American Thought Embodied in “Letter from Birmingham Jailâ€

Abstract

“Letter from Birmingham Jail†was written on April 16, 1963, by Martin Luther King, Jr., the famous civil rights leader. The 1960s in America is usually called a decade that changed a nation. Some important social reform movements took place during this period. And it is also a special period for intellectual history which includes these main streams of American thought, such as puritan Christianity, revolutionary rationalism, and transcendentalism, pragmatism. Based on a close reading and a detailed analysis of the letter, we can find the traces of the influence of the American thought on Martin Luther King.