Why Not Every Man?

The record of civil disobedience by African Americans begins soon after slaves were brought legally to the American colonies: they began to run away. Through the years of the abolitionists, the struggle against the Fugitive Slave Act, Emancipation, opposition to Jim Crow laws, and the emergence of the civil rights movement, blacks continued the peaceful protest of their inequality and lack of freedom. The Hendricks also show how the idea of civil disobedience, first suggested in America by Henry David Thoreau, crossed oceans to influence Mohandas K. Gandhi, whose thinking in turn attracted a young divinity student named Martin Luther King, Jr. This powerful yet concise work...traces the idea of civil disobedience over time and place...A welcome and timely book for a broad general audience.-John David Smith.