Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And Nonviolent Direct Action

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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Nonviolent Direct Action

Nonviolent direct action is a means of reform introduced long ago, which is still in use today. The most well-known use of nonviolent direct action was by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960’s during the civil rights movement. King was amongst very few civil rights leaders who did not believe in using violence or other immoral behavior to achieve the moral desire of desegregation. King made use of nonviolence to demand a negotiation from those communities that refused to negotiate, and to end violence against the blacks, without using violent means to do so.
Nonviolent direct action is a method which was first used by Gandhi. As King was searching for a way to put an end to the white racism and segregation in Montgomery, he read speeches and essays by Gandhi and Thoreau on civil disobedience, and began to discuss the idea of a nonviolent resistance movement with his wife, Coretta King (Sitkoff 48). Determined to devise a strategy, King also studied speeches on the application of Gandhian tactics to the race problem, and other historical examples of direst mass action. Being an educated man, he was well aware that acting violent and extreme against the whites would result only in imprisonment, and would not allow the blacks to gain respect or consideration, and he knew he had to use this information to form a plan that would force the blacks to be heard, and force the whites to see the harsh magnitude of the racial problems in the south.
There are four basic steps to any nonviolent campaign, according to King, and these steps are: (1) collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive; (2) negotiation; (3) self-purification; and (4) direct action (McQuade and Atwan 737). Direct action creates a crisis and establishes tension which causes a community that has avoided negotiation to be forced to acknowledge and confront the issue at hand. Those involved in ...