Civil Disobedience Is A Disturbance Essay

Is Civil Disobedience Really a Disturbance, or a Call for Change?

Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. once said that “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws”, indicating several things: one, moral is more important than the surrounding rules, two, the laws of the government may not always be just and three, to not be afraid of going against what is seemingly right in order to make a difference in the world. Many people in the past have stressed the importance of civil disobedience, such as King, Henry David Thoreau and Arthur Miller in his book The Crucible. In King’s “A Letter from Birmingham Jail”, there is an emotional appeal to the clergymen to join him in his act for equality, after he was thrown in jail for parading

King, Thoreau and Miller demonstrate that civil disobedience can occur in different ways, but for the society’s greater good by spreading awareness of the real issues that need to be addressed, and to encourage people to rethink

The Socratic Method also encourages debating commonly accepted viewpoints and embracing the grayness of beliefs. When King mentions the “nonviolent gadflies”, he is referring to a court case involving Socrates declaring that in political terms, gadflies stung, or rallied people to see the truth. By comparing himself, and those with him in the march, to the “nonviolent gadflies,” King establishes that there is a necessary need for civil disobedience to bring about awareness regarding inequality that had to be sparked in people through his speeches and marches. Moreover, King labels prejudice and beliefs that the black people are subordinates as “myths and half-truths” and urges the clergymen to notice and join them in an attempt to combat the racism that