Henry David Thoreau and Dr. Martin Luther King are two people who helped to change America for the better with their actions and their words. Henry David Thoreau, in both is writing and in his social practice, developed a new form for citizenship and civic action called Civil Disobedience. He developed Civil Disobedience in response to his government’s support of slavery, but also its support for the Mexican-American War. Over the years, many great leaders of important social movements, both within and without America, have been inspired by the example of the life and social practice Henry David Thoreau, and have been influenced by the ideas presented in his writing like “Civil Disobedience” and “Walden’. One of the great Americans inspired by Henry David Thoreau and his actual as well as his essay “Civil Disobedience” was Dr. Martin Luther King, the American civil rights leader. King, too, was an eloquent and powerful writer, who, in essays like Letter from a Birmingham Jail and in speeches like his “I have a Dream Speech” used rhetoric and a powerful ethical sense to convince his audience of the justice of his cause. King was also like Thoreau in that, King, too, was thrown in jail for his act of Civil Disobedience, just as Henry David Thoreau was thrown in jail for his. And both men wrote powerful essays in support of freedom and liberty while incarcerated. From jail, “writing in the margins of the newspaper, King responded to the clergymen in one of the most seminal statements of dissent in American history. For dissenters King’s letter, like Thoreau’s Resistance to Civil Government is holy writ. Dissenters, whatever their cause, frequently and inevitably refer to these documents for tactics and inspiration “ (Young 434)
One strategy that both writers share is to make an appeal to a higher law than the law they are being accused of breaking. Both King and Thoreau were in jail for breaking, or protesting, legitimate legal law. Thoreau is in jail for protesting the Spanish American War and slavery. His form of protest was to withhold his income taxes, for he did not wish to support, with either his body or his money, a government which waged imperialist war and which allowed slavery to exists. Martin Luther King was in jail for practicing the civil disobedience he learned from Henry David Thoreau in order to protest the completely legitimate and legal laws of segregation and Jim Crow law. The Spanish American war was declared by the President and Congress according to the method for declaring war laid out in the Constitution. Likewise, slavery, was protected by the Constitution. The various segregation laws in the southern states were established according to each state’s constitution. Thus, in terms of every day, human, civil law, neither King nor Thoreau had a leg to stand on; they were breaking the law, not the slave holders or the segregationists. Thus, neither King not Thoreau can make a legal appeal, to the audience. They must find an extra-legal, yet still just argument to make their case.
The solution that both men arrive at is to appeal to a higher law to justify their actions, and to condemn the laws which they are protesting. In other words, there is a source of law, be it moral, religious, or political, which is superior to the laws they are protesting. For King, there are two higher, superior laws, which justify his actions, and which condemn segregation. The first source is political. First, he reminds the reader about “Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools” (King 3). To begin with, the various segregation laws may not even be Constitutional. However, he further undermines the legitimacy of segregation and Jim Crow. He moves from the Constitution to the other founding document of the United States, the Declaration of Independence. He writes, “was not Thomas Jefferson an extremistwe hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal (King 4). The Declaration of Independence is like the mission statement of America; it lays out the founding father’s vision of what the United States should be like. And, as King points out in his “I Have a Dream Speech”, the Declaration of Independence the promise that American makes to all its citizens, that they shall be treated equally before the law. Segregation and Jim Crow laws go against the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, and break the American promise. By invoking Jefferson and the Declaration, King is making the case that he is following the true law of America; It is segregation which breaks the law.
However, after proving that he is following the higher, truer, American laws, he continues to demonstrate that there is yet another higher law which clearly shows segregation to be unjust and unlawful. Unlike Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King was an ordained Christian minister, and a theologian. He also knows that much of his audience, both white and black, are Christians, or religious in some way. Thus, he knows that appeals to a higher, religious law will both help explain his motivation, and serve as a very powerful argument to persuade his audience to accept and agree with his position. King quotes both St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas, both law makers in the early church, to demonstrate that he is obeying the higher moral law of god.
However, although most people assume Thoreau employed no religious grounding in On Civil Disobedience, or if he did, it is the universal spirituality of Trasncendentalism. As James Duban writes in "Conscience and Consciousness: The Liberal Christian Context of Thoreau's
Political Ethics,” Thoreau made use of Unitarian Christianity as a higher arbiter of what is right and what is wrong than Civil Law (Duban 210-211). AS Thoreau says, “unjust laws exist: shale we be content to obey them” (Thoreau). He answers the question by pointing out most men are content to obey them because they are afraid to disobey them. For some reason they find disobeying the unjust law a worse crime than the existence of the unjust law.
