In both Martin Luther King, JR’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and Nelson Mandela’s “I Am Prepared to Die”, the authors present their idealistic views of racial equality and their ideas of how that equality should be achieved. In his letter, King states, “I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to injustice everywhere” (224). With these statements, King concentrates on the injustice around him and how that prejudice affects King and his people everywhere. He chooses to peacefully strive to achieve the goal of a socially and racially equal society. In his statement in the Pretoria Supreme Court, Mandela says,

I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die. (267)

Here Mandela states that he has, as does King, an idealistic notion of a racially equ

In conclusion, we have found that while both King and Mandela share in the ultimate fight for social equality, they have differing beliefs in the methods one should use to obtain it. King concentrates on the goal of achieving a racially harmonious society by implementing equally harmonious measures because he believes that all forms of violence are utterly immoral. Like King, Mandela concentrates on the goal of a racially harmonious society. However, the means he uses to strive toward this goal are drastically different – he resorts to violence because he believes (and seems to have proven) that it is only by using violence that he can make any difference in his society. Upon examination of King and Mandela’s works, this comparative analysis suggests that a common goal, racial equality, can be obtained (theoretically) using either passive or aggressive means. As seen in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and “I Am Prepared to Die”, the method used to obtained a goal is often not as relevant as the actual realization

But he ultimately recognized this method as the only successful means of allowing his people to be heard. Mandela “felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of whi

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