PARAGRAPH 12-13 WHY DOES KING INCLUDE THE QUOTE “AN UNJUST LAW IS NO LAW AT ALL”? HOW DOES IT RELATE TO SEGREGATION?

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws.This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, it is rather and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws. One may well ask, ''How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?'' The answer is found in the fact that there are two typesof laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St.Augustine that ''An unjust law is no law at all.''

Now, what is the diffrence between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. To use the words of Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher , segregation substitutes an ''I - it'' relationship for the ''I - thou'' relationship and ends up relegating person to the status of things. So segregation is not only politically, economically, and socialogically unsound, but it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is seperation. Isn't segregation an existential expression of man's tragic seperation , an expression of this awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? So I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court Because it is morally right , and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morrally wrong.