WHEN is it justified, then, for the citizen to act as his own legislator, and to decide that he will or will not obey a given law?Īn answer that covers all the issues this question raises cannot be given here, nor can a set of principles be proposed that will allow anyone to make automatic and infallible judgments concerning the legitimacy or illegitimacy of specific acts of civil disobedience. In this case, doing one's duty happened also to be agreeable and even fashionable, but this does not change the fact that many right‐thinking citizens, who today condemn pacifists or integrationists for using illegal methods to advance their cause, have themselves used such methods happily and tmashamedly. During Prohibition, a large number of respectable, conservative Americans dutifully broke the law in defense of what they regarded as an inalienable human right. Moreover, such massive resistance to law is by no means confined only to supremely glorious or dangerous causes nor is it used only by revolutionaries, underdogs or outsiders. Millions of ordinary people with no pretensions to being either heroes or saints have employed it in India, in South Africa, in the resistance movements against the Nazis and in the struggle for equality for Negroes in the United States. It is to the point to note, however, that massive resistance to law, justified in the name of higher moral principles like “freedom,” “equality” and “national independence,” has been a conspicuous feature of our period, and one of its most effective techniques of social action. OUR period in history is frequently described as “materialistic” and “conformist,” an age in which governments have enormous powers to crush the bodies and anesthetize the minds of their subjects, and in which the great masses of men and women-presumably in contrast with men and women of other times-prefer to play it safe rather than raise questions of basic moral principle.
And it is an interesting question not only for its philosophical implications but because it has always been a painfully practical question as well, and never more so than today. lt has regularly propelled men into radical examination of the premises of personal morality and civic obligation and, indeed, of government itself.
All, nevertheless, raise the same fundamental question: Does the individual have the right-or perhaps the duty-to disobey the law when his mind, his conscience or his religious faith tells him that the law is unjust? A group of students defies the State Department's ban on travel to Cuba a teachers' union threatens a strike even though a state law prohibits strikes by public employes advocates of civil rights employ mass demonstrations of disobedience to the law to advance their cause the Governor of a Southern state deliberately obstructs the enforcement of Federal laws, and declares himself thoroughly within his rights in doing so.Īn observer can approve the motives that lead to some of these actions and disapprove others. liam Grier and Price Cobbs highlighted this problem in their seminal work, Black Rage, declaring, “The gravest danger we see is that unscrupulous people may use psychotherapy with blacks as a means of social control, to persuade the patient to be satisfied with his lot.DURING recent months, public events have repeatedly dramatized an old and troublesome problem. It leads one to ask: Are these articles written by people who are out of touch with the history of perpetration over generations that others have to bear-a history that is still living today? Are they secretly, however unconsciously, hoping to absolve their guilt without redress? Clearly, we can’t be outraged by racism in Ferguson and then promote forgiveness and letting go as the only door to healing injury and injustice.
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