Active Nonviolence is Dangerous

When John Lewis went into battle on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, he was armed with an army surplus backpack carrying the weapons of a toothbrush, an orange and an apple, and two books, one of them by Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who writes about the spirituality of nonviolent protest.

Lewis was only 25 years old, but he was already experienced in this kind of spiritual confrontation. When he was 20 at the Nashville Sit-Ins, he and his fellow counter sitters had mustard, ketchup and coffee poured 

on their heads, cigarettes put out in their hair, and they had been dragged from stools and kicked and punched as they tried to get some food and drink at segregated lunch counters in downtown Nashville. 

John Lewis and James Zwerg after Beating

When Lewis was 23, as part of the Freedom Riders form Washington DC to New Orleans, he was beaten twice, once in South Carolina and then again, into unconsciousness, along with James Zwerg, at the Greyhound bus depot in Montgomery, Alabama. In addition, one of the buses was fire bombed in Anniston, Alabama by 200 angry whites, but, fortunately, no one was seriously injured. As Lewis told us the last time I heard him speak, he had been arrested over 40 times and jailed many times. Active nonviolence is certainly not an endeavor for the faint of heart. 

In the next three posts I will reflect on why nonviolence can be so dangerous, the dynamics of civil disobedience, and the spirituality of nonviolence, which is at the heart of the Christian gospel, although the civil rights leaders of the 50’s and 60’s had to go to India and explore the work of Hindu Mahatma Gandhi in order to learn how to appropriate it’s truth and method.

Thomas Merton and the Dalai Lama living in exile in India, who won the Nobel Peace Prize  in 1989 for nonviolent protest as a path to social change.

First, we have to distinguish between passive and active nonviolence. Passive nonviolence, which means sitting back and doing nothing, does not create social change. In fact, it makes things worse by unintentionally continuing to support the status quo. On the other hand, as Merton explains:

The genuine concept of nonviolence implies not only active and effective resistance to evil but in fact a more effective resistance. But the resistance which is taught in the Gospel is aimed not at the evildoer, but at evil in its source. It combats evil as such by doing good to the evildoer, and thus overcoming evil with good (Romans 12;21), which is the way our Lord Himself resisted evil. [The Nonviolent Alternative, 177]

How then, did this approach to social change make its way into the Civil Rights Movement?

James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr.

If you watched John Lewis’ funeral service, you saw a 91-year-old Methodist pastor, James Lawson, speak. He grew up in Ohio, and went as a missionary to India where he studied Ahimsa (nonviolent resistance) and Satyagrapha (steadfastness to truth), the form of nonviolent resistance developed by Gandhi. Returning to Ohio in 1955, he enrolled in the Graduate School of Theology at Oberlin College, where one of his professors introduced him to Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1957, who urged him to move "to the South" by joining the faculty at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. There he began teaching nonviolent protest techniques in the basement of First Colored Baptist Church, along with its pastor Kelly Miller Smith, to students who included John Lewis, Diane Nash, James Bevel and Bernard Lafayette, who became the leaders of the Nashville Sit-Ins.

Diane Nash and Kelly Miller Smith

As for King, he encountered the concept of active nonviolence when, after graduating from Moorhouse College in Atlanta at the age of 19 (he was a brilliant student), he entered Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pa., and learned of Gandhi's use of active nonviolence to drive the British out of India. Then, in 1958, Martin and Coretta both went to India to learn more about the work of Gandhi for themselves. 

Merton explains further the relationship of this method of social change to spirituality:

What is certainly true is that Gandhi not only understood the ethic of the Gospel as well, if not in some ways better, than many Christians, but he is one of the very few men of  our time who applied Gospel principles to the problems of a political and social existence in such a way that his approach to these problems was inseparably religious and political at the same time. [180]

As for the way the civil rights leaders used this approach, Ambassador and Rev. Andrew Young summarizes it in his book A Way Out of No Way:

Nonviolent direct actions seek to change an unjust situation by addressing it openly and publicly in an attempt to raise it “before the court of public opinion” in the confidence that it can be changed without violence. There is no guarantee, of course, and no method is foolproof. However, with nonviolence or, as Gandhi called it, “truth force,” neither person nor property is destroyed. At times you will be called on to suffer, but never will you inflict suffering. [ 89]

As Ambassador Young infers, there may be people at the extremes, both left and right, who try to usurp such active nonviolent protests for their own goals, but those committed to nonviolent change will continue to focus on the need for change through a process that protects both life and property.

The power and effectiveness of this method of active nonviolence was so compelling that, in 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. At his acceptance speech in Norway, King stated:

I conclude that this award is a profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression. 

Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts. Negroes of the United States, following the people of India, have demonstrated that nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love. [A Call to Conscience, 106]