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" I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest. The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement; " He was moved by Thoreau because he stood up for what he believed in, even if that meant breaking the law. Thoreau's ideas moved Martin Luther King and helped urge him to stand up for what he believed in too despite the consequences.

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"Gandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale." King continues, saying, "It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking. ...I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom." He was moved by Gandhi because he helped open his eyes and find what he was looking for.

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"If humanity is to progress, Gandhi is inescapable. He lived, thought, and acted, inspired by the vision of humanity evolving toward a world of peaceand harmony. We may ignore him at our own risk."
Adam Fairclough

By Gregg Blakely

"As I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi, my skepticism concerning the power of love gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time that the Christian doctrine of love, operating through the Gandhian method of nonviolence, is one of the most potent weapons available to an oppressed people in their struggle for freedom."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. Martin Luther King's main political teaching is that "Non-violent civil disobedience is the primary and necessary means of effecting social and political change." How did Dr. King arrive at this statement? Who and what were the formative influences? Were those influences restricted to Gandhi, or were there other, equally important individuals whom Dr. King looked up?

It appears that there were a myriad of thinkers, philosophers, and people whom King knew personally, who were responsible for shaping his approach.

Personal Influences
"In an age when whites viewed black neighborhoods as hellholes of vice and social disorganization, Daddy King's church stood like an anchor in a stable and respectable community. And in a dominant culture that stereotyped blacks as childish, sycophantic clowns, King's father prided himself on being the equal of any white person."
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Martin Luther King, Sr., quite often referred to simply as "Daddy King," served as the first role model for young Martin Luther King, Jr. and one of the principal influences in molding his personality. King's father was constantly concerned with social and political issues. He assisted in the organization of voter registration drives, participated in the NAACP, and sat on the board of Morehouse College. As pastor of the local church, he embedded strong religious ideals in his son and linked him to the church. The lectures from both King's parents on the subject of racial harmony stuck with Martin Luther and armed him against all forms of prejudice.

King soon left to begin his formal education at Morehouse College, where he became acquainted with the remarkable president of the school, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, who influenced generations of black students. This propensity to shape the minds of black students was not lost on young King. In Mays's strength of purpose and religious commitment, young men like Martin found a role model. Later on, he publicly recognized Dr. Mays as an enormous influence on him in his formative years. He confirmed the religious convictions that the young man had already developed through his father's influences. King is said to have believed that without God, nonviolence lacked substance and potency.

Academic Influences

It was with a strong Christian faith in hand that Martin Luther King embarked upon his formal education. He said that Henry David Thoreau's essay, "Civil Disobedience," was his "first intellectual contact with the theory of nonviolence and resistance." It was primarily Thoreau's concept of refusing to cooperate with an evil system which so intrigued Dr. King.

As Martin moved on to the seminary, he began to pass countless hours studying social philosophers, including Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Hobbes, Bentham, Mill, and Locke. Next came Hegel and his contention that "truth is the whole." This fascinated King and convinced him that growth comes through struggle, an idea that would later prove very important in his life. While King deplored the substituting of materialism for religious values, he applauded Marx for exposing the injustices of capitalism, promoting class consciousness among the workers, and challenging the complacency of the Christian churches. It was in part due to his reading of Marx that King became convinced that capitalism had failed the needs of the masses and that it had outlived its usefulness. When it comes to identifying his greatest influence, however, I think King might place Walter Rauschenbush ahead of all of these philosophers, for his book Christianity and the Social Crisis. It was this work which made King realize that a person's day-to-day socioeconomic environment was important to Christianity.

In King's later career, he came to be associated to certain thinkers by the content of his speeches and writings. For example, he used the concept "agape" (Christian brotherly love) in ways that showed the unmistakable influence of Paul Ramsey. Ramsey has coined the phrase "enemy-neighbor" (the neighbor includes the enemy) and referred to regarding him with love as the ultimate in agape, for in such cases nothing can be expected in return. King's own words closely echo this statement when he professes that, "the best way to assure oneself that love is disinterested is to have love for the enemy-neighbor from whom you can expect no good in return, but only hostility and persecution."

As well, in later years, King talks of nonviolence as a way of catching or drawing one's opponent off balance and, as a result, potentially changing his or her mind. When nonviolent resistance is practiced effectively, it can disarm one's opponent by weakening his moral defences and disturbing his conscience. In this description of nonviolent resistance, King draws on Richard Gregg's doctrine of "moral jiu-jitsu," as Gene Sharp and others will also do later.

In his final year at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania (where he obtained a bachelor's degree in divinity), King studied Reinhold Niebuhr, a Protestant theologian who impressed him profoundly. Niebuhr played a vital part in stimulating the renaissance of theology in the United States. King was intrigued by the key ideas in Niebuhr's theological book, The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941). He later recalled having been excited by Niebuhr's concept of man representing both a child of nature and a spirit who stood outside it. He felt that Niebuhr led him to a fuller understanding of group behavior, human motives, and the connection between power and morality. In King's own words: "Niebuhr helped me to recognize the complexity of man's social involvement and the glowing reality of collective evil."

In what is perhaps Niebuhr's most relevant statement on the subject of non-violent direct action, he professes, "Even in a just and free society, there must be forms of pressure short of violence, but more potent than the vote, to establish justice in collective relations." This is obviously a thought that King both liked and followed. It is interesting to note that Niebuhr was critical of using anything except force to combat imperialism, territorial aggression, and class exploitation. Even Gandhian nonviolence was viewed by Niebuhr as a form of coercion. At this phase of his intellectual development, King had accepted Niebuhr's argument that coercion is absolutely required to restrain evil and combat oppression, but he remained unpersuaded of the relevance of Gandhian nonviolence. Even though King recognized how greatly Black Americans were outnumbered and that it was, in effect, hopeless to attempt violence as a solution, he was skeptical of pacifism at this point. His warming toward nonviolence began on a Sunday afternoon in Philadelphia, where in 1948, he attended a lecture by Dr. Mordecai Johnson, who discussed the teachings of Mohandas K. Gandhi.

