The disruption of traffic, infringing on a right of access to a public road, is in his view a permissible means of extracting a public concession to an aggrieved groups demands. One might further suggest that even in the first phase of his activism, Kings actions and his rhetoric did not fully accord with the strict criteria for civil disobedience that he adumbrated in the Letter. Critics have a point in charging that King bore a measure of responsibility for the eruptions of lawlessness that would begin to sweep U.S. cities from 19651968, even as the direct-action movement was achieving its greatest triumphs.[REF]. In cases of reformist no less than of revolutionary civil disobedience, it is therefore imperative to define clearly and to circumscribe closely the conditions under which this mode of protest is warranted. In summary, as King presented it in the Letter, civil disobedience may only be undertaken: (1) for the right reasons; (2) in the right spirit; and (3) by the right people. Is civil disobedience wrong? - Studybuff Now, millions of people are being strangled that way.[REF], Violent in itself, that injustice was in Kings view also violent in its emerging effectsabove all in the rioting that began in Watts just days after the Voting Rights Act became law and spread, in the two years thereafter, to hundreds of cities across the U.S. As was the case in Watts, the riots were often precipitated by disputes involving policebut evidence suggests that neither charges of police brutality nor discontentment at socioeconomic deprivation was the predominant cause. And if that official [is nonresponsive], you can say, All right, well wait. And you can settle down in his office for as long a stay as necessary.[REF], In advocating this radicalized form of civil disobedience, King contended that those who perceive a serious societal injustice have the right to disobey just laws to the end of reforming unjust laws or policies. In Birmingham, the very citadel of southern segregation, the movement would either revitalize itself, King believed, or it would fail and all previous gains would come to naught. [REF] It reached its full fruition in the pivotal campaign of the entire movement, the Birmingham campaign in the spring of 1963, which occasioned his most extended and influential reflection on the subject. The difficulty appears first in the fact that, as King at times acknowledged, his expansive, second-phase conception of rights was rooted in principles outside Americas constitutional tradition: We have left the realm of constitutional rights, he remarked in Where Do We Go From Here? It is the non-violent, noncompliance with unjust laws that is ordered towards changing the laws. The constitutional primacy of the legislative power is the institutional corollary of the rule of law. Consequently, its practice must be confined to rare and exceptional circumstances. The ontology of civil disobedience merely sets out that disobeying a law is potentially justified on extra-legal grounds. There is, consequently, no moral obligation to obey them. Because, as Madison put it, the latent causes of faction are sown in the nature of man,. We should explore legal channels first. Two years later, a riot in Detroit wrought even greater destruction.[REF]. That same day, the local newspaper published a public letter addressed to King and his fellow protesters, written by a group of eight Birmingham clergy (seven Christian pastors and one rabbi).