Examples Of Civil Disobedience

As defined by Merriam-Webster, civil disobedience is the refusal to obey governmental demands or commands especially as a nonviolent and usually collective means of forcing concessions from the government. One way of practicing civil disobedience is by peaceful resistance, like protests. Peaceful resistance to laws have positively impacted society, and I am going to explain using three examples.

The fact of the matter is our nation was built from an act of peaceful resistance. There are many examples of when the American colonists resisted the oppressive rule of the British, specifically King George III. With the Boston Tea Party, many colonists threw tea in the Boston Harbor because of their distaste with the Tea Act. According to history, there were similar responses
My next example has to do with the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement: Rosa Parks. In a Time Magazine excerpt entitled Standing Up by Sitting Down, Parks was having a hard time keeping her seat on December 1, 1955. At that time, African-Americans made up about seventy percent of bus ridership. Despite that, they were bound by law to sit in segregated areas. In addition to that, if a White American was to ask for their seat, then they were to comply with their orders – by law. With no evidence of violence, Parks peacefully refused to give up her seat. Shortly thereafter, she was arrested and fined for not abiding by the law. However, her actions incited the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a peaceful protest in which the Montgomery African-American population refused to use public transportation. Eventually, the Alabama district court ruled segregated seating as unconstitutional. A year later, the United States Supreme Court upheld the same ruling and decided that racial segregated seating was indeed unconstitutional. Consequently, this became one of the driving forces for the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. From this example, we can