Gandhi
"It is ironic, yet inescapably true that the greatest Christian of the modern world was a man who never embraced Christianity."
Martin Luther King, Jr.

After hearing Dr. Johnson speak about Gandhi, Martin Luther King became extremely enthused about the Mahatma's ideas. He felt compelled to expand his knowledge of Gandhi, and after reading a number of his books, began to lose his skepticism about the power of love. King himself states in Stride Toward Freedom, "Gandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale." King continues, saying, "It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking. ...I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom."

It was Gandhi's doctrine of satyagraha ("truth force") which had the most powerful influence on King. At the time, however, King was still in the seminary and lacked a clear idea about how it might be applied effectively. Still, the whole idea of satyagraha developed a special meaning to him. For King, agape was at the heart of the teachings of Jesus. After discovering Gandhi's thought, King felt he had found the key by which oppressed people could unlock social protest. Gandhism was a way to fight the oppression of black Americans - a method that was consistent with the Christian ethic of love. Martin Luther King now saw that Gandhi proposed a method by which Jesus' concept of Christian love could be set to work on the problems of those fighting to achieve freedom and justice.

In 1959, King visited India and became fully convinced that satyagraha could be effectively applied to the struggle by blacks in the United States for racial integration. King was now thinking about love as an engine for social change. He saw the importance of the ethos of nonviolence as a cohesive force within the black struggle. The Gandhian idea of the "Beloved Community" would go on to become the central goal of King's spiritual campaign, for he now believed in nonviolence as a viable option for black Americans. The nonviolent civil rights movement was born.

As King's career and involvement in a nonviolent struggle went on, his words began to echo Gandhi's own sentiments. For example, in King's discussion of civil disobedience he says, "an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law." Similarly, King says, "In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty." These statements echo the words of the Mahatma himself, who always taught respect for the law, provided it is consistent with the truth.

King, like Gandhi, also talks about enduring suffering as a path to self-purification and spiritual growth. He had discovered through Gandhi that achieving social justice, especially when it comes to racism and discrimination, comes through suffering because it stretches below the rational and the conscious. In the words of Kenneth Smith, "Reason has to be enlightened by suffering; suffering is an aid to understanding."

King's Personal Transformation

As time passed, Martin Luther King's study of Gandhi continued and he began to adopt Gandhi's philosophy at a more personal level. He began to view Gandhi's ideas as more than just tactics. Nowhere is this more evident than in the following statement made by Dr. King:

Nonviolence in the truest sense is not a strategy that one uses simply because it is expedient at the moment; nonviolence is ultimately a way of life that men live by because of the sheer morality of its claim. But even granting this, the willingness to use nonviolence as a technique is a step forward. For he who goes this far is more likely to adopt nonviolence later as a way of life.

Martin Luther King's lifelong experiment with nonviolence evolved from his original intellectual realization of its possibilities as a method of social change to its eventual adoption as a personal way of life. In the words of William Watley:

This conversion was not only the result of the deeper insights he gained as he learned more and more about Gandhian nonviolence; much of that conversion process occurred through King's own experiments with the truth of nonviolence, as he lived it, applied it, refined it, and suffered through it, beginning in Montgomery.

Martin Luther King's formal education ended in 1954, by which time he had fused a diverse collection of ideas and theories into a unified, positive social philosophy. One of the main principles of this philosophy was the strong belief in nonviolent resistance as one of the most powerful weapons available to oppressed people in their struggle for social justice. Walton identifies the three most important causal figures of this philosophy:

From Jesus, Thoreau, and Gandhi had come the philosophical roots for King's theory of nonviolent social change; from Christ's Sermon on the Mount, with its emphasis on humility, self-criticism, forgiveness, and the renunciation of material gain, came the initial inspiration for a nonviolent approach; Thoreau's example had taught the rightfulness of civil disobedience; and Gandhi showed that there was a method for mass non-violent resistance to the state.

A.B. Assensoh takes the summary in a different direction, saying, "In retrospect, it is possible for one to examine the overwhelming scholarly evidence of the various influences which were dominant on King's formative years, and subsequently come to the conclusion that the most significant of them all was that of parental influence." The Christian morals that King's parents passed on to him filtered into his life's work more than any other influences. Still, it is impossible to ignore the vast political and intellectual influence of India's leader upon America's own civil rights champion. Despite the important contributions of some other social and theological thinkers, such as Thoreau and Niebuhr, Gandhi's influence was by far the greatest.

Mahatma Gandhi blended together a profound religious faith with deep social involvement. He engaged himself completely in his attempt to satisfy the needs of his people, and he dedicated the full length of his adult life to serving humankind at enormous personal sacrifice. To Gandhi, religion and public service were equivalent. In his eyes, service to humanity was the path to self-actualization, and to experiencing God. In the life and writing of Martin Luther King, Jr. we find a similar blend of the religious and the social. We also find the same dedication to serving the needs of his people. This point is both inspiring and tragic. Through the devotion of their lives to religious-based social action, both Gandhi and Dr. King made the ultimate personal sacrifice. By way of an assassin's bullet, each man sacrificed his life.

Gregg Blakeley is a student and lives in relentless pursuit of the truth.

References
Assensoh, A.B. (1987). Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and America's Quest for Racial Integration, London: Arthur H. Stockwell Ltd.

Ayres, A. (Ed.). (1993). The Wisdom of Martin Luther King, Jr., New York: Meridian.

Fairclough, A. (1990). Martin Luther King, Jr., Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Gandhi, M. (1949). For Pacifists, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House.

