The Future of Non-Violence
The Future of Non-Violence
The decade of the sixties was such a period of transition, of beginnings and endings, of highs and lows--for me personally, as well as for the larger society-- that I still find it difficult to realize that my three children only know about it from written reports and other documentaries. And yet their beginnings were curiously intertwined in one way or another with the earth-shaking, world-shattering moments that occurred so frequently during that era.
This weekend as we mark the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., martyr--or so we tell the children-- to the cause of civil rights for people of color, it is time to look more closely at his all-encompassing legacy which indeed grew out of his experience of having been born black in white America.
Quoting now from PARTING THE WATERS, America in the King Years 1954-63 by Taylor Branch in reference to an early '60's session of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference: ...[Dr.] King...was reminding his audience of major SCLC events ahead... when one of the white men in the audience walked to the stage and lashed out with his right fist. The blow made a loud popping sound as it landed on King's left cheek, He staggered backward and spun half around.
The entire crowd observed in silent, addled awe. Some people thought King had been introducing the man as one of the white dignitaries so conspicuously welcome at Birmingham's first fully integrated convention. Others thought the attack might be a staged demonstration from the nonviolence workshops. But now the man was hitting King again, this time on the side of his face from behind, and twice more in the back.
Shrieks and gasps went up from the crowd. People recalled feeling physically jolted by the force of the violence--from both the attack on King and the flash of hatred through the auditorium. The assailant slowed rather than quickened the pace of his blows, expecting, as he said later, to be torn to pieces by the crowd. But he struck powerfully. After being knocked backward by one of the last blows, King turned to face him while dropping his hands. It was the look on his face that many would not forget. Septima Clark, who nursed many private complaints about the strutting ways of the SCLC preachers and would not have been
shocked to see the unloosed rage of an exalted leader, marveled instead at King's transcendent calm. King dropped his hands "like a newborn baby," she said, and from then on she never doubted that his nonviolence was more than the heat of his oratory or the result of his slow calculation. It was the response of his quickest instincts.
This impression struck a number of others, including perhaps the assailant himself, who stared at King long enough for...others to jump between them.
"Don't touch him!" cried King. "Don't touch him. We have to pray for him." His words, signaling an end to the immediate crisis, released a flood of noise...One of [the preachers] jumped to the microphone to hold back the crowd, saying, "We can handle this on stage." ...King kept talking quietly to the white man, saying no one was going to hurt him, and the man said very little except to mumble that he believed in white supremacy and that Sammy Davis, Jr. had married a white woman. (pp.653-4)
That happened in September 1962. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., scholarly son and grandson of southern Negro Baptist ministers, himself a Baptist minister with a theological education from an integrated seminary and a Ph. D. from Boston University, had been pressed into the leadership position of the eventually successful Montgomery Bus Boycott that consumed a year of his first pastorate in the mid-fifties. Early in 1959, as the organizer and head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference who had carried his concern over the plight of
Negroes across the country and beyond, he had visited India, meeting and talking with followers of Gandhi and, in the process, deepening his understanding of and commitment to the use of nonviolent resistance as the most powerful instrument of change available to the oppressed.
The year following the convention attack King was jailed again. This time, from his solitary confinement in the Birmingham jail, he wrote in a long letter on the margins of smuggled-in newspapers a statement of his philosophy and his commitment to active nonviolence. In and out of jail, in and out of favor with his peers and contemporaries --black and white—spied on by the FBI, now courted, now shunned by governmental leadership, the next five or so years --what proved to be his last years--were filled with marches and speeches and
protests and demonstrations as he sought the reconciliation of black and white, of oppressed and oppressor.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. And his concept of the
scope of the social ills resolvable by active nonviolence expanded: in April of 1967 he announced his opposition to the war in Viet Nam; as leader of the Poor People's Campaign he was in Memphis in support of the sanitation workers' strike when a sniper's bullet felled him in his thirty-ninth year.
Branch summarizes the legacy of the two murdered leaders: The reaction to Kennedy’s assassination pushed deep enough and wide enough in the high
ground of political emotion to enable the movement to institutionalize its major gains before receding. Legal segregation was doomed. Negroes no longer were invisible, nor those of normal capacity viewed as statistical freaks. In this sense, Kennedy's murder marked the arrival of the freedom surge, just as King's own death four years hence marked its demise.
