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Protest, Nonviolent A form of action that seeks to effect political change through nonviolent means. The strategies of nonviolent protest include both legal protest and civil disobedience, the disobeying of or refusal to cooperate with laws thought to be unjust. Although nonviolent protest has deep roots in African American political activism, it is usually associated with Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. King and other activists used demonstrations, marches, boycotts, sitins, and other forms of nonviolent protest to persuade public opinion, force desegregation through economic pressure, create legal challenges to segregation through the courts, and encourage the passage of civil rights legislation. Nonviolent protest in America has its origins in the colonial peace church movement of the eighteenth century. At that time, religious denominations such as the Quakers and the Shakers began to advocate pacifism (the rejection or avoidance of statesanctioned violence) ...