Gandhi, M. (1996). Selected Political Writings. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

Hanigan, J. P. (1984). Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Foundations of Nonviolence. New York: University Press of America.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. (1958). Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Moses, G. (1997). Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolence, New York: The Guilford Press.

Smith, K.L. & Zepp, I.G. (1998). Search for the Beloved Community: The Thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr., Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press.

Walton, H. (1971). The Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr., Westport, Conn: Greenwood Publishing Corp.

Ward, B. & Badger, T. (Eds.). (1996). The Making of Martin Luther King and the Civ l Rights Movement, London: MacMillan Press Ltd.

Watley, W.D. (1985). Roots of Resistance: The Nonviolence Ethic of Martin Luther King, Jr., Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press.

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The Formative Influences on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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"If humanity is to progress, Gandhi is inescapable. He lived, thought, and acted, inspired by the vision of humanity evolving toward a world of peaceand harmony.

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Theses people were objecting to "poverty wages". This Walmart in Los Angeles was supposed to be paying workers 25,000$ a year but this man named Anthony Goytia is only getting payed 12,000$ a year he says "It’s a daily struggle, to make sure my family doesn’t go hungry.” It did make people aware, the CEO of Walmart Bill Simon came out and talked about how many Walmart employees get payed over 25,000$ and how many workers get payed less than 25,000$ a year.

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Surrounded by about 100 police officers in riot gear and a helicopter circling above, more than 50 Walmart workers and supporters were arrested in downtown Los Angeles Thursday night as they sat in the street protesting what they called the retailer's "poverty wages."

Organizers said it was the largest single act of civil disobedience in Walmart's 50-year history. The 54 arrestees, with about 500 protesting Walmart workers, clergy and supporters, demonstrated outside LA's Chinatown Walmart. Those who refused police orders to clear the street after their permit expired were arrested without incident. Those who fail to post $5,000 bail would be jailed overnight, Detective Gus Villanueva, a Los Angeles Police Department spokesman, told The Huffington Post.

Their primary demand to Walmart: pay every full-time worker at least $25,000 a year.

One of the protesting Walmart workers, Anthony Goytia, a 31-year-old father of two, said he believes he will make about $12,000 this year. It's a daily struggle, he said, "to make sure my family doesn't go hungry."

"The power went out at my house yesterday because I couldn't afford the bill," Goytia told HuffPost. "I had to run around and get two payday loans to pay for my rent from the first" of the month. "Yesterday we went to a food bank."

To make ends meet, Goytia said he sometimes participates in clinical trials and sells his blood plasma. He has been asking his managers for full-time employment for a year and a half. Instead, he said, they hire temporary workers, who can be fired at any time.

Goytia was one of several dozen Walmart workers in Southern California who went on strike Wednesday and Thursday, calling for an end to low wages, unpredictable part-time hours and retaliation for speaking out. They were joined by other employees on their days off and dozens more who rode buses from Northern California.

The strike, protest and arrests are the latest in a series of worker actions across the country coordinated by OUR Walmart, an advocacy organization with ties to the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. The actions in Los Angeles this week are the first in what organizers said would be a series of protests leading into the holiday shopping season.

The protesters said Walmart can afford to pay every worker at least $25,000 a year -- pointing to Walmart's $17 billion profit from the latest year and the founding Walton family's fortune, which equals the wealth of the bottom 42 percent of American families.

Walmart CEO Bill Simon disclosed in a presentation recently that 475,000 Walmart workers are paid more than $25,000 a year. That leaves 525,000 to 825,000 Walmart workers earning less than $25,000. House Democrats seeking to boost the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 per hour have criticized Walmart for its low wages.

Walmart invited HuffPost to speak to a couple associates working in the Chinatown store during the protest Thursday. In the presence of a consultant working for Walmart, two employees -- Do Nguyen, 29, and Aldo Hernandez, 55 -- said that they are treated well by their employer. Nguyen, who has worked for Walmart for almost a year, said that asking for a minimum of $25,000 is "a national issue, not a Walmart issue."

Hernandez, who has worked for Walmart for almost five years, said he gets good health benefits through Walmart and doesn't struggle to support himself and his son. Both Nguyen and Hernandez declined to say how much they make.

Kory Lundberg, a spokesman for Walmart, said that the company has hundreds of thousands of associates who earn $25,000 or more and that others have the opportunity to do so.

"There are unparalleled opportunities at Walmart," Lundberg said. "We're going to be promoting 160,000 associates this year. That's larger than the total workforce of most companies out there."

"Folks can come in as entry level or whatever level they're at and can work up as far as they're willing to go," Lundberg said. "That's one of the things we're proudest of."

After working full time at Walmart in Paramount, Calif., for 10 years, Martha Sellers, 55, makes $25,400 a year. In the last few years, she said, her managers have been cutting her weekly hours, sometimes to as few as 12 hours a week.

With that income, she said, she has to pay her rent in pieces. "If I pay all my rent at one time, then I have $12 to live on and put gas in my car until I get paid again," Sellers, who attended Thursday's protest, said.

"I have a very nice neighbor who lends me money. But then the next month, I'm short again," Sellers said. "I never get caught up."

LA's Chinatown Walmart, about one-fifth the size of the company's regular stores, opened in September despite thousands of Angelenos protesting it during the summer. It is the retailer's first store in central LA.

In October 2012, for the first time in Walmart's history, some workers went on a one-day strike, even though Walmart jobs have never been protected by a labor union. More than 70 LA Walmart workers from nine stores walked off the job for a day, followed by over 80 Walmart workers walking off the job in a dozen other U.S. cities.

Last year, through online organizing, OUR Walmart coordinated strikes on Thanksgiving and Black Friday in 46 states and 100 stores. The actions put a spotlight on the world's largest retailer during one of the biggest shopping periods of the year. And yet, Walmart had its most lucrative Black Friday ever, according to the company.

