All civil disobedience is illegal. Good trouble.
Protest and resistance and fighting back do not only rely on the desperate. Indeed, the most desperate often do not have the resources to push back effectively. It’s also a case of people saying, this isn’t right and I’m going to pitch in, whether they are desperate or not. The struggle to register black southern voters had many supporters and activists who were not the most desperate or even directly affected. Of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, only Chaney was black or from the south.
A big part of what makes civil disobedience effective in a dictatorship is when the military refuses to suppress the protests. In the protests in Eastern Europe and the Philippines, the military refused to put down the protests. Thats the main difference. A military and police that are willing to violently suppress protests (like you see in Iran) are largely ineffective.
I get the impression that as long as the police and military are willing to violently suppress protests, the protests themselves are still ineffective. The real power lies in the military and whether they side with the protesters or the government. In Eastern Europe, the protests in teh 50s and 60s were suppressed by the military, but the protests in the post soviet era were not put down by the military. In Iraq under Saddam, there were massive protests after the gulf war, but the military sided with the government so the protests didn’t work.
As far as the US, what really worked was legislation. The civil rights acts under LBJ are what really progressed civil rights. That and court decisions. I don’t know if the sit in and boycotts in and of themselves accomplished much other than raising awareness so that civil rights could be passed and enforced on the federal levels by the executive and legislative branches.
Not so! See “From Dictatorship to Democracy” by Gene Sharp. The appendix lists 198 nonviolent actions, most of which are legal, but nevertheless disruptive to the oppressive regime.