Thoreau’s solution to this problem was one used by many activists who came after him, including Martin Luther King. He appeals to a higher law, and uses the higher law to condemn the state which is disobeying the higher law by enforcing the unjust law. As was seen, the higher law can be grounded in American history, or it can be grounded in religious ethical appeals, Thoreau wonders about the state “Why does it always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels” (Thoreau). Surely any state who would condemn men such as those listed by Thoreau does not deserve respect or obedience. Instead, the reader should be like Christ who disobeyed Caesar, and Luther who disobeyed the Pope, all in the name of a higher, truer morality. While Thoreau was not the religious man that King was, it is clear that he was completely willing to use religious arguments to make his case. For, “Thoreau suggests that his apparently radical outlook is actually
consistent with long-established religious values; "absolute right," he elsewhere mused, is "synonymous with the law of God” (Duban 212)
Thus, while the reader does have evidence of Thoreau’s use of religious appeals in his essay, it is important that the reader not reconstruct Thoreau into a fundamentalist or even into a practicing Christian. In addition to his Unitarianism, Thoreau read and practiced some forms of various Eastern religions, as was part of the trend of transcendentalism including eastern spirituality. One of these spiritual social practices that Thoreau regularly practiced was the contemplative mode, which might entail contemplative reading, meditation, or the contemplation of one’s lived environment. As noted by Charles Suhur “religious scriptures are among those that evoke that contemplative responseparts of the New Testament, the Upanishads and the Dhammapadaspiritual musings by authors likeThomas MertonErich Frommand Henry David Thoreau” (Suhor 28).
Both Thoreau and King employed the contemplative mode. Certainly, both men practiced contemplative reading, however, it was a different type of contemplative activity which enabled King and Thoreau to construct their essays On Civil Disobedience and Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Both men were able to engage in contemplative action while in prison. Suhor lists many of the components of the experience of a contemplative text produced after the contemplative experience. The main point is that the contemplative experience provokes, or is recorded, in, a contemplative text, which then transfers that contemplative experience to the reader (Suhur 29-30). Without listing each of the components of the experience what matters is that the reader takes from the text a deeply powerful feeling of ethical, moral, or aesthetic insight, a description that should be familiar to readers of either Civil Disobedience or Letter from a Birmingham Jail. The point is that this resonance on the part of the reader is what allows them to be certain that they are right and the law is wrong.
It is strongly believed that King read Thoreau’s On Civil Disobedience, and that he found the same inspiration in Thoreau, that many other activists and organizers have (Young). While King was a true modern master of rhetoric, he employed several of the same rhetorical strategies and appeals to write his letter as Thoreau used to pen his essay. Both men, although coming from a different religious background, made the appeal to the higher moral law of god central to their texts. Likewise, they both employed civic, political, and legal arguments in order to reach the widest possible audience. And both texts leave the reader with a strong sense of ethical certitude and the knowledge that one is right for disobeying laws supporting slavery, or for disobeying laws supporting segregation.
Works Cited
Duban, James. "Conscience and Consciousness: The Liberal Christian Context of Thoreau's
Political Ethics." The New England Quarterly 60.2 (1987): 208-222.
King, Martin Luther. Letter from a Birmingham Jail. The Martin Luther King Institute at
Stanford University. Edited and Annotated Michael Wilson. 16 Aptil 1963. Web. 20 April 2016
King, Martin Luther. “I Have a Dream: Address Delivered on the March on Washington.” The
Martin Luther King Institute at Stanford University. 28 August 1963. Web, 20 April
2016
Rosenwald, Lawrence A., and From William Cain. "The Theory, Practice, and Influence of
Thoreau's Civil Disobedience." A historical guide to Henry David Thoreau (2000): 153-79.
Suhor, Charles. “Contemplative Reading--the Experience, the Idea, the Applications”. The
English Journal 91.4 (2002): 28–32. Web
Thoreau, Henry David. On Civil Disobedience.” Cross Roads Project at Virginia University.
1849. Web. 21 April 2016.
Young, Ralph. Dissident: The History of an American Idea. New York: New York University
Press, 2015