Regarding associates being required to work earlier on Thanksgiving, Lundberg said, "Folks understand that when they come to work for Walmart, that we're a 24-hour store, and Thanksgiving is one of those days that we serve our customers."

Sellers went on strike on Black Friday last year and said she plans to do so again this year. "Walmart claims to be a family-oriented company," she said. "But where's the family time? They took away Easter too."

"Where is the American economy going if we're all working poverty wages?," Sellers said. "There will be no working class. We'll all be in a poverty class."

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Biggest Civil Disobedience Against Walmart In History

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Surrounded by about 100 police officers in riot gear and a helicopter circling above, more than 50 Walmart workers and supporters were arrested in downtown Los Angeles Thursday night as they sat in the street protesting what they called the retailer's "poverty wages."

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Martin Luther King played a role of leadership for the civil rights movement. He made the speeches and spoke out against the law to fight for what he believes in. He mentions people like Rosa Parks who refused to give up her seat on the bus and was arrested. All of these leaders during this time were just trying to get the law enforcement to see that everyone was created equal and that's how they show be treated.

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Vision and Motivation

Although slavery in the United States ended in the late 19th century, institutionalized racism continued to oppress African Americans even decades later. By the mid-20th century, blacks were still forced to use separate public utilities and schools from the superior ones reserved for whites; they suffered routine discrimination in employment and housing, as well as abuse and lynching from some whites, and they were unable to fully exercise their right to vote.

For decades, civil rights activists had been fighting these laws and social customs to secure equality for all Americans. These activists had won some significant victories; among the most notable was the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which held that state laws requiring black students and white students to attend different schools were unconstitutional. However, these victories could not dismantle the systemic racism that plagued the country. It was in this environment, seeing the possibility of an America where black and white citizens were truly equal, that Martin Luther King, Jr. joined in the fight for civil rights for black Americans.

Goals & Objectives

A Baptist minister by training, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sought to raise the public consciousness of racism, to end racial discrimination and segregation in the United States. While his goal was racial equality, King plotted out a series of smaller objectives that involved local grassroots campaigns for equal rights for African Americans. In 1955, King became involved in his first major civil rights campaign in Montgomery, Alabama, where buses were racially segregated.

It was there that Rosa Parks, an African American woman, refused to vacate her seat in the middle of the bus so that a white man could sit in her place. She was arrested for her civil disobedience.[2] Parks' arrest, a coordinated tactic meant to spark a grassroots movement, succeeded in catalyzing the Montgomery bus boycott. Parks was chosen by King as the face for his campaign because of Parks' good standing with the community, her employment and her marital status. Earlier in 1955, Claudette Colvin, a 15-year old African American girl, had been arrested for the same crime; however, King and his civil rights compatriots did not feel that she would serve as an effective face for their civil rights campaign. Rosa Parks helped contribute to the image that King wanted to show the world, a crucial tactic in his local campaigns.[3]

With Parks in jail as a victim of Montgomery's racism, King was able to develop an effective response to her arrest that involved the entire community. King mobilized Montgomery's African American community to boycott the city's public transportation, demanding equal rights for all citizens on public transportation there. After a year-long boycott, a United States District Court ruling in Browder v. Gayle banned racial segregation on all Montgomery public buses. In many ways, the Montgomery bus boycott kicked off a national struggle to eliminate racial discrimination, with King leading the way.

The success of the Montgomery campaign led Dr. King and fellow African American civil rights activists to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, whose mission was to harness the moral authority and organizing power of black churches to conduct non-violent protests for civil rights reform. With King as its leader, the SCLC's initial focus was to lead localized campaigns of desegregation in Southern cities like Albany, Georgia; Birmingham, Alabama; and St. Augustine, Florida that mirrored the Montgomery campaign. In each of the cities, King and thousands of SCLC activists worked towards specific goals: ending segregation in just one area, such as diners, buses, schools, or shops. Despite the asymmetrically more powerful police and local government officials who had institutionalized policies of segregation for years, King's nonviolent tactics of civic activism forced the issue of segregation onto the national agenda.

By drawing nation-wide attention to segregation, King became a core organizer, one of the "Big Six", of the famous 1963 March on Washington, which demanded political and economic justice for all Americans. It was a public opportunity for King and his cohorts to place their concerns and grievances before the nation's capital, as expressed by King in his renowned "I Have a Dream" speech. The March on Washington not only led to the passage of significant civil rights legislation, but it also allowed King to advocate for other human rights causes like poverty and workers' rights.

Leadership

Born in 1929, King grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, a city plagued by racial segregation. King benefited from both a secular and religious education, receiving a PhD in systematic theology from Boston University in 1955. Shortly after he began his career as a pastor in 1954 at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, the Montgomery civil rights campaign thrust King into the epicenter of the civil rights movement.

After successfully ending the laws that upheld segregation in Montgomery's public transportation system, King sought to create an umbrella organization to tackle the issue of segregation in other communities. In early 1957, King invited more than 60 African American church leaders to a series of meetings to discuss additional desegregation campaigns, out of which came the SCLC. Leading the SCLC until his assassination in 1968, King utilized the national organization to lead local and national campaigns to end systematic racism across the United States.[8]

The SCLC differed from other civil rights groups like the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), in that it was established as an umbrella organization of affiliated churches and community organizations and therefore did not recruit individuals into forming local chapters. As such, the approach of King and the SCLC allowed a much broader range of African Americans to become involved in the civil rights struggle through boycotts, sit-ins, and other peaceful protests.

