The need for changes to the situation of African Americans in the last half of the twentieth century is evident in Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr. With 1963 as its original publication year, the document encompassed King’s ideologies on the use of civil disobedience to combat segregation and other racial injustices against the black populace in the United States. Apparently, King and his followers sought to achieve the Civil Rights of the African Americans through peaceful protests; however, rather than listen to the complaining masses, racist whites insisted that the protests defied law and order in the country. Still, as King explained, the Caucasians’ arguments were baseless because contrary to their assumptions, there is a difference between just and unjust laws and at the same time, moral laws surpass those passed civilly.
Martin Luther King, Jr. commenced his assertions on the just and unjust laws by pointing out that while the former is for human dignity and all people, the latter served a different purpose as it favored some and oppressed others. For instance, in the case of black segregation, the laws that supported such mistreatments of blacks only served to ensure that African Americans could not access the same opportunities as their white counterparts and for that reason, were unjust. In King’s words, through the unjust law of racial segregation, the “segregator [got] a false sense of superiority” while the segregated lot assumed false inferiority (2003, p.394). To that end, individuals have the moral responsibility to defy unjust laws lest they take root despite going against natural law.
At a personal level, and with the concept of white supremacy in mind, King’s views are both correct and convincing. From the history of slavery in the United States to that of the black lynchings after emancipation, it is apparent that white societies of a better part of the twentieth century still embraced social order. In other words, the inferiority and superiority complexes that King mentions are plausible simply because black people were predominantly inferior to whites. Thus said, self-serving laws such as those of segregation were unjust on the grounds of morality and the understanding of liberty on American soil. Concurrently, the love and compassion preached by Christian clergymen did not advocate the mistreatment of persons based on their skin color; hence, civil laws that challenged moral codes were indeed unbreakable.
References
Martin Luther King, J. (2003). Letter From Birmingham Jail (1963). In Bloom, L.Z, White, E.M., and Borrowman, S. Inquiry: Questioning, Reading, Writing (2nd ed., pp. 389-403). New Jersey: Pearson.
