Civil disobedience has an honourable history, and when the urgency and moral clarity cross a certain threshold, then I think that civil disobedience is quite understandable, and it has a role to play.
In 1999, I was in St. Louis with Martin Luther King III as we led protests against the state's failure to hire minority contractors for highway construction projects. We went at dawn on a summer day with over a thousand people and performed acts of civil disobedience.
King consciously steered away from legal claims and instead relied on civil disobedience.
There were three Selma-to-Montgomery marches in March 1965, and Rosa Parks had missed the first one. Parks, whose act of civil disobedience sparked the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, moved to Detroit two years later for safety reasons.
I believe that Gandhi was correct. Non-violent civil disobedience is the only way to bring about change that allows people to enjoy the change and not get killed in the process.
You can rebel in different ways. Civil disobedience is rebelling. As long as it's peaceful, of course.
As the remaining voices for civil disobedience are suppressed, the political spectrum narrows even further.
We will continue civil disobedience to fight for democracy and for human rights in Hong Kong.
Yes, what has happened is we have moved from responding to these terrorist attacks as acts of civil disobedience to getting to the point after September 11 that we said, no, this is not just civil disobedience, this is an act of war.
My first civil disobedience arrest for social justice was in 1986 for protesting the SDI.
