MLK and Thoreau

Nearly every writer on the philosophy of civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., makes a connection between King and Henry David Thoreau, usually via Thoreau’s famous essay, “Civil Disobedience” (1849). In his book Stride Toward Freedom (1958), King himself stated that Thoreau’s essay was his first intellectual contact with the theory Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, King would have found ideas more nearly akin to his own.

The kind of civil disobedience King had in mind was, in fact, quite different from Thoreau’s view of civil disobedience. Thoreau, like most other transcendentalists, was primarily interested in reform of the individual, whereas King was primarily interested in reform of society. As a protest against the Mexican War, Thoreau refused to to advocate the use of mass civil disobedience to effect revolutionary changes within the social system.

However, King’s writings suggest that, without realizing it, he was an incipient transcendentalist. Most transcendentalists subscribed to the concept of “higher law” and included civil disobedience to unjust laws as part of their strategy. They often invoked the concept of higher law to justify their opposition to slavery and to advocate disobedience is philosophically akin to the transcendentalists’ opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law in the nineteenth century.