Dr. Martin Luther King Junior urged his followers to exercise civil disobedience in order to bring about racial justice.
Dr. King was inspired by the essay of the same name, "Civil Disobedience" by XIX century author Henry David Thoreau, in it he argues that personal morality and sense of justice is more important than that of any government, democratic or not, and therefore it is a duty of a just man to dissobey the laws of a government he believes is inherently wrong.