New interior worlds were opened, along with a means of understanding freedom
movements all over the globe. King was swelling. Race had taught him hard lessons about the greater witness of sacrifice than truth, but there was more. Nonviolence had come over him for a purpose that far transcended segregation. It touched evils beyond color and addressed needs more human than status or possessions, Having lifted him up among rulers, it would drive him back down to die among garbage workers in Memphis. (p. 922)
Perhaps Branch was right: the freedom surge was only four years in duration. But it did bring about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and endowed many people of color with a new sense of self-worth while embarassed, awakened-- guilty--European Americans began to perceive a new definition of fuller humanity. But, the riots which immediately followed the King assassination, the controversy that raged on over our adventure in Viet Nam, the continuing bent toward conspiracy, intrigue and dirty tricks in high governmental circles and the the various attempts we have made through military means to mold the world at least to our leaders' liking, to say nothing of what passes for public entertainment! still bespeak a monstrously violent society.
Martin Luther King, Jr., catalyzed and initiated a movement toward freedom and dignity, reconciliation and peace. But, for the most part, since his death what remains of that movement has been owned by and restricted to African Americans, except, of course for his birthday which so cynically is used as yet another holiday to boost retail sales.
The realities of the sixties-- the beatings, the bombings, the murders, the protests, the sit-ins, the marches over the issue of racial segregation certainly did not result in the complete conversion of this nation to the just society it purports to be. In his last year or so even Dr. King began to realize that the issues of race and poverty were but specific symptoms of a larger social ill. He said: "For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values." And, in good prophetic style, he pointed:
"The greatest irony and tragedy of all is that our nation, which initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world, is now cast in the mold of being an arch anti revolutionary."
The realities of our current decade beset us with continuing inequalities on racial and ethnic bases, with reports of child abuse and battered women, with homelessness and joblessness, escalating poverty and widening class divisions, and with a leadership that continues to see only arms and police action and prisons as solutions to social and political problems rather than placing a priority on our corporate responsibility as a nation for feeding the hungry, providing shelter and education and access to the resources that insure the welfare of all the people for all the people. These realities bespeak a society permeated by-- invested in, violence no less than the impoverished German nation that once played into the hands of a mad demagogue, whose insanity was so meagerly echoed by the near-witless American Nazi "lieutenant" who accosted Martin Luther King, Jr., that late September afternoon in 1962.
In some ways, it is a bleak and frightening world this August 25, 2000. But the potential for change, the possible direction that would build a more responsible, gentler nation that could extend its hopeful and helpful influence around the globe was revealed in the teachings and in the "transcendant calm" of the self-styled "drum major" of the march for justice and peace whose birthday anniversary we celebrate this weekend.
Not that Martin Luther King, Jr., was a god, or even a saint. He did not know certainty and success in all his ventures, nor was he able to break out of the patriarchal mold which infects religion and politics and cultural expectations as we know them. But as an exemplar of nonviolent resistance, he demonstrated that we are not inherently, genetically, inexorably doomed to be ever
characterized by violence against ourselves, each other, our planet home.
Rather in the life and career of Dr. King we may discern our own human potential for constructing a future of nonviolence. Curiously and perhaps understandably, we have no positive word for the concept of reconciliation-through-pacific-confrontation that is alluded to by the term, "nonviolent resistance" or "active nonviolence." But we have Dr. King's example as well as that of many who worked with him-- all very human individuals-- who endured violent physical and
spiritual assaults but were nonetheless capable of caring for their oppressors and able to respond without rancor even unto death.
Ever the prophet, King knew that the Promised Land of a nonviolent future was not likely to be realized quickly or soon. We still hear his resonant sermonic voice intoning: "I may not get to the promised land with you," he said on the eve of his assassination, "but ...we as a people will." His Dream continues despite the nightmare world we inhabit alongside the gentler one which resides in each of us. Our choice of which we will nourish to fruition will determine how many monuments to holocausts coming generations must raise, be they museums or Birthday holidays or graveyards for the homeless and outcast of society. Our choice will determine whether or not there will be a future of nonviolence.
