The American thinker Henry David Thoreau probably coined the term "civil disobedience," but he was far from the first to utilize this technique of protest to affect change. Thoreau spent one night in the Concord, Mass., jail in 1848 for refusing to pay his poll tax. He said he did not want his money used to support the Mexican War and the institution of slavery. By this nonviolent protest, Thoreau joined a long line of folks who defied the laws in hopes of changing society. Some ancient Greeks -- notably Socrates -- explored the principle of obeying one's sense of right rather than following the letter of the law, and you could say the colonial Americans who carried out the Boston Tea Party were engaging in an act of civil disobedience, though the colonists eventually moved on to more un-civil disobedience.
Beginning in the early 1900s, Mohandas Gandhi adopted civil disobedience as his method of protest against the British colonial oppression of the Indian people. He took some of his ideas from Jesus' "Sermon on the Mount," which includes the lines "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." With the help of Gandhi's example, India eventually obtained independence from Great Britain, and, amazingly, India and Great Britain experienced subsequent alliances and partnerships. Gandhi called his principles "satyagraha," which means "the force that is generated through adherence to the truth" At the core of Gandhi's movement was his belief that if you are willing to suffer hardship, even imprisonment, for a belief, you will eventually win over the people on the other side. Gandhi called it a "change of heart." If your cause is just, he and his followers believed, eventually the truth will win out and justice will prevail. This separates nonviolent civil disobedience from violent forms of protest -- it requires the protester to hold the moral advantage in the struggle, and it is partially designed to demonstrate the moral authority of the oppressed person or group. A violent protest or resistance movement, however, can be successful and accomplish its goals whether those goals are righteous or not.
Just a few years after Gandhi's assassination, the Rev. Martin Luther King, who had long admired "the Mahatma," put the Indian leader's principle of nonviolence to work in leading the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott. Rosa Parks' act of civil disobedience in refusing to let a white man have her seat on a public transit bus sparked the boycott. The boycott went on for 13 months until the United States Supreme Court ruled that segregated transportation was unconstitutional. Many would say that this protest was successful in part because the protesters had the moral authority and made it obvious with their peaceful tactics.
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