Essay On Civil Disobedience

In the early 1900s, Mahatma Gandhi was the prominent leader of the Indian Independence Movement. In 1955, a young Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat over to a white man in spite of the laws set in place. An act that would lead to her arrest. In the mid-1950s, the renowned Martin Luther King, Jr. led the Civil Rights Movement in the United States defying Jim Crow laws through sit-ins, conducting marches and boycotts, and accepting jail sentences in the attempt to highlight racial injustice. All of these acts of defiance and many more were done in hopes of creating equality amongst all of America. They even helped author forms of non-violent civil disobedience.

These peaceful resistances to laws each exemplify how such civil disobedience can positively impact a free society. Gandhi was able to instill a "foundation of dissent" in hundreds of millions of Indians which historians believe was the main reason that India was able to gain full independence in 1947. Rosa Parks was coined the mother of the Civil Rights Movement as she used civil disobedience along with other …show more content…
A major example would be the Black Lives Matter Movement. The Black Lives Matter Movement is said to be a "tactic to (re)build the Black liberation movement". This movement is one in which activists are supposed to use various non-violent methods to prove their points about how violence in the world is doing nothing but harm to the communities in which it persists. Just recently, in the summer of 2016, activists in Portland, Maine blocked a downtown intersection as a means of protesting the shooting deaths of unarmed black men in Minnesota and Louisiana. The protests have impacted the world in a multitude of ways. There has been widespread recognition of the cruel treatment of minorities, in particular African-Americans. It has even brought a vast amount of individuals together in order to combat racial injustice and cruel and unusual