ethos), and the appeal to reason (logos).

When King uses the example of a little girl with “tears welling up in her eyes” (92) as her parent explains to her that racism prevents her from attending an amusement park, the idea of an innocent child bearing the psychological burden of rejection pulls at the heart strings of the reader and thus makes the reader more sympathetic to the abused humanity of African-Americans.

King uses ethos to establish his authority with his primary audience of eight Alabama clergymen. King consistently relies on sources and examples drawn from Christianity. For example, when he responds to the clergymen’s criticism that he is an outsider, he responds by highlighting the example of “prophets of the eighth century B.C. [who] left their villages and carried their ‘thus saith the Lord’ far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, [and]…the Apostle Paul [, who]left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world” as a precedent for his own work outside of his hometown (86).