Photo by Magharebia, via Wikimedia Commons

You may not have heard of it, but the West African country of Mauritania has what is probably one of the most vibrant and active protest movements in the world today. Protests drawing tens of thousands of people (out of a total population of just three million) take place almost weekly in the capital Nouakchott, with many smaller protests happening on a daily basis around the vast country. The protests are overwhelmingly nonviolent — even in the face of frequent violent suppression — and have been going on since February 2011.

It would be comfortable to file these protests as another part of the Arab Spring: Mauritania is on the southern reaches of the Saharan Arab belt, and large-scale protests here started with the self-immolation and subsequent death of Yacoub Ould Dahoud, an action mirroring the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi, which set off the revolt in Tunisia. As in other Arab countries that experienced large-scale protests, Mauritania is governed by an autocratic regime whose leader, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, originally came to power through a coup d’état.

But while these similarities exist and the pro-democracy protests in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world surely have been a source of great inspiration for local activists, Mauritania merits a second look.

Firstly, the range of participating actors in Mauritania are as diverse as their agendas. While a common concern of all protest movements is the end of the rule of Abdel Aziz, there are a host of other issues that various groups want to have addressed, not all directly related to the country’s ruler.

Saidou Wane, a Movement for Justice and Equality in Mauritania activist speaks during a protest against the government at Fountain Square in April. Photo via Cincinnati.com

Chief among them is the issue of slavery. Some estimates say that up to a third of Mauritania’s population is enslaved (even though the practice has been formally abolished multiple times). Victims are overwhelmingly ethnic black Africans. This creates racial tensions in Mauritania’s multiethnic society, but also religious ones, as certain interpretations of Islam are used to legitimize slavery.

These tensions have forced their way into the open in the context of current protests, with anti-slavery activist Biram Ould Abeid publicly burning Islamic legal manuals discussing the issue. Abeid was subsequently arrested by the authorities, and his case is controversially debated among other activists.

Another very active group, traditionally eyed suspiciously in Western societies, are the Islamists. Organizations like Tawassoul demand a state and society based on principles of Islamic law. While not cooperating a lot with other protest movements, they have been incredibly persistent in their activities against the regime, including protests of Salafist women against democracy (which is seen as not compatible with Islam) and for the release of imprisoned husbands.

More familiar political standpoints are expressed by the traditional political opposition and various youth movements, the biggest of which has followed the modern tradition of naming itself after the date of the first big protest, 25F (February 25, 2011). These groups focus on democratic reform and an end of the reign of President Aziz.

With all these different actors and goals competing for internal support and attention, it is remarkable that protests have almost completely stayed peaceful for well over a year. While protesters frequently face violence from police (including kettling, arbitrary arrests, beatings, water cannons, tear gas and attack dogs), the protesters have employed a wide range of nonviolent tactics.

In addition to traditional rallies, marches, speeches and sit-ins, protesters have occupied public squares with tents and use social media and video live streaming to coordinate protests, document violence and communicate with the outside world.

As the growing momentum of the protests show, these nonviolent tactics have so far fulfilled their goal of mobilizing the general population against the regime. But President Aziz should not be counted out just yet.

While the diversity of the protesters and their goals shows on the one hand that a vibrant civil society and widespread discontent exists in Mauritania, their disunity may still allow Aziz to carry the day. Already, the affair around the Islamic book burning by anti-slavery activist Abeid has allowed Aziz to portray himself as a defender of Islam. Given the incompatibility of demands by pro-democracy activists and Islamists, it is easy to imagine Aziz discovering his inner zealot to rally support from this part of society (a strategy tried and tested on the other side of continent in Sudan).

Another possible development could see Aziz taking advantage of the regional situation. With large parts of neighboring Mali controlled by Islamist groups and the fear of an “African Afghanistan” running high in European, U.S. and African capitals, Aziz could implement some feigned democratic reforms and present himself as a beacon of stability in the region, hoping for (and probably getting) Western military support and closed eyes, ears and mouths in the U.N. Security Council and the African Union.

But given the level of mobilization in Mauritania so far, the pro-democracy movements in Mauritania have a good chance of succeeding against such moves. Looking at successful nonviolent struggles elsewhere, activists in Mauritania could enhance the likelihood of success by working to undermine the foundations of the regime. Actions like strikes and boycotts can be incredibly effective, if well employed. Additionally, the protest movements could reach out to security forces, trying to convince at least elements of them to turn over to their side. After all, police and soldiers need to feel that they will be part of a better future as well, otherwise many of them will go with the devil they know instead of with the change they mistrust.

