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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text's major themes.
Tension
Tension is an organizing motif in “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” both as something a person or community might feel and as a tool for social justice. People who suffer oppression endure constant tension and, as King explains, it is the aim of nonviolent direct action to shift its burdens to the oppressors. All too often, those who benefit from inequality are sheltered from its effects. For this reason, then, King contends that no one will relinquish privilege voluntarily. The creation of tension, through protest and nonviolent confrontation, is one way to force an issue, encouraging oppressors to consider social conditions in a new way. It is not the case, then, that protest creates tension. Instead, it merely brings hidden tensions to the surface by shifting how they are experienced. King urges his readers to direct their discontent, and the tension it causes them, into productive outlets, creating the possibility for a new social order in which tension will no longer play a central role.
Optimism
Even though King expresses disappointment, frustration, and even anger at various points in “Letter from Birmingham Jail," optimism is one of its recurrent motifs. King sees reason to hope that a better day will dawn in the many people willing to embrace nonviolent direct action, and the likely jail time it will entail, as a means for achieving a more just society. As he turns from the Black community to his white critics, King’s use of optimism shifts. Although he continues to use the rhetoric of optimism, he stresses a tendency to be too optimistic. By presenting both sides of his argument through optimism, King establishes with his writing something the text posits, that people are woven together in a basic way. Finally, King’s emphasis on hope not only encourages readers to look to and work for the future, but also corresponds to a pervasive American tendency to be hopeful and optimistic, even in the face of daunting odds.
Judgment
Across the text, King encourages his audience to render judgments on unjust laws, complacent white moderates, and religious institutions too cowardly to act. At the core of the work’s interest in judgment is a basic difference of opinion on who is permitted to judge someone or something as wrong. According to King’s unnamed critics, his actions are unwise as his followers wrongly flout both law and social custom; King counters that it is entirely right for him, and for his followers, to reject laws they judge to be unjust. They do so while accepting the punishment for their deliberate transgression, done in the name of justice. At the same time, judgment is not only a secular matter in “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” King also insists that God’s judgment will fall upon people who forestall the pursuit of justice or who embrace hate instead of love. Judgment thus works on several levels across the text.
