Antigone Letter From Birmingham Jail Analysis

Sophocles’ play Antigone is very similar in theme to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “A Letter from the Birmingham Jail.” Antigone is about a girl that goes against the king’s commands and is then going to be killed. Dr. King’s “A Letter from the Birmingham Jail” is about him persuading the clergymen that everyone deserves to have equal rights and that it shouldn’t be a privilege for whites only.

Antigone is the niece of a king and goes against her uncle’s command when he says that Polyneices isn’t allowed to have a soldier’s burial and his body must be left in the desert to rot. Antigone decides to bury him anyway because she values god’s law of burial over her uncle’s rule. Antigone tells her sister “Ismene, I am going to bury him. Will you come?... He is my brother. And he is your brother, too… Creon is not strong enough to stand in my way” (Sophocles 694). Antigone values her brother over her uncle & she believes in god’s law over Creon’s decision. King values equality and common law. He dictates “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

Her last words were “Your kings, led away to death. You will remember What things I suffer, and at what men’s hands, Because I would not transgress the laws of heaven” (Sophocles 725). She is going to be sent to death for defying the king but she says that she would always obey the gods; in her mind she has done nothing to deserve punishment. King is in jail writing his letter for peacefully protesting. He writes “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed” (King 746). He knows what would happen to him for protesting but he says that he must demand for it because it will never be handed out. Blacks can’t wait for their freedom, they must urge for