The decade of the sixties was such a period of transition, of beginnings and endings, of highs and lows--for me personally, as well as for the larger society-- that I still find it difficult to realize that my three children only know about it from written reports and other documentaries. And yet their beginnings were curiously intertwined in one way or another with the earth-shaking, world-shattering moments that occurred so frequently during that era.
This weekend as we mark the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., martyr--or so we tell the children-- to the cause of civil rights for people of color, it is time to look more closely at his all-encompassing legacy which indeed grew out of his experience of having been born black in white America.
Quoting now from PARTING THE WATERS, America in the King Years 1954-63 by Taylor Branch in reference to an early '60's session of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference: ...[Dr.] King...was reminding his audience of major SCLC events ahead... when one of the white men in the audience walked to the stage and lashed out with his right fist. The blow made a loud popping sound as it landed on King's left cheek, He staggered backward and spun half around.
The entire crowd observed in silent, addled awe. Some people thought King had been introducing the man as one of the white dignitaries so conspicuously welcome at Birmingham's first fully integrated convention. Others thought the attack might be a staged demonstration from the nonviolence workshops. But now the man was hitting King again, this time on the side of his face from behind, and twice more in the back.
Shrieks and gasps went up from the crowd. People recalled feeling physically jolted by the force of the violence--from both the attack on King and the flash of hatred through the auditorium. The assailant slowed rather than quickened the pace of his blows, expecting, as he said later, to be torn to pieces by the crowd. But he struck powerfully. After being knocked backward by one of the last blows, King turned to face him while dropping his hands. It was the look on his face that many would not forget. Septima Clark, who nursed many private complaints about the strutting ways of the SCLC preachers and would not have been
shocked to see the unloosed rage of an exalted leader, marveled instead at King's transcendent calm. King dropped his hands "like a newborn baby," she said, and from then on she never doubted that his nonviolence was more than the heat of his oratory or the result of his slow calculation. It was the response of his quickest instincts.
This impression struck a number of others, including perhaps the assailant himself, who stared at King long enough for...others to jump between them.
"Don't touch him!" cried King. "Don't touch him. We have to pray for him." His words, signaling an end to the immediate crisis, released a flood of noise...One of [the preachers] jumped to the microphone to hold back the crowd, saying, "We can handle this on stage." ...King kept talking quietly to the white man, saying no one was going to hurt him, and the man said very little except to mumble that he believed in white supremacy and that Sammy Davis, Jr. had married a white woman. (pp.653-4)
That happened in September 1962. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., scholarly son and grandson of southern Negro Baptist ministers, himself a Baptist minister with a theological education from an integrated seminary and a Ph. D. from Boston University, had been pressed into the leadership position of the eventually successful Montgomery Bus Boycott that consumed a year of his first pastorate in the mid-fifties. Early in 1959, as the organizer and head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference who had carried his concern over the plight of
Negroes across the country and beyond, he had visited India, meeting and talking with followers of Gandhi and, in the process, deepening his understanding of and commitment to the use of nonviolent resistance as the most powerful instrument of change available to the oppressed.
The year following the convention attack King was jailed again. This time, from his solitary confinement in the Birmingham jail, he wrote in a long letter on the margins of smuggled-in newspapers a statement of his philosophy and his commitment to active nonviolence. In and out of jail, in and out of favor with his peers and contemporaries --black and white—spied on by the FBI, now courted, now shunned by governmental leadership, the next five or so years --what proved to be his last years--were filled with marches and speeches and
protests and demonstrations as he sought the reconciliation of black and white, of oppressed and oppressor.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. And his concept of the
scope of the social ills resolvable by active nonviolence expanded: in April of 1967 he announced his opposition to the war in Viet Nam; as leader of the Poor People's Campaign he was in Memphis in support of the sanitation workers' strike when a sniper's bullet felled him in his thirty-ninth year.
Branch summarizes the legacy of the two murdered leaders: The reaction to Kennedy’s assassination pushed deep enough and wide enough in the high
ground of political emotion to enable the movement to institutionalize its major gains before receding. Legal segregation was doomed. Negroes no longer were invisible, nor those of normal capacity viewed as statistical freaks. In this sense, Kennedy's murder marked the arrival of the freedom surge, just as King's own death four years hence marked its demise.
