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Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience (1849) and King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963): Comparisons This is a succinct summary the views of Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr. who spread their most heartfelt desires as they wrote during times of confinement. In Civil Disobedience (Thoreau) and Letter from a Birmingham Jail (King), there is obvious influence of Thoreau, whose Disobedience was heard as his protest over slavery and the U. S. – Mexican War, on King, whose Letter decried practices of racial segregation in Alabama’s largest city.

A degree to which Thoreau influenced King shows in the following quotation:

When a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize (Thoreau, 1849,  ¶ 7).

King, in leading a movement for Civil Rights, could identify with Thoreau’s nonviolent indignation:

…there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only the legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all’ (King, 1963, ¶ 15).

A list of similarities between these two men and these two literary declarations could continue, however, not all of Thoreau’s views were embraced by King. For one thing, they arrived at similar conclusions but from different philosophical platforms. King, the Christian minister, based his civil disobedience on the precepts of the Bible while Thoreau, the Transcendentalist, saw it a citizen’s duty to rebel on moral principles as established in a secular society. King was the historian, “Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people…sought to convict [them] for being ‘disturbers of the peace’ and ‘outside agitators.’ But the Christians pressed on…they were ‘a colony of heaven,’ called to obey God rather than man” (King, ¶ 31). Thoreau was the prophet, “But, to speak practically and as a citizen… I ask [that] every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it” (Thoreau, ¶ 3).

References

King, M. (1994). Letter from a Birmingham Jail. New York: HarperCollins.

Thoreau, H. (2009). Civil Disobedience. Scott’s Valley, CA: CreateSpace.