The Problem of the Compatibility of Civil Disobedience with American Institutions of Government

Professor Black has presented a stirring discussion of civil disobedience and nonviolence as we think of those terms in thecontext of the civil rights movement. In examining the effect offederalism on the problem, he suggests that the civil disobediencethat we have thus far seen, for the most part, is not really disobedience,but rather is an assertion of the national law againstthe state law. Another suggestion, a chilling one, is that whenthe power structure of a state is used to keep a race in oppressionso that change by political means is hopeless, then massive andgeneral disobedience is neither an improper response, nor one whichthe rest of the nation is obliged to aid in suppressing