Civil Disobedience

"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer;  a day that revels to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.  To him, your celebration is a sham, your boasted liberty, and unholy license; your national greatness,  swelling vanity;  your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless;  your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence your shouts of liberty, and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisy a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation  of savages.  There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practises more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour" wrote Frederick Douglass.  

Douglass was referring to the grave injustice toward the slaves.  How can America be celebrating when slaves were being mistreated, kill and sold every day.  Shouldn't gaining independence from Britain include all those who lived in America be able to enjoy such freedom and liberty too.  This was not so for the slaves for they were considered to be property rather than people.  America was happy to be free from Britain but America did not reward the same freedom to its slave.  How can you want freedom from a country you consider to be a tyrant when America it self was a tyrant toward its own people.  In the Declaration of Independence it spoke about all men and women are created equal and that they have rights.  But these rights were not awarded to women and slaves.  

Douglass, Stanton and Anthony were agitators who use the words in the Declaration of Independence which was about equality and God given rights, to point out the injustices that America was committing against some of its citizens mainly women and slaves.  Stanton and Anthony use civil disobedience to point out the how women were being discriminated and The Civil Rights Movement use civil disobedience to promote the cause of the Blacks in America.  Civil disobedience has been use as a form to bring about many changes in the government and institutions.