In Henry Thoreau's “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” and Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail'' they were both written for a purpose. In the writing of these, there were many similarities in the reason they were written, one is that they both share their opinions on social injustice and civil disobedience. The purpose of writing had some differences from each other. In Thoreau’s speech, he is speaking about expressing his feelings toward what he thinks is an unjust government. This compared to King's speech where he discusses why he feels they should end segregation. Even though these are two different speeches written on different things, they both share similarities in why they were written. In Thoreau’s letter “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” he writes to justify the actions that he took against the government and to explain the moral reasoning behind his logic. He shows this in the text by, “It is for no particular item in the tax bill that I …show more content…
An example showing this is:
“I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.” (para. 46)
The way that this is showing his purpose is because he is saying that trying to get equality a moral and nonviolent way is not going to work even though he wants it to. He is saying that even though it is not good they might have to use non-morals so they could get equality and it is even worse if they don’t get equality using a moral way because what is happening to them is immoral. His second purpose in writing this is to defend the strategies of nonviolent resistance. This is shown when he