Henry Thoreaus Civil Disobedience and Martin Luther King Jr. :: Henry Thoreau, Martin Luther King

Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience took the original idea of transcendentalism and put it into action. His civil acts of defiance were revolutionary as he endorsed a form of protest that did not incorporate violence or fear. Thoreau’s initial actions involving the protest of many governmental issues, including slavery, landed him in jail as he refused to pay taxes or to run away. Ironically, more than one hundred years later, the same issue of equal rights was tearing the United States apart. Yet African Americans, like Martin Luther King Jr., followed in Thoreau’s footsteps by partaking in acts of civil disobedience. Sit-ins and peaceful rallies drew attention to the issue while keeping it from escalating into a much more violent problem. Thoreau’s ideas were becoming prevalent as they were used by Civil Rights Activists and the Supreme Court, in such cases as Brown v. Board of Education. The ideology that was created by Thoreau aided the a ctivists and the government in their quest for equality and a more just system of law. The main goal of the Civil Rights Movement was to instate equality under the law. King was a figurehead for the Civil Rights Movement. King’s ability to organize factions into a force that was unaffected by violence greatly contributed to the success of the Civil Rights Movement. In a letter he wrote from a Birmingham jail, King describes the four steps to non-violent protest. The first step is â€Å"collection of the facts to determine whether an injustice exists.†i This relates to Thoreau’s critique of an unjust government. Thoreau believed that every machine had friction, yet â€Å"when the friction comes to have its machine†¦let us not have such a machine any longer.†ii In the case of civil rights, the government has the friction of racial inequalities. That friction had several machines which enables whites to prevail over African Americans. King’s second step was negation. Thoreau lived during a time when negotiation was non-exi stent. He met the government â€Å"once a year--no more--in the person of its tax-gatherer; this is the only mode in which a man situated as I am necessarily meets it.†iii In the case of Thoreau and King, their struggle could not be resolved by simple negotiation. The third step, as King calls it, was self purification.