Martin Luther King Jr on Resistance

2. The reciprocity test. An unjust law is a code that a majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. A just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is the test that does the most work, because it can be applied without agreeing about morality: you simply ask whether the rule-makers exempted themselves.

3. The participation test. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that had no part in enacting it, because it was denied the vote. King ties this directly to the disenfranchisement of Black voters in the segregated South, and the point generalises: a rule imposed on people excluded from the process that produced it lacks the one justification otherwise available.

4. The application test. A law that is just on its face may be unjust in application. A statute requiring a permit for a parade is unobjectionable in itself and becomes unjust when it is used to deny the permit to one group in order to prevent it from protesting.

The fourth test is the one students most often omit and the one a good Indian answer can use immediately, because in India the challenge to a law is very often that it is neutral in terms and discriminatory in operation.

How an unjust law must be broken

King's answer to the accusation of lawlessness is the passage the syllabus is really after, and it has three parts.

Openly. Not evasively or in secret.

Lovingly, meaning without hatred of the opponent, and with the willingness to keep dealing with them afterwards.

With a willingness to accept the penalty. The person who breaks an unjust law and willingly accepts imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community is, King argues, expressing the very highest respect for law.

That last proposition is the answer to the whole objection. The civil disobedient is not saying that law does not matter. They are saying that this law is not entitled to obedience, and they prove that they still hold the legal order in respect by submitting to its penalty rather than escaping it.

Two things King says that are easily missed

On the moderate. King says the movement's most difficult obstacle was not the outright opponent of desegregation but the moderate who preferred order to justice, who preferred a negative peace in which there was an absence of tension to a positive peace in which justice is present, and who kept advising the movement to wait for a more convenient season. That criticism is aimed at people of goodwill, and it is what makes the letter uncomfortable to read.

On tension. King accepts openly that non-violent direct action creates tension, and argues that it is meant to. The tension it creates is not violence; it is the constructive, non-violent tension that forces a community that has consistently refused to negotiate to confront the issue. He distinguishes that from the violent tension the movement was accused of causing.

The Beloved Community

MU has asked this term directly, so it is worth a paragraph of its own.

What it names. The beloved community is King's expression for the end that non-violent struggle is aimed at: a reconciled and integrated society in which the opponent has been won over rather than defeated. It is the answer to the question of what the movement wanted after the unjust laws had gone.

Why the method follows from the goal. Because the aim is reconciliation and redemption rather than victory, the means cannot be the humiliation or defeat of the opponent. Non-violence attacks the evil and not the person doing it, so that the two can live together afterwards. King's contrast is that the aftermath of non-violence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is bitterness.

Why it is not sentimental. It does not mean the absence of conflict, which is precisely the negative peace King attacked in the passage above. Getting there requires the tension that forces negotiation, so the beloved community is the destination of confrontation rather than an alternative to it.

Where it connects. It is the point at which King is closest to Gandhi, whose satyagraha likewise aims at converting the opponent rather than coercing them, and furthest from the arguments at chapter 440, where Mandela concluded that a state which had closed every peaceful channel could not be reached by appeal alone.

The criticisms

It requires an audience with a conscience. Like Gandhi's method, King's depends on the wrong being seen and on the watching public being capable of shame. Where the media does not report and the public does not care, the method has nothing to work on.

Who decides which law is unjust? If each person applies King's tests for themselves, the objection is that the legal order becomes a matter of individual assessment. King's answer is his insistence on accepting the penalty: the disobedient is not exempting themselves from the law's operation, only from its moral claim, and the community's response through the courts remains.

The moderate's objection is not absurd. The clergymen's point, that a legal remedy was available and should be used, is exactly the condition this book has stressed throughout. King's answer is factual: the legal route had been tried for years and had produced desegregation on paper and not in Birmingham. The strength of his answer therefore depends on the facts, which is the right place for it to depend.

It is easier to state than to satisfy. The self-purification stage is demanding, and a movement that skips it produces the violence it disclaims.

A worked example

A municipal corporation makes a rule that no person may sleep in a public place at night, and enforces it only against people living on the pavements in one part of the city, while the same conduct at a festival or a public celebration is never proceeded against.

Test 1. Does it uplift or degrade? A rule whose enforcement takes away the only place a person has to sleep degrades.

