Revolutionary Nonviolence

Organizing for Freedom

James M. Lawson Jr

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780520387850
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Sozialgeschichte

A persuasive account of the philosophy and power of nonviolence organizing, and a resource for building and sustaining effective social movements. Despite the rich history of nonviolent philosophy, many people today are unfamiliar with the basic principles and practices of nonviolence––even as these concepts have guided so many direct-action movements to overturn forms of racial apartheid, military and police violence, and dictatorships around the world. Revolutionary Nonviolence is a crucial resource on the long history of nonviolent philosophy through the teachings of Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., one of the great practitioners of revolution through deliberate and sustained nonviolence. His ongoing work demonstrates how we can overcome violence and oppression through organized direct action, presenting a powerful roadmap for a new generation of activists. Rev. Lawson's work as a theologian, pastor, and social-change activist has inspired hope and liberation for more than sixty years. To hear and see him speak is to experience the power of the prophetic tradition in the African American and social gospel. In Revolutionary Nonviolence, Michael K. Honey and Kent Wong reflect on Rev. Lawson's talks and dialogues, from his speeches at the Nashville sit-in movement in 1960 to his lectures in the current UCLA curriculum.This volume provides a comprehensive introduction to Rev. Lawson's teachings on how to center nonviolence in successfully organizing for change.

1

The Power of Nonviolence in the Fight for Racial Justice

I have been teaching nonviolence for the past sixty years, since the launch of the Nashville sit-in campaign in 1960. Although I have taught nonviolence over the decades, this is the first publication that captures my teachings on the four steps to a nonviolent campaign.

Nonviolence is a living and breathing science. It has been called the most powerful force on earth, one that has shaped human history and propelled us forward. Since 1789, the United States has not reached a consensus on the meaning and practice of nonviolence. From 1789 until 1954, the Supreme Court never issued a decision that said all the residents of the United States of America are the people of the United States of America. On the contrary, the Supreme Court declared in several cases that Black people had no human rights that any white person needed to consider. The Supreme Court also said that a corporation is a person and therefore is a recipient of the human rights that God the Creator has given all humankind. And until very recently, the Supreme Court did not acknowledge that women are of equal worth and equal importance in our society.

Why is it that we have the United States badly divided by racism, by sexism, by white supremacy, and by violence, but we do not have a consensus that we can make the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of the Constitution apply to all? America has been shaped by a history of slavery, genocide, and settler colonialism, with capitalists seeing the world as their plantation. Black people in Memphis used to refer to this as the plantation mentality. The governing theories, philosophies, and practices that shape our political, economic, social, and cultural life are based on what I call plantation capitalism.

The situation after the election on November 3, 2020, illustrates the point that we have not yet developed a human consensus that the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of the Constitution must be interpreted and understood, with their vast humanistic power for the betterment of the human race. We still contend and struggle with each other to see this nation go forward as “We the people of the United States of America.”

Multitudes of Americans do not understand that our present freedoms represent the consequences of three essentially nonviolent movements of the twentieth century: the push by women for the right to vote, especially the period between 1910 and 1920; the labor movement and the worker strikes, from the 1930s to the 1960s; and then what the late Congressman John Lewis has called the nonviolent movement of America, which others have termed the Civil Rights Movement, from 1953 to 1973.

In all three of these major movements, you see millions and millions of people struggling to shape a more democratic society. But the opposition to that today still comes from racism, sexism, and the violence of plantation capitalism. The slow climb in the quality of life for millions of people is not a result of plantation capitalism and big business. The power structures have not done this. The power structures have not made the workplace safer. The improvement of workers’ lives hasn’t come about by the big banks or the Chamber of Commerce or Congress or the president. It has come about because we the people have done the work to organize.

We have recently experienced perhaps the largest, most creative nonviolent movements that have captured the imagination of the human family. The general term for that campaign is Black Lives Matter, and it has resulted in millions of people in the streets in peaceful marches and largely peaceful demonstrations. In the summer of 2020, it brought together people from all sections of the country in an estimated twenty-four hundred locations in all fifty states, in more than seventy-three hundred demonstrations, as well as in protests in other parts of the world.¹

In this moment, we need to understand nonviolence more than ever. In the early part of the twentieth century, Gandhi proceeded to experiment with nonviolent struggle and also drew from the religion of Jainism. Nonviolence is a philosophy and a methodology he called “satyagraha,” putting together the Indian word satya, meaning primarily truth, God, soul, spirit, or love, with graha, meaning strength, power, or force. We also call it soul force.

We are now witnessing a struggle in which many different groups that have been recipients of the hostility of the nation have demanded that their rights be recognized and that discrimination against them end. But during much of our history, neither the Supreme Court, nor Congress, nor the White House have been forthright allies for the affirmation or the practical application of these human rights for all the people of our country. Some talk about our past as though it is an ideal past, rather than acknowledge the intense struggles that we have gone through and that continue. In doing so, they belittle and they limit the present moment of conversation and struggle.

