Christian to recognise the injustice I describe’. Insofar as we interpret King’s
argument for civil disobedience to be based on his Christian beliefs it might be
thought he is engaged in what Rawls terms conscientious refusal, but conscientious
refusal is not incompatible with civil disobedience – a person, such as King, can be
motivated by a secular political morality anda Christian morality. What would be
problematic is to appeal only to a non-political morality.
Second, the Letter was written to Christian clergy, so the Christian references
are unsurprising. Third, King goes on to restate the argument in secular language:
An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding
on itself. This is difference made legal. On the other hand a just law is a code
that a majority compels a minority to follow that it is willing to follow itself.
This is sameness made legal.
(King, 1991: 74)
He gives a couple of examples, the first of which is problematic. Because the
state of Alabama had denied blacks the right to vote they could not be bound by
its laws. The danger with this argument is that even if blacks had voted, being in
a minority they might have been subject to discriminatory laws. A rather better
example is the denial of police permits to demonstrate: King accepts that there should
be controls on demonstrations, but objects to the misuse of permits to deny civil
rights activists the possibility of peaceful protest, while opponents of civil rights can
protest unhindered.
King argues that a sign of the good faith of the civil rights activists is that they
break the law openly and are willing to accept the penalties for lawbreaking. These
are, of course, on Rawls’s list of conditions for civil disobedience. Finally, as if to
underline the stabilising power of civil disobedience, King concludes his Letter with
the following statement:
One day the South will know that when the disinherited children of God sat
down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for the best in the
American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, and
thusly, carrying our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which
were dug deep by the founding fathers in the formulation of the Constitution
and the Declaration of Independence.
(King, 1991: 84)
What makes the Civil Rights Movement an important example of civil
disobedience is that in philosophical terms it took place in the space between the
constitution and lower-level law. This may also, however, raise some definitional
difficulties. The most visible aspect of the civil rights struggle was the clash between
supporters and opponents of equal rights in the streets, on the buses and at the
lunch counters. But behind that struggle was another: a struggle between federal
law and constitutional judgements on the one side, and the Southern states on the
other. It is notable that when defenders of segregation organised themselves
politically – at elections – they adopted the banner of States’ Rights: the rights of
the states against the president, Congress, and Supreme Court. Civil disobedience
was made possible by: (a) the existence of a (basically) just Constitution, and (b)
the refusal at a lower level of law-making to respect the Constitution. It could be
argued that what the civil rights activists were doing was appealing, not to the
Chapter 19 Civil disobedience 441