What was Martin Luther King's approach to the Civil Rights Movement?

Martin Luther King's approach, or strategy, for fighting for civil rights is best described as nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience. King, influenced especially by Indian protest leader Mohandas Gandhi, believed in building pressure for social change by leading marches through hostile segregated areas, violating segregation laws (civil disobedience) and otherwise directly challenging Jim Crow. He recognized that this strategy would place activists in considerable danger, both of arrest and physical abuse, but this was,...

Martin Luther King's approach, or strategy, for fighting for civil rights is best described as nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience. King, influenced especially by Indian protest leader Mohandas Gandhi, believed in building pressure for social change by leading marches through hostile segregated areas, violating segregation laws (civil disobedience) and otherwise directly challenging Jim Crow. He recognized that this strategy would place activists in considerable danger, both of arrest and physical abuse, but this was, in some ways, the point. The Civil Rights Movement emerged in the age of television, and King hoped to use nonviolence in the face of violence to win public support for his cause. This, in turn, would put pressure on the federal government to enforce existing laws and court decisions and pass new ones, like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

King and other leaders also used direct action to create a state of crisis for local governments, who lacked the resources to deal with the scale of many of the protests he organized. "Flood the jails!" was a rallying cry for many civil rights protesters who put pressure on governments lacking jail space to deal with them to give in to their demands. So while King advocated peaceful nonviolent protest as a means of creating a moral contrast between his cause and that of the segregationists, this approach should not be mistaken for passivity. Rather, King advocated attacking segregation at its heart.