Civil Disobedience Essay Example for Free

Civil Disobedience Essay Civil Disobedience is the act of disobeying authority but in a legal and civilized manner. It was introduced by writer Henry David Thoreau in his work named â€Å"Civil Disobedience. †This legal and orderly method of rebelling is often used in hope that a change will be made such as an unjust law. Many people often wonder whether Civil Disobedience still holds true in the day and age. Everyday civil disobedience is used. Whether it is aginst the governmentBack in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, many civil rights leaders and other men and women, young old have demonstrated notable acts of Civil Disobedience, which have changed many unjust laws and treatment. For example, during the 1950s and 60s, blacks were not allowed to sit in the front of the bus just because they were black. A woman named Rosa Parks saw this rule as unjust and unfair to African Americans. One day she decided to rebel against this law, so she remained in the front of the bus. She was asked to remove herself and move in the back and she refused. By civilly rebelling, she was arrested and put in jail for courage to stand up against the discrimination. Now today, it doesn’t matter where blacks sit on a bus. Her act of civil disobedience has diminished bus laws against blacks and other discriminative laws towards African Americans. Many people may say that now in this day and age, if the media believes that a certain law is just, civil disobedience will not work. This assertion sounds very convincing, but just because it is in the media, doesn’t make it just. In newspapers and throughout the most of the south, you saw nothing but African American discrimination. Martin Luther King and the rest of the civil right activists stood up to this in a civilized manner and now you don’t see that anymore. Even in recent news, look at what was going on Egypt. Citizens were fighting against their tyrannical leader and he was overthrown. So the media can’t stop people from feeling a certain way no matter who advertises it. Civil disobedience has been used all over the world for many different reasons and by many different people, ranging from Gandhi in India to Martin Luther King Jr in the United States. With that being said, we should all understand that Thoreau’s theory of civil disobedience still holds true today. Without the theory of civil disobedience, where would we all be? How would anything progress?