MLK’s Philosophy of Non-Violence Considered

The annual commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday provides the opportunity to reflect once more on his impact as eloquent champion and voice for the Black Freedom struggle during the Civil Rights era, often referred to as the “Movement” of the 1950s and 1960s. This post highlights reminiscences related by activists about his role and influence on the struggle.

It was early on my graduate school career when I encountered the critique (made by the anthropologist Eric Wolf, among others) regarding scholarship that steers clear of engaging complex, contradictory and untidy social and cultural processes and opts instead for neat, tidy and un-nuanced explanations. In this mode of analysis our understanding of the past is so reduced that it fosters the belief that “history is just one da** thing after another.” I was reminded again of that adage while writing this blog about Dr. King’s life’s work in the Black Freedom Struggle, particularly the philosophy and practice of non-violence.

The phrase about history resonates with the drily sarcastic assessment of the late Julian Bond, prominent civil rights activist and former Congressman from Georgia, that public understanding of the multiple dimensions of the struggle has been distilled down to the phrase, “Rosa sat down, Martin stood up, then the white folks saw the light and saved the day.” (Say Burgin, “Julian Bond’s ‘Time to Teach’: An Interview with Jeanne Theoharis,” 2021). Elaborating on Bond’s summation, casting the spotlight on singular individuals and dynamic leaders doing heroic things in the cause consigns the actions of others to the footnotes of history. Interpretations in this vein, whether academic or journalistic, diminish historical understanding of the complexity and dynamism, not only of the freedom struggle, but more broadly of the ways in which social movements arise, develop and change (and fail) over time.

The philosophy of non-violent direct action that underpinned the Movement is a key case in point. It was central to Dr. King’s strategic approach to combatting the systemic, racial oppression that denied African Americans their basic human rights in all aspects of society. Dr. King and his many followers, especially the organization he led, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), put the strategy into action during protests, marches and on the picket lines to raise consciousness of oppression and discrimination in public institutions, the voting booth, and restaurants. Photographs and televised images from the front lines of the struggle magnified the contrast between peaceful, African American protesters and their brutalization by police dogs, water cannons, and crowds of angry whites in the Deep South. The narrative framing is that the public awareness and outrage expressed by white Americans who viewed these images on their television screens or read countless articles about such occurrences swayed politicians’ attitudes and hastened the passage of legislation to dismantle segregation in law and in practice.

While the able leadership of Dr. King is the predominant focus of retrospective accounts, contrasting and contradictory perspectives advanced by Movement activists regarding strategy, tactics, and approaches in achieving these goals, are mostly written out of linear narratives that focus on the successes and failures of iconic leaders. In the text to follow, I foreground the ambivalent views of activists regarding non-violence during interviews we recorded with them for the Civil Rights History Project (2010-16). Their experiences provide a more nuanced picture and a necessary corrective to the dominant narrative about this aspect of the freedom struggle.

Dr. King’s most public, and famous, statement on non-violence is contained in the well-known Letter from Birmingham Jail,” during his incarceration during the 1963 Birmingham campaign to desegregate the city’s institutions and places of business. King’s message to white moderates, especially clergymen, who opposed the campaign rejects their call to stand down. His stance is that there is a moral imperative to engage injustice peacefully and that the practical purpose behind the philosophy of nonviolent confrontation of segregationists is to “create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.” He is clear that the protesters intend to “present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community.”

The contradictions and tensions between Dr. King and his presumed community of fellow clergymen over engaging in public confrontations with the power structure were also evident within the coalition of organizations that comprised the Black freedom movement, albeit for rather different reasons. Within the Movement coalition, not all activists embraced the nonviolent approach whole-heartedly, but did see its utility in the field.

Even as early as 1960, tensions were felt within the Movement. Charles “Chuck” McDew, a South Carolina State college student, was elected to be a representative to the inaugural organizing meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on the Shaw University campus in Raleigh, North Carolina, in April 1960. From the outset, McDew and several student activists were not convinced that Dr. King’s idealization and adoption of Gandhian non-violent resistance that the Mahatma had developed against British colonial rule in India would work in the context of the Deep South in the United States.

