Yesterday, I ran across a copy of Henry David Thoreau’s famous essay, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. As I reread his essay, originally published in 1849, his words once again resonated in this era of peaceful marches against police brutality committed upon our fellow citizens.
In Thoreau’s time, the stakes were even higher—an abolitionist, he advocated withdrawing support of the government and in his case, stop paying taxes, to protest slavery and the Mexican-American war waged by an expansionist United States.
“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.... where the State places those who are not with her, but against her,—the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.... Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. [...] But even suppose blood should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man's real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing now.”
In an eloquent excerpt, Thoreau writes:
“If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth—certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”
From On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, H.D. Thoreau, 1849
Mahatma Gandhi, impressed by Thoreau’s arguments, wrote in 1907,
“Thoreau was a great writer, philosopher, poet, and withal a most practical man, that is, he taught nothing he was not prepared to practice in himself. He was one of the greatest and most moral men America has produced. At the time of the abolition of slavery movement, he wrote his famous essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. He went to gaol for the sake of his principles and suffering humanity. His essay has, therefore, been sanctified by suffering. Moreover, it is written for all time. Its incisive logic is unanswerable.”
— "For Passive Resisters" (1907)
In his quest for liberty from Britain, Gandhi adopted peaceful civil disobedience and ultimately won independence in 1947. “Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state becomes lawless and corrupt.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his autobiography:
“During my student days I read Henry David Thoreau's essay On Civil Disobedience for the first time. Here, in this courageous New Englander's refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery's territory into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times.
I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest. The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before. Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, these are outgrowths of Thoreau's insistence that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice.”
— The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
King made nonviolent protests a key component to his civil rights activism. “Mass civil disobedience can use rage as a constructive and creative force.”
On this New Year’s Eve of 2021, I remember the crowds of people over these last years, in the midst of a pandemic, peacefully assembling in towns and cities across the world for those who have wrongly died in the hands of law enforcement. For eight minutes and 46 seconds we knelt for George Floyd, with the words, “I can’t breath,” pounding in our minds and hearts. For, as citizens, we must demand justice—it is not only our right, but our duty.
K.E. Lanning