Thoreau and King

Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” has been known to influence many twentieth and
Twenty-first century icons, but one of the most well known is Martin Luther King Junior who was heralded as sparking the civil rights movement. King has been quoted as saying, “a sit- in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, it is an outgrowth of Thoreau’s insistence that evil must be resisted and no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice” (Thoreau 433). Further examination of King’s Stride toward Freedom can help advance the modern readers’ comprehension of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” within the context of the twenty-first century. Many instances of Thoreau’s influence on King can be seen in King’s writings (Goldman 3). For example in Stride toward Freedom King states, “To accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system; thereby the oppressed become as evil as the oppressor” (Thoreau 424).