Martin Luther King Jr on Resistance

In one line

King's contribution is a test for telling a just law from an unjust one, and a defence of breaking the unjust one openly while professing the highest respect for law itself.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Martin Luther King Jr defended civil disobedience on the ground that an unjust law is no law in the moral sense, offering a test by which a just law uplifts human personality while an unjust law degrades it, that an unjust law is one a majority imposes on a minority which it does not make binding on itself, and that a law is unjust where those bound by it had no part in enacting it; and he insisted that one who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly and with a willingness to accept the penalty, which is the highest respect for law.

The situation the argument arose in

King wrote in April 1963 from a cell in Birmingham, Alabama, where he had been arrested for taking part in a demonstration against racial segregation in breach of a court injunction. The letter answers a public statement by eight local clergymen who agreed that segregation was wrong but urged that the campaign was untimely, that the courts should be used instead of the streets, and that outsiders should not have come.

That is worth stating, because it explains the shape of the argument. King is not answering a defender of segregation. He is answering people who agreed with his goal and objected to his method, which is exactly the objection every student instinctively makes, and it is why the letter is on so many syllabuses.

The four steps of a campaign

King describes non-violent direct action as a disciplined sequence, and this is the part most easily reproduced accurately.

1. Collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive.

2. Negotiation with those in a position to remedy them.

3. Self-purification, in which those who will take part train themselves, ask whether they can endure being struck without striking back and being jailed without bitterness, and withdraw if they cannot.

4. Direct action, only after the first three have been done.

Notice the resemblance to Gandhi's conditions, which is not accidental: King had studied Gandhi's campaigns closely and said so. The differences are that King's sequence is stated as an organisational method for a movement, and that self-purification is a formal stage with a test attached.

The tests for an unjust law

This is the most examinable material in the chapter, and there are four tests.

1. The moral test. A just law squares with the moral law; an unjust law is out of harmony with it. Any law that uplifts human personality is just; any law that degrades human personality is unjust.