UF Professor Says Classics Had Influence On Martin Luther King

August 26, 2003

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Thursday marks the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and a University of Florida professor who has studied his discourses says the civil rights leader drew his inspiration not only from the Bible but also from classic works about civil disobedience, such as the Greek tragedy “Antigone.”

UF classics Professor Lewis Sussman developed his theory on the connection between King and Antigone — a princess heroine in the Sophocles’ tragedy who went against her uncle, the king, and gave her brother a proper burial, although he had been labeled a traitor — in an article in the current issue of The Classical Bulletin.

King believed in the idea that if a law is immoral, it is proper to disobey it as long as you accept the punishment that will follow, Sussman said.

This is the same theory that first appeared in “Antigone,” Sussman said. The princess said, “I will not obey an unjust law, and if something happens because of it – so be it,’” he said. King would have done the same thing, he said.

Sussman actually met King in 1967 during a demonstration on Fire Island, NY, when King was protesting to allow blacks on the island. He wasn’t quite what Sussman expected.

“I thought he would be some sort of hell-raising speaker and just a dynamic man,” Sussman said. “But he wasn’t. He was sort of a small guy riding a bike and very soft-spoken. But later when I saw him speak, he was transformed.”

Sussman said he first made a connection between Antigone and King in the 1970s while he was teaching a class about civil disobedience at the University of California, Irvine, in which his students were reading the Greek tragedy.

In his current article, Sussman compares Antigone’s disobedience to King’s 1963 Birmingham, Ala., campaign to end segregation. Although city officials had obtained an injunction against public demonstrations, King and 50 volunteers marched to downtown Birmingham where King was arrested and hauled to jail – a fate he had accepted before he set out on the march, Sussman said.

In a letter written in his cell in Birmingham, King outlined his similar philosophy that an unjust law is no law at all, Sussman said.

King studied the classics in college, and a syllabus for a course he took in Greek religion at Crozer Seminary included “Antigone.” King’s studies, however, are not all that suggest the classics influenced his political theories, Sussman said.

“This (classical literature) was stuff that was greatly on his mind,” Sussman said. “Although King only rarely ever traveled outside the U.S., when he did travel out of the country, he made it a point to go to Athens and Rome.”

Also, in the last speech of his career delivered the night before his assassination in Memphis on April 3, 1968, King talked about the personalities he might meet in ancient Greece if God were to send him on a journey through the high spots of human history. Sussman reviews this speech and its classical references in an article to be published later this year also in The Classical Bulletin.

“The major point is King did have the classics on the mind,” he said. “When you read about his education, you see when he got into college he started to delve into the classics, and he took what he learned with him for the rest of his life.”