“Congress shall make no law… prohibiting… the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” These words from the first amendment of the constitution, ratified in 1791, were beautifully written by James Madison to demonstrate the American ideal of a government that must reflect the people it governs. After all, many American people protested in various ways against the British government just a decade earlier because they did not have fair representation. Peaceful resistance has often been the source of social and political change and has historically represented people who feel that their voice is not being heard. Therefore, civil disobedience positively impacts a free society because …show more content…
One of the most prominent and heralded examples of this occurrence is the arrest of Rosa Parks, from which the Montgomery Bus Boycott stemmed. Parks’ act of civil disobedience in refusing to give up her seat on the bus in 1955 sparked a protest and brought national attention to the segregation of buses and mistreatment of African Americans. These actions directly caused the end of bus segregation the very next year, as noted by Prerana Korpe in her article “Rosa Parks and Civil Disobedience.” Herbert Storing, in his essay “The Case against Civil Disobedience,” argues that civil disobedience “is an unsuccessful attempt to combine, on the level of principle, revolution and conventional political action.” However, there have been many times when civil disobedience did manage to combine these concepts successfully, and in the times that this merger did not occur effectively, it sparked public interest and movements that did use one or both of the ideas of revolution and conventional political action to accomplish results. In this way, civil disobedience acts as a way to amplify the voices of the oppressed and directly access the decision-making power of the government, especially regarding unfair