Describing his plan to recruit three thousand of the poorest citizens from various urban and rural areas to participate in a Poor Peoples March on Washington, he indicated that this nonviolent army, this freedom church of the poor, will work with us for three months to develop nonviolent action skills.[REF], Even so, Kings remarks relative to the character and motivations of this newly recruited army suggest that here, too, he departed significantly from his earlier account. In this way both the disobedience and the acceptance of the penalty are essential to Kings effort to reform the law by means of moral suasion. A consideration of Americas first principles, as explicated in the political thought informing the American Founding, corroborates Kings view. To such questions King offered no compelling answers. It is a powerful means of combating unjust laws, and freeing society from oppressive restrictions. Civil disobedience is an effective tool which can help resolve unjust situations and display public rejection to participate in immoral activities. That sort of care is especially needed at the present time. An enactment to which lawmakers subjected only others, not themselves, would be no true law, and a similar disqualification would apply to any legislation imposed upon an unjustly disfranchised portion of the population.[REF]. Their letter, entitled An Appeal to Law and Order and Common Sense, urged the protesters to desist, arguing that direct-action street protests, especially those involving lawbreaking, were unhelpful as means for repairing race relations in Birmingham. The Birmingham campaign, epitomized by the now-canonical Letter, is credited with generating an irresistible momentum for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This was my first intellectual contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance.[REF], A still more powerful influence was Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi, whose teaching King discovered as a seminary student a few years thereafter. As we will see, American civil disobedience in its most widely admired form, in the theory and practice of King, is mainlybut not perfectlyin accord with those founding principles. Kings apologetic discussion of the rioting raises troubling questions. Attempts to emulate those methods have naturally followed, and the multiplication of such attempts must heighten the likelihood of a corrosive effect on the publics attachment to law. Moreover, all should consider the degree to which the successful practice of civil disobedience in the early 1960s, by virtue of its very success, has functioned in the post-Civil Rights era to normalize the practice of lawbreaking as an element of protest and commensurately to erode popular respect for law. He adopted an idea of rights grounded in indefinite human needs rather than in definite and distinctive human faculties, thus leaving rights claims with no clear foundation or limiting principle even as he endorsed a great expansion of those claims.[REF]. An aggrieved minority also has a right to take actions necessary and proper to prevent or correct governmental or societal transgressions.[REF]. But, if one person can create change that gives them more power than others. 33 Civil Disobedience is justified on Kantian grounds to synthesize moral and positive law. Like slavery in this respect, segregation violates the moral law by relegating persons to the status of things.[REF] Such practices and the positive laws that support them do violence to the divine and natural order by denying to some classes of human beings the status of full moral humanity or personhood. That earlier argument, the argument presented in the Letter, conforms for the most part with the closely circumscribed idea of civil disobedience supported by the Founders understanding of natural rights and the rule of law. Civil disobedience is a nonviolent form of protest. It had been raised not only by moderate southern whites such as the eight clergymen but also by defenders of segregation and by some conservative, moderate, and even liberal black supporters of the cause. In sum, at the present moment in American public life, the practice of purportedly civil disobedience is becoming increasingly normalized even as its proper basis, tactics, and objectives are subject to increasing confusion. A delegation of poor people can walk into a high officials office with a carefully, collectively prepared list of demands. But when a fire is raging, the fire truck goes right through that red light, and normal traffic had better get out of its way . [REF], It follows that should government attempt to exercise powers beyond those duly delegated to it, it would forfeit its legitimacy and therewith its claim to popular allegiance and obedience. Enthusiasts of civil disobedience proper should likewise recall the eruption of hundreds of urban riots in the years 19651968, almost immediately following the civil rights movements moment of greatest triumph. When proponents of this lately predominant form conflate Kings two models, The same conditions, however, that recommend a return to the Declarations tightly circumscribed justification may also render such a response presently unavailable. Justice, King maintained, is manifest in a higher law that is accessible to human reason. Granted, the commitment pledge did not quite signify a religious test for participation; it required meditation on Jesuss teaching, not worship of Jesus, and it required prayer to a God of love, not necessarily to the God Christians recognize. For his own, very different reasons, King, too, judged the first phase of his movement as only a partial and mixed success. Understand laws before you obey them Yes, but yet slightly no. Civil disobedience is a particular form of political protest that involves the deliberate violation of the law for social purposes. They are to be conceived in the Declarations spirit of justice and consanguinity, and likewise in the spirit of Abraham Lincoln (We are not enemies, but friends. Dissatisfied with Johnsons War on Poverty, King called for a multifaceted real war on poverty designed to provide jobs, income, and housing for all in need of them: in sum, a new economic deal for the poor, consisting in a massive, new national program.[REF]. Kings account of unjust laws in the Letter specifically targeted laws in Americas Old South that sustained race-based segregation and disfranchisement, laws inconsistent in principle with any plausible understanding of human moral equality. Mindful of the dangers in an excessively permissive justification, he rejected the sort of disobedience that would lead to anarchy and explained his own practice in terms that indicate an earnest intention to negate or minimize any anarchic effects.