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Their philosophy was that immoral laws could be changed through the constitutional process and that even non-violent and civil disobedience was a form of lawlessness and that it is not acceptable to violate any laws even to achieve justice.
5.) According to Zinn, what were the achievements of the Civil Rights era and what has yet to be achieved?
Zinn acknowledges that the United States made tremendous progress in racism. However, he also warns that there are still many remaining areas of inequality between white and black society that have lasted much longer. In almost every measure of the quality of life, black people have fewer advantages than white people and they still face prejudice and discrimination. Zinn suggests that there is still a substantial amount of racism in the country that exists on more subtle levels that, in some ways makes it harder to address effectively.
1.) What is your gut reaction to this reading?
I agree with Martin Luther King Jr. completely: it...
The authorities who wrote and enforced those laws were some of the racists.
2.) Explain the philosophies of love and of human nature that fuel non-violent activists in their practice of non-injury toward another, even if he/she is getting attacked
The philosophies of love and human nature that fuel non-violent activities must do so from a higher level than the unjust actions they oppose. It is not immoral to violate man-made laws if those laws are unjust, but it is not moral to commit violence even in defense if one can be rescued without causing them harm.
3.) Explain the concept of moral and immoral laws
Martin Luther King Jr. explained the concept of moral and immoral laws. According to him, manmade laws can be as immoral and as corrupt as the people and governments that write them. In Germany, the government wrote laws that required citizens to report the locations where Jews were hiding so that they could be exterminated. When human laws are immoral, man has every right to violate them for the sake of morality.
Civil Disobedience Thoreau's Disobedience Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience not only gives a startlingly strong argument against paying one's taxes (which is in itself a difficult task), it also gives a subtle but clear image of Thoreau himself. In this essay, the reader discovers a writer who is at once romantic and cynical, idealistically self-sacrificing and fiercely self-centered, areligious and mystical. It would be tempting to portray Thoreau as inconsistent or somehow
Civil Disobedience The Trial of Socrates The Athenians suffered a crushing defeat in 404 B.C.E. with the end of the Peloponnesian War. A Spartan occupation force controlled the city, and instituted the rule of the Thirty Tyrants to replace Athenian democracy. While a form of democracy was reinstated it lacked the acceptance of ideas and freedom of speech that had been such an integral part of Athenian society (Rogers). In Athens at this
John Locke's social theory not only permits disobedience but also a revolution if the State violates its side of the contract. Martin Luther King, Jr. says that civil disobedience derives from the natural law tradition in that an unjust law is not a law but a perversion of it. He, therefore, sees consenting to obey laws as not extending or including unjust laws. At present, a new and different form
Civil Disobedience: Thoreau's research on civil disobedience puts it as the refusal by the citizens to obey laws or even pay taxes in a country. The end result of the disobedience is normally war, especially when the citizens want to take laws into their hands. The decision by citizens to take the law into their hands forces the government to act forcefully, which results in the war. However, when proper procedures
Regardless, to condemn Brown to death in Thoreau's view demoted the far greater human destruction of life via the institution of enslavement Brown attempted to end. This does not seem so much to be a contradiction or a defense of violence but a tempering of the anger that Brown created in the hearts of many Americans, and an attempt to put the violent acts of Brown in the context
Pharisaical practices are as popular today as they may be supposed to have been in the time of Christ -- and one of the biggest hypocrisies of our time is what Roosevelt called "the great arsenal of democracy," the shield-phrase with which the U.S. would pursue its policy of "manifest destiny" all over the globe (and an ideology it had been pursuing since the end of the 19th century when