Nonviolent protest so conceived may or may not involve actions in violation of positive law, but where such protest. Observe with both friend and foe the ordinary rules of courtesy. Its primary finding may be summarized in this lesson: Civil disobedience is justifiable but dangerous. That civil disobedience may be practiced only for the right reasons is first and fundamental among the regulating conditions King suggested. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham, King reported, than in any other city in the nation. In response, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. Civil disobedience cannot be an armed struggle. As King rightly understood, civil disobedience may only be undertaken: (1) for the right reasons; (2) in the right spirit; and (3) by the right people. In summary, as King presented it in the Letter, civil disobedience may only be undertaken: (1) for the right reasons; (2) in the right spirit; and (3) by the right people. It is difficult to imagine the change they affected coming about any other way - or certainly as quickly. The Problem of Civil Disobedience Subject: Politics & Government Study Level: College Words: 1375. To reform the citysand the regions and the countryslaws, it was necessary to expose that conflict, and to expose that conflict it was necessary to demonstrate to a national public the effect of those laws in inflicting brutality and imprisonment on a class of decent and law-abiding people, who would demonstrate those qualities most visibly by their voluntary acceptance of the penalties for disobeying the citys law. ) or https:// means youve safely connected to the .gov website. To its proponents, led by King, the idea of civil disobedience represents a compelling linkage of morality and efficacy, a happy marriage of moral ends to moral means in the pursuit of social or political reform. "The refusal to obey the demands or commands of a government or occupying power, without resorting to violence or active measures of opposition; its usual purpose is to force concessions from the government or occupying power. Let me explain. 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 . One might also discern in Kings eagerness to deploy the language of revolution and natural rights in preference to that of constitutional law a certain zeal for revolution at odds with his insistence on respect for positive law. Now, millions of people are being strangled that way.[REF], 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. To gain a full, sympathetic understanding of Kings position, it is necessary, as King scholar Jonathan Rieder has commented, to think concretely about the distinction: In Birmingham, the lawbreakers [castrated] a black man; they bomb[ed] ordinary families . 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. In the Letter, King contended that as applied to his direct-action campaign, the ordinance that the injunction was issued to enforce was a violation of the U.S. Constitution, in particular of the First Amendments guarantee of rights of peaceful assembly and protest. It was integral, in other words, to his larger design of exposing the stark conflict between local positive laws sustaining racial subordination and the moral laws of nature. 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].
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