The IAFOR International Conference on Arts and Humanities 2016, Dubai, UAE

The IAFOR International Conference on Arts and Humanities 2016, Dubai, UAE

The IAFOR International Conference on Arts and Humanities 2016, Dubai, UAE

Recognized as a great anti-slavery narrative, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 19 century novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin is often seen as more of a historical document today. Yet the way several of Stowe’s characters such as Mrs. Bird, Ophelia, and Uncle Tom himself confront the issues of slavery (or fail to) prophetically mirror the positions of non-violence and civil disobedience that Martin Luther King, Jr. outlines in his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Thus the vehement, anti-slavery position of Mrs. Bird (whose husband initially supports slavery) echoes a position of civil disobedience where one has the moral right to disobey unjust laws that deny human dignity. In Miss Ophelia, a teacher from the North, (and who opposes slavery) her emphasis on training and religious conversion for slaves marks her more like the sympathetic but over-cautious clergy that supported King’s position on civil disobedience but were afraid to act on it. And in the character of Uncle Tom himself, he is almost like a prototype of a protestor confronting social injustice through the means of nonviolence and also a tactic that King outlined known as “creative suffering.” 

Kenneth Ronald DiMaggio