 Practitioners and other critics maintain that this dichotomy between non-violent persuasion and violent coercion is false on the grounds that there is such a thing as ‘non-violent coercion’, which is furthermore compatible with the goal of moral suasion. Non-violence appeals to the conscience of the public, by eliciting shame and indignation at the witnessing of civil disobedients’ suffering and their discipline in the face of violent repression. After the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott, which unleashed spectacular white retaliatory violence, Martin Luther King, Jr., saw appeals to conscience as insufficient without disruption and “some form of constructive coercive power” (King 1968, 137). “Nonviolent coercion always brings tension to the surface”, he wrote (ibid.), affirming “the coercive face of nonviolence” along with its persuasive face (Livingston 2020a, 704; see also Terry 2018, 305). “The purpose of our direct action program,” King proclaimed in his ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’, “is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation” (King 1991). Non-violent action is thus the means to the goal of both forcing negotiations – an essential “mechanism for social change” (Atack 2012, 139) – and of persuading – its corresponding mechanism for moral and cultural change. This leaves open the question whether confrontational attacks that single out particular persons through harassment, doxing, and ‘calling out’ are compatible with non-violence. Such acts are coercive and, like verbal insults, they may be said to inflict psychological violence on the target.