Max Rameau, by Miami Workers Center, via Flickr.

In Rochester, New York, activists are fighting to win control of Catherine Lennon-Griffin’s foreclosed, bank-owned home as a community land trust, at her request — making this one of the first examples in the country of a neighborhood winning back a bank-owned residence and designating it for community use.

Lennon-Griffin has been re-occupying her home Avenue since last Mother’s Day, after being forcibly evicted in March by a SWAT team with dozens of officers and police cars. The eviction was so shocking that Lennon-Griffin’s 72-year-old neighbor ran out of her own home in her pajamas shouting, “This is not America when we are removing people from their homes!” until she was arrested along with six others.

This repossession would not only be a victory for Catherine Lennon-Griffin and her grandchildren, who lived in a homeless shelter until the reoccupation, and a major setback to Bank of America, the current leader both in national foreclosures and in settlements for illegal and fraudulent mortgage activity. Winning this house would also be one of the first concrete successes for activists who see the housing crisis as an opportunity to reimagine American society’s use of land on a mass scale.

“We are in a transformative moment,” says Max Rameau of Take Back the Land, the group working with Lennon-Griffin’s neighborhood. “Because this crisis is firmly rooted in the housing crisis, I think we’re going to have significant changes in the way people think about not just housing but land itself.” Since its inception in 2006, Take Back the Land has helped communities take over dozens of abandoned, bank-owned homes in Miami, Madison, Rochester and other cities, both to provide housing for those in need and to challenge entrenched ideas about privatization, control of space and how to de-commodify community needs.

Take Back the Land’s approach overlaps in many ways with the Occupy movement. Rameau is strongly opposed to stating demands, for example, because he doesn’t want to undersell the potential of this moment. (He compares housing groups that demand principal reductions to the early phases of the 1955 Montgomery bus boycotts, when the demand was not desegregation but merely “segregation with dignity.”) The group is focused on underlying causes and human rights, treating the current wave of foreclosures as one symptom of the larger inequalities in land relations and our nation’s failure to designate a family’s shelter a basic human right. Finally, like Occupy, Take Back the Land sees the solution as mass action — in this case, widespread home and land takeovers.

“If we were to go to Bank of America right now and say, ‘Hand over all your vacant properties!’ they would laugh at us and then call the police,” says Rameau. “But if we went to them and said, ‘We are now in control of 250,000 of your properties,’ I think we’d be in a very different position. At some point it will cost the banks more to evict us from all these homes than the value of the homes. We need to reach that critical mass.”

With a new wave of foreclosures coming this year, people across the country are clamoring for change more drastic than the $26 billion settlement for underwater homeowners approved earlier this month. Nearly 50 percent of Americans supported a moratorium on foreclosures in 2010, a rarely-cited figure that flies in the face of the those who insist that principal reductions pose a moral hazard and that underwater homeowners merely want a free house.

In mid-May, Chicago housing and Occupy groups are planning to take over dozens, if not hundreds, of vacant properties. Even in a conservative city like Raleigh, North Carolina, where those facing foreclosure say that the culture is filled with shame and alienation, Nikki Shelton and the group Mortgage Fraud NC briefly took back Shelton’s foreclosed home two weeks ago. In Philadelphia and Detroit, urban gardeners are turning vacant lots into community gardens. Last weekend, 300 people near Berkeley, Ca., took over a tract of University of California-owned land that had been slated for privatization — ironically, in order to become a high-end grocery store.

However, we are still far from taking over a quarter of a million homes or abandoning the individualistic, “manifest destiny” belief in private land ownership as the crux of society. Rameau is well aware of the other potential outcome of this decisive moment: increased privatization and consolidation of land in the hands of the few.

“I think it is very easy to see — although I don’t think that people in general are thinking about it — that in 10 or 20 years the U.S. could have five landowners,” he warns. “We could have advanced capitalism in terms of the economy but feudalism in the way land relationships work.

“But if we can articulate a map of how land relationships would work, how a society would be organized in which housing is a human right and how community control of land would operate, I think we can win that argument and convince enough people to join the fight and win.”

Spirit Affinity Group's action at Livermore National Laboratory in March, 1983. Courtesy of author.

