ABSTRACT

The great civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) is often held up as a paradigmatic example of a civil disobedient. There are at least two reasons for this. First, King’s activities were focused on fighting what can only be acknowledged as grave and persistent injustices: those perpetrated against African Americans in the southern states of America. His cause, we might say, was a just cause. And though he broke various laws in waging that fight, he employed and advocated only nonviolent action. His nonviolence is the second reason he deserves the honorific of one of the great civil disobedients.