Influence of Thoreau on Martin Luther King Jr

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Henry Thoreau was a famous American philosopher, writer, and naturalist of the 19^th century. His writings have influenced many leaders in the 20^th century; including Martin Luther King Jr. Thoreau was a renowned transcendentalist writer. He believed that the individual conscience and intuition transcend experience and are the best guide to the truth and logical reason.

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Thoreau is well known for his 1849 essay entitled Civil Disobedience. This essay influenced great contemporary leaders such as Nelson Mandela, Mohandas Gandhi and the American civil rights champion Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King was born in Atlanta, in 1929. He acquired public speaking skills at college, from where he graduated with honors.

Fairclough observes that although Thoreau lived one century before the time of Dr. King, his thinking, mainly expressed through writing, remained an influential legacy (12). The similarity in the writings of these two men is that both of them were fighting for equality and justice, and for this struggle, both were incarcerated. In his written work Letter from Birmingham Jail, Dr. King says that Thoreau’s essay Civil disobedience marked his first intellectual contact with the nonviolence and resistance theory. He was intrigued by Thoreau’s concept of not accepting to cooperate with a morally decayed system.

By the time Martin Luther King completed his formal education in 1954, he had merged a collection of ideas from diverse ideas and theories in one unified positive social philosophy.  One of the most outstanding principles in this philosophy was the unshakable belief in nonviolent civil disobedience as a powerful weapon that the oppressed people can use in their persistent struggle for social justice.

According to Miller, three main figures shaped Martin Luther King’s philosophy: Jesus, Thoreau, and Gandhi (71). Christ’s Sermon on the Mount greatly inspired Dr. King, with its emphasis on self-criticism, humility, renunciation of material gain and forgiveness. After this initial inspiration for a non-violent approach, Dr. King came across the writings of Thoreau, who sought to show that civil disobedience was the right course of action for all oppressed people to use in order to achieve social justice. Thirdly, Gandhi provided Dr. King with a workable method through which mass non-violent resistance could be implemented in order for social justice to be achieved. Incidentally, Gandhi himself had drawn much of his ‘resistance-to-the-state’ inspiration from Thoreau.

            Throughout the history of the civil rights struggle, there are many times that the American people felt a need to revolt against the government. One of these times was during Henry Thoreau’s lifetime. Another time when the revolt was imminent was during the civil rights movements of the 1950s. The main reasons for revolts included the government’s discrimination against African-Americans and the use of poll tax to support the Mexican War. Thoreau refused to pay any money in the form of poll tax because it would be used to finance the Mexican was, to which he was opposed. This war involved Texas, a state that was to enter the union as a pure slave state. While in Walden Jail, Thoreau wrote Civil Disobedience. More than a hundred years later, Dr. King would go to jail for acting on promoting non-violent civil disobedience.

            Thoreau wrote that people who practice civil disobedience choose to break the law that they consider unjust. By doing this, they call attention to the injustices it perpetuates. Years later, Martin Luther King Jr. adopted the same idea and called for direct action protests against the injustices, to which black Americans were being subjected. A good example of this civil disobedience was the Birmingham bus boycott.

Works Cited

Fairclough, Adam. To redeem the soul of America: the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King Jr. Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 1989.

Miller, Keith. “Composing Martin Luther King, Jr.” PMLA, 105.1 (1990): 70-82