Is breaking the law acceptable under certain circumstances

Breaking the Law

In his 1963 letter from a Birmingham jail, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. expressed to his fellow clergymen his reasons for breaking the law. King declared that he could not "sit idly by" and watch injustice take place. He argued "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Dr. King was willing to go to jail for his cause. He broke segregation laws to draw attention to the discrimination and hatred African-Americans were forced to endure throughout the United States but especially in the South. He was justified in breaking the law because the laws were man-made and perpetuated inhumanity and hate. Breaking the law is justified in such instances where laws are arbitrarily made and morally wrong.

More than fifty years after Dr. King penned the letter, it endures because of its eloquence and its message. Sharon Shahid argued recently in USA Today, only partly with tongue in cheek, that Dr. King's message might not have such a profound impact if written today, using today's technology. If Dr. King had "tweeted" from jail, his words would have reached a larger audience in much less time. Given the recent events in Egypt, where social media made an enormous difference in the outcome of the peaceful revolution, one might suppose that Dr. King could have likewise mobilized peaceful forces with 140-character bursts. Shahid calls King's voice "so poignant and crystal clear in print" and doubts that a text message could convey anywhere near the same urgency or convey the hardship, sacrifices, and pain. She further adds that, with Twitter, Dr. King's message would have been, minutes after it was released "drowned out by a thousand other disparate musings" (Shahid, 2011).

Unlike Malcolm X, who also fought for civil rights but sometimes frightened people with his fiery rhetoric, Dr. King never called whites names and never advocated hatred or violence. He denounced what he called the "black nationalist" movement, charging the movement was made up of people who had lost faith in America and "absolutely repudiated Christianity." Dr. King was a man of peace who believed that peaceful means could accomplish the mission. He believed violence would only beget further violence, leaving the streets of the South "flowing with blood."

Aeschliman (2005) argues that Dr. King's letter continues to stand the test of time and is comparable in importance to a number of great American documents. He calls the letter

"a document drawing on, appealing to, reaffirming, explaining, and extending the living tradition of the Declaration, the Constitution, the speeches and achievements of Lincoln,

the reforming zeal of Bryan and the two Roosevelts, and the commitments of American lives to two world wars. It also drew explicitly and eloquently on the Judaeo-Christian

tradition, containing a profound recognition of the religious source of ethics that had been central to most of the Founding Fathers (and especially to Washington, Adams,

Hamilton, Madison, and Jay), Lincoln, Bryan, and America's twentieth-century

Presidents."

Dr. King was jailed for parading without a permit. He called the law he violated "just on its face and unjust in its application." He pointed out there was nothing inherently wrong with an ordinance that requires a permit for a parade. The injustice was in the way the ordinance was applied. It was used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the right they are guaranteed by the First Amendment, to gather peacefully and protest.

Dr. King devoted considerable space in his letter to explaining the difference between just and unjust laws. He wrote that a just law is manmade but follows moral law or the law of God. Unjust laws, he wrote, are any that degrade human personality. He further stated, "An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself." He could not have explained the difference any more simply or beautifully. It is essentially a restatement of the Golden Rule, whereby people are expected to treat others as they themselves would want to be treated.

Dr. King explained in the letter that breaking the law was a last resort. "It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative." Dr. King and others tried to reason with segregationist policymakers. Dr. King outlined four basic steps of a nonviolent campaign, noting that all four had been tried in Birmingham to no avail. Those seeking civil rights, who were seeking to overturn unjust laws, had to lay their case "before the conscience of the local and the national community." Dr. King cited Biblical examples as well as the horrible example of Nazi Germany, where too few were brave enough to stand up to Hitler and his unjust laws. Shortly after Dr. King's assassination, another case earned attention, that of Lt. William Calley and the massacre of women and children in the Vietnamese village of My Lai. Calley never denied taking part in the massacre or giving orders to his men, claiming that he was acting on orders of his superior. ("Calley apologizes, 2009). The case came to light because several soldiers under Calley's command refused to obey. By defying their commanding officer, they were breaking the law, but they were obeying a higher law. What they did was moral and just.