In a 1960 televised debate with King, the segregationist James J. Kilpatrick, editor of the Richmond News Leader, remarked that in the controversy over public school integration, [W]e at the South were exhorted on every hand to abide by the law and it is therefore an interesting experience to be here tonight and see Mr. King assert a right to obey those laws he chooses to obey and disobey those that he chooses not to obey.[REF] Prominent black leaders also objected to the practice of civil disobedience, as Emory O. Jackson, editor of the black newspaper The Birmingham World, Joseph H. Jackson, president of the National Baptist Conference, and even the great civil-rights attorney (and, subsequently, the first African-American U.S. Supreme Court Justice) Thurgood Marshall, all called for fidelity to the law in pursuance of the movements objectives.[REF]. Secure .gov websites use HTTPS Civil disobedience can thus be justified at least where the moral duty to obey is nonbinding. Consequently, its practice must be confined to rare and exceptional circumstances. It is notable in this regard that the numerous authorities King cited in the Letter do not include Thoreau, whose highly individualist idea of conscience, disdain for majoritarian democracy, and pronounced antinomianism King did not share.[REF]. 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. He is the author of Our Only Star and Compass: Locke and the Struggle for Political Rationality (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998) and Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism (University Press of Kansas, 2008). one phase of development in the civil rights revolution came to an end. He announced the advent of a second phase, targeting conditions in impoverished urban ghettoes across the country and aiming at the realization of [socioeconomic] equality across lines of class and color. People who engage in it do not wish to inflict any damage but to raise awareness and make their views known to the authorities. 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. Civil disobedience is justified when laws made by humans are unjust. As Kings own legacy reveals, however, civil disobedience is complicated in its theoretical basis and problematic in its practical effects. Yet despite these shortcomings, his discussion adumbrates several regulating and confining conditions that, properly elaborated, could supply a defensible justification of the practice. The very definition of a Republic, John Adams remarked, is an Empire of Laws, and not of menwords he wrote in the spring of 1776, even as his compatriots were engaged in an armed uprising that they as a people, with Adamss own assistance, would shortly thereafter declare to be revolutionary and justified by a law higher than any human law. Why Is Civil Disobedience In A Democracy Is Not Morally Justified? It is plainly at odds with his insistence on the correspondence of moral ends and moral means. I have one definition to give. 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. 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. [REF], The dangers were sufficiently great that the average person, naturally concerned for the preservation of life and limb, could not be presumed willing or able to brave them. The practice of civil disobedience must preserve or enhance respect for law and therewith for constitutional republicanism. 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. To practice civil disobedience only where necessary means, in the precise sense, to practice it as a next-to-last resort, short only of uncivil or violent resistance to tyranny. Gandhi's civil disobedience campaigns of the 1920's and 1930's were pivotal factors in attaining independence. Monumental Disappointments in Our Public Spaces. 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. To the contrary, it signifies a purposeful encroachment on others rights and interests as members of civil society. Spirit. 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. Critics argue that it promotes lawlessness and undermines the rule of . This means that the practitioner of civil disobedience must judge properly in identifying unjust laws as the justification for disobedience. 10. On what ground could he locate the natural rights of persons, given his denigration of the property righta right affirmed in classical natural-rights philosophy as a direct corollary of the liberty of the person? It is justifiable, where circumstances warrant, by the first principles of the American republic and of free, constitutional government, and it is dangerous in that it poses a threat to the rule of law. 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. Drawing upon the higher-law tradition of American and western political thought, King argued that to qualify as law in the proper sense, a given statute or ordinance must conform with the principles of justice. Justice, King maintained, is manifest in a higher law that is accessible to human reason. With Selma and the Voting Rights Act, King wrote in his final book, Where Do We Go From Here? Protests against domestic injustices are to be conceived with a view toward preserving or restoring conditions of basic concord. The account of civil disobedience developed in this thesis can be defended . Introduction. Fordham Law Review - Fordham University However, none of these objections are decisive against every act of civil justification. [REF], 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. Among the most striking features of the city riots, he argued, was that the violence, to a startling degree, was focused against property rather than against people. The overwhelming majority of people killed during the riots, he went on, were protesters killed by law enforcement officers. 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 concluded: If one can find a core of nonviolence toward persons, even during the riots when emotions were exploding, it means that nonviolence should not be written off for the future as a force in Negro life.[REF]. Strive to be in good spiritual and bodily health. 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. In his very first public speech (as a prizewinner in his high schools oratory contest), King protested that decades after Emancipation, Black America still lives in chains. For the remainder of his secondary and advanced education, he searched for the proper means, as he put it in that initial speech, to cast down the last barrier to perfect freedom.[REF]. Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: TEN-HERNG LAI, CHONG-MING LIM Environmental Activism and the Fairness of Costs Argument for Uncivil Disobedience, Journal of the American Philosophical Association 19 (Jan 2023): 1-20. Kings Achievement. Civil disobedience is a nonviolent form of protest. To dislocate the functioning of a city without destroying it can be more effective than a riot because it can be longer-lasting, costly to the larger society, but not wantonly destructive.[REF]. 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. Civil disobedience in a democracy is not morally justified because it poses an unacceptable threat to the rule of law. To What Extent is Civil Disobedience Justified in a Democracy 6. He offered a second illustration in the form of a direct suggestion. 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. 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. Here is the key point: Kings actions in Birmingham and elsewhere were born of a deep impatience, informed, as he wrote in the Letter, by a centuries-long history of injustice, including promises made and unfulfilled, that had taught him to equate slow or partial progress with no progress: Half a loaf is no bread., Recall, too, however, that civil disobedience as King conceived it was to be practiced only. He then turned to their specific objection to the tactic of civil disobedience. Famous examples include Gandhi's Salt March in 1930, Rosa Parks's refusal in 1955 to give up her bus . However, from an outside perspective, the justifications are analyzed through the values of the individual, organization or government. Legitimate, constitutional government can possess only those powers delegated to it by the people who are its constituents, and the people in turn can delegate only powers they rightfully possess under the law of nature. 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. The action in Birmingham was Kings first disobedience of a court order, and he found it a very difficult decision. In his first book, Stride Toward Freedom, King recalled the discoveries that would supply the moral power for the social revolution he envisioned. The moral justification of civil disobedience is context sensitive; it should be restricted to a certain situation when there is a defect in the legal system, and the problem that could not be resolve through the legitimate way. Attempting to find virtue in the difference, King offered a troubling description of the prospective participants in his second-phase project, highlighting not their moral discipline but their social desperation: The only real revolutionary, people say, is a man who has nothing to lose.[REF], In a similar vein, 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. Again, the justification of civil disobedience in this kind of case depends on the particulars. Sacrifice personal wishes in order that all men might be free. [REF] Its present legitimacy and prestige, however, reflect the influence of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, a movement characterized by its leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., as the greatest mass-action crusade for freedom that has ever occurred in American history.[REF] Prompted by that movement, America has undergone sea changes in law and in public sentiment regarding race relations and the antidiscrimination idea, and Kings Letter from Birmingham Jail, containing his most elaborate justification of the practice of civil disobedience, has become a widely anthologized writing and a fixture in U.S. secondary and collegiate civics education.