King often played a leadership role as the public "face" of civil rights campaigns, and as such, he was careful to maintain a public image that would be acceptable to America's white majority. Diametrically opposed to the militant and divisive image that Malcolm X, the public face of The Nation of Islam, portrayed to the world, King carefully cultivated his image so that people thought of him as a moderate, not as a radical extremist. In many ways his moderate image enabled him to actively recruit a critical mass of white Americans to join the movement; King not only embodied the hopes and dreams of African Americans, but also those of white progressives across the country. He also worked to put a united face on the civil rights movement, serving as a bridge-builder between different activist groups at a time when Americans were increasingly interested in ideas of liberation and equality. He was never seen as fully belonging to any of the various factions that threatened to split the civil rights movement, and was particularly effective behind the scenes in bringing together black leaders who otherwise would have been unwilling to work together.

As a civic leader and human rights defender, King drew heavily upon the writings and actions of Gandhi for inspiration. King felt such a strong connection to Gandhi that he visited India in 1959; the trip, according to King, deeply affected his understanding of civil resistance. King explained, "Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity." King was so dedicated to Gandhi's nonviolent tactics of civil resistance that he surrounded himself with civil rights activists like Bayard Rustin, who had studied Gandhi's teachings, so that they could incorporate his teachings into King's activism.

Civic Environment

King and his fellow civil rights fighters faced enormous and often brutal opposition from local officials and police forces in Southern cities, civil rights opponents, and white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Civil rights protestors were frequently arrested and jailed; King was arrested 30 times for his civil rights activities.[12] Police forces in many Southern cities did not hesitate to use violence against protestors, and some Alabama police forces even collaborated with the Klan to allow vicious mob attacks on Freedom Riders, the first African Americans to exercise the rights they had gained with respect to the public transporation system in the South. Meanwhile, the Klan bombed the homes of civil rights activists including King himself and assassinated activists such as Medgar Evers. However, these brutal actions actually galvanized support for the civil rights movement, as they attracted increased national publicity and mobilized whites who had previously been indifferent to the plight of African Americans.

In addition to the threat of these groups, King was under constant surveillance by FBI agents who were interested in his ties to Communists. Because King was a charismatic leader with an ability to mobilize African Americans, the FBI viewed King as a threat to the status quo and attempted to blackmail him by threatening to reveal his alleged extramarital affairs. King, however, did not yield to these attempts to damage his credibility.

Although many state governments were hostile to the civil rights movement, the civic environment of the United States was nonetheless favorable for the movement in many ways. Post-slavery amendments to the American Constitution provided a legal basis for equality that had not yet been realized in practice, and the democratic nature of American society gave King and his followers some measure of freedom of association. While unsympathetic media outlets in the South had little interest in giving King a platform on which to spread his ideas, the national media was largely sympathetic to his goals.

Message and Audience

From the launch of his first civil rights campaign in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, King emphasized the importance of equality among all races, whether on a bus in Alabama, a restaurant in Georgia, or a voting booth in Mississippi. Moreover, regardless of the issue or the place, King strove to deliver that message utilizing methods of non-violent civic activism that included city-wide economic boycotts, sit-ins, speeches, and public marches. In addition to tactics of mass mobilization, King used his tremendous charisma and skills as an orator to combat segregation; his "I Have a Dream" speech during the 1963 March on Washington is revered as one of the most powerful speeches in American history.

King expertly tailored his message according to its intended audience. As an ally in the Evangelical movement for social justice put it, "He could, in turn, be raucous, smooth, erudite, eloquent, vulgar, and even salacious [without being] a chameleon or a hypocrite." One of King's many biographers, Jonathan Rieder, remarked that King "had an uncommon ability to glide in and out of black, white, and other idioms and identities in an elaborate dance of empathy. Straddling audiences, he blurred not just the lines between them but their very meaning."

In Montgomery, developing a response to the unlawful imprisonment of Rosa Parks, King helped to lead a citywide boycott of public transportation. African Americans refused to use public transport until city officials agreed to change the rules to make them less humiliating. The boycotters' demands were modest and did not even include desegregation. They asked for courteous treatment on buses; the hiring of black bus drivers to service bus routes predominantly used by black passengers; and seating on a first-come, first-served basis with whites in the front and blacks in the back of the bus.

The boycott received strong support from the black community, and since they made up the majority of public transport users, the boycott had a noticeable effect on revenues. The boycotters endured fines, arrests, and even physical attacks, but on November 13th, 1956, the Supreme Court finally ruled that racial segregation laws for buses were unconstitutional. In just over a year, the Montgomery Bus Boycott was ended.

Eight years later, in March 1963, King and the SCLC launched a campaign to end segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, where they hoped to replicate the results of Montgomery. Instead of focusing on a specific issue like public transportation, King wanted to put an end to economic policies in Birmingham that promoted segregation and discriminatory practices against African Americans. Knowing that this would require more intense civic action, King organized the Birmingham campaign to be more aggressive than previous ones. In what became known as "Project C", with the C standing for Confrontation, King and his cohorts of civic activists launched economic boycotts against businesses who refused to hire people of all races and desegregate their facilities, and began a series of marches through the city and peaceful sit-ins at libraries and restaurants that he knew would provoke the arrest of civil rights activists. Explaining his strategy, King said, "The purpose of...direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation."[20]

In response to the protests, Birmingham police not only arrested large numbers of nonviolent activists, but they attacked many others using clubs, dogs, and high-pressure water jets. King, who was arrested during the initial stages of Project C, used his time in jail to write his famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail," in which he argued that true civil rights could not be achieved without nonviolent direct actions of civil disobedience. King wrote that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," and made the case that "one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." The letter, which was later published in many magazines and books, still serves as one of the best examples of civic activist writing in American history. The letter, alongside Project C, led to significant gains in Birmingham by the end of Spring 1963; many of the discriminatory practices in Birmingham were abolished, and the city became notably less segregated.

