Social Ethics. Letter from Martin Luther King Jr. Essay

The Letter that Martin Luther King wrote to eight ministers in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 was in response to their published appeal to their congregations to stop demonstrating against the unjust segregation laws that had been oppressing the black population in the South since the end of the Civil War. As King was the leader of these demonstrations, he was one of the 53 individuals who were arrested that Good Friday. In particular, his statement “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that an unjust law is no law at all” seems to set up his entire movement of peaceful protest as a simple refusal to obey unjust laws. By obeying unjust laws, the black people were being horribly oppressed and squeezed out of every chance to improve their way of life.

They weren’t necessarily asking for handouts to make their lives better, just a removal of the obstacles that kept them down. King’s Letter attempts to justify his actions and highlight the need for nonviolent demonstrations such as the one he’d just led. It was only through this sort of action that the white population could be forced to negotiate better terms for the black man. In making his argument, King indicates that the levels of frustration among the black community are reaching such proportions that something must be done now, while peaceful means are still possible, before this frustration reaches its boiling point and explodes into violence.

The peaceful protests that grew out of the sentiments King expressed in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail came together in the form of a large march on Washington in which about 20,000 came to hear King deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

Within this speech, King managed to educate the people listening regarding the various ways in which they’d been kept oppressed by unjust laws. This helped to illustrate to white people living in other parts of the country what the situation was in the south. “In a sense, we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.

This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” At the same time he was reminding Americans of their Constitutional rights, he managed to inspire others to move forward in attempting to find ways of bringing blacks and whites together in a world where color does not serve as a limiting factor in the relationship.

As he listed the images of the ‘dream’ from which the speech takes its title, King told his audience, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ … I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Although King’s speech is now a part of history, his dreams for the future have come much closer to fruition than he perhaps thought could be possible. Unfortunately, there remains much left to be done. Statistics have indicated that black students drop out of school at much higher rates than white students and prison populations are also much more black than white. Racial profiling remains an issue within enforcement circles, and black people are found more often than white people working in menial, labor-intensive, and low-income jobs rather than high level careers.

Works Cited

“Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” University Of Pennsylvania – African Studies Center (1963). Web.