The Moral Obligation of Civil Disobedience

I attended St. Agnes School in the Oakland neighborhood of the City of Pittsburgh. Contrary to what one might expect, I was one of only a handful of Catholic students enrolled in the school; the typical student at St. Agnes School was black and non-Catholic, with their parents seeking a place of refuge from the Pittsburgh Public Schools.

As such, the battle against slavery and racial segregation in this country occupied a significant part of our instruction time. We learned about the heroes of the Civil Rights Movement, from Rosa Parks to Martin Luther King, Jr. We learned that progress was made specifically by those who refused to obey unjust laws.

In my young, innocent mind, I was left with a simple thought that I have held onto until today: slavery and segregation only were allowed to exist because supposedly “good” people sinned through indifference, and they only came to an end when enough people arose who refused to conform to the injustice of the status quo.

My thoughts along these lines were given further substance when Henry David Thoreau’s “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” was assigned to us in my sophomore year of high school. The moral obligation to disobey unjust laws non-violently and then to accept punishment in the hopes of forcing change was one of the major lessons I took away from my Catholic schooling. The willingness to embrace the consequences of such non-violent direct action was one of the things I admired about the political left, even if I did not count myself one of its members.