A longtime co-worker of mine became committed to nonviolence during a demonstration he attended many years ago as the movement to end France’s brutal war in Algeria was gearing up. In the midst of a chaotic scene in Paris, he saw a man sitting contemplatively in the street as a military vehicle bore down on him. Rather than running him over — as it seemed very likely just a moment before — the vehicle came to a stop. The driver then nudged the vehicle up to the demonstrator, coaxing him to get up. But he didn’t. This went on for a while, but the protester remained in his fixed position. Finally the driver gave up and swerved around the man, leaving him in the street.

There are no guarantees with nonviolence. This scene could have ended very differently (as it did when I saw my friend, Vietnam veteran Brian Willson, run over by a Navy munitions train nearly 25 years ago during a protest against arms shipments to Central America). But this vignette from a half century ago unfolded as it did because this anonymous man in some unnamed French street had, as Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, become like a mountain: centered, poised, relentless. He didn’t rant. He didn’t run. He was here. He was now. And because of this, he transformed a highly mechanistic and objective operation (a military vehicle sweeping away an obstacle in its path to establish preeminence and to reestablish order) into a highly interpersonal and intersubjective one. Despite the roles each person had been assigned in this play, they engaged with one another in a way that was no longer found in the script.

By being here and now, not only did the military vehicle relent — thus dramatizing concretely and symbolically an end to the military barrage being used by his nation to hold on to empire — it succeeded in irrevocably changing someone who was watching. Watching this simple, firm act managed to circumvent my friend’s deeply entrenched defenses and, in an instant, to reframe things. He understood for the first time that we have a power which had previously been only vague and theoretical.

In these days of accelerating movement building, it is useful to reflect on the power of action that is centered, poised and relentless. Just as this long-ago scene on a Parisian street communicated a new way of being to my friend, so all nonviolent action is a form of communication, a specific type of discourse, designed to provoke a new kind of conversation with one’s larger society.

Social movements change the world by changing the conversation. Injustice succeeds by monopolizing the chat, dominating the airways, laying down the law. Social movements rush headlong into history fueled by the conviction that such a one-way monologue is death. They are always dreaming up methods to muscle their way into the room, to pull up a chair, and to flick the discussion in a very different direction using a very different lingo.

While injustice hinges on controlling the semantic universe to manufacture consent — so that money becomes speech and corporations become people — social movements succeed by crashing the party and challenging the chatter. They do this using the most powerful language we have at our disposal: the creaky, resilient and three-dimensional profundity of the human body — whether in Selma or Cairo or a forgotten street in Paris.

Nonviolent action is about stoking a serious, jaw-dropping conversation with one’s society. As the late Bill Moyer’s book Doing Democracy stresses, the goal of a movement is not to convince the policy-maker to change. Instead, it is to alert, educate, win and mobilize the populace on whom the policy-maker depends for her or his power. The aim of nonviolent action is to spark and sustain a conversation with one’s larger society about grievances and their remedies. It seeks to pry open the doors of dialogue, so that whatever injustice we’re pitted against can be seen for what it is and we can finally all sit down and hash it out.

To do this, though, one’s action has to find a way past all the implacable guards posted to keep these doors locked: fear, cynicism, apathy, powerlessness, hate.

The genius of nonviolent action is that it carries within its beating heart the capacity to slip past these defenses. Where violent action can often harden opposition and increase polarity, nonviolent action has the power to circumvent — and sometimes even to short-circuit — the willful knot of emotional and political obstacles a society erects to defend itself against transformation. No one action will create change, but each has an opportunity to advance the society-wide conversation on which change will ultimately rest.

At least three dimensions of nonviolent action help to do this: vulnerability, creativity and a commitment to the larger good. The more these are expressed, the greater the potential that a given action will reach a society’s soul, or at least its “right brain.” The language of bodies in action — vulnerable, creative and implicitly desiring the good of all — speaks to us in a peculiarly poignant and clear way.

Over the years I have seen this embodied power in action. I have seen people bring their deepest selves to critically important conversations, delivering their piece of the truth in person and in public: at federal buildings, at weapons facilities, in the streets, in the public square. Not always, but often, they have changed the atmosphere, opened possibilities that weren’t there before and extended a conversation that seemed stuck.

Sometimes creating embodied power is a conscious process: remembering to breathe, recalling why we are taking action, walking with intentionality and purpose, anchoring ourselves in our heart and our deepest longing, noticing what we are feeling. In nonviolent action trainings, I invite people to choose six words that capture why they are taking this step, a phrase to which they can return again and again during the action. Other times this power comes from the form of the action itself. For example, for many years I participated in “die-ins” to symbolize the destruction that various policies mete out. Being horizontal and silent and immobile in this way induced a focused, contemplative intentionality.