In the months after the end of the Birmingham campaign, King became intimately involved in the organization of the historic August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The organizers intended to highlight the status of African Americans in the South; however, in order to give the march a more widely accepted audience, it was organized under the auspices of civil rights, labor, and religious organizations. In expanding its message beyond the scope of African American civil rights to universal labor issues, the march took on a life of its own, culminating in the gathering of a quarter of a million people in front of the Lincoln Memorial for King's keynote address. Drawing inspiration from both the Bible and the United States Declaration of Independence, King outlined his hopes for racial harmony and the prospect of equality in the United States: "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.' Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children."

King's speech was met with great applause and admiration from the march's attendees, as well as from Americans throughout the country. The success of this speech and the march as a whole led to the passage of significant civil rights legislation; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the National Voting Rights Act of 1965 legally ended segregation throughout the country. While the passage of civil rights legislation brought King's dream much closer to reality, there was still much work to be done at the community level in terms of implementation, and King spent the next three years working tirelessly towards that goal.

For his tremendous efforts in working towards desegregation, King was awarded the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize and named Time Magazine's Man of the Year in both 1963 and 1964, while posthumously receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2004, having a national American holiday, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, named after him, and receiving a myriad of other prestigious national and international awards.

Outreach Activities

By carefully shaping his message and image, King was able to win support from a number of organizations within the United States that might otherwise not have supported him. King often used points of cultural reference that would be well-known to his audience, whether white or black, secular or religious.[24] To the American Jewish Congress, for example, King proclaimed, "My people were brought to America in chains. Your people were driven here to escape the chains fashioned for them in Europe. Our unity is born of a common struggle for centuries, not only to rid ourselves of bondage, but to make oppression of any people by others an impossibility."[25]

At times, however, King chose to compromise in order to win the support that he needed. King played a key role in changing the tone of the March on Washington in order to make it less stridently critical of the government. The March had originally been conceived as a condemnation of the federal government's failure to address the needs and concerns of African Americans, but at the request of President John F. Kennedy, King persuaded the other organizers to take a less aggressive approach. This change in tone inspired criticism from some civil rights such as Malcolm X, who dismissed the event as a "Farce on Washington," but it improved relations between activists and the federal government and led to concrete change quickly.

On April 4, 1968, King was assassinated as he stood on the balcony of his hotel room in Memphis, Tennessee, while on a trip advocating for black sanitary workers' rights. His death led to panic and riots across the country, but did not derail the civil rights movement from fighting for the equality of African Americans. In the decades since his assassination, activists have continued to work to end racial discrimination in the United States. Their work built upon King's remarkable legacy: a largely nonviolent movement which, despite impassioned and often brutal opposition, tore down discriminatory laws to help create a country true to its ideals of equality and justice.

Learn More

News and Analysis
"African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968)." Wikipedia. 25 March 2010. Davis, Ronald L.F. "Racial Etiquette: The Racial Customs and Rules of Behavior in Jim Crow America." "Home Page." Civil Rights Movement Veterans. 14 April 2010. "Home Page." Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. 14 April 2010. "I Have a Dream." American Rhetoric. 14 April 2010. "I Have Seen the Promised Land." Time. 1 Jan 2006. Ling, Peter J. "Martin Luther King's Style of Leadership." BBC History. 1 April 2003. "Martin Luther King, Jr." Wikipedia. 13 March 2010.
Books
Burns, Stewart. Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott. USA: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
Branch, Taylor. At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

Branch, Taylor. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.
Freedman, Russell. Freedom Walkers: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. USA: Holiday House, 2006. Lawson, Steven F. Black Ballot: Voting Rights in the South, 1944-1969. Lanham: Lexington Books, 1999.
Nojeim, Michael J. Gandhi and King: The Power of Nonviolent Resistance. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2004. Print.

Phibbs, Cheryl. The Montgomery Bus Boycott: A History and Reference Guide. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2009.

Rieder, Jonathan. The Word of the Lord is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr. Cambridge: Harvard Press, 2008.

Williams, Juan. Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965. New York: Penguin Books, 1988

Video
"Martin Luther King: I Have a Dream." YouTube. "Death of Martin Luther King, Jr. 1968 Announced by Robert F. Kennedy in Indiana." YouTube.
Footnotes
[1] "Brown vs. Board of Education: About the Case." Brown Foundation. 11 April 2004.
[2] Walsh, Frank (2003). The Montgomery Bus Boycott. Gareth Stevens: Milwaukee. p. 24.
[3] Barnes, Brooks. "From Footnote to Fame in Civil Rights History". The New York Times 25 Nov 2009.
[4] King, Jr., Martin Luther; Clayborne Carson; Peter Holloran; Ralph Luker; Penny A. Russell (1992). The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. University of California Press. p. 9.
[5] Marable, Manning; Leith Mullings (2000). Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal: an African American Anthology. Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 391-392.
[6] Downing, Frederick L. (1986). To See the Promised Land: The Faith Pilgrimage of Martin Luther King, Jr. Mercer University Press. p. 150.
[7] Fuller, Linda K. (2004). National Days/National Ways: Historical, Political, And Religious Celebrations around the World. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 314.
[8] Marable et al.
[9] Ling, Peter J. "Martin Luther King's Style of Leadership." BBC History. 1 April 2003.
[10] King et al. pp. 135-136.
[11] Ibid.
[12] "Biography." The King Center.
[13] Theoharis, Athan G.; Tony G. Poveda; Richard Gid Powers; Susan Rosenfeld. The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999. p. 123.
[14] Kotz, Nick (2005). Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws that Changed America. Houghton Mifflin Books. p. 247.
[15] "King - Letter from a Birmingham Jail: 45 Years Later." Harper's Magazine. April 2008.
[16] Neuhaus, Richard John. "Remembering and Misremembering Martin Luther King, Jr." First Things. 2008.
[17] Rieder, Jonathan. The Word of the Lord is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr. Cambridge: Harvard Press, 2008. p. 2
[18] Freedman, Russell. Freedom Walkers: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. USA: Holiday House, 2006. p 54.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (Perennial Classics). New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2004. Print.
[21] "Letter from Birmingham Jail." Bates Now. 2001.
[22] Harrell, David Edwin; Edwin S. Gaustad; Randall M. Miller, John B. Boles; Randall Bennett Woods; Sally Foreman Griffith. Unto a Good Land: A History of the American People, Volume 2. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2005. p. 1055.
[23] "Martin Luther King Jr. - I Have a Dream." American Rhetoric. 25 March 2010.
[24] Rieder, 290.
[25] King, Martin Luther, Jr. The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Volume IV: Symbol of the Movement, January 1957 - December 1958. Ed. Clayborne Carson, Susan Carson, Adrienne Clay, Virginia Shadron, and Kieran Taylor. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, p. 407.
[26] Schlesinger, Arther Meier. Robert Kennedy and His Times. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Boggs, Grace Lee. Living for Change: An Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
[29] Ibid.

