Henry David Thoreau's Speaking Out Against Society

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Speaking Out Against Society Freedom from anything is a product of the awareness that one must revolt for a higher moral cause to get a good outcome. People have to fight for what they believe in and speak their word to get what they want in society. Sometimes those groups get what they want and other times people are not so fortunate. In the eyes of Henry David Thoreau, he believed in exactly that. As an American transcendentalist, Thoreau enthusiastically maintained these beliefs through his journalism. He implemented his approval for independence and fairness in his essay called Civil Disobedience. This essay was written after Thoreau spent a night in the Birmingham jail and he thought about the American society. This essay is know very well known and has influenced many civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. King regularly used the philosophies that Thoreau wrote in his paper during the bus boycotts in Alabama. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a nonviolent protest where the African American citizens of Alabama rejected the use of the buses until desegregation was passed. The protest all started when Rosa Parks put her foot down and did not give up her seat to a white male on the bus. She was later arrested for violating a city law requiring racial segregation of public buses. The boycott was ultimately ended by the Supreme Court decision to desegregate the buses. Throughout the entirety of the passive protest, MLK proceeded with the essay written by Thoreau in his mind so that he would never let the white people change his view of equal rights. He kept striving to achieve perfect equality between blacks and whites to make a change in the faulty society. Henry David Thoreau would always stress the thought that mainst... ... middle of paper ... ...rights so every human is born with the same rights. Therefore, everyone would be able to have a say in things and not be discriminated against. Throughout the civil rights protests, being neutral and not starting arguments with the white people came in very handy for the African American because it shows that blacks aren’t that bad and should be treated fairly and not as anything less. During the movement, communities started to understand the meaning of everybody’s thoughts. Through this change in thought, the revolution was able to come over people and show them how badly they were treating normal citizens in the past. Hence, fighting against an unfair law or rule has always begun with the start of an individual speaking his or her own mind, and it usually ends with the group of people believing in that idea getting what they want if they fight hard enough for it.

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