ABSTRACT
Men are, of necessity, social beings; they are not thereby automatically chattels of whatever sort of society they happen to find themselves in. Moral persuasion and orderly political processes are obviously the preferable means for a man to use to change those things he finds wrong in his society. But moral persuasion, to be effective, requires in those to be persuaded a special set of conditions which may be entirely beyond the control of the man attempting the persuasion. And use of the legal machinery for social change requires a certain amount of political
power and a particular leverage in order to make that power felt in the right places. I f the morally acceptable defenses of the individual citizen against laws he finds unacceptable are restricted to moral persuasion and legal processes, then the man who can find no audience and who has no power is left with no moral resource within the structure of the society, and his only recourse is violence-rebellion or crime. Moral persuasion is an empty phrase to the Negro in Mississippi who is effectively disenfranchised and virtually unprotected by the law. Orderly legal change is an impossibility for the man without a semblance of legal right or power.
