Nonviolent direct action is a means of reform introduced long ago, which is still in use today. The most well-known use of nonviolent direct action was by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960’s during the civil rights movement. King was amongst very few civil rights leaders who did not believe in using violence or other immoral behavior to achieve the moral desire of desegregation. King made use of nonviolence to demand a negotiation from those communities that refused to negotiate, and to end violence against the blacks, without using violent means to do so.

Nonviolent direct action is a method which was first used by Gandhi. As King was searching for a way to put an end to the white racism and segregation in Montgomery, he read speeches and essays by Gandhi and Thoreau on civil disobedience, and began to discuss the idea of a nonviolent resistance movement with his wife, Coretta King (Sitkoff 48). Determined to devise a strategy, King also studied speeches on the application of Gandhian tactics to the race problem, and other historical examples of direst mass action. Being an educated man, he was well aware that acting violent and extreme against the whites would

There are four basic steps to any nonviolent campaign, according to King, and these steps are: (1) collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive; (2) negotiation; (3) self-purification; and (4) direct action (McQuade and Atwan 737). Direct action creates a crisis and establishes tension which causes a community that has avoided negotiation to be forced to acknowledge and confront the issue at hand. Those involved in the use of direct action, had to create such a dramatic crisis that the issue of racism could no longer be evaded by the city. A perfect example of this would be the boycott of the Montgomery buses. When the bus companies refused to integrate the public buses, the black citizens of Montgomery, and a few whites as well joined in a boycott of the bus system, which caused the buses to run into a large financial problem. Without the business of a large portion of the city, the bus company could not survive, and the issue was finally negotiated. This boycott further proved the effectiveness of nonviolence.

To King, there seem to be two opposing sides of black groups during the civil rights movement, those who had become desensitized by the racial discrimination, and had grown insensitive to the issue of racism, and those extremists who believed that violence must be used to get their point across. King and his nonviolent groups were a minority among the other blacks, because they felt that both of these approaches would be futile in producing results. There was an evident disagreement with those who had given up o

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