What did Martin Luther King, Jr. mean by civil disobedience? What were the elements of his strategy?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Civil disobedience is based on the belief that people have the right to disobey the law under certain circumstances. This tactic was not new; Blacks in the United States had used it before and Gandhi also had urged its use in India. Under Martin Luther King, Jr.'s leadership, however, civil disobedience became a widely used technique and even gained a measure of acceptability among some prominent Whites. King distinguished between man-made laws that were unjust and should not be obeyed because they were not right, not in accordance with God's higher moral code (1963:82).

In disobeying unjust laws, King (1958:101–107) developed this strategy:

• actively but nonviolently resisting evil,
• not seeking to defeat or humiliate opponents but to win their friendship and understanding,
• attacking the forces of evil rather than the people who happen to be doing the evil,
• being willing to accept suffering without retaliating,
• refusing to hate the opponent, and
• acting with the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice.

King, like other Blacks before him and since, made it clear that passive acceptance of injustice was intolerable. He hoped that by emphasizing nonviolence, Southern Blacks would display their hostility to racism in a way that would undercut violent reaction by Whites.