Introduction : why not every man? -- Slavery and civil disobedience from colonial times to 1830 -- Abolitionists, 1830-1861 -- Civil disobedience and Jim Crow railroad cars -- Danger : "Have top eye open" -- From the Civil War through reconstruction : the end of slavery -- Thoreau's essay travels across the oceans to Gandhi -- The walls of segregation go up once more -- "Trumpets begin to sound" : Martin Luther King, Jr., and the beginnings of the civil disobedience movement -- A better day.