Martin Luther King vs. Thoreau free essay sample

Written over 114 years after Henry David Thoreau’s essay â€Å"Civil Disobedience†, Martin Luther King wrote his most famous essay; â€Å"Letter from a Birmingham Jail. † In the times of Henry David Thoreau there was only one topic of politics in the United States, slavery. Many southerners wanted to keep slavery while many northerners were against it. Henry David Thoreau was a white northerner that was against slavery, and he was willing to go to jail for it. He proved that in writing his famous letter. In the letter Thoreau describes what it means to be civilly disobedient. In Thoreau’s terms, Civil Disobedience is standing up peacefully against laws you do not think are moral. He was civilly disobedient in not paying poll taxes for over six years because he knew the money was used to support slavery. Martin Luther King was a great civil rights leader that lived in the period of the Civil Rights Movement. We will write a custom essay sample on Martin Luther King vs. Thoreau or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page King went to jail for a peaceful march against racial hatred after he was specifically told not to march. He was put in a jail in Birmingham for eight days; this is when he wrote his famous letter in response to a letter from eight Alabama clergymen. He was arguing against racial hatred and used the effects of ethos, pathos, and logos to attain his argument. Although Thoreau is formal with his writing and uses plenty of logical reasoning to attain his point, King is more like likely t move the readers due to his ability to reach your emotional side, and his credibility as a leader of the Civil Rights Movement. Thoreau was not the best with pathos, but he did do some things well with his emotional appeal. At one point in the essay, he argues that people are more worried about money and their jobs than they care about humanity. Thoreau says, â€Å"Merchants and Farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity†. This line effectively reaches the emotional side due to its speaking of humanity. Overall, Thoreau is not good at involving emotional appeal in his essay. King does a fantastic job at reaching the emotional side. King talks about his family and fellow brothers and sisters being treated with pure hatred. He states, â€Å"I doubt you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its dogs sinking teeth in the unarmed, nonviolent Negroes†. He makes people realize that the police force they have been honoring may not be as good of people as most people presumed. It takes a lot of hatred for people to order attack dogs to attack a nonviolent, unarmed man, no matter what his skin tone may be; it is pure hate. King still did well in his essay with ethical appeal, but this was Thoreau’s forte. Thoreau uses ethical ideas and makes statements that really make the reader question their beliefs prior to reading his essay. â€Å"But Paley appears never to have contemplated those to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in which a people, as well as an individual must do justice, cost what it may. † This excerpt shows the need for justice no matter what the cost is, what the laws of the present time may be, but you need to do whatever is right. King uses ethical appeal well in a couple places of his essay. One of these places is where King says, â€Å"Even so I am sure that if I had lived in Germany at the time, I would have an idea†. King is proving that the hatred in the United States is so atrocious, that even if he lived in a place with equal rights among men such as Germany, the hatred would still be palpable from all the way across the world. King and Thoreau both wrote exquisite essays, but overall Kings ability to reach the emotional side wins in the end. Although Thoreau was very logical and had an outstanding ethical appeal, King reached all inner emotions altering peoples’ minds change from their hatred. In the end, both the issues of slavery and the issues of social hatred have been resolved for the most part. Slavery was the predecessor to the Civil Rights Movement, so in turn Martin Luther King could not have possibly done what he did without people like Henry David Thoreau. People like Thoreau gave slaves their freedom in the first place, which gave them the opportunity to fight for their rights; Martin Luther King heard that message loud and clear when he became the most prestigious member ever of the Civil Rights Movement.