Martin Luther King Jr. And The Civil Rights Movement

Progress Through Peaceful Protest

In a government, laws are designed to keep society stable, giving life a status quo of rules. The law in a democracy has the ability to support the wishes and rights of the people, but oftentimes does not represent the wishes of minority groups. Though democracies are driven by the voice of the people, the wishes of the few can be drowned out by those of the many. The solution, though not often supported, is peaceful civil disobedience. This form of protest can give voice to the wishes of an unheard minority. Peaceful civil disobedience, like that of Martin Luther King Jr. or the Solidarity movement of Poland, positively affects society by correcting civil injustices and by helping to change laws for

In the case of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s, the law was not allowing African Americans to be equal to other American citizens. Both the attitude of the country and loopholes in the laws allowed discrimination and segregation. In order to make a faster change when the country was not willing to move fast enough, King became a leader of African Americans in many movements like the Montgomery Bus Boycott, sometimes risking his own safety to earn his equality. In the case of the boycott, King and other African Americans in Montgomery, Alabama refused to ride the public buses so long as they were segregated, and after over a year of threats, house bombings, and even the arrest of King himself at one point, the United States Supreme Court ruled that laws for segregating buses were unconstitutional. King did break Alabama law in the pursuit of justice, but he vehemently defended his peaceful actions. He justifies breaking the law by saying, “there are just and unjust laws,” and, “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” The voices of the Civil Rights Movement were better heard once nonviolent protests erupted in the 1960s, allowing for legislation for equality to move forward and become law in the United

In Soviet-controlled Poland in the second half of the twentieth century, laborers lacked satisfactory living conditions, mostly because of low wages and a punishing economy. A group of laborers, led by Lech Wałęsa, began peaceful strikes in shipyards of Poland from the late 1970s until their labor union, Solidarity, was outlawed in 1981. Their protests continued though, and at one such protest in 1988, reporter John Tagliabue recounted that, “if the labor unrest of the last few weeks demonstrated anything, it was that the Government and the party no longer has the vigor to use such powers,” meaning that the labor unrest was beginning to succeed over the wishes of the government. The eventual outcome of the Solidarity movement was a list of reforms for the economy, semi-free elections in 1989, and the eventual collapse of communism in Poland. Protests, even today, attempt to change customs or laws that do not work. For example, in the United States there have been multiple protests in the past few years concerning gun violence, police shootings, and racial discrimination. Like the protests in Charlotte, people are gathering to speak out against wrongful shootings by police and others. Many of these shootings, like that of Keith Lamont Scott, have brought society’s true feelings about tension caused by racial discrimination into