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.[REF]. s of forcing concessions from th. To gain our bearings amid todays protests, characterized more by disruption and coercion than persuasion, we should look beyond contemporary justifications and return to the best of Kings thinkingand beyond King, to the understanding of civil disobedience grounded in Americas first principles. In this respect, his dissatisfaction with the half a loaf gained in previous decades applied also to his movements accomplishments, which marked, in his view, not the end of its work but only the end of the beginning, as President Lyndon Johnson said in anticipation of the Voting Rights Act.[REF]. Or, when a man is bleeding to death, the ambulance goes through those red lights at top speed. Civil disobedience, Hugo Bedau noted, "is not just done; it is committed. It is permissible, on those principles, only where necessary and, in a context of functioning constitutional, republican government, only in exceptional cases. Aquinas writes that these laws are Something similar was true with respect to the indignations and provocations to which protestors would be subjected, which could be expected often to surpass the limits of the average persons patience. A closer analysis makes clear, however, that it signifies a radical departure from the practice he defended in the Letter. Whereas in that earlier account he explained that civil disobedience must be practiced only for the right reasons, in the right spirit, and by the right people, the mass civil disobedience he advocated in 1967 effects decisive modifications of all three of those regulating conditions. Their appeal provided a perfect occasion for a response from King, who with other movement leaders had been contemplating, since a previous campaign in Albany, Georgia, the composition of a prison epistle to serve as a manifesto for their movement. Civil disobedience is justified if the laws enacted by the majority deny the liberty of others. Recent protesters have been generally heedless of the obligation to compose well-reasoned, empirically careful, rights-based arguments to support the justice of their cause, and their protests have consisted largely in efforts at disruption and coercion rather than persuasion. How, for instance, are we to know that protestors claims of injustice are valid and the changes they demand are salutary? In a democracy, minority groups have basic rights and alternatives to civil disobedience. You are in a real way depriving him of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, denying in his case the very creed of his society. Such exposure is a condition to be avoided at all costs; to escape or avoid it is the primary objective in the formation of political society.[REF]. For his own, very different reasons, King, too, judged the first phase of his movement as only a partial and mixed success. What be important for present purposes a that this ground is sufficient for justified civil disobedience. 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. Of this venerable right, the practice of civil disobedience is extolled by its proponents as an ingeniously conceived varianta finely calibrated method of protest, at once safe and effectivenot so radical as needlessly to unsettle an established order and just radical enough to remediate governmental or societal injustices. The conclusion seems inescapable that in his desperate zeal to add rapid socioeconomic uplift to his movements previous victories in securing civil and political rights, King again neglected a piece of wise counsel from Rustin, who observed: There is a strong moralistic strain in the civil rights movement which would remind us that power corrupts, forgetting that absence of power also corrupts.[REF] Especially in his final two years, King overestimated his ability to govern the anger of the urban poor that he purposely assisted in arousing. King departed from his previously held regulatory principles in another, related respect. [2] This fact, along with the profession of nonviolence, helps explain the mainstream legitimacy accorded such acts, but it also means that civil disobedience so conceived may pose a greater threat to Americas republican constitutional order than would a conception of civil disobedience as an inherently revolutionary practice. The discussion begins with a consideration of Americas founding principles, focusing in particular on the natural-rights principles summarized in the Declaration of Independence, and then moves to an extended analysis of the arguments of Martin Luther King, Jr. In more recent times, the riots in Baltimore saw the death . The difficulty appears first in the fact that, as King at times acknowledged, his expansive, second-phase conception of rights was rooted in principles outside Americas constitutional tradition: We have left the realm of constitutional rights, he remarked in Where Do We Go From Here? Like slavery in this respect, segregation violates the moral law by relegating persons to the status of things., Further, the dignity of human personality signifies the, Acknowledging the seriousness of any act of lawbreaking, King recognized his responsibility to explain the criteria for judging the injustice of law and the rightfulness of disobedience. Above all, because the right to civil disobedience is intelligible only as a corrective of rulers lawlessness, it must not itself foster lawlessness. 