Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King were important leaders in their time, even though by background they had very little in common and would not have been on the same side had they been contemporaries. Jefferson was a large slave owner in Virginia who became governor of that state after writing the Declaration of Independence and then president of the United States in 1801-09. Even though he wrote the famous words ‘all men are created equal’, he meant only white men, not blacks, women or Native Americans. As a politician and chief of state, he most certainly did not believe that any of these groups should have equal citizenship rights, and because he regarded blacks as naturally inferior to white, believed they should either remain in slavery or be sent back to Africa if they were freed. Nor was Jefferson a believer in Christianity or any organized religion, while King was a Baptist minister who based his principles of nonviolence and social justice on the Bible. He was the most important black civil rights leader in U.S. history, and when he referred to the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, he took them at their word and actually extended the concept of human rights and equal citizenship far beyond the white make audience that Jefferson and the Founders were really addressing. King meant that these rights should apply to every person in the world rather than being reserved for whites only, and stated so very eloquently in his speeches and major writings like “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. King could therefore speak and write with immense moral authority that Jefferson simply lacked on these issues. Also unlike Jefferson, he was not trying to foment a violent revolution of become the leader of an independent nation, but he could easily point out that blacks had suffered from 300 years of injuries, abuses and violations of fundamental human rights in the U.S., that they had the victims of tyranny and arbitrary power, and that this type of existence was simply intolerable.
King and Jefferson were really making a moral appeal to the entire world in these documents, even though in the formal sense the Declaration of Independence addressed King George III and his disgruntled American subjects, while King was writing to white Southern clergy who were indifferent or hostile to civil rights for blacks. Jefferson wrote “let facts be submitted to a candid world” as his listed the “long train” of tyranny and injustice the American colonists had suffered over the years (Declaration of Independence 1776). King was making a moral argument against tyranny and human rights and equal justice under the law, and also denouncing the United States for betraying its own principles of liberty and democracy for all. He would have agreed with Jefferson that no one was required to obey an unjust law that violated the rights of the people, and that “whenever any form of government shall become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it” (Declaration of Independence 1776). Obviously his purpose was not to found an independent country or become one of the leaders of an armed movement or violent revolution, but he could also have pointed out that blacks had suffered a “history of unremitting injuries and usurpations”, including slavery and segregation for over 300 years (Declaration of Independence 1776). He and Jefferson would ceratinaly have agreed that “freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed” and “justice too long delayed is justice denied” (King 1963).
King affirmed his deeply-held convictions about Christian nonviolence and social justice, which were regular themes in all his speeches and writings, and regardless of whether the Southern white clergy were listening to him. In this respect he differed greatly from Jefferson, who was quite skeptical of Christianity and all organized religion and in his document had only a general reference to the “laws of nature and of nature’s God” (Declaration of Independence 1776). Jefferson was basing his principles of the idea that all men (or at least white men) had natural rights to life, liberty and property, but he certainly had no intention of fighting a revolution in the name of Christianity. King was a Baptist minister, as was his father, and stated that he was in Birmingham “because injustice is here” and just as Paul “carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town” (King 1963). Although the white clergy condemned King for breaking the law, he insisted that laws that oppressed or enslaved minorities or degraded the “human personality” were unjust. Blacks in the South had no right to vote or decide in the creation of these laws, and therefore should break them, although “one who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly and with a willingness to accept the penalty” (King 1963). Jefferson was not willing to accept any further penalties from George III and the British government since the colonists had just formally severed all ties with them, and now the issue would only be settled by force of arms. This was perhaps the most important area of disagreement between King and Jefferson, aside from the obvious difference that the Virginia slaveholder did not really believe that blacks had any human rights at all. King did not want the civil rights movement to turn into a violent revolution or provoke another civil war.
After eight years of warfare, Jefferson and the American colonists did achieve their goal of an independent nation, which is why the Declaration of Independence has become one of the most important documents ever written, particularly its most famous phrase about how all men are created equal. It would not have been famous had they lost the war, of course, but since they were victorious other leaders of revolutionary movements and the cause of human rights have been able to take these same words and apply them to issues and causes that Jefferson would never have intended. After a long struggle, King was also successful in beginning the process of desegregation in Birmingham, although the Ku Klux Klan came very close to assassinating him there when they blew up the hotel where he had been staying. In 1965, King would be in Selma, Alabama, organizing the marches and protests for voting which, which again provoked a very harsh police response that was seen on national television. This led to the passage of the 1965 Voting Right Act. Later, King became outspoken in his opposition to the Vietnam War, and at the time of his assassination in Memphis in 1968 was preparing to lead a Poor People’s March on Washington.
WORKS CITED
Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.
Martin Luther King, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, April 16, 1963.
http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/resources/article/annotated_letter_from_birmingham
