Civil Disobedience

Civil disobedience is the refusal to obey a rule or law in such a way as to challenge or change it. Civil disobedience often takes the form of not cooperating with objectionable regulations, as when African American Rosa Parks (1913–2005) refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama , in 1955, defying a city law. Disrupting public ceremonies, trespassing, and obstructing traffic are also forms of civil disobedience. Private acts of civil disobedience include refusing to pay one's taxes or refusing to be drafted into the military.

Although some forms of civil disobedience may involve the use of violence, the history of civil disobedience in the United States is strongly linked to nonviolent protest, which is not necessarily illegal. Nonviolent protest methods include picketing, sit-ins, marches and demonstrations, sit-down strikes, hunger strikes, and boycotts (refusal to do business with someone to express disapproval). Civil disobedience and nonviolent protest have played a large role in shaping U.S. history, particularly during the Civil Rights Movement (1954–65).

The Influence of Thoreau and Gandhi

Civil disobedience and nonviolent protest were brought to the attention of Americans by two early practitioners: American writer/philosopher Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) and Indian political and spiritual leader Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948). In 1846, Thoreau refused to pay his poll taxes (a fixed tax for voting once used to keep African Americans from voting). Thoreau was also jailed for his protest of the Mexican-American War (1846–48). In his famous essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” (first delivered as a speech in 1848), Thoreau addressed the moral necessity of resisting laws that conflict with one's individual conscience. Arguing that a government that forces its citizens to violate their personal morals is a bad government, he urged people to consider civil disobedience.

In the early decades of the twentieth century in India, Gandhi embraced many of Thoreau's ideas. He applied them, however, to a social and political cause: Indian independence from British colonial rule. Gandhi called his form of civil disobedience “nonviolent direct action,” in order to avoid the idea of inaction. Pacifism (the rejection of violence) was central to Gandhi's vision. Though a devout Hindu, Gandhi was heavily influenced by the New Testament idea of loving one's enemy. Gandhi's nonviolent resistance played a major role in gaining India's independence in 1947.

Gandhi influences U.S. civil rights movement

Civil disobedience and nonviolent protest were adopted by a few African American civil rights leaders in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1941, African American activist A. Philip Randolph (1889–1979) called for blacks to adopt a strategy of direct-action, nonviolent protest, including marches and huge demonstrations in Washington, D.C. In the 1940s, a civil rights organization called the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) blended Gandhi's philosophy with its own methods of nonviolent protest. Like Gandhi, CORE called this method “nonviolent direct action.”

Most black leaders in the years prior to World War II (1939–45) frowned upon acts of civil disobedience and protest, fearing backlash. In the first half of the twentieth century, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was the front-runner among civil rights organizations. It brought case after case of racial injustice to the courts in order to change discriminatory laws (laws that treated African Americans differently than white people). NAACP and other civil rights leaders promoted the ideal of accomodationism, in which African Americans were advised to fit into their environment and prosper as best they could in the hope of a better future.

Martin Luther King Jr. and nonviolence

In December 1955, civil rights activist Rosa Parks defied a Montgomery, Alabama, city regulation by refusing to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man. She was arrested for her act of civil disobedience. African Americans in Montgomery quickly organized a protest on her behalf. They appointed a young Baptist minister, Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968), to lead their year-long Montgomery bus boycott . King was well versed in the writings of Thoreau and Gandhi and deeply committed to the Christian concept of brotherly love, but he had not yet committed himself to nonviolent protest. It was in the midst of the bus boycott that the twenty-six-year-old King realized that nonviolence was the most powerful weapon that could be used against racial hatred and prejudice.

King's speeches and sermons began to address his new philosophy, derived largely from Gandhi and the Bible. Because nonviolence was widely viewed as “doing nothing,” King repeatedly emphasized the active dimensions of nonviolence. It is only passive in the sense of refusing to inflict physical harm on others, but it could—and often did—result in physical injury to the protester. Like a soldier, a nonviolent protester was highly trained for duty. The training involved learning not to hate individual people. King warned those who wished to join his nonviolent protest movement that they might be beaten, humiliated, insulted, or arrested, but they were never to strike or talk back to those who tried to harm them. The fight was between justice and nonjustice, or good and evil, but never between people. The aim of the nonviolent protest was to cause moral shame in the opponent, thus bringing about change. King pointed out that African Americans, as only 10 percent of the population, had little chance of achieving their goals by violent means. Their best strategy for achieving justice was nonviolence.

In February 1958, King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a national organization dedicated to nonviolence and to achieving justice for blacks in every segment of American life. Along with CORE, it was one of several major civil rights associations committed to nonviolent methods of protest.

SNCC

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC; pronounced “Snick”) was founded in 1960, following the successful 1960 sit-in carried out by four black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina . (See Sit-in Movement .) The students sat down at a racially segregated lunch counter at a department store and were refused service because of their race. The event sparked a wave of student sit-ins. Frustrated by the accommodationist tactics of the NAACP, and the slow pace of the SCLC, SNCC activists envisioned the possibility of immediate social change. SNCC workers took over the freedom rides of 1961, in which volunteers defied the segregation regulations that were still practiced in buses and bus depots. SNCC also worked on voter registration and education campaigns in the Deep South. SNCC volunteers living

in local rural communities in Mississippi , Alabama, and Georgia were subjected to beatings, unlawful arrest, and even murder. Through active nonviolent methods, these dedicated students brought to the movement a sense of grave urgency and brought masses of black citizens into the civil rights movement.

Bloody Sunday

In 1965, SNCC joined forces with the SCLC for the Selma-to-Montgomery, Alabama, march in support of voting rights. On Sunday, March 7, 1965, more than five hundred marchers set off from Selma on the Edmund Pettus Bridge toward Montgomery. On the far side of the bridge they encountered a small army of volunteers put together by the local sheriff and well-equipped state troopers. The marchers were ordered to stop. Before they had a chance to disband, the police attacked them, some on horseback, others swinging billy clubs and whips, and some wielding tear gas canisters. Eighty people were injured, some severely. Television cameras were rolling, and footage of “Bloody Sunday,” as it came to be called, outraged the nation. A second attempt at the march was led by King, who encouraged the marchers to march peacefully past the angry crowds and to let them know that not even death could stop African Americans from achieving equality. The march was at least partly responsible for passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a milestone in the civil rights movement.

Bloody Sunday is often considered the crowning glory of King's nonviolent protest struggle. In bringing the struggle into the living rooms of the American public and forcing the president to act, it achieved its purpose without once resorting to violence.

After Bloody Sunday, though, the nonviolent protest era of the civil rights movement began to splinter. SNCC moved away from its early emphasis on nonviolence to the more militant (warlike) philosophy of the black power movement . King turned his focus to northern economic issues and protesting U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War (1954–75) before his assassination in 1968. Nonetheless, his nonviolent methods and philosophy were used by other minority groups, particularly the Latino, Native American, and antiwar movements, of the 1970s.