Letter From Birmingham Jail Thesis

Halfway through the twentieth century, African Americans endured a physical, mental, and emotional view of white supremacy, enclosed in laws, policies, and a variety of racial confinements and violence. During this time, Jim Crow laws -- the segregation of public places-- resulted in schools, transportation, bathrooms, etc being “separate but equal”. The Civil Rights Movement was an attempt of civil lawfulness for African Americans to acquire equal rights in the United States. Despite the continuous wars during the twentieth century and the elimination of slavery, discrimination against blacks continued--where they would undergo drastic forms of racism, especially in the South. Overtime, African Americans were tired of the racism and violence against them. Therefore, the Civil Rights Movement began

to a radicalized movement with the significance on cultural identity, separatism, and black nationalism with Malcolm X. Martin Luther King Jr.’s standpoint on integration, nonviolence, and his social impact are the reason why the civil rights movement was successful. To begin, Martin Luther King Jr. believed that segregation was biased. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, King writes, “There are two types of laws; just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws… [But] I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all’... Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality” (Martin Luther King Jr.). This demonstrates how Dr. King understood that segregation degrades and damages humans. Segregation during this time followed the idea of “separate but equal” where blacks and whites were separated when it came to schools, transportation, bathrooms, etc. However, “separate but equal” was not really equal because the separation would still result in better treatment for the whites (i.e good