Civil Disobedience

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE denotes the public, and usually nonviolent, defiance of a law that an individual or group believes unjust, and the willingness to bear the consequences of breaking that law. In 1846, to demonstrate opposition to the government's countenance of slavery and its war against Mexico, Henry David Thoreau engaged in civil disobedience by refusing to pay a poll tax. One may interpret Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849) as an explanation of his nonpayment of the tax, an expression of an individual's moral objection to state policies, and as a civic deed undertaken by a concerned citizen acting to reform the state. The essay became popularized posthumously under the title "Civil Disobedience" and influenced abolitionists, suffragists, pacifists, nationalists, and civil rights activists. Some construed civil disobedience to entail nonviolent resistance, while others considered violent actions, such as the abolitionist John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry (1859), as in accordance with it.

While Thoreau's own civil disobedience stemmed from a sense of individual conscience, subsequent activists used the tactic to mobilize communities and mass movements. Mohandas Gandhi found that Thoreau's notion of civil disobedience resonated with his own campaign against the South African government's racial discrimination. Thoreau's ideas also shaped Gandhi's conception of satyagraha (hold fast to the truth), the strategy of nonviolent resistance to the law deployed to obtain India's independence from Great Britain. Gandhi's ideas, in turn, influenced members of the Congress of Racial Equality, who in the 1940s organized sit-ins to oppose segregation in the Midwest.

Thoreau's and Gandhi's philosophies of civil disobedience inspired the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.'s strategy of "nonviolent direct action" as a means to end segregation and achieve equality for African Americans. King articulated his justification for the strategy of civil disobedience in "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (1963), addressed to white clergymen who criticized the civil rights activism of King and his followers. King argued that one had a moral responsibility to oppose unjust laws, such as segregation ordinances, as a matter of individual conscience and for the purpose of defying evil, exposing injustices, pursuing the enforcement of a higher government law (specifically, adhering to federal laws over local segregation laws), and inciting onlookers to conscientious action. King charged that inaction constituted immoral compliance with unjust laws, such as Germans' passivity in the face of the Nazi state's persecution of Jews, and alluded to Socrates, early Christians, and Boston Tea Party agitators as historical exemplars of civil disobedience.

The moral and legal questions involved in civil disobedience are difficult and complex. In the United States, most advocates of civil disobedience avowed it to be a strategy for overturning state and local laws and institutions that violated the Constitution and the federal statutes. They claimed to be, in a sense, supporting lawfulness rather than resisting it. During the 1960s and subsequent decades, diverse groups employed tactics of civil disobedience, including the free speech movement at the University of California at Berkeley, Vietnam War protesters, the anti-draft movement, environmentalists, abortion rights supporters and opponents, anti-nuclear activists, and the anti-globalization movement.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Albanese, Catherine L., ed. American Spiritualities: A Reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Patterson, Anita Haya. From Emerson to King: Democracy, Race, and the Politics of Protest. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Rosenwald, Lawrence A. "The Theory, Practice, and Influence of Thoreau's Civil Disobedience." In A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau, edited by William E. Cain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Donna Alvah

Joseph A. Dowling

See also Civil Rights Movement ; and vol. 9: Civil Disobedience .