Antigone: Martin Luther King's Nonviolent Campaign

Martin Luther King, Jr. defines “civil disobedience” as a way to show others what to do when a law is unjust and unreasonable. As King stated in the letter from Birmingham, “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.” When Negros were being treated unfairly, Martin Luther King, Jr. stepped in to show people how to peacefully protest and not be violent. The dictionary definition of civil disobedience is the refusal to comply with certain laws or to pay taxes and fines, as a peaceful form of political protest (Webster Dictionary). That is what Martin Luther King, Jr. did when nothing was changing in the town after the law for public school to be non-segregated. In Antigone, Creon created an edict that states that nobody could bury Polynices’s body because he was a traitor to Thebes and his family. Under Martin Luther King’s definition of an unjust and a just law, Creon’s edict is unjust and degrades Polynices’ right to be buried because of lack of information and favoritism of one brother.

In the play, Antigone, Antigone’s brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, killed each other over the throne of Thebes. Eteocles took the rightful throne to King after his father ran away in shame because he killed his own father and married his mother. As soon as Eteocles took the throne, he banished his brother, Polynices, so that he did not have to share the throne. Polynices went to create an army with the Argos Kings and mad Thebans. During the battle, Polynices and Eteocles fight to death and both of them die. Polynices is to rot to death and be eaten by the wild dogs and animals, while Eteocles gets the proper burial for he was the rightful king. In Martin Luther King Jr.’s...

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...ut her son’s death, she goes and slits her throat. Creon then feels Antigone’s direct action when he is all alone at the end of the play. His edict caused so much pain in suffering for his family, he led them all to suicide.

In Antigone, Antigone goes through Martin Luther King Jr.’s steps for a nonviolent campaign and it becomes violent and deadly. Antigone successfully goes through each step of the nonviolent campaign proving that Creon’s edict was unjust and unlawful. In the end, Creon truly finds out how senseless his edict was, when he was left alone as the King of Thebes without a wife, a son, or a daughter-in-law to be.

Works Cited

Antigone. New York: Dover Publications, 1993. Print.

King, Dr. Martin Luther, Jr. "Letter From A Birmingham Jail." Letter to The Clergymen. 16 Apr. 1963. American Identities. N.p.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005. N. pag. Print