Dr. Martin Luther King was a man who did not stand by and do nothing in the face of injustice. King had a clear definition of what justice meant to him and fought for a country where this idea of justice was implemented. When King wrote the letter from Birmingham jail he was writing a call to action. King wanted the participants in the movement to never become complacent, to remain vigilant and always fight for what was right and just.
I believe that King's letter is relevant in today's society. Media attention focuses on the extremes of American politics while the majority remains in the middle and receives the least amount of attention. This middle group are the people who make the decisions in theory because there are more of them. As King points out, these are also the most complacent group of people, unwilling to change the status quo because they have comfortable lives. The paragraphs in Kings speech that called these people to task and challenged them to make a difference was the part of the letter that I found the most inspiring. I think that if more people were called to task for their apathy then we would have a more just society.
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In your inquiry you talked about King taking action in the face of injustice. King was the leader people needed to get things going despite the fact that some people disagreed with his antics. The world needs leaders like that who will take action and stand up for what is morally right. There have been leaders like this in the past, for example our nation’s founding fathers including Thomas Jefferson. Frederick Douglas is another man who was not willing to hesitate when taking action. During the time of his Fourth of July speech African Americans were much more oppressed than even in Dr. King’s time. Many were still in slavery before the civil war. So it was an honor for Douglas to be able to give a speech on the Fourth of July but instead of saying what people wanted to hear he spoke about the things he felt were right and just. Douglas, like King, took action for his beliefs when others would not have.
As you stated in your response to King's letter, "he was a man who did not stand by and do nothing in the face of injustice." This is so true and I completely agree and feel as if Douglass was the same type of man. Unlike that of King though, Douglass called out those who he felt were wrong, he pointed fingers as to display the "injustice" in which blacks were receiving when such laws were said to be fair and "constitutional".
Douglass' speech was given on the Fourth of July; I think that this was the perfect time for such a statement as this. Basically he is saying,'How can we call ourselves America, a United country, if not all of our citizens are given the same basic rights? How can we celebrate such 'justice' if these laws are not necessarily 'just'?
Just like King's letter, this speech can be tied into today's society. We still struggle with these 'just and unjust' laws.
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