Compare And Contrast Thoreau And Martin Luther King

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Has there ever been a moment where you have disagreed with the law but were afraid of going against it? Going against the law for an unfair reason in a nonviolent way is civil disobedience. Henry David Thoreau who was a transcendentalist in the mid-nineteenth century wrote his essay Civil Disobedience (1849) to show people how it’s okay to go against an unjust government. The composition has been used by multiple writers such as Martin Luther King Jr. Thoreau’s essay helped King fight against injustice. Martin Luther King Jr. was the leader of the Civil Rights movement, his philosophy was based off nonviolence. His Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963) was built upon the concept of Civil Disobedience. Both Thoreau and King wrote about how to be well mannered but disobedient, however they use different techniques to achieve this such as their tone, metaphors, and appeals of logic and feelings to disseminate their standpoint on the injustice of the government. The tones in these two pieces are highly different. Thoreau uses more of a censorious tone which is moreso directed towards the government. Thoreau believes that the government is a tool for the people to use and not something that should be taking control of their lives. He criticizes the electoral process by stating, “He forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available for …show more content…
were both substantial writers with the same idea. Their work was used amongst a variety of different people. Even though Thoreau and King used similar techniques to inform the reader, they had dissimilar explanations on the motives for their essays, If Thoreau and King were alive today, they’d be disappointed towards the fact that injustice still exists several years later. They’d still be trying to open up the people’s eyes so injustice towards certain groups would stop and would be civil but
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