Rosa Parks And Civil Disobedience

Civil disobedience is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “refusal to obey governmental demands or commands especially as a nonviolent and usually collective means of forcing concessions from the government.” Civil disobedience happens because someone sees a law that goes against what they believe. If the law directly affects them and they cannot, in good conscience, obey that law, civil disobedience would be disobeying that law; or, if the law that goes against what they believe affects someone else, they may disobey other laws to make their point. Peaceful resistance to laws can positively impact a free society when used wisely and carefully. The United States of America began with a revolution. This caused upheaval and chaos, but when it was over, it turned out to be worth it. The people who participated in that revolution knew that they would suffer for resisting unjust laws. They fought anyway, for their

Rosa Parks used this form of resistance when she refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in 1955. The following quote is from an article called “Rosa Parks and Civil Disobedience,” published on newseum.org by Prerana Korpe: "Parks had taken a seat near the middle of the bus, just behind the 'whites only' section. When the bus filled up and no seats remained, the driver ordered four African Americans, including Parks, to clear their seats so that a white man could sit down. All but Parks acquiesced. "Parks was arrested for her act of civil disobedience and convicted of violating the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation in the South until 1965. Her arrest and subsequent appeal helped spark a 381-day-long boycott of public buses led by Martin Luther King Jr. and a court case that took Alabama’s discriminatory laws all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. […] The boycott ended when bus segregation was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in