Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

“Nobodiness” 

Segregation generates multiple forms of inequality that can be quantified—separate facilities, different outcomes in the courts and schools, limited access to jobs and housing—but it also attacks the psychology and spirit of the people it oppresses, undermining their sense of self. King coins the term “nobodiness” to capture how it feels to be relentlessly undermined, demeaned, and insulted. “Nobodiness” symbolizes, in other words, the harm that segregation causes but that cannot be seen or measured easily, although King insists that it is no less violent or damaging for its invisible cause. The constant fight against the moral degeneration associated with “nobodiness” is exhausting and, as King makes clear, inappropriate in a nation that is organized around the principle that all persons are created equal. One of the aims of “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is to support efforts to replace the hopelessness of “nobodiness” with the equality implicit in its opposite, “somebodiness.”  

Birmingham, Alabama 

Alabama was a key state in the fight for civil rights and Birmingham, an industrial center for both Alabama and the South in general, was central to the campaigns. In 1963, when Governor Wallace took the oath of office, he pledged the state’s unwavering commitment to segregation, famously promising that it would continue today, tomorrow, and always. Other elected officials, like Eugene “Bull” Connor, agreed emphatically with this position. The majority Black population of Birmingham suffered under some of the most stringent segregationist policies in the nation. For these reasons, Martin Luther King himself identified Birmingham as a powerful symbol of racism and intolerance in the United States. The city accrued this meaning not only through its fervent embrace of segregation but also its violent opposition in the 1930s to efforts at unionization. 

Jail 

Jail is both where Martin Luther King composes the letter and an important symbol throughout its text. He explains at the letter’s conclusion that his confinement afforded him the opportunity to write at length, as well as to think and pray extensively. Even though jail is an ordeal, for King as for the other activists who risk imprisonment by protesting, King indicates that it can also have positive ramifications. Filling jail cells with peaceful protesters is a basic tenet of nonviolent direct action. The idea of jail or imprisonment appears in the letter in a second way when King likens segregation itself to imprisonment. Early in the letter, King lists various experiences associated with the racial system of the United States, all of which form the metaphorical cages of poverty and deprivation that Black Americans have and continue to endure. As “Letter from Birmingham Jail” makes clear, what it means to be in jail may depend importantly on whether or not a person understands themself to be free.