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. Readers receive only very limited guidance as to how they are to judge, amid a wide range of plausible interpretive possibilities, what sorts of laws work to uplift or to degrade human personality. Even after the enactment of the Voting Rights Act, King believed, America remained in a state of social emergency, a desperate and worsening situation even more serious than the country had faced in 1963. A concern about injustice was a minimum condition, but King insisted that civil disobedience must be animated also by an ethic of love and service for other human beings, including perpetrators as well as primary victims of injustice. So far as it is dissociated from the objective of full, fundamental regime change, it would become more widely available and appealing as a means of mere reform, and thus normalized, it would tend to act over time to corrode popular respect for the rule of law. Alternatively, civil disobedience may be justified under a despotic regime, but not in a democracy where there are legal instruments avail-able for the redress of grievances. In its most concrete manifestation, however, the precept of obeying law so far as possible appears in his insistence on submitting to the legally prescribed punishment for disobedience. Civil Disobedience and Americas First Principles. Henry David Thoreau (born David Henry Thoreau) was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, philosopher, and abolitionist who is best known for Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state. With Selma and the Voting Rights Act, King wrote in his final book, Where Do We Go From Here? Even where it proves necessary to disobey an unjust law, to disobey the law in its entirety may be unnecessary to the purpose of reformand indeed may conflict with that purpose. 8. The substitutes for civil disobedience in a democracy include the court system, and at another level, the legis-lature. There is nothing wrong with a traffic law which says you have to stop for a red light. Such behavior would only hurt the system. On what ground could he continue in his second-phase arguments to affirm the moral imperative of nonviolence, given his justification of coercion? It makes governments more accountable Sometimes it's the only tool in the box Sometimes it's the only way to publicise an issue Sometimes the law is wrong. There is a fire raging now for the Negroes and the poor of this society . Civil disobedience is a morally justified act since it seeks to openly and non-violently address wrong and problematic phenomena in society. 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. Noting that the injunction method was proving an effective tool for segregationists in thwarting blacks rights to peaceful protest, King therefore decided to reject his fathers advice to submit to the courts ruling. Mindful of the difficulties involved, King wrote, we decided to undertake a process of self-purification. In the Declaration of Independence, the ultimate recourse is a right, again where circumstances dictate, to full-blown revolution: Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of [its proper] ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government., Further, it should be clear that the imperative subjection to the rule of law applies no less to the people themselves, as represented by a ruling majority, than to government. 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. Reasons. The Limits and Dangers of Civil Disobedience: The Case of Martin Luther King, Jr. At the heart of the American character, evident since our nations birth, is a seeming paradox: Americans take pride in our self-image as a republic of laws and no less pride in our propensity toward righteous disobedience. People who engage in it do not wish to inflict any damage but to raise awareness and make their views known to the authorities. To the contrary, it signifies a purposeful encroachment on others rights and interests as members of civil society. In his first book, Stride Toward Freedom, King recalled the discoveries that would supply the moral power for the social revolution he envisioned. In roughly the first third of the letter, King responded to the clergymens charge that it was imprudent of him to lead protests at that moment in Birmingham. Their appeal provided a perfect occasion for a response from King, who with other movement leaders had been contemplating, since a previous campaign in Albany, Georgia, the composition of a prison epistle to serve as a manifesto for their movement. Judged by its main objectives of reforming the law and strengthening the bonds of moral community, Kings direct-action protest movement of the 1950s and early 1960s appears to have been a resounding success. Martin Luther King, Jr.s Discovery of Civil Disobedience, From his adolescence to the end of his life, Martin Luther King, Jr., found inspiration in the promise inherent in the Declaration of Independence, although he was acutely aware that for black Americans, that promise had gone unfulfilled. 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. The subsequent campaign in Selma, organized on the same principles and initiated by its own act of civil disobedience, generated a similar energy for the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Because, as Madison put it, the latent causes of faction are sown in the nature of man,[REF] the doctrine of a right to resist unjust government carries the danger that it might itself be put to unjust uses and thus might operate to undermine the rule of law. 