[REF]. 32 Civil disobedience is justified because it promotes human dignity, promotes the idea that the government is limited in 33 Civil disobedience proclaims that humans have dignity. What defensible basis is there for his finding of a core of nonviolence in acts of intimidation against persons and of violence against property? Civil disobediencenecessarily involves violation of the law, and the law can make noprovision for its violation except to hold the offender liable forpunishment. King held further acts of civil disobedience to be warranted because he regarded prevailing conditions of poverty and rising discontentment as effects of a set of terrible economic injustices no less grievous and even more widespread than the wrongs of the Jim Crow regime: In our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income . As I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi, King reported, my skepticism concerning the power of love gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time its potency in the area of social reform . He proudly described his movement as a mass-action crusade, but by insisting on proper training and character formation, he made clear that not simply anyone was suitable for direct-action protest and civil disobedience: Not all who volunteered could pass our strict tests.[REF]. [REF] It reached its full fruition in the pivotal campaign of the entire movement, the Birmingham campaign in the spring of 1963, which occasioned his most extended and influential reflection on the subject. In his first book, Stride Toward Freedom, King recalled the discoveries that would supply the moral power for the social revolution he envisioned. Rawls thus limits justified civil disobedience to cases where a democratic majority has implemented a law that violates a basic liberty right and thus oversteps its authority. Peter C. Myers was the 20162017 Visiting Fellow in American Political Thought in the B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics, of the Institute for Constitutional Government, at The Heritage Foundation, and is Professor of Political Science at the University of WisconsinEau Claire. When Locke said the ruling power ought to govern by law, he meant that the law must rule so that both the people may know their duty and the rulers too kept within their bounds.[REF] In Lockes design and in that of the American Founders, governmental powers are bounded in that they are limited to those specifically delegated by the people who are to be subject to them. In a general sense, Kings conformity with this precept in the first phase of his activism appears, despite his sometimes eager usage of the language of revolution, in his scrupulous expressions of respect for the principles and institutions established by the American Founders. King attempted to find even in the riots themselves support for his contention that the disaffected urban poor constituted a promising new class of potential pilgrims to nonviolence. Let me explain. The substitutes for civil disobedience in a democracy include the court system, and at another level, the legis-lature. Civil disobedience is the refusal to obey the demands of an occupying power. . Protests against domestic injustices are to be conceived with a view toward preserving or restoring conditions of basic concord. It is not clear that a patient reliance on the judicial process in the Birmingham campaign would have doomed the direct-action movement to failure, as King feared. These are untenable claims. Those evils did ensuebut as King emphasized, they came in the main from the actions of segregations defenders, not from its protesters. To the contrary, it signifies a purposeful encroachment on others rights and interests as members of civil society. Many types of objections to civil disobedience have been raised, often based on the view that citizens in a democracy are obliged to obey the law. Famous examples include Gandhi's Salt March in 1930, Rosa Parks's refusal in 1955 to give up her bus . On what ground could he continue in his second-phase arguments to affirm the moral imperative of nonviolence, given his justification of coercion? He added that federal courts have consistently affirmed his position that the threat of violence by othersthe so-called rioters vetoprovides no legally defensible ground for an abridgement of the right of peaceful protest. Indicative of the moral qualities required are the tenets of the Commitment Card the leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) required volunteers to sign: I hereby pledge myselfmy person and bodyto the nonviolent movement. Martin Luther King, Jr., the most renowned advocate of civil disobedience, argued that civil disobedience is not lawlessness but instead a higher form of lawfulness, designed to bring positive or man-made law into conformity with higher lawnatural or divine law. Most worrisome in the recent waves of purportedly civil disobedience is their participants disregard for the divided legacy of the Civil Rights movement. The constitutional primacy of the legislative power is the institutional corollary of the rule of law. It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking.[REF]. Most acts of civil disobedience are justifiable. It is meaningful, if unsurprising, that the SCLC required of protesters a commitment suffused with the moral spirit of Christianity. We started havingworkshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves the questions: Are you able to accept blows without retaliating? Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?[REF]. He lent his moral authority to a radicalized form of civil disobedience that was more likely to sow disrespect than respect for law and more likely to foster division than moral reconciliation. Is there any tenable moral distinction between the intimidation he equivocally decried and the disruption and coercion he advocated as elements of his mature form of civil disobedience? Two main considerations, however, convinced King of the immediate necessity of civil disobedience in the Birmingham campaign. Reasons. Although the enlistees in that new army might receive training similar to what their first-phase predecessors received, the fact remains that the latter, drawn substantially from a population of southern churchgoers imbued with a Christian ethic of love and service, were beneficiaries of a moral heritage that many of those solicited for the later phase did not share.
