Romanticism in the Civil Rights Movement Anonymous College

Stride Toward Freedom by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a civil rights era memoir detailing the importance of love in revolution, and the necessity to revolt non-violently and with understanding towards others that are in different cages than your own. King sites Thoreau, Hegel, Gandhi, and Niebuhr in regards to non-violence and its role in social revolution. King infers from them that love, rather than hate, is fundamental in the activism required to make an oppressor come to understand their own immorality in a way that forces change and a collapse in the foundation of a flawed belief system. To exist as the oppressor requires any justification that one can procure, and to be approached by the oppressed and see the ideal self is to have enslaved something that you love, and that loves you.

The oppression of the familiar cannot exist in a morally conscious society. Moreover, such injustice cannot exist in a society of such egocentricity--as men and women in general, perceive those who do not love as we do, and who do not have the same rituals as we do, as savage. When; however, a man whose identity is benign to the majority shares the same dark history, same god, same holidays, same air, culture etc. society may dismantle its...