Martin Luther King Unjust

Martin Luther King Jr. is a name known by all. He was born in 1929 and was a Baptist minister. He was also a leading spokesman for the American civil rights movement. A year before he won the Noble Peace Prize in 1964, he was incarcerated in an Alabama jail. While incarcerated, he wrote an open letter that was titled “Letter from the Birmingham City Jail”. In his letter he talked about the injustices that he faced, his idea of a nonviolent campaign, how laws can be unjust, how his ideals of nonviolence would bring change, and the racial injustices of the time. Dr. King Jr. claimed in his letter that there are four basic steps to protesting a nonviolent campaign. His first step was to collect facts to determine whether injustices were alive.

His first reason was that a fair law is made by man and coincides with moral law or God’s law. Thus, for a law to be unjust, it does not correspond with moral law. This means that for a law to be ethical it either has to be morally sound or follow the basic guidelines clarified in the Bible. This goes along with two types of crimes that exist today. Mala prohibita is crimes that we say are wrong, but morally has no wrongdoing. This includes speeding, drug violations, driving violations, and other similar offenses. These transgressions are still morally unsound, but only because we made it that way. In contrast, mala in se are crimes that are wrong in and of their selves, and they are wrong everywhere. These crimes include murder, rape, assault, robbery, and so on. These types of crimes are morally and ethically wrong. This type of conviction can be traced back to the Bible, in the Ten Commandments. Thou shall not kill, thou shall not steal, and thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife, so on and so forth. As an example, imagine a new law is passed that states it would be a mala prohibita classification of crime if you did not kick a cat every time you saw one. This obviously would not be a fair or just law. There is no moral, ethical, or religious reasoning behind the law. You are only being told by a legal viewpoint what is right and what is wrong. Even though it would be an act of omission to not committing the

This was because the minority population did not have the ability to vote freely without a chance of enduring the consequences. He gave the example of how in some counties of Alabama, there were a majority of African Americans. Yet, these counties did not have one African American vote because of the fear of the penalties they could face if they were to participate in the voting and election process. This led to an unbalanced state due to the fact that much of the population was unable to give their opinions about issues of the time. This also meant that there was a much less chance of a candidate with anti-segregation views being elected into office. If this were to be the case, it would make it very unlikely, or at least much harder, to make any change come