Letter To Birmingham Jail Analysis

To Americans and many others around the world, the U.S. is the face of what should be a “free society,” not including every society’s minor flaws. Maybe it’s because I’m barely entering the brink of my social awareness as a U.S. citizen or maybe is it more due to recent threats to our freedom as Americans, but now more than in the past decade or so, the media has brought the image of huge protests, riots, and demonstrations into the spotlight. And unfortunately, more often than not, many of these events result in violence, aggression, and opposition.

Nonetheless, people’s intentions and visions of victory surely do not aim to end in chaos and harm to our societies. Participants only seek to feel unified and protected in the face of fear. Such

He writes that “one has not only a legal but moral responsibility to obey just laws” as well as “a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws” (Letter from Birmingham Jail). King asserts his belief to clergymen in his Letter to Birmingham Jail that he can urge people to obey laws like the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision (to outlaw segregation in public schools) because it is one that is morally right; in like manner, he can also urge people to disobey segregation ordinances because they are ones that are morally wrong. Essentially, he uses this idea as one justification for the civil rights activists’ demonstrations. To this day, King’s ideals in correspondence with the degradation that his people faced are commended by many people whether it be to achieve credibility or to express genuine support for what he represented. Solidarity reminds that even if someone holds power over you, you are not alone in your beliefs or in your supposed

Without any sort of resistance, people with power inevitably get carried away. In many cases, it is a governmental system that seems to have maintained obsessive control over citizens, so it appears that the citizens are the ones that need to initiate the balance necessary within society. Henry David Thoreau argues in his essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” that the “government is best which governs the least.” Thoreau believed that it is a citizen’s responsibility to oppose any law which is morally wrong even though it is law. He discusses the role of people in a very authoritative government and how they follow every single rule out of habit, like machines, only some people recognizing injustices and still not doing anything about