In the 1980s I took part in a die-in at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a member of Spirit Affinity Group. Some of us decided that we would not cooperate with being arrested (to symbolize our unwillingness to cooperate with the lab’s design of nuclear weapons). When I refused to get up after a police officer had placed me under arrest, he started tugging at my arm. “Don’t fool around with him!” his superior yelled from across the street. “Just break his wrist.” The officer grabbed my wrist and I suddenly felt a piercing jab of pain as he started to break it. With no premeditation, I leaned up and calmly whispered, “You don’t have to do that.” We were now looking in each other’s eyes. There was another stab of pain — then it stopped. He had decided not to go through with it. He had just given me a gift by sparing my wrist. I then decided to give him a gift by getting up and walking with him. As we trotted over to the police bus, he abruptly said, “Thank you for telling me that I didn’t have to do that. They brought someone in last week to teach us to break wrists. I didn’t feel right about this at the time, but when my commanding officer told me to break your wrist, I had to follow orders. Something about what you said woke me up. I’m glad I didn’t do it.”

As noted before, there is no guarantee that nonviolent action will always have such happy outcomes. (A police officer broke the wrist of my friend David Hartsough under similar circumstances, and of course many others have paid much more dearly than this.) But nonviolent action bears within its vision and method the potential for transforming the intractable in small and large ways, for helping to break the spell of violence and injustice, just as the two of us in front of a weapons laboratory were momentarily transformed.

Nonviolent action invites us to bring our deepest self to a heart-to-heart with those we encounter in the messy chaos of the action itself and with our larger society. And it invites us to do this through the irreducible plenitude and power of our bodies, creatively risking a little or a lot for the well being of this suffering world.

Poster from madrilonia.org.

“We don’t want May 12 to be a celebration of our anniversary, or a one-day demonstration,” one often hears activists in the Spanish 15M movement saying lately. “We want it to be a new milestone.” For months now, many of them have been taking part in local and international meetings to prepare. Through online conference calls using the open-source platform Mumble, organizers from Occupy, 15M and movements all around the world chose May 12 as a day for a global mobilization, leading up to another on May 15.

After its birth with occupations in public squares across Spain last May, 15M has been a model for movements around the world, many of which have reached a critical mass and brought to the fore issues of austerity, wealth inequality and political corruption. Yet, in Spain and elsewhere, governments continue to respond with more budget cuts and increased police repression. Activists hope that this latest round of mobilizations will help turn the tide.

In Madrid, work on mid-May started among the movement’s various collectives in January, and, over the course of weekly meetings, a group was formed to put all their ideas together and coordinate citywide actions. Although the pace was slow during the early months, by April there was a basic outline for the mid-May mobilization. On May 12, Madrid will probably look much like it did last October 15: Four marches will depart from the four cardinal points of the city and join in Sol square at 9 p.m. for a dinner together until midnight. People in cities across Spain will also be in the streets. But, this time, the day of action will be only the beginning.

The night of May 12, or early the next morning, people will move from Sol to 12 nearby squares. Then, until May 15, each square in the center of Madrid will represent a particular issue: education, employment, health care, democracy, economy and so on. The 15M working groups will organize workshops, conferences and assemblies dedicated to sharing ideas and finding solutions related to each issue. The conclusions reached during a given day will be brought to a nighttime general assembly. Other initiatives are being discussed as well, including the formation of a people’s tribunal on May 13 to hear evidence presented by activists who have been collecting data on the practices of the banks. That day, also, housing groups are planning to occupy banks while demanding a collective renegotiation of mortgages.

A big question, however, is whether 15M will be able to camp again in the squares at all. In Madrid, the movement has announced that, from May 12 to 15, Sol square will be the space for a permanent assembly, without using the term “camp.” But news that 15M would be creating another encampment in Sol was quickly announced by the Spanish mass media, and the government responded quickly and firmly that no such thing would be allowed. In Barcelona, the movement secured a permit to camp in Catalunya square from May 12 to May 15, possibly to alleviate the city’s reputation for harsh repression, especially after the police violence of the recent general strike. In Madrid, however, repression against 15M has hardened in the last few weeks, although without physical violence.