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Martin Luther King, Jr: Fighting for Equal Rights in America

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Vision and Motivation Although slavery in the United States ended in the late 19th century, institutionalized racism continued to oppress African Americans even decades later. By the mid-20th century, blacks were still forced to use separate public utilities and schools from the superior ones reserved for whites; they suffered routine discrimination in employment and housing, as well as abuse and lynching from some whites, and they were unable to fully exercise their right to vote.

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This shows civil disobedience because when Martin Luther King lost these cases in court he didn't agree with them and organized peaceful protests. He was fighting for rights for everyone and the freedom to be equal.

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Among the most important of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s contributions to American history were his commentaries on the relationship between the law and social justice.

King's views toward the law can be divided into two categories: law as obstacle and law as opportunity.

Law as an Obstacle to Racial Justice

Much of the civil rights movement was a struggle against law: against racially discriminatory laws or racially neutral laws that segregationists used to attack civil rights activism.

Southern police arrested civil rights protesters-including, on multiple occasions, King-for violating practically every criminal code provision: disturbing the peace, marching without a permit, violating picketing or boycott laws, trespassing, engaging in criminal libel and conspiracy. The NAACP was prosecuted in Alabama and elsewhere for refusing to disclose its membership rolls as required by state law. Several southern states went after civil rights attorneys for legal ethics violations. Montgomery used minor traffic ordinance violations as a way to undermine the carpools used during the Montgomery Bus Boycotts. Alabama prosecuted King on charges of tax evasion.

King often struggled to explain why he believed civil rights activists were justified in breaking certain laws-even some laws that on their face said nothing about race-while also condemning segregationists for their defiance of Brown and other federal civil rights requirements. He famously tackled this question in his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, where he differentiated just and unjust laws. "A just law," he wrote, "is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law." Since segregation laws fall squarely in the later category, "I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court because it is morally right, and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong."

A more challenging situation, King continued, involves a law that "is just on its face and unjust in its application." It was this kind of law that landed King in his Birmingham jail cell, since he had been arrested for parading without a permit. "Now, there is nothing wrong with an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade," he explained, "but when the ordinance is used to preserve segregation and to deny citizens the First Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and peaceful protest, then it becomes unjust."

In this particular case, King might have won in the court of public opinion and certainly in the court of history, but he lost in the highest court of the land. When the Supreme Court finally decided to hear an appeal of the conviction of civil rights protesters for violating a state court injunction ordering them to refrain from demonstrating, the Court ruled 5-4 against the civil rights protesters. King and his cause generally fared well before the Supreme Court, but this case was one of a handful of exceptions. Justice Stewart, writing for the Court, reprimanded the protesters in Walker v. Birmingham:

This Court cannot hold that the petitioners were constitutionally free to ignore all the procedures of the law and carry their battle to the streets. One may sympathize with the petitioners' impatient commitment to their cause. But respect for judicial process is a small price to pay for the civilizing hand of law, which alone can give abiding meaning to constitutional freedom.

For King, unjust laws-and the courts that enforced them-were obstacles in the cause of racial justice.

Law as an Opportunity for Advancing Racial Justice

And then there were the laws that King and other civil rights activists wanted: school desegregation orders; non-discrimination requirements for restaurants, hotels, and private employers; voting rights protections. King's attitude toward these kinds of civil rights laws is also quite interesting.

King understood court decisions and legal reform as a central component of broader political and social struggle. Although he certainly saw the importance of courtroom decisions and legislation, when he talked about the power of law, he tended to focus on the difficult work required to give life to basic legal principles. Judicial and legislative breakthroughs were not just moments for celebration. They were calls to action.

King's sometimes tense relationship with civil rights lawyers helped shape his attitude toward the law. From the start of his civil rights career, King recognized his debt to the civil rights lawyers. In December 1955, on the eve of the Montgomery bus boycott that first brought him to the nation's attention, he gave a passionate speech in which he framed boycotters' cause as building on the long work of civil rights lawyers, particularly the dramatic NAACP victory in Brown the year before. "If we are wrong," he declared, "the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong." Furthermore, civil rights lawyers played a critical role in the eventual triumph of the boycott. The boycott was teetering on the brink of failure, faced with a potentially crippling legal challenge to the carpool system on which the boycotters relied, when news arrived that the Supreme Court had struck down the segregated bus system as unconstitutional.

Yet King also sought to distance himself from the NAACP and its litigation-based tactics. There was an element of inter-organizational rivalry at play here-King's SCLC competed with the NAACP for attention and funds. There was also an element of a generational divide at play, as King became more closely aligned with the younger element of the movement that was committed to direct-action protest and lashed out against the legalistic tactics favored by the older civil rights activists.

