• How Can You Advocate Breaking Some Laws And Obeying Others?

“One may well ask: ‘How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all ”(Martin Luther King Jr.). The Civil Rights movement succeeded in achieving equality and ending segregation between white and black people by breaking the unjust laws that treated black citizens like they were less than human. Civil disobedience makes a positive impact on a free society because it reveals unjust laws, it is done
During the civil rights movement, many people had to break the Jim Crow laws to show the government that those laws are not equal. For example, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man. Her peaceful protest of an unequal law that led to her arrest that soon sparked the Montgomery bus boycott. The bus boycott lasted for more than a year until the Supreme Court said bus segregation was unconstitutional. By peacefully breaking that unconstitutional law, Rosa Parks started a huge movement, which showed how segregation laws were unjust and helped bring an end to them. Civil disobedience helps show society and the government how there was an unjust law and that it needs to be
Civil disobedience is usually done because an unjust law or act is making life uncomfortable or difficult for certain groups of people and they want a change. An example of this is the Boston Tea Party. While the colonist weren’t breaking a specific law that explicitly says, ‘Don’t drop the tea into the Boston Harbor,’ it was still a protest of the Tea Act put in place by Parliament. The Tea Act told the colonists the only place they could buy tea from was the British East India Company, giving them monopoly on the tea sales in the American colonists. Many colonist were tired of the government controlling them to the extent where they couldn’t choose what tea to buy and the Sons of Liberty stepped in. They dressed as Native Americans, boarded the ships, and threw the tea into the harbor. By throwing the tea in the harbor, the colonists showed the British government that they wanted a change and they were tired of their tyrannical rule over the colonies without representation in Parliament. The colonist wanted a positive change in society where they would be represented in Parliament and there weren’t unfair taxes. Without this act of civil disobedience, the United States may not have even existed yet. Using civil disobedience can make a positive change in society and can even shape a