As he notes: “[During] that meeting, Dr. King felt we should all join SCLC. I disagreed, because Dr. King felt if you joined, if you used the practice of nonviolence, that you should accept nonviolence as a way of life in your life. I disagreed with that, because, I said, ‘Yes, I use nonviolence, and we use nonviolence, but it’s – for me, it was strictly a tactic.’  And I didn’t believe – and personally, I didn’t believe it would work. It was a tactic that I think had a – I felt –  had a short life and wouldn’t work. […] As I said, in the United States nonviolence won’t work, because when Gandhi used, in India, the tactic of having people lay down on railroad tracks to protest, I said, ‘and it worked.’ I said, ‘But if a group of black people lay down on railroad tracks here, in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana, any of these Southern states, a train would run you over and back up to make certain you are dead.’ You cannot make a moral appeal in the midst of an amoral society. And I said that it was not immoral, [that] we lived in a society that was amoral, and as such, nonviolence was not going to work. And so, I said, I couldn’t.. and the people with me could not …join Dr. King. And, ‘Thank you, but no thanks.’” (Excerpt begins at 45:48 in the interview below.)
<p

Courtland Cox, Howard University student and another founding member of SNCC, points to the different positions held by the delegation from his institution as opposed to the contingent from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. In the segment of his interview presented here, he talks about Fisk students Diane Nash and John Lewis and their mentor, the Reverend James Lawson. Reverend Lawson’s deep knowledge and practice of Gandhian philosophy was a central aspect of his pacificist stance as a Christian minister. For these reasons he was an important model for Dr. King. Cox, like McDew and others, notes that the Howard group viewed non-violence as a tactic in sharp contrast to those for whom “non-violence was a way of life.” (Excerpt starts at 24:42 in the interview below.)

Debates, discussions and arguments about on the topic became starkly real to the student volunteers and others who traveled from their Northern colleges to the South during the early 1960’s to help African American community members gain voting rights or to teach in Freedom Schools. Once on the ground, they were unprepared for the violence perpetrated both against local African Americans and also against themselves or as the white segregationists labeled them, “outside agitators.” In some circumstances, abstract philosophy ran headlong into everyday life when students who were committed to the philosophy of non-violence had to reconcile the reality of living and working among African American community members who were armed not only for self-defense but also to protect the students.

Ruby Sales was a seventeen year old Tuskegee College who went to join SNCC in the actions for voting rights in Montgomery during the Alabama Voting Rights Campaign in March 1965. She and other student volunteers very quickly found themselves in the cross hairs of law enforcement officers and deputized posses who beat and chased them down on horseback. In this interview for the CRHP, she recalls in vivid detail losing her naivete from the shock at the brutality and then witnessing the power of non-violence in the actions of a friend and colleague under these dire circumstances. “[What] I’m trying to say is that that day shook my life when the horses started charging and the men, and those white men started swinging the billy clubs. And I must tell you I was so naïve – I’m almost ashamed to admit this – that I kept looking up in the sky, because I had grown up with this notion of God on a mighty chariot delivering God’s children. And if you were doing the right thing, then you would be delivered. And I waited and waited and waited, and no chariot, and no God. And that day I lost my Southern Baptist religion and began to contextualize the world beyond theological terms, looking for social and economic terminologies to explain the world.” (Excerpt begins at 16:23 in the video below.)

The last word on this topic for this post is, naturally Dr. King’s. In selecting images for this post from the the Glen Pearcy collection of photographs of the Alabama Voting Rights Campaign in 1965 I was reminded of Dr. King’s powerful statement after the historic Selma to Montgomery March had concluded. He invokes memories of victims of violence like Jimmy Lee Jackson and the Reverend James Reeb and the four girls murdered in the Birmingham church bombing, all in in Alabama, and also the civil rights workers in Mississippi, and makes the plea to ensure they did not die in vain. In the concluding paragraphs of his speech, he states, “And so as we go away this afternoon, let us go away more than ever before committed to this struggle and committed to nonviolence. I must admit to you that there are still some difficult days ahead. We are still in for a season of suffering in many of the black belt counties of Alabama, many areas of Mississippi, many areas of Louisiana. I must admit to you that there are still jail cells waiting for us, and dark and difficult moments. But if we will go on with the faith that nonviolence and its power can transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows, we will be able to change all of these conditions.”