We can never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal."

Martin Luther King Jr. made this point while defending civil disobedience against unjust laws during the U.S. civil rights struggle. In 1963, after being arrested for participating in nonviolent demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, King responded to white clergy who criticized the protests as “unwise and untimely” and emphasized obedience to the law. King argued that legality is not the same as morality: oppressive regimes can enact “legal” injustice, while resistance to tyranny can be branded “illegal.” By invoking Nazi Germany and the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet control, he framed segregation laws as part of a broader historical pattern in which law can be used to sanctify wrongdoing.

The quotation draws a sharp distinction between what is lawful and what is right. King’s examples are deliberately extreme to expose a logical error in the demand that activists simply “obey the law.” If legality alone determined justice, then the machinery of the Third Reich would be defensible and anti-totalitarian resistance would be condemnable. King uses this contrast to justify principled, nonviolent lawbreaking when laws degrade human dignity. The deeper claim is that moral evaluation must stand above positive law: citizens have responsibilities not only to comply with just statutes but also to resist legal systems that institutionalize oppression.