After an announcement of further fare increases on public transportation in Madrid, for instance, the collective Yo No Pago organized a new protest in Sol square on April 20. Nearly 200 people marched from Sol, walking through several streets in the city center, until they were surrounded by riot police in Gran Vía. The activists were identified, and all of them may receive a €300 fine. The following week, there were more actions related to public transport, including one in which activists pulled the brake levers of 13 subway trains, causing a halt in service for 10 minutes. Within hours, police had arrested three suspects, who now face five years in prison. Last Friday, hundreds of people went to Sol square to show their support for those who were arrested, and, again, police surrounded the protesters, together with bystanders, identifying them in order to charge them further fines.

These precedents in Madrid are troubling, but if the movement is able to bring hundreds of thousands of people into the streets as it did on October 15, all the police of the city will be not able to prevent Sol square from being reoccupied and turned once again into the space of public debate and resistance that it was a year ago.

Tarak Kauff of Veterans Peace Team holds Veterans for Peace flag while awaiting arrest on May 1. Photo by J.A. Myerson, via Twitter.

Unlike some of Occupy Wall Street’s iconic actions in recent months, May Day did not include a scene of mass arrest. Several dozen arrests were scattered throughout the day and night during various marches and actions. But, as never before in the movement’s short history, arrests of military veterans in particular featured prominently.

The day’s first arrest was of OWS regular Bill Steyert, who momentarily blocked the intersection at 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue, waving a yellow flag, just as the morning “99 Pickets” actions were beginning. Among the last and most dramatic arrests were of members of the newly-formed Veterans Peace Team, at a memorial dedicated to Vietnam veterans.

As night fell and tens of thousands of marchers arrived at New York’s Financial District, police blockades thwarted Occupiers’ plans to hold an after-party in Battery Park. Those who remained gathered instead at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Plaza on Water Street. A drum circle played, while others formed a large assembly in the round, amplifying each other’s voices with the “people’s mic.” There, Tarak Kauff, a founder of Veterans Peace Team and a longtime Veterans for Peace member, announced that his group would stand on the front lines before the police, who were already surrounding the area by the hundreds. Referring to the environmental crisis and the prolonged wars on behalf of powerful interests, he told the crowd, “We are in a fight for survival.”

Kauff and seven other Veterans Peace Team members, along with two clergymen, would be arrested within the hour, holding their ground at the memorial.

Veterans Peace Team began organizing and training late last year, as a wave of evictions and violent repression against the Occupy movement spread across the United States. Their first mission, however, was abroad — in support of those resisting the construction of a military base on South Korea’s Jeju Island. The South Korean government deemed these American veterans enough of a threat to warrant deporting them from the country upon arrival.

In late March, Veterans Peace Team took part in an OWS march against police brutality, and its members have been in ongoing discussions with the OWS Direct Action Working Group before that and since. Symbolic arrests like what Veterans Peace Team practiced on May Day, along with the recent “Cardboard Roses” civil disobedience actions on Wall Street, have been part of OWS’ ongoing search for the means, post-encampment, to make its message heard and resonate.

After his release from police custody, I spoke with Tarak Kauff about the action.

What led Veterans Peace Team to join Occupy Wall Street on May Day?

A number of us have been involved in the Occupy movement since, well, before the beginning, and we had been following the organizing leading up to May Day. We say in our statement of purpose, “As veterans, we stand with the Occupy movement as members of the 99 percent and oppose any and all use of force by police against peaceful protesters exercising their right to peaceably assemble to seek redress of grievances.” We were aware of the potential for police violence and wanted to be on the scene both as people participating in May Day and also as U.S. military veterans and allies to stand, if needed and requested, as a front line facing the police.

Did you know that you’d be arrested that day? Did you have an idea of what the circumstances would be?

We were aware of the possibility of arrest but were not specifically looking to be arrested. We actually did not have any idea how this would play out but were on call in case of a situation where police repression seemed imminent. I don’t think anyone knew how this would eventually evolve, as the police were calling the shots, erecting barricades and directing the march where they wanted it to go. It wound up at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Plaza, an appropriate place for us to take a stand.

You spoke to a large assembly there as people were discussing whether or not to stay past the 10 p.m. closure of the memorial. What did you think when others didn’t seem to be staying? What did you do?

