While injustice is prevalent in many areas of the world, there are those who use violent or nonviolent measures to either tantalize anarchy or prompt a negotiable change. Both Antigone and Martin Luther King Jr. employ methods of civil disobedience to fulfill their moral duty of fighting injustice. Although they both nonviolently and directly stand up for their beliefs, their approaches and reasoning to right what has been wronged differ. While Antigone disobeys the laws of man because she considers the laws of God to be far superior, King does so to expose gross hostility and entice government change while justifying his civil disobedience in his faith.
Labeled a martyr by Kreon, the ruler of Thebes who has committed himself to sustaining political and social order, Antigone, throughout the entire play, does not sit idle and allow injustice to persist. Rather, Antigone stands alone and employs her own techniques of civil disobedience because she believes Kreon’s refusal of her brother’s burial is impiously corrupt. By stealthily burying her brother’s body, Antigone demonstrates her persistence to contest any law enacted by man that directly challenges the law of God. While explaining her actions to Ismene, her cowardly sister, she claims “I must please those down below a longer time than those up here,” proving her far greater devoutness to God’s law than to Kreon’s (74-75). While Antigone did want the people of Thebes, including her sister, to realize this injustice could not continue and to act on it, she did not receive any support until the deed was already completed. In fact, when Ismene lied to Kreon claiming she committed this crime alongside Antigone, Antigone retorts by saying “just save yourself; I don’t begrudge you your escape” (553). This proves that Antigone did not care for those who became bystanders to this injustice; all she was concerned with was to right what has been wronged by following the divine law over Kreon’s. As a martyr to the people of Thebes, Kreon, and through her unlawful burial of her brother, Antigone fulfills her moral obligations to herself and the Gods no matter the punishment. Antigone’s pious acts of civil disobedience can be viewed as a lesson to all of those fighting against injustice.
While Antigone employs civil disobedience because she believes religious laws hold a higher degree than Man’s law, Martin Luther King Jr. out rightly breaks laws he believes are unjust by means of nonviolent protests and sit-ins to force uncomplacent communities to challenge the issues first hand. In his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” King explicitly expresses that “the purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.” By means of direct action, sit-ins, boycotting, and other methods of nonviolent protest, King exhibits the issue of racial segregation in an operational way that prohibits the government from continuing these outrageous violations of human rights and forces them to negotiate and come to a mutual agreement. King, as he explains his letter, also utilizes these methods to entice the “white moderate,” or those who are “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice,” by preventing them from turning the other cheek as they have been doing for years: “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.” King strives to spark an anger so pronounced in those that are both victims and bystanders of racial segregation that they join the movement and follow through with their moral obligations to right what has been wronged by using these methods of civil disobedience. Through King’s direct yet nonviolent civil disobedience, it is clear that he stands up for injustice because he believed it was his moral duty to “help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.” Ultimately, King was able to instill a tension so great that he was able to fulfill his moral duty to right injustice through this civil disobedience.
While Antigone and Martin Luther King Jr. have used civil disobedience in distinctive ways and in dissimilar circumstances, they display some paralleling justifications and reasoning for their methods of peaceful political protest. For instance, when considering the broader rational behind Antigone and King’s displays of civil disobedience, both justify their actions through their deeply rooted faith. Antigone, an inexplicable believer in the divine being of God, holds divine laws to an extremely high standard. In fact, she completely ignores the law of the land set by Kreon because she would rather die performing a “crime of peity” than let Kreon dictate why her brother does not deserve a proper burial (73). Likewise, King’s political and human rights activist work was deeply driven by his experiences as a Christian leader. In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” King states that “through the influence of the Negro Church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle.” This quote highlights the fact that King’s renowned nonviolent tactics of civil disobedience were built upon his faith. King even compares himself to Apostle Paul in this letter: “just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom far beyond my own hometown.” King and Antigone’s methods of civil disobedience were also both carried out through nonviolent measures with an outright acceptance of all punishments and disciplines when disobeying the law. In lines 465-466, Antigone freely admits her crime of burying Polyneices and thus accepts her banishment to an enclosed cave where she will eventually starve to death, all in the name of fulfilling her moral duty and rejection of injustice: “for me, therefore, to meet this doom is equal to no grief at all.” Comparably, King states that “one who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty” in his letter. Obviously, King and Antigone hold similar standards to those who break laws that their conscience deems unjust and have at least one similar reasoning behind their refusal to obey an immoral law through the use of civil disobedience.
Through Antigone’s and King’s differing yet comparable displays of civil disobedience, society is able to view the reasoning and methodology behind actions not everyone might understand. Ultimately, both Antigone and King believed it was their moral obligation to disobey what they understood to be unjust. Their rebellious yet noble acts clarify that there are many different methods of standing up for what is morally just. Antigone and King’s methodologies of civil disobedience can instill a grander confidence in people to confront injustice instead of cowering from it.