"A creative psalm of brotherhood": The (De)constructive play in Martin Luther King's "letter from Birmingham jail"

Scholars have celebrated the spoken word in King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail," but they have overlooked the significance of the Letter's writing. In this essay I closely read King's act of writing the Letter, along with the figures of speech he employs in it, and I show how both - by enacting the mass media's ability to cross contexts - are essential to King's political strategy of nonviolent direct action, as well as to the Letter's argument against segregation - an argument that, before the fact, follows the steps we have since come to associate with deconstructive analysis.