This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The standard account of civil disobedience's modern history runs in a straight line: Thoreau names the practice in 1849, Gandhi applies it at scale in South Africa and India, King applies it again in the American South. This atlas records that line, because it is the framing the sources themselves most often repeat. It also records, on the same entity, that the line's middle link disputed it.
Gandhi read Thoreau's essay, by his own account, sometime after his resistance campaigns in South Africa were already underway, not before them. When later writers credited Thoreau with having shaped that early South African resistance work, Gandhi pushed back directly: his methods, he said, had developed out of his own reading of other sources and his own practical organizing, and Thoreau's essay confirmed and helped name a method he had already begun to practice, rather than originating it. That is a meaningfully different claim than the standard line makes. Confirmation is not the same as causation, and Gandhi, the one person positioned to know which was true of his own development, said the influence ran the weaker way.
None of this displaces Thoreau's genuine, well documented contribution: the 1849 essay gave the practice a name and a developed argument that both Gandhi and King later drew on explicitly, whatever the exact sequence of Gandhi's own early development. What it complicates is the tidiness of a single unbroken chain running Thoreau to Gandhi to King, a chain each subsequent figure is often credited with simply inheriting whole. Gandhi's own account suggests something closer to parallel invention meeting a name and an argument already available, which is a less clean story than the standard one, and a more accurate one.