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OkontaPSecondEssay 4 - 05 Jun 2016 - Main.EbenMoglen
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< | It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | | | Coded Language: John Brown as an American Patriot | | | Individuals opposed to the actions of Brown often point to Martin Luther King Jr., as a respectable man, that championed for social and legal change without the use of violence. Yet, these respectability politics are limited. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s was maintained through the highly publicized and politicalized access to vicious attacks on people of color perpetuated by white supremacists. Now, while King has claimed that violence begets violence, his participation in illegal marches, sit-ins, and boycotts (at the very least), show that illegal actions often move and accelarate social movements and society towards justice. MLK writes that, “man-made law” is “no law at all,” when it is, “out of harmony with the moral law” and “is not rooted in eternal and natural law.” Legal action is not always the best action when freedom from a powerful oppressor is being pursued. A man-made law that oppresses another is not in sync with natural law and must be defeated, even if through "illegal" actions. John Brown, the patriot, embodied this ideal. American superhero. American patriot. | |
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> | I'm not sure where this
draft advances over what we discussed in the classroom. The point
of bringing Thoreau's plea for Brown into the group was to create
the moment of which this essay is an echo. We both understand the
points of view represented here as right and wrong. We see that
they are little closer now than they were 155 years ago when the
Civil War ended.
But our effort is not to discover the abyss. It is to appreciate
the mechanisms by which a society deals with the breadth of its
differences. The point isn't that as lawyers we are supposed to be
against slavery. That will be true everywhere except where it
isn't. The point is that we must understand all the forces on the
board, including the ones that aren't supposed to exist or that
we're not supposed to allow ourselves to see, in order to do what
we are actually supposed to do, which is to produce
justice.
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| Revision 4 | r4 - 05 Jun 2016 - 22:01:41 - EbenMoglen |
| Revision 3 | r3 - 11 Apr 2016 - 18:49:44 - OkontaP |
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