Douglass, King, and Malcom X's Speeches Regarding the Fight for Equal Rights

The Fight for Equal Rights
Student’s Name
Institution
The Fight for Equal Rights
The fight for equal rights and against oppression lasted for nearly two decades. This paper looks into the speeches given by Fredrick Douglass, Malcolm X and a letter by Martin Luther King and summarizes what they stood they stood for and advocated. Malcolm X in “The Ballot or the Bullet” (1964), advocates for racial, economic and social justice. He urged the Blacks to separate religion from justice and that Islam was his personal business. He noted that Martin Luther Jr and many other preachers were famous not for their religious work but their work on justice. In the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” written in response to the clergymen who criticized him and his fellow activists, Martin Luther King Jr (MLK) urged the Blacks to fight for justice with civil disobedience and love. In his speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July” Fredrick Douglass, which he gave on July 5, 1852, refusing to celebrate the Fourth of July until all slaves were emancipated, he wished for the day to be celebrated in honor of the Founding Fathers and the principles they stood for and was critical of the unjust, unreasonable oppression of the Blacks.
Douglass noted the tone of the complacency that had overtaken the country in just 76 years after the Declaration of independence. He criticized the politicians of the time but acknowledged that the sole responsibility rests the citizens and not the government (Douglass, 1852). His speech was a call ...