At the assembly it initially looked like the crowd was determined to stay, so we made the decision to stand as a front-line buffer between the police and the Occupiers. We had already lined up with two of the clergy from Occupy Faith, one of whom was a Vietnam veteran, and at that point we were committed. But, just a few moments before the police moved in, we were told that the crowd was leaving. Though we probably had time to change our minds, we felt it would not be appropriate at that point to leave. We had every right to be where we were and stand there. I could understand the Occupiers leaving; the police presence was massive and there was a possibility of arrests and violence from the police. A lot of these kids have been roughed up before and the prospect of a day or two in the Tombs is not appealing. I think it would have been great if they stayed, but I don’t blame them for leaving.

How did the police treat you? Do you think they treated you any differently for being veterans?

They treated us generally with respect. I think there were a few factors — firstly, that we were veterans, secondly, that we obviously were not resisting and, thirdly, that our attitude was not confrontational or angry, just determined. We recognize that they are human beings. We understand fully that the police protect the interests of the ruling elite or the 1 percent, but we treat them as individuals, not as enemies. I often see that many of them have considerable anger, fear and the capacity to be brutal, but there are also many who are good, decent people who sympathize with the Occupy movement. You can see it in their faces and in how they act. We were lucky; the cops who made the arrests were all pretty decent, and a few of them even expressed considerable sympathy for the Occupy movement during the booking process.

Why is it so important to have a group composed mainly of veterans? Is it more a matter of who veterans are, or of how they tend to operate?

For whatever strange reason, veterans of military service get a certain amount of respect and credibility from the public. Often, even the police will say, “Thank you for your service.” Many police officers are vets and identify with us, so our presence could discourage violence on their part. If not, then the world will see the system using violence on its own military veterans. Of course, we realize that while in the military we were actually serving the 1 percent, who profit off of war and exploitation. Because of that, when we now denounce war and its many attendant evils, people tend to realize that many of us are speaking and acting from experience. So it’s more a matter of who we are than anything else. I think that anyone can operate with discipline, purpose and integrity. You don’t have to be a vet. Some of our best members are non-veteran allies.

Do you have plans for future actions?

Yes. We will be in Chicago at the NATO protests, and we have a letter for NATO which we intend to deliver in person. If we are stopped at the barricades, we will stay there without anger or hatred, face to face with the police state.

A general strike can be one of the most potent noncooperation methods in the repertoire of nonviolent resistance. It is a widespread cessation of labor in an effort to bring all economic activity to a total standstill. Although it is easy to broadcast the call for a general strike, it is exceedingly difficult to implement for the maximal impact that it potentially exerts. What’s more, a general strike must be called prudently, because it loses its effectiveness if weakly executed.

The Occupy movement’s calls for a general strike in the United States on May 1 make me think of an instance in which a general strike was brilliantly carried out and with great effect, in Czechoslovakia in 1989 — for only two hours.

For years beforehand, the sharing of subversive literature, drama and ideas against the communist regime had been occurring in Czechoslovakia, virtually unseen. In fact, historian Theodore Ziółkowski reminds us that “almost from the moment when the Soviet empire, after Yalta, swallowed up the nations of Eastern Europe, the fight against Communism began.” Thousands of clandestine samizdat (Russian for self-published) publications had been manually typed on onion skin with carbon paper, read, passed from hand to hand and circulated sub rosa. Incarcerated authors and dramatists worked intensively in contemplation and planning from their prison cells. While building strong networks among these civil society organizations in formation, Czechoslovaks considered how to withdraw their cooperation from the communist party-state, and thereby bend it to the popular will.

On November 17, 1989, in Czechoslovakia’s capital, Prague, police brutally interrupted a student demonstration. In response, the Czechoslovak people undertook what came to be known as the Ten Days, as I have recounted in more detail elsewhere. Events seemed to unfold instantaneously, but anyone who has studied nonviolent struggles knows otherwise. Aided by Radio Free Europe and labor unions, Prague’s theatrical circles would become catalytic in organizing a massive national resistance, including major demonstrations against the procedures of the regime. Citizens were emboldened by listening to Radio Free Europe and reading samizdat, and were thus aware of the popular national nonviolent mobilizations already underway in Poland, Hungary and East Germany. The Czechoslovaks also benefited from a more enlightened Soviet policy than during the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. These relative advantages, and the caliber of leadership emanating from the playwrights and thinkers in theatrical circles, meant that the Czechoslovaks would be able to bring about their 1989 Velvet Revolution with astounding haste and effectiveness, a key element of which was the breadth of participation in a general strike.

