Martin Luther King

             (1929-1968), Clergyman and Civil Rights leader, was president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the organization that directed the boycott against segregated bus line. This protest made King a national figure. Lewis H Van Dusen Jr. has devoted much of his life to questions of legal ethics. He argues with King the struggle for civil rights set a precedent for the violence, and asserts antiwar and civil rights protesters abuse the concept of civil disobedience. .
             Van Dusen said," the pressures of demonstration are desirable only if they take place within the limits allowed by law" (874). The demonstration was the pressure that forced the government and the people to confront segregation and rethink if the segregation law was right or wrong. However, he believed the pressure to exceed the limits of the law was undesirable. For example, in the Eyes on the Prize, the black students sat down at the counter but the white people customers did not want the black people to sit down. The black people waited to be served until the stores closed. According to Van Dusen, these action were against the law and must not be permitted under any circumstance in order to preserve the democracy.
             King writes," an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law" (815). To King, nonviolence does not mean passively accepting anything unfair or unjust. According to him, Black American must take nonviolent actions to break Segregation laws. Such nonviolent actions are sit-ins, protest marches Even though these actions to some extend violent the laws, they are nonviolent since black people who carry on them do not harm anyone but rather "accept blows without retaliating" (A Letter from Birmingham Jail, 875).