...A Little Jail-Bird Told Me The pen is mightier than the sword. This saying emphasizes that words are stronger than violent actions. Martin Luther King Jr. believed strongly in this saying. Being a leader of the civil rights movement, King believed in peaceful protests over violent protests. He was a kind hearted man peacefully fighting for equal rights of black and white people. At one point, his focus was Birmingham. Birmingham was thoroughly segregated and treated blacks worse than most areas. While in Birmingham, King was arrested. While in jail, King wrote a letter in response to criticism he received from white clergymen. In this letter, Martin Luther King Jr. uses a friendly, non-hostile tone mixed with a list of undisputable facts to calmly, yet assertively point out his issues with racial dilemmas. Right in the intro of the letter, King starts with a friendly and hospitable tone. He respectfully states, “…since I feel you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statements in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.” (King 1). Here, he keeps a calm tone, but his use of the word “hope” can be inferred to show that his letter may at some points become stern and serious, showing that he isn’t going to easily budge on his stance on the civil rights movement. Right away he makes it clear he is not hostile at all. He speaks respectably in order to be respected, which is not exactly common for a black...
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...REPARATIONS TO FORMER SLAVES DESCENDANTS. The debate of reparation continues unabated and legendary. It is gathering such a momentum that people who initially did not support it are now changing camps to galvanize support for it. Man was born equal without any superiority of one race over the other. Pigmentation, I believe, should not be a paradigm by which we determine who should rule or enslave the other. Although slavery is as old as the existence of man, its longevity is not a permissible cause to be perpetrated against humanity. The untold hardship executed against humanity, precisely Africans during the era of this heinous and barbaric so called “trade”, as if human beings were commodities, needs a meticulous attention by all level-headed people. In an article, “Lawsuits seek reparation from Britain, France, and Netherlands for their roles in Atlantic slave trade”, the Prime Minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Ralph Gonsalves in his speech on the 68th United Nations General Assembly said “the European nations must pay for their deeds”. He bemoans, “ “The awful legacy of these crimes against humanity – a legacy which exists today in our Caribbean – ought to be repaired for the developmental benefit of our Caribbean societies and all our peoples,” Gonsalves said. “The European nations must partner in a focused, especial way with us to execute this repairing.” Although the petitioners have not specified a monetary figure for the...
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