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. What is Civil Disobedience? There must be more than a statement to the larger society; there must be a force that interrupts its functioning at some key point Mass civil disobedience as a new stage of struggle can transmute the deep rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative force. 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. 6. There is a fire raging now for the Negroes and the poor of this society . Civil disobedience is variously described as an act by which "one addresses the sense of justice of the majority of the community" (Rawls 1999, 320), as "a plea for reconsideration" (Singer 1973, 84-92), and as a "symbolic appeal to the capacity for reason and sense of justice of the majority" (Habermas 1985, 99). Strive to be in good spiritual and bodily health. An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice. [REF] Such actions have become increasingly normalized in post-1960s America, as groups protesting a wide range of issuesincluding, in a partial list, nuclear armaments, abortion, environmental policy, and more recently, alleged misdeeds in the financial-services industry, immigration policy, and alleged police misconducthave laid claim to the method of civil disobedience. Is civil disobedience wrong? For enthusiasts of rightful disobedience (civil or not), events such as the American Revolution and the Civil Rights movement serve as congenial examplesbut the participants in the slaveholders rebellion of 1861 and the mid-20th century campaign of massive resistance to desegregation no less firmly believed their causes to be just. King characterized poverty and unemployment as deprivations of the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and he conceived of poverty as a form of segregation. [REF], It is meaningful, if unsurprising, that the SCLC required of protesters a commitment suffused with the moral spirit of Christianity. Visiting Scholar, 2016-17 Visiting Fellow in American Political Thought. Americans trust in government has fallen to historic lows as our partisan divisions and animosities have intensified;[REF] large and increasing numbers of Americans are convinced, for one set of reasons or another, of the illegitimacy of the ruling order. However, he was "interested primarily in social matters". In the definition cited above, the general objective of civil disobedience, to effect a change in laws or government policies, encompasses a variety of possible specific objectives, ranging from reform of particular laws or policies to fundamental change in constitutional order. Violent in itself, that injustice was in Kings view also violent in its emerging effectsabove all in the rioting that began in Watts just days after the Voting Rights Act became law and spread, in the two years thereafter, to hundreds of cities across the U.S. As was the case in Watts, the riots were often precipitated by disputes involving policebut evidence suggests that neither charges of police brutality nor discontentment at socioeconomic deprivation was the predominant cause. Our impatience, he said, was legitimate and unavoidable. The implication is that civil disobedience was undertaken as a last, nonviolent resort and was justified as such. Kings distinction between disobedience that is evasive or defiant and disobedience marked by acceptance of the authority of law is vividly meaningful in context. 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]. 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 . Disobedience Breeds Disrespect Civil disobedience is an ad hoc device at best, and ad hoc measures in a law society are dangerous. 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. Its aim is to make that society more just, and justice is a stabilizing influence. He was less successful, however, in clarifying the ideas of personhood and equality that were to supply the basis and the limiting principle for claims of rights and of rights violations. And if that official [is nonresponsive], you can say, All right, well wait. And you can settle down in his office for as long a stay as necessary., In advocating this radicalized form of civil disobedience, King contended that those who perceive a serious societal injustice have the right to disobey, 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. Civil disobedience, despite its illegal nature, can sometimes be justified vis--vis the duty to obey the law, and, arguably, is thereby not liable to legal punishment. A consideration of Americas first principles, as explicated in the political thought informing the American Founding, corroborates Kings view. It is used to prevent more chaos that is to come. Prudence, in other words, dictates a narrow-tailoring rule, according to which less radical alternative measures are to be preferred, explored, and exhausted prior to the adoption of more radical measures. Seek to perform regular service for others and for the world. Against his critics, King insisted that civil disobedience signifies no disrespect but, to the contrary, the highest respect for law.[REF] For King, as in the logic of the Declaration, civil disobedience may be practiced only where necessary and only so far as necessary to the purpose of reforming an unjust human law.