This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Martin Luther King Jr. did not invent nonviolent civil disobedience, and he never claimed to. What he built was the largest sustained American application of it, and a specific argument for why breaking an unjust law openly, rather than evading it quietly, is itself a form of respect for law rather than an attack on it.
That argument had two sources King named directly: Henry David Thoreau's 1849 essay, which King first read as a student at Morehouse College and reread several times, and Mahatma Gandhi's campaigns in India, which had shown the method could move a colonial power rather than remain a private act of conscience. King fused the two into a strategy rather than a philosophy alone: organize a mass, disciplined, public violation of a specific unjust law, accept the arrest and the sentence without resistance, and let the contrast between the injustice being protested and the dignity of the protest do the persuading.
The Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 to 1956, which King led into national prominence, was the proof of concept: 385 days of a sustained, coordinated mass action that ended not in concession from Montgomery's government but in a US District Court ruling in Browder v. Gayle striking down bus segregation outright. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which King co-founded in 1957, existed to organize the method again, deliberately, across the South, rather than leave it to arise spontaneously city by city.
King's own formulation, that a protester who breaks an unjust law openly and willingly accepts its penalty shows the very highest respect for law, is not a slogan borrowed from Thoreau or Gandhi. It is King's own answer to the objection civil disobedience always faces, that lawbreaking of any kind erodes the rule of law, and it is the reason his version of the method could be taught, organized and repeated at a scale neither of his acknowledged influences had achieved on their own.