Compare Gandhi's Resistance To Civil Disobedience

How does one change a law unjust? How does one let the government realize a law has infringed on the basic rights of man? For Henry David Thoreau, it was through the act of civil disobedience. With his condemnation of the Mexican-American War and his firmly rooted abolitionist views, Thoreau quickly grew disdainful with the American government and began his nonviolent resistance in the year 1842 by refusing to pay poll taxes. During his one night of imprisonment 4 years later, he wrote his essay, “Resistance to Civil Government”, later entitled “Civil Disobedience” which would go on become the inspiration for the social movements of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Gandhi’s acts of civil disobedience were carried out for the purposes of gaining India’s independence form

Among the most influential of his protests, Gandhi held the Salt March in March of 1930 and traveled 241 miles with tens of thousands of people, to the coast of India where he made his own salt. Just two years before India would achieve Swaraj, or self-rule, Gandhi was shot in Delhi. Nearly a decade later Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began his own movement of civil disobedience to abolish the Jim Crow laws and to bring equal treatment to the African American community. Martin Luther King believed in peaceful protests. He held boycotts, sit-ins, and even a 47-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. On August 28, 1963 held a march on Washington, in which nearly 300,000 people followed Martin Luther King to the Lincoln Memorial where he delivered his historic “I Had a Dream Speech”. The Jim Crow Laws were repealed at the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which Martin Luther King attended. Sadly, his life was cut short when he was assassinated by James Earl Ray on April 4,