40 Fun Facts About Civil Disobedience

Henry David Thoreau was jailed in 1846 for refusing to pay which tax, in protest at slavery?

Poll tax had gone unpaid by Thoreau for six years when the local collector, Sam Staples, stopped him and asked for it; he refused once more and was locked up.

Gandhi's 1930 march to the sea at Dandi defied a British monopoly on which everyday commodity?

Salt could legally be made and sold only by the British, so Gandhi walked 240 miles in 24 days and then broke the law by making his own at the shore.

Whose 1955 arrest for refusing to give up a bus seat sparked a year-long boycott in Alabama?

Rosa Parks was secretary of the local NAACP chapter, not simply a tired seamstress, and the boycott her arrest set off ended with bus segregation ruled unconstitutional.

Thoreau was living in a cabin he had built beside which body of water when he was arrested in 1846?

Walden Pond was his home for two years, two months and two days, and he was walking into town on an errand when the tax collector stopped him.

From a jail cell in which Alabama city did Martin Luther King Jr. write his famous 1963 open letter?

Birmingham's jail is where King answered eight white clergymen who had argued that segregation should be fought in the courts, not the streets.

Thoreau's jailing for tax refusal, the spark for his essay Civil Disobedience, lasted how long?

One night was all: someone paid the bill against his wishes, and Thoreau walked out the next day with the seed of one of history's most influential protest essays.

In which tragedy by Sophocles does a Theban princess defy King Creon's decree by burying her brother?

Antigone puts her duty to her dead brother above the edict of Creon, her own uncle, which is why the play is read as one of the earliest portraits of principled law-breaking.

Which object, used as a shield against pepper spray, named Hong Kong's 2014 democracy protests?

Umbrella Revolution was a name coined on Twitter in September 2014, and it caught on within days once a British paper used it in a report on tear gas fired at the crowds.

Which conflict of the 1840s did Thoreau refuse to support with his taxes, alongside slavery?

The Mexican–American War began in 1846, the year of his arrest, and the lecture behind his essay attacked it as American imperialism.

In which city did an unidentified man stand in the path of a column of tanks in June 1989?

Beijing's Chang'an Avenue was the spot, the day after the army crushed the Tiananmen protests, and the name and fate of the man who halted the tanks remain unknown.

Who is thought to have paid Thoreau's overdue tax in 1846, freeing him from jail against his wishes?

His aunt is the usual suspect, but the essay never names her: Thoreau wrote only that someone interfered and paid the tax.

To what does Thoreau's Civil Disobedience liken government when it urges citizens to resist injustice?

A machine was his image for the state: a little friction is normal, he argued, but when it requires you to wrong another person, you should break the law.

In Civil Disobedience, where does Thoreau say is the true place for a just man under an unjust government?

A prison, Thoreau wrote, is the only house in a slave state where a free man can live with honour, and he urged abolitionists to risk being locked up rather than pay.

Thoreau opens Civil Disobedience by accepting the motto that the best state is one that does what?

Governs least is a line often wrongly credited to Thomas Jefferson; Thoreau was borrowing the motto of a political magazine of his day.

Which inner faculty does Thoreau's Civil Disobedience say a citizen must never resign to the legislator?

Conscience comes before the statute book, Thoreau argued: we should be men first and subjects afterward, respecting what is right rather than whatever is legal.

In Civil Disobedience, Thoreau dismisses which civic act as a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon?

Voting, he wrote, only tells others feebly that you would like the right side to win, and a wise man does not leave what is right to the mercy of chance.

Thoreau wrote in Civil Disobedience that any man more right than his neighbours already constitutes what?

A majority of one was his answer to those who would wait for numbers on their side: he urged abolitionists to withdraw their support from Massachusetts at once.

By his own account, Thoreau was arrested in 1846 while walking into town to collect what from a tradesman?

A mended shoe was the errand, and Thoreau finished it the moment he was released: he put the shoe on and went straight off to pick berries with friends.

Which Transcendentalist essayist, Thoreau's mentor, owned the woodland where Thoreau built his cabin?

Ralph Waldo Emerson let Thoreau build there in 1845, after other local landowners had refused him permission for a hut.

Who published Thoreau's essay in 1849, as Resistance to Civil Government, in her anthology Aesthetic Papers?

Elizabeth Peabody, a bookseller who backed the Transcendentalists, printed it first; the famous title, Civil Disobedience, came in 1866, four years after Thoreau's death.

