Name:
Henry David Thoreau and Civil Disobedience
Do you agree or disagree? Put an “A” by the number if you agree with the
statement. Put a “D” if you don’t agree with the statement.
____1. If people refuse to follow a law they believe is unfair, they should be willing
to go to jail for their belief.
____2. Non-violent ways of working for civil rights may be slow, but they will work in
the end.
____3. Each person should have the right to decide for himself what laws he will
obey or will disobey.
____4. A government whose laws are disobeyed should not punish those who give
reasons for disobeying the laws.
____5. Martin Luther King was right in breaking law when he ate in “white only”
restaurants.
If you agreed with all of these statements, then you believe in “civil
disobedience”, an idea that Henry David Thoreau wrote about in the 1800s.
Henry David Thoreau was born in Massachusetts in 1817. In 1846, when he
was 29 years old he spent a night in jail for refusing to pay a tax designed to
support a war with Mexico. He wrote about this experience in the essay “Civil
Disobedience” (1849). He said that people should fight laws that they believe to
be unjust. The form of protest is called “passive resistance”. The person or group
does not kill or harm any people to protest the laws. Thoreau’s writing influenced
Ghandi in India who protested the British control of India. Martin Luther King
also was influenced by Thoreau. In 1963 King spent time in a Birmingham,
Alabama jail protesting the segregation of blacks in the South.
Place a “T” or “F” to the statement as to whether it is an example of
“passive resistance.”
_____1. A terrorist group hijacks an airplane and demands that political prisoner are
set free.
_____ 2. The Ku Klux Klan burns a cross on an African American’s lawn and
threatens to hang him if he doesn’t move his family from the neighborhood.
_____3. A group of environmental supporters chain themselves to a tree that is
2000 years old to prevent it from being cut down.
_____4. Students take over the school cafeteria and refused to easy any food 14 h
ours until the School Board Allows fast food chains to sell food in the cafeteria.