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. (Contains 71 notes.)