New interior worlds were opened, along with a means of understanding freedom
movements all over the globe. King was swelling. Race had taught him hard lessons about the greater witness of sacrifice than truth, but there was more. Nonviolence had come over him for a purpose that far transcended segregation. It touched evils beyond color and addressed needs more human than status or possessions, Having lifted him up among rulers, it would drive him back down to die among garbage workers in Memphis. (p. 922)
Perhaps Branch was right: the freedom surge was only four years in duration. But it did bring about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and endowed many people of color with a new sense of self-worth while embarassed, awakened-- guilty--European Americans began to perceive a new definition of fuller humanity. But, the riots which immediately followed the King assassination, the controversy that raged on over our adventure in Viet Nam, the continuing bent toward conspiracy, intrigue and dirty tricks in high governmental circles and the the various attempts we have made through military means to mold the world at least to our leaders' liking, to say nothing of what passes for public entertainment! still bespeak a monstrously violent society.
Martin Luther King, Jr., catalyzed and initiated a movement toward freedom and dignity, reconciliation and peace. But, for the most part, since his death what remains of that movement has been owned by and restricted to African Americans, except, of course for his birthday which so cynically is used as yet another holiday to boost retail sales.
The realities of the sixties-- the beatings, the bombings, the murders, the protests, the sit-ins, the marches over the issue of racial segregation certainly did not result in the complete conversion of this nation to the just society it purports to be. In his last year or so even Dr. King began to realize that the issues of race and poverty were but specific symptoms of a larger social ill. He said: "For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values." And, in good prophetic style, he pointed:
"The greatest irony and tragedy of all is that our nation, which initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world, is now cast in the mold of being an arch anti revolutionary."
The realities of our current decade beset us with continuing inequalities on racial and ethnic bases, with reports of child abuse and battered women, with homelessness and joblessness, escalating poverty and widening class divisions, and with a leadership that continues to see only arms and police action and prisons as solutions to social and political problems rather than placing a priority on our corporate responsibility as a nation for feeding the hungry, providing shelter and education and access to the resources that insure the welfare of all the people for all the people. These realities bespeak a society permeated by-- invested in, violence no less than the impoverished German nation that once played into the hands of a mad demagogue, whose insanity was so meagerly echoed by the near-witless American Nazi "lieutenant" who accosted Martin Luther King, Jr., that late September afternoon in 1962.
In some ways, it is a bleak and frightening world this August 25, 2000. But the potential for change, the possible direction that would build a more responsible, gentler nation that could extend its hopeful and helpful influence around the globe was revealed in the teachings and in the "transcendant calm" of the self-styled "drum major" of the march for justice and peace whose birthday anniversary we celebrate this weekend.
Not that Martin Luther King, Jr., was a god, or even a saint. He did not know certainty and success in all his ventures, nor was he able to break out of the patriarchal mold which infects religion and politics and cultural expectations as we know them. But as an exemplar of nonviolent resistance, he demonstrated that we are not inherently, genetically, inexorably doomed to be ever
characterized by violence against ourselves, each other, our planet home.
Rather in the life and career of Dr. King we may discern our own human potential for constructing a future of nonviolence. Curiously and perhaps understandably, we have no positive word for the concept of reconciliation-through-pacific-confrontation that is alluded to by the term, "nonviolent resistance" or "active nonviolence." But we have Dr. King's example as well as that of many who worked with him-- all very human individuals-- who endured violent physical and
spiritual assaults but were nonetheless capable of caring for their oppressors and able to respond without rancor even unto death.
Ever the prophet, King knew that the Promised Land of a nonviolent future was not likely to be realized quickly or soon. We still hear his resonant sermonic voice intoning: "I may not get to the promised land with you," he said on the eve of his assassination, "but ...we as a people will." His Dream continues despite the nightmare world we inhabit alongside the gentler one which resides in each of us. Our choice of which we will nourish to fruition will determine how many monuments to holocausts coming generations must raise, be they museums or Birthday holidays or graveyards for the homeless and outcast of society. Our choice will determine whether or not there will be a future of nonviolence.
