Nonviolent resistance is a method of protest that employs such strategies as strikes, sit-ins, boycotts, hunger strikes, and civil disobedience. Use of these means to achieving social change is a significant theme in American history, dating back to Henry David Thoreau’s 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also studied the methods of Mohandas K. Gandhi, who led the peaceful movement for Indian independence from England in the 1940s. King insisted that nonviolent resistance, combined with moral and spiritual conviction, is the key to lasting and profound social change.