Letter from a Birmingham Jail - Themes
You can find this storyboard in the following articles and resources:
Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King Jr
Lesson Plans by Kristy Littlehale
"Letter from a Birmingham Jail" challenged the complacent attitudes of the local clergymen during the Civil Right’s movement, as Martin Luther King, Jr. sat in a jail cell for his peaceful protests against injustice. Teach your students all about this important letter with Storyboard That!
Storyboard Description
Letter from a Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King Jr. | Transcendentalism | Civil Rights Movement | MLK Jr.
Storyboard Text
- INJUSTICE
- EXAMPLE 1
- Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere!
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- EXAMPLE 2
- How can I explain this to my children?
- Funtown is closed to colored children? So we can't go?
- Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?
- "I am in Birmingham because injustice is here...I am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my home town."
- We urge the public to continue to show restraint should the demonstrations continue!
- "Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust."
- Why can't you say, "Follow this decree because integration is morally right and the Negro is your brother?"
- APATHY
- "You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I'm sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations."
- "In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched while white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. "
- These are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.
- EFFECTIVENESS OF NONVIOLENT PROTESTS
- DOWN WITH JIM CROW!!!
- WHITES ONLY
- Dave's Cafe
- Hey! Y'all are blocking my customers and messin' with my business!
- WHITES ONLY
- Equal Rights for All!
- HEY! GET OFF THAT SHIP RIGHT NOW, IN THE NAME OF THE KING!!!
- TEA
- Into the water!
- TEA
- Breakfast Blend
- Too late, Redcoat!
- EARL GREY
- That's gonna cost ya...
- "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 which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue."
- This nation CANNOT survive half slave and half free!!!
- "In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience."
- Equal Rights for All!
- DOWN WITH JIM CROW!!!
- STOP SEGREGATION NOW!!
- EXTREMISM VS. MODERATION
- "...And now this approach is being termed extremist. Was not... Abraham Lincoln [an extremist]: 'This nation cannot survive half slave and half free'?"
- "Others have marched with us down nameless streets of the South... Unlike so many of their moderate brothers and sisters, they have recognized the urgency of the moment and sensed the need for powerful 'action' antidotes to combat the disease of segregation."
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