3). For both Thoreau and King, the matter of unjust laws was urgent. In his speech delivered during the March on Washington, King stated, "It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality," ("I Have a Dream"). A century earlier, Thoreau advocated the expedient breaking of an unjust law. Of unjust laws Thoreau stated, "if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law," ("Civil Disobedience" Part 2, para. 5).
King draws directly from Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," pointing out the urgency to break unjust laws in order to transform the very ethical foundations of the society. "And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges," ("I Have a Dream"). King's "whirlwinds of revolt" are precisely what Thoreau called the "counter friction to stop the machine," ("Civil Disobedience" Part 2, para. 5). Thoreau would have commended the March on Washington as a large-scale method of invigorating the social order and creating a "more perfect union."
Thoreau's personal means of civil disobedience was to shun the poll tax; for Thoreau, paying taxes to an unjust state is condoning injustice. Thoreau was imprisoned for his offense yet stood his ground. King was likewise held in prison, from where he penned some of his most influential writings including the "Letter from Birmingham Jail."
Nowhere in "Civil Disobedience" does Thoreau advocate armed resistance; it is as if Thoreau understands that with an effective campaign of peaceful protest that great revolutions are possible. King understood the power of civil disobedience to move the vast and seemingly impenetrable forces of a government...
John Locke's social theory not only permits disobedience but also a revolution if the State violates its side of the contract. Martin Luther King, Jr. says that civil disobedience derives from the natural law tradition in that an unjust law is not a law but a perversion of it. He, therefore, sees consenting to obey laws as not extending or including unjust laws. At present, a new and different form
Pharisaical practices are as popular today as they may be supposed to have been in the time of Christ -- and one of the biggest hypocrisies of our time is what Roosevelt called "the great arsenal of democracy," the shield-phrase with which the U.S. would pursue its policy of "manifest destiny" all over the globe (and an ideology it had been pursuing since the end of the 19th century when
Civil Disobedience The concept of "Civil Disobedience" was first put forward by the American author, Henry David Thoreau in his famous essay "Civil Disobedience" initially published in 1849 as "Resistance to Civil Government." Although Thoreau's essay had little impact in the nineteenth century, his ideas about civil disobedience were put into practice in the twentieth century by leaders such as Mohandas Ghandhi during India's struggle for independence and by Martin Luther
Regardless, to condemn Brown to death in Thoreau's view demoted the far greater human destruction of life via the institution of enslavement Brown attempted to end. This does not seem so much to be a contradiction or a defense of violence but a tempering of the anger that Brown created in the hearts of many Americans, and an attempt to put the violent acts of Brown in the context
Both the British Empire and the American South shared a prejudicial view of minorities. Both set themselves up as superior to those who were forced to obey their laws, and believed that their citizens were inferior due to their race. Rosa Parks is now known as "the mother of the civil rights movement." Her actions began a series of events which ended much of the inequality faced by African-Americans in the
.. becomes unjust" (Lincoln 158). Here, King is referring to the Civil Rights movement and its non-violent protest which in the minds of the lawmakers disrupted and desegregated society by allowing blacks to interrelate with the Southern majority who keenly believed in the separation of the races. In addition, King brings his argument against unjust laws full circle by declaring "One who breaks an unjust law must do it openly,
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