It is the deliberate, public breaking of an unjust law, and the willingness to go to jail for it. The phrase was coined by a man who spent a single night in a Massachusetts cell.
Civil disobedience is the open, nonviolent refusal to obey a law one believes is unjust, while accepting the legal punishment that follows. That last part is essential: it is not ordinary lawbreaking but a moral argument made by breaking the law and bearing the cost.
The phrase comes from Henry David Thoreau. In 1846 he refused to pay a tax that funded slavery and the Mexican-American War, and spent a night in jail. His 1849 essay on the experience, later titled Civil Disobedience, argued that a just person must sometimes break an unjust law.
Thoreau's idea traveled the world. Mohandas Gandhi built a movement against British rule on it, and Martin Luther King Jr. made it the engine of the American civil rights movement, refining it into a disciplined strategy of nonviolent resistance.
King added a crucial point in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. One who breaks an unjust law openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty, he wrote, is actually expressing the highest respect for law, by appealing to a higher justice the law has betrayed.
