What Exactly is Civil Disobedience?
Civil Disobedience is when people choose to purposely break a law because they intend to challenge that law in a court of law, with their neighbor's as their judge.
Civil Disobedience is when you say, “Go ahead and arrest me for breaking a law that I know in my heart is wrong.”
Civic Disobedience has an amazing history of courageous people: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Henry David Thoreau, the Loving Family, the four students from Greensboro, all of them freshman at North Carolina A&T College. What did the four students do? They sat down at a counter designated white-only and refused to leave. They asked to be arrested. Within months, the term sit-in was born, and that was before the internet. It was also the birth of the civil right movement in America.
And let’s not forget Gandhi, and his march on salt?
Meanwhile back in Florida…
I’m a AP teacher in Florida, and you want me to teach Florida history without mentioning the word race? I’m a AP teacher in Florida, and you want me to stop teaching AP psychology because we would have to mention the word ‘Gay.” Oh no, we can’t mention race, or gays, according to Florida law?
Well how about this: I once performed in a play called Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. We had people lined up around the street waiting for tickets on our first night. We sold out every night. We relaunched the play more than four times and were sold out each night as well. Would you shut the arts down as well?
I applaud Palm Beach County Florida for their Civil Disobedience. They have decided to teach both courses anyway, despite the new laws. I believe that the laws system will defend them eventually. Unfortunately, the law takes a long time to catch up and lawyers are expensive.
I admit that I am afraid. Laws can be bought and sold. Perhaps I need the courage of those four dudes siting at a counter at Woolworth.
Franklin McCain was one of the four young men who shoved history forward by refusing to budge.
McCain remembers the anxiety he felt when he went to the store that Monday afternoon, the plan he and his friends had devised to launch their protest and how he felt when he sat down on that stool.
"Fifteen seconds after ... I had the most wonderful feeling. I had a feeling of liberation, restored manhood. I had a natural high. And I truly felt almost invincible. Mind you, [I was] just sitting on a dumb stool and not having asked for service yet," McCain says.
https://www.npr.org/2008/02/01/18615556/the-woolworth-sit-in-that-launched-a-movement