The work of lawyers was important, King stressed, but it must not dominate the energy of the movement. Direct-action protest was both an extension of, and an alternative to, the NAACP's project of school desegregation litigation, which by the late 1950s had largely stalled in the face of obstructionist legal maneuverings. A new wave of civil rights protest emerged, sparked by the student lunch counter protests of 1960 and motivated in large part by frustration with the slowness of legal reform. To understand what drove African Americans to take to the streets to demand their rights, King explained, "[o]ne must understand the pendulum swing between the elation that arose when the [school desegregation] edict was handed down and the despair that followed the failure to bring it to life." He critiqued what he saw as an overly idealistic vision of the law that the NAACP lawyers relied upon in making their case for Brown. "When the United States Supreme Court handed down its historic desegregation decision in 1954, many of us, perhaps naively, thought that great and sweeping school integration would ensue."

Injustice might find expression in unjust laws, but King emphasized that the roots of injustice are deeper. For King, the law by itself was limited in its ability to affect hearts and minds; to truly uproot entrenched patterns of inequality, one must acknowledge the limits of legal reform. African Americans "must not get involved in legalism [and] needless fights in lower courts," King warned, for that was "exactly what the white man wants the Negro to do. Then he can draw out the fight." This was the harsh lesson of Brown and massive resistance. "Our job now is implementation. . . . We must move on to mass action . . . in every community in the South, keeping in mind that civil disobedience to local laws is civil obedience to national laws."

One of King's contributions to the struggle for racial equality was his passionate skepticism toward the efficacy of legal change when it was unaccompanied by organized social action.

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Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Law - ISCOTUS now

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Among the most important of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s contributions to American history were his commentaries on the relationship between the law and social justice. King's views toward the law can be divided into two categories: law as obstacle and law as opportunity.

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Gandhi and Thoreau both got arrested for nonviolent protest against unjust laws. Gandhi like Thoreau got people to break the law in a peaceful way so that the law would get changed.

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Gandhi did a march to the sea in protest of the British monopoly on salt. He wanted to change this law because people that would be selling salt would charge a lot more than it was worth because only certain people could sell it and Gandhi did not think that was right, so he marched to the sea and started making salt with all the people that marched with him.

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On March 12, 1930, Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi begins a defiant march to the sea in protest of the British monopoly on salt, his boldest act of civil disobedience yet against British rule in India.

Britain's Salt Acts prohibited Indians from collecting or selling salt, a staple in the Indian diet. Citizens were forced to buy the vital mineral from the British, who, in addition to exercising a monopoly over the manufacture and sale of salt, also exerted a heavy salt tax. Although India's poor suffered most under the tax, Indians required salt. Defying the Salt Acts, Gandhi reasoned, would be an ingeniously simple way for many Indians to break a British law nonviolently. He declared resistance to British salt policies to be the unifying theme for his new campaign of satyagraha, or mass civil disobedience.

On March 12, Gandhi set out from Sabarmati with 78 followers on a 241-mile march to the coastal town of Dandi on the Arabian Sea. There, Gandhi and his supporters were to defy British policy by making salt from seawater. All along the way, Gandhi addressed large crowds, and with each passing day an increasing number of people joined the salt satyagraha. By the time they reached Dandi on April 5, Gandhi was at the head of a crowd of tens of thousands. Gandhi spoke and led prayers and early the next morning walked down to the sea to make salt.

He had planned to work the salt flats on the beach, encrusted with crystallized sea salt at every high tide, but the police had forestalled him by crushing the salt deposits into the mud. Nevertheless, Gandhi reached down and picked up a small lump of natural salt out of the mud-and British law had been defied. At Dandi, thousands more followed his lead, and in the coastal cities of Bombay and Karachi, Indian nationalists led crowds of citizens in making salt. Civil disobedience broke out all across India, soon involving millions of Indians, and British authorities arrested more than 60,000 people. Gandhi himself was arrested on May 5, but the satyagraha continued without him.

On May 21, the poet Sarojini Naidu led 2,500 marchers on the Dharasana Salt Works, some 150 miles north of Bombay. Several hundred British-led Indian policemen met them and viciously beat the peaceful demonstrators. The incident, recorded by American journalist Webb Miller, prompted an international outcry against British policy in India.

In January 1931, Gandhi was released from prison. He later met with Lord Irwin, the viceroy of India, and agreed to call off the satyagraha in exchange for an equal negotiating role at a London conference on India's future. In August, Gandhi traveled to the conference as the sole representative of the nationalist Indian National Congress. The meeting was a disappointment, but British leaders had acknowledged him as a force they could not suppress or ignore.

India's independence was finally granted in August 1947. Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu extremist less than six months later.

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Mohandas Gandhi begins 241-mile civil disobedience march

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On March 12, 1930, Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi begins a defiant march to the sea in protest of the British monopoly on salt, his boldest act of civil disobedience yet against British rule in India. Britain's Salt Acts prohibited Indians from collecting or selling salt, a staple in the Indian diet.

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Martin Luther King was born on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta Georgia and died on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. He was a minister and a social activist who led the Civil Rights Movement up until his assassination.

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Mahatma Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869. He was born in Porbandar, Kathiaiwar, India. He was known for his nonviolent philosophy of passive resistance. He was also known for leading India in an independence movement.

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In paragraph 6 he is saying that we all need to break the law at one time to get something done about what we don't like because the government cannot stop us all at one time. I do think that this would be effective nowadays.

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In paragraph 5 he is saying that you should stand up for what you believe in. Everyone that was standing up and speaking out was being thrown in jail for it. I think it would be effective to an extent, but it may not change some people mind.

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In paragraph 2 he is saying that you can either respect the law or you can respect the right thing you should do. He is saying that if you just do the right thing then the law will follow and stand behind you. I think that this would be effective today because if you arent breaking any laws then the government has no reason to shut you down so they will stand with you.

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He is saying that people need to fight for what they want. You also have the to refuse and resist the government. I think that people now do fight fr what they think is right and wrong.