Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter From Birmingham Jail: Peaceable Protest

"Letter From Birmingham Jail": Peaceable Protest
Martin Luther King, Jr. and his supporters progressed into Birmingham, Alabama one of the most racially segregated cities in the United States. They went into Birmingham because of injustice, and their goal was to have racial equality. That same day a group of 8 prominent white Alabama clergymen published a letter in the local newspaper urging his supporters to withdraw their ties from King and his demonstrations. Although they were in basic agreement with King, that segregation should be outlawed. They considered King as an outside agitator. The clergy's unjust view praised the community as a whole, journalist and the police department specifically for handling the protesters in such a peaceful manner. And encouraged people not to take place in or support the act of protest. In reply, King instantaneously wrote a letter while being imprisoned for

King says there are two types of laws one that is just which is a law that you have a legal and moral responsibility to follow. But then there are unjust laws and he says that a person has a moral responsibility to disobey those because they are no law at all. And he agrees with St Augustine when he states that "an unjust law is no law at all"(Augustine). Then King says that just laws uplifts human personality and unjust laws are a law that degrades human personality. And then he cleverly states that "segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority"(King). By King saying this shows that every law towards the blacks during the era or segregation were unjust laws. And then he uses another excellent example of an unjust law. A law is unjust if it is set upon a minority, for example not allowing the blacks a right to vote to make them feel inferior to the