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Summary Of Letter From Birmingham Jail By Martin Luther King

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I strongly agree with Martin Luther King Jr., in his essay titled Letter from Birmingham Jail, when he asserts that it is the obligation of people to resist unjust laws. King initially wrote the essay in response to the open letter by a group of clergymen from Birmingham, Alabama, who were criticizing the methods in which King and his supporters were protesting. Not only does King defend his position, but he also expands on the idea of just and unjust laws. Essentially, King says that it is crucial that people be aware of laws that are just and unjust, how they are applied, and what should be done if a law is unjust. I agree with what King says about just and unjust laws, because I believe that there will always be unjust laws. It is very dangerous if a society, or really any organization, begins to blindly follow the laws put out by authority figures. This would allow the authority to take advantage of the members of society and focus on personal/private interests. It is a question of when, not if, that authority will create an unjust law/rule. This is due primarily to the fact that humans are flawed on a fundamental level. We know this because religion has long recognized this fundamental weakness. The Catholic Church itself has …show more content…
John Dalberg-Acton best summarizes this with his remark “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” This understanding is quintessential when it comes to trying to build the best society possible. In his essay, King attempts to make the clergymen adopt and support this understanding of human nature. As previously mentioned, he does so by relating it to the idea that laws are not always just and can be abused by corruption, and so it becomes necessary for members of society to intervene to limit the potential harm of unfair

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