I strongly believe that just as Henry David Thoreau was greatly influenced by the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, (who introduced Thoreau to the ideas of transcendentalism) Martin Luther King, Jr.'s thinking was greatly influenced by that of Thoreau's. He was most probably influenced more by India's Mahatma Gandhi; however, Gandhi's principles were mainly based on those of Thoreau. Though Thoreau lived more than 100 years before the time of King, his thinking remained an influential legacy. They each wrote based on contemporary events that had been going on in their particular time, pursuing the same type of objective: equality and justice among mankind. Another similarity between these two influential writers is the fact that they had been incarcerated, for different reasons, however the circumstances they were trying to defeat were very much alike.

During his incarceration at Birmingham jail, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote a letter to...