Test 2. Do the rule-makers accept it themselves? They are not affected by it at all, and could not be. That is the reciprocity test failing.

Test 3. Did the affected group take part in making it? Pavement dwellers are among the least represented people in any municipal process, and many are migrants without a local vote.

Test 4. Is the application discriminatory? The rule is neutral on its face and is enforced against one group only. King's fourth test is satisfied on its own.

And how it would be resisted. Openly, with prior notice; without hostility to the officers enforcing it; with the participants prepared to be arrested and not to resist arrest; and with the penalty accepted rather than evaded. Notice that in India there is also a strong legal challenge available on the same facts, so King's own sequence would require negotiation and the legal route first, and only then direct action.

Distinctions that carry marks

What King is NOT saying

He is not saying law does not matter. His claim is the opposite: accepting the penalty is what shows respect for law.

He is not licensing evasion. Secret breach is excluded by the requirement of openness.

"Unjust law is no law" is used morally, not technically. King is not making the jurisprudential claim that such a rule fails to exist as law; he is saying it lacks moral claim, which is why he still expects to be punished under it.

He is not saying negotiation is pointless. It is step two of his own sequence, and his argument is that it had been tried and had failed on these facts.

Quick revision

1. The setting: Birmingham, April 1963, answering clergymen who agreed with the goal and objected to the method as untimely.
2. Four steps: collection of the facts; negotiation; self-purification; direct action.
3. Four tests for an unjust law: it degrades human personality; it is a code the majority imposes on a minority without binding itself; it is inflicted on those denied a part in enacting it; and it is just on its face and unjust in application.
4. How to break it: openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty, which expresses the highest respect for law.
5. The moderate: preferring a negative peace, the absence of tension, to a positive peace in which justice is present, and always advising the movement to wait.
6. Tension is deliberate, and is constructive and non-violent, aimed at a community that has refused to negotiate.
7. Criticisms: it needs an audience with a conscience; it puts the identification of unjust laws in individual hands, answered by the acceptance of the penalty; and the moderate's objection stands wherever an effective legal remedy really is available.

Test yourself

1. Give King's tests for distinguishing a just from an unjust law. First, the moral test: a just law uplifts human personality and an unjust law degrades it. Second, the reciprocity test: an unjust law is a code a majority compels a minority to obey while not making it binding on itself, and this test can be applied without agreement about morality by asking whether the makers exempted themselves. Third, the participation test: a law is unjust if inflicted on a minority that had no part in enacting it, having been denied the vote. Fourth, the application test: a law just on its face becomes unjust when used against one group, as with a parade permit requirement applied to deny a permit only to those protesting.

2. What are the four steps of a non-violent campaign, and what does self-purification involve? Collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive; negotiation with those able to remedy them; self-purification; and direct action, which is undertaken only after the first three. Self-purification is a formal stage in which the participants train and test themselves, asking whether they are able to endure being struck without striking back and to accept imprisonment without bitterness, and withdrawing if they cannot, since a movement that omits this stage produces the violence it disclaims.

3. How does King answer the charge that civil disobedience is lawlessness? By the manner of the breach. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly rather than evasively, lovingly rather than with hatred of the opponent, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. A person who breaks such a law and willingly accepts imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community is, on his argument, expressing the very highest respect for law, because they deny the moral claim of one rule while submitting to the legal order's response rather than escaping it.

4. What did King say about the moderate, and why is it uncomfortable? That the movement's greatest obstacle was not the outright segregationist but the moderate who preferred order to justice, who preferred a negative peace consisting in the absence of tension to a positive peace in which justice is present, and who constantly advised waiting for a more convenient season. It is uncomfortable because it is directed at people of goodwill who agree with the goal, and because the advice to wait is exactly what a reasonable and sympathetic person is most likely to give.

5. Compare King and Gandhi. Both require non-violence, prior negotiation, self-discipline and acceptance of the penalty, and King had studied Gandhi's campaigns closely. King's distinctive additions are a set of four testable criteria for identifying an unjust law, of which the reciprocity and participation tests can be applied without moral agreement; the express embrace of constructive, non-violent tension as the object of direct action rather than as its unfortunate consequence; and the identification of the sympathetic moderate, rather than the opponent, as the principal obstacle.