Overnight on November 17 — Day One — and into November 18, students became determined to go on strike. They spread word to Prague’s Charles University and other colleges and universities. Although students were the first to call for strikes, by Saturday afternoon the denizens of Prague’s famous theaters had declared their support and were proposing a national general strike for November 27. The students straight away endorsed the proposed general strike and for six weeks would persist in striking on their own, to a great extent backed up by similar noncooperation measures by actors and dramatists. As the students published releases announcing their strikes, the theatrical managers and actors circulated theirs, while Radio Free Europe broadcast texts transmitted by telephone. Official media, having long toed the government line, condemned the officials’ violence of November 17. Employees at television stations denounced biased coverage and disputed untruthful news reports. Broadcasts of the first photographic images of the Prague demonstrations proved to be critical because they disclosed to thousands what was happening in their own country.

On Day Three — Sunday, November 19 — a crowd of 200,000 gathered in Prague for a demonstration to protest the police brutality against the students. That night a citizens’ pro-democracy organization called the Civic Forum (Občanské Fórum) emerged, many of whose members had been persistent critics of the party-state. Over the following three days, throngs occupied Prague. Tens of thousands of young people and students took over Wenceslas Square, carrying flags and chanting slogans: “Freedom,” “Resign,” “Now’s the Time” and “This Is It.”

With playwright Václav Havel as the guiding light, Prague’s Magic Lantern Theater became the nerve center of the Civic Forum, in part because of its proximity to Wenceslas Square. Its wardrobes and changing rooms were assigned to committees, and Havel became the author and mediator for the Civic Forum’s statements and positions. Throughout the Velvet Revolution, the forum would act as the speaker for the Czechoslovak people, while coordinating the collective nonviolent actions of the broad opposition. The Civic Forum encompassed most perspectives and sentiments of opposition, and included some reform-minded communists. A Slovak group, Public Against Violence, acted as partner to the forum.

Prague’s theaters were perfect for hearty political debate. Instead of the curtain rising on productions, the actors would lead audiences in discussions of the situation. Signs instantly appeared in theaters across the country reading “We Strike” or “On Strike,” rousing unity because of the popular esteem for the dramatic arts. Theaters in Bratislava, Brno and Ostrava went on strike the next day. Wherever actors and dramatists gathered, they joined the noncooperation.

On Tuesday, November 21 — Day Five — the Civic Forum and student representatives met officially with Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec, who guaranteed that no violence would be administered against Czechoslovak citizens. The government announced that “socialism was not up for discussion,” but no one missed the meaning of such a meeting in the midst of mounting popular defiance. In Wenceslas Square in Prague and in Hviedoslav Square in Bratislava, mass demonstrations ratified calls for a general strike on November 27. Václav Havel addressed the multitude as the exemplar of the Civic Forum, his speech blunter and less courtly than usual. When he and the respected banned priest Václav Malý spoke, the crowd could hear every word, because rock groups had lent huge amplifiers. A message from the Roman Catholic František Cardinal Tomášek declared, “We cannot wait any more,” stressing that Czechoslovakia was surrounded by countries that “had broken the back of totalitarianism,” referring to Poland, Hungary, and East Germany. Bells rang. One journalist reported 200,000 sets of key rings unforgettably jangling. Throngs chanted “Today Prague, tomorrow the whole country!” and “Time’s up!” Striking students held sit-ins at institutions of higher learning throughout Prague.

On Wednesday, November 22 — Day Six — the Civic Forum formally announced a two-hour general strike for Monday, November 27. The forum and its partner, Public Against Violence, sought an incapacitating general strike with the participation of virtually every citizen to exert sufficient pressure on the government to accelerate a rapid, nonviolent transition of power. A general strike could reduce the threat of reprisals among large numbers of participants, yet many were ambivalent about hurting an already stagnating economy. By limiting the strike to two hours, the effect of a general strike would be wielded while minimizing harm to the economy.

Coal miners in northern Bohemia announced that they would join the work stoppage, but no one knew to what extent laborers in the country’s smokestack industries would join the growing noncooperation action. By Thursday, November 23 — Day Seven — Wenceslas Square saw more than 300,000 marching. The party-state started to split and divide. The ministry of defense that day announced that the Czechoslovak military forces would not be deployed against Czech and Slovak peoples. The Civic Forum issued a statement renewing commitment to a Czechoslovak tradition: “We are against violence and do not seek revenge.”

