In his essay “Resistance to Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau gives his insight on what he suggests is a better/fair government. He believes the government to be artificial and driven by the powerful. Thoreau explains how this can be fixed by rebelling against the government and demanding change; the very definition of civil disobedience itself. Being against the Mexican-American war and slavery, he saw them as acts of aggression and arrogance. Thoreau not only influenced people of his time
relating the suffering that minorities were enduring to the privileged white class. Wisely, King used allusions in his writing that allowed readers to draw from well-known events in history and relate them to their own world. King engaged in civil disobedience, but as he points out, so did biblical figures. "It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar; on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake" (210). King's audience of Christian