The Black Lives Matter movement presents another evolutionary period for the awakening of the American people in this, the United States of America. Millions of us now as never before are demanding that our sociopolitical structures become thoroughly equal, thoroughly democratic, thoroughly just, thoroughly manifesting the total human rights of all the people of this country.

The media talk about tension, while they misplace what the tension is about. The tension is not between political parties or between different understandings of the economy. The tension is in fact about the visions and the dreams in the language of our historical documents and the way we seek to implement them today.

We are perhaps the first generation of the people of the United States of America who are contending with the full spectrum of the issues that afflict the human family. No previous generation has struggled with the wide, huge variety of human issues from the ancient and immediate past that have prevented the human race from advancing as far as we could advance.

This is why the introduction of nonviolent struggle with that language is the most important invention out of the twentieth century leading into the twenty-first century, when we know much more about nonviolent history and nonviolent theory. The twentieth century produced many campaigns that helped us to see the possibilities of nonviolence. We have seen that the way of nonviolent struggle can replace violence, war, hostility, and fear and instead, help us to embrace courage and character.

We must not allow this tension in this struggle to cool off. We must do the work that needs to continue. We need to make an urgent effort, an urgent push to understand the history and practice of nonviolence—even as we understand that we are still neophytes in applying this energy that has always been with the human race—and to apply it to our own pragmatic concerns. The nonviolent invention from the twentieth century has another major quality that Americans have not yet carefully examined: it comes from our own long history of nonviolence, it comes from Gandhi, and it comes from Martin Luther King Jr.

Rev. Lawson receiving the UCLA Medal, 2018. Courtesy of Reed Hutchinson, UCLA.

In contrast to nonviolence, the way of violent conversation, violent structures of inequity and injustice, is the way that will turn our planet into a hothouse and then into an ice-cold Mars. Military violence, domestic violence, the continued lynching of people in the prison systems and by the police—that system of violence is causing our society to sink into greater and greater chaos, turmoil, confusion, animosity, and division. The contemporary world has too much violent rhetoric and violent means and weaponry. Either the nations and the peoples of the world will pick up nonviolent struggle, or the current way in which the world moves will conclude with the massive suicide of the human race and life as we know it on this planet Earth.

Human life as we know it is such a powerful mysterious stream of energy and powers, and I submit that nonviolence is the only way to make progress for the well-being of the human family. It is the only way we the people of the United States can proceed to make equality, liberty, justice, and the beloved community a reality at every crossroads, in every rural and urban area of this country and the world. There are never any guarantees, but it is important to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world.

2

Understanding Violence and Nonviolence

Our society has a very long history of violence, which we largely deny again and again. We pretend that we are the most peaceful people in the world, that it’s the other people who are violent. It is very difficult then for people to wrap their heads around the idea that there may be far superior ways of getting things done. Most of us have been weaned and nurtured on the mythology that if you want to make any kind of serious change, violence is the way to do it. A lot of us male people think that if we want to have a stable family, we have to be in charge, and we are the boss. And if this means a little roughness—even physical roughness or abuse—we do it. This is a form of violence that is prevalent across the United States and is not talked about, which makes it much more devastating for children and women and even for the men themselves, though they may not understand this.

Violence thrives at the government level as well. Since World War II, which I lived through as a high school student, we have systematically deserted the Constitution and its historic roots. The Constitution says that civilians will be in charge of the military. The people who wrote that lived in a time when the military was extremely strong, when there were draft acts in Europe and Great Britain, and many men were drafted for the expansionary adventures of Western Europe. The writers of the Constitution wanted to see if they could slow down that history of tyranny and dictatorship, so they made the president of the United States the commander in chief and gave Congress control and oversight of the budget. All that has largely been thrown out the window. It is now the military and the huge private profiteering industry of war that runs the Congress and the White House. That’s the reality.

So when we got hit with terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001, and the whole nation was bewildered and hurting, our president said we must do something. And what is that something? It is, “We go to war.” So we go to war. That’s an illustration of doing the wrong thing, and it only increased the quagmire and further complicated the issues. It resolved nothing. And that’s why a nonviolent perspective says that oftentimes doing nothing, that digging in to analyze and investigate, is better than any kind of immediate action. The kinds of military escalations and violence we have all around the world are proving to be the number one enemy of the human race and especially of women and children.

My point is that it is extremely difficult for us to wrap our heads or hearts or wisdom around the notion that there is such a thing as nonviolence—a nonviolent theory, nonviolent techniques, and nonviolent strategy that can make things change so that in the end, there is a better feeling among a much larger number of people. There may be diehards who disagree. For example, in the Montgomery bus boycott of December 5, 1955, to January 17, 1956, a lot of white people in Montgomery and Alabama were outraged that the bus boycott had effectively stymied a piece of segregation and hatred. The other side of the story in Montgomery, Alabama, was that Black people were treated miserably. There were lots of incidents with bus drivers and police that outraged Black people year after year before they finally did the boycott. But there were still white people at the end who just could not stand it. And so you have people like that still in the United States, who have not yet bothered to do some searching to truly join the human race and to find their own role with human affections, human understanding, and human perspectives.

It’s extremely difficult for us to wrap...