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Civil Disobedience And Civil Rights Essay

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Crawford 1
Land, water, sky. These are the seemingly immutable components of the Earth that we all feel are our birthright. Now place yourself in the position of the native American people, land removed from their ancestral use and many times themselves being removed from the land of their birth and relocated to small land holdings on the poorest, “worthless” land available. Water dammed, rerouted, and apportioned to non-native landholders. Skies filled with pollution from strip mining of those same ancestral lands, or irradiated with atomic waste in the name of “National Security”. These rights of land, water, and sky ratified by treaties which have been repeatedly violated by State and Federal government when the marginal land “given” was …show more content…

Braving attack dogs, fire hoses, barb wire wrapped clubs wielded by a brutal police force determined to retain the “whites only” lifestyle that had been in place for generations, the marchers, primarily black citizens pushed to beyond their limits by segregation, met these attacks with bravery and non-violence. In response to a published open letter, “A Call for Unity”, written by eight white Alabama clergymen against Martin Luther King Jr. and his methods, although supposedly in favor of desegregation they wanted blacks to withdraw their support from King, referring to him as an outsider. King was provoked by this attack and started writing a response on the newspaper that had been smuggled to him. Originally titled, “Why We Can’t Wait” he transformed it into, “Letter from …show more content…

However, there are salient points in the Declaration that are instructive as to what constitutes civil disobedience and what doesn’t. Justifiable disobedience to the ruling party in regards to unresolved oppression, and unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness come immediately to mind, but the willingness, and the outright threat of resorting to violence to obtain the object of separation from Britain moves this action out of the realm of

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