Thoreau's Speech

Martin Luther King Jr. was a very influential man, but who influenced him? A man named Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau, a philosopher, essayist, and naturalist, gave a speech in the 1840’s. This speech was very influential on King and many other activists during the civil rights movement. On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience was the name of Thoreau’s speech, or lecture, in which he spoke to people to tell them to rebel against any corrupt government. His main point was that if a government was corrupt do not be submissive go with what you believe in and rebel. So during King’s jail sentence in Birmingham he wrote a letter replying to a group of clergymen. In this letter he uses some points from Thoreau. His main purpose is to get his reader to understand

Thoreau used was analogies. These analogies helped him to create pictures in his audience's brains. One analogy he uses is "If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go..."(Civil 18) There are a few analogies in this sentence alone. One is the government being called a machine. In which the other analogy "the friction necessary" must create problems to get that government to change the way it does things. He uses this analogy to give his audience, those who are listening to his lecture, another way to think about the government other than straight forward thinking. Another example of an analogy is when Thoreau says “ I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.”(Civil 26) In this analogy the chestnut and acorn are analogies for humans. what he is trying to portrait with this analogy is that if one race rules another then that race that is being overshadowed will die off. This again creates another view for the audience of the time and it leaves them thinking about what that analogy meant. This is an effective way of keeping the readers into his