What Sanskrit-derived name, often translated as truth-force, did Gandhi give his method of nonviolent protest?

Satyagraha grew out of a naming contest in Gandhi's own journal: he adapted a relative's winning entry because he had tired of the English phrase passive resistance.

In which country, where Gandhi worked as a lawyer for 21 years, did he first lead mass civil disobedience?

South Africa is where Gandhi was thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg for refusing to leave first class, one of the humiliations that turned him towards protest.

Which Russian novelist wrote The Kingdom of God Is Within You, a book Gandhi said overwhelmed him?

Leo Tolstoy so impressed Gandhi that in 1910 he and a friend named the idealistic community they had just founded Tolstoy Farm.

Which 15-year-old was arrested for keeping her bus seat nine months before the Montgomery bus boycott began?

Claudette Colvin never became the face of the campaign, but she was one of four plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, the federal case that struck down bus segregation.

In which Southern city did four Black college students begin the 1960 Woolworth's lunch-counter sit-ins?

Greensboro's protest began when four freshmen sat down at a 66-seat counter; within months the Woolworth's chain had dropped segregation in its Southern stores.

What name was given to the activists who took interstate buses through the segregated South in 1961?

Freedom Riders were testing Supreme Court rulings that had already outlawed segregation in interstate travel; a mob burned one of their buses outside Anniston, Alabama.

Martin Luther King Jr. began drafting his 1963 jail letter in the margins of what?

A newspaper smuggled into his cell carried the clergymen's statement he was answering, so King began his reply around its edges and finished it on scraps and a legal pad.

Which saint did King cite in his 1963 jail letter for the idea that an unjust law is no law at all?

St. Augustine made the point in the fourth century, and King paired him with Thomas Aquinas to argue that the Jim Crow statutes were unjust and need not be obeyed.

Which suffragette founded Britain's Women's Social and Political Union, whose jailed members refused food?

Emmeline Pankhurst founded the all-women union in 1903; she and her daughters were repeatedly jailed, and members who would not eat were often force-fed.

Which American suffragist was arrested in Rochester for casting a ballot in the 1872 presidential election?

Susan B. Anthony was fined $100 and told the judge she would never pay a dollar of it; she never did, and the authorities let the matter drop.

By what nickname is the 1913 British law known that freed hunger-striking suffragettes, then re-arrested them?

Cat and Mouse Act was the scornful public name for it: ministers seemed to toy with weakened women as a cat does with its prey, freeing them only to seize them again.

Which US president's White House was picketed from 1917 by the Silent Sentinels, suffragists led by Alice Paul?

Woodrow Wilson found the first group ever to picket the White House standing at his gates; they were tolerated at first, then arrested for obstructing traffic.

In which dialogue by Plato does the condemned Socrates refuse to escape, arguing he must obey Athens's laws?

Crito is named after the friend who offers to pay for the getaway; Socrates answers by imagining the Laws of Athens standing before him and making their case.

Which Romantic poet wrote The Masque of Anarchy in response to the 1819 Peterloo Massacre?

Percy Shelley's poem has been called perhaps the first modern statement of nonviolent resistance, yet it was not printed in his lifetime, appearing only in 1832.

Which anti-apartheid leader rose to prominence in the 1952 Defiance Campaign of deliberate law-breaking?

Nelson Mandela was himself arrested that year, as volunteers broke curfews and walked into whites-only areas; over 2,000 were held in October 1952 alone.

Which climate movement, launched in Britain in 2018, courted mass arrest by blocking roads and bridges?

Extinction Rebellion made headlines by blockading five Thames bridges in London in November 2018, borrowing the mass-arrest tactics of 1960s anti-nuclear campaigners.

During which war did American protesters publicly burn their draft cards, an act Congress then made a crime?

The Vietnam War card-burners took their case to the Supreme Court and lost: the justices ruled that the ban was justified and had nothing to do with free speech.

Which heavyweight champion was stripped of his title in 1967 for refusing induction into the US Army?

Muhammad Ali lost more than three years of his prime before the Supreme Court unanimously overturned his draft-evasion conviction in 1971.

Which Underground Railroad conductor escaped slavery, then made some 13 trips back to free about 70 others?

Harriet Tubman kept going after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 forced officials everywhere to help recapture escapees: she simply led people farther north, into Canada.

Which abolitionist, hanged after his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, did Thoreau defend in a famous public plea?

John Brown was being disowned by many fellow abolitionists when Thoreau gave his speech in Concord, two weeks after the raid and weeks before the execution.