Douglass, King and Legal Justice Essay

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would attack the institutional laws that maintained black Americans as vastly unequal from their white counterparts. In his famous missive from legal captivity for protesting on behalf of equal rights, King articulated how it was that the Civil Rights movement could at once work to utilize laws to change institutional segregation and simultaneously resist Jim Crow laws still in effect.

Meditating on the subject, King remarked, "One may well ask: 'How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?' The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all.'" (King, p. 1) Here, King provides a core legal principle of the protest movement and, in doing so, offers an ethical basis for the flight and abolitionist activities of his predecessor in Douglass.

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Conclusion:

Placing these two texts into conversation with one another, we can see a direct correlation between the evolving sense of injustice felt by slaves prior to the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation and the legal contextualization of this sense as it manifested during the Civil Rights era. Indeed, if any distinction between the two works of literature may be made, it is in their respective missions. Douglass would be among the first to extricate himself from slavery and employ educational refinement as a way of revealing the hypocrisy and cruelty of the system of slavery. His transformation would be a major building block for the emergence of latter era figures like King. The Civil Rights leader would channel the educational values espoused by Douglass directly into legal action. In doing so, and in giving his life to the cause, King would achieve nothing less than hastening the change in the Constitutional Law of the Land repealing the unjust laws of Jim Crow.

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