What is the message in “Letter from Birmingham Jail”?
For me, the message is the one the Sophocles dealt with in Antigone in the 430s B. C. and Socrates expressed at his trial in 399 B.C.–what to do when the civil law and the moral law conflict. Dr. King put it more explicitly: when the two conflict, any right-thinking person has a moral obligation to break the civil law but should do so in the full expectation of being punished. Thus he was in Birmingham Jail, responding to the shocked and scandalized reactions of his colleagues at finding a man of God in such a place. In the Greek tragedy bearing her name, Antigone chooses to defy an edict forbidding the burial of her brother, who was killed in battle attacking his home city. Her religion and her promise to that brother both require her to bury him, and she does. When the king (her uncle, Creon) orders the body dug up, she returns to bury it a second time and gets caught–very likely intentionally. When Creon then asks her (almost hopefully, it seems) whether she was unaware of the ord
