The Role Of Civil Disobedience In The United States

The United States was built on civil disobedience stemming from the sacred rights of conscience and citizenry. Acts of civil disobedience by the United States predate its very foundation as colonies. The pilgrims of the Plymouth colony were known as separatists, leaving their homes in England to pursue religious freedoms and other rights in a new land. They didn’t leave with pools of blood behind them, and violent cries of revolution, but rather peacefully practiced their own ways of life in this new English colony, which was essentially “breaking the law”. When the colonies were finally founded and the Crown enforced harsher taxes and limited free market availability of good, the colonists once again took to acts of civil disobedience. They petitioned for a say in their own government, enforced
The colonists acts of civil disobedience did not stem from an attitude of malice or thirst for blood, but rather from a yearning for fairness for not only them, but the generations that would follow. Though their struggle turned violent, it was through no fault of their own. The English Monarchy and Parliament did not heed the peaceful disobedience of the colonists, and as such, history will remember this as what brought the United States of America into fruition. The nation was born out of civil disobedience, but in her life span, even she forgot about the lessons she learned.
The pinnacle example of civil disobedience in the United States is the Civil Rights movement. The Civil Rights movement produced some