Striking students insistent on free elections and a change in government then sent hundreds of their numbers into the countryside to visit industrial plants and talk with workers, enlisting their involvement in the general strike. The government raised calamitous warnings of economic breakdown and tried in other ways to frighten the workforce not to join the general strike. Reporters who traveled to machinery works encountered busloads of communist militia members blocking the students from contacting the laborers and sharing handouts. The Reverend Václav Malý, now a spokesperson for the Civic Forum, proclaimed that workers at more than 500 enterprises had pledged to strike.

On Saturday, November 25 — Day Nine — the Civic Forum pronounced the upcoming national general strike as a “referendum” on communist rule. In Prague, 800,000 marched; in Bratislava 100,000 demonstrated. On national television, with Havel announcing that the planned November 27 national general strike would proceed, the forum had become the rudder for the nationwide preparations for the two-hour strike action. The forum encompassed virtually the entire Czechoslovak opposition to the party-state, served as the representative for the Czechoslovak public, coordinated the opposition’s civil resistance and had become a national voice. Comporting itself in a sensible, ethical and deliberately open manner — if a slightly chaotic one — the Civic Forum called its program “What We Want” and concentrated on civil and human rights, a free and independent judiciary, multiparty electoral democracy and political pluralism, economic and free-market reforms, and alterations to the nation’s environmental and foreign policies.

Roughly 6,000 strike committees were at work preparing to bring all economic activity to a halt. As midday approached on Monday, November 27, the population stopped functioning as church bells rang. Minutes before noon, a television broadcaster stated that he was joining the strike and would go off the air. Taxi drivers aligned themselves so as to block Prague’s ring road with a two-mile succession of cabs. This elegantly executed national noncooperation action lasted from noon until two o’clock — during lunchtime, so as not to endanger jobs. The colossal industrial strike reflected no divisions between classes, as laborers, workers of all skills, intellectuals, academicians, students, artist and theatrical personnel together orchestrated the nationwide general strike.

This countrywide, successful act of noncooperation brought the Civic Forum and the government into discussions that would soon lead to a peaceful democratic transition of power. The party-state began to yield. The Civic Forum and the government began discussions. The “leading role” of the communist party, protected in a constitutional clause, was formally rescinded. On December 29, 1989, the Federal Assembly, the communist-dominated national legislature, unanimously elected Havel as president.

The artists, playwrights, academicians, priests and activist intellectuals wanted genuinely revolutionary change that would transform Czechoslovakia permanently and construct a resilient democracy. Years of prudently building the strength of civil society had culminated in the ability to mount a memorable and effective national general strike. With the united voices of the Civic Forum and Public Against Violence, the people had brought about an expeditious transition of power. Czech educator Jan Urban explains the logic of those who were coordinating Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution: “[F]rom the first moment, we wanted to be aggressively nonviolent in our stance — to make a power of our lack of weapons.” He summarized, “In the course of one week, in November 1989, Winter blossomed into Spring in Czechoslovakia. A nonviolent mass movement … triumphed … in transition from the negation of the old to the building of the new.”

Following the huge turnout of Bersih 2.0 in 2011, Bersih 3.0 returned on April 28 with renewed vigour and determination to make the voices of Malaysians heard. Meaning ‘clean’ in Malay, Bersih calls for clean and fair elections in a country fed up with problems of electoral fraud, phantom voters, vote-buying and a lack of independent public institutions. Following recent amendments to the Election Offenses Bill that have led to the removal of election monitors, Bersih 3.0 was seen as an opportunity to make the unhappiness of Malaysians known to their government and the international community.

While last year’s event was mainly focused in the capital city of Kuala Lumpur, Bersih 3.0 saw gatherings in 11 Malaysian cities, as well as solidarity events from around the world. Bersih 3.0 Singapore, though, came with a twist: although there was a solidarity event for Malaysians living and working in Singapore, it was held in Johor Bahru, Malaysia. Effectively, the event became Bersih 3.0 for Malaysians in Singapore… in Malaysia.

In Singapore, most public assemblies require permits from the police. Cause-related activities involving foreigners are rarely — if ever — allowed. Last year’s gathering of Malaysians at Hong Lim Park resulted in an organizer being called in for questioning by the police, and so it was no surprise when the permit for a gathering this year was rejected.

Bersih 3.0 Singapore therefore organized for Malaysians in Singapore (referred to as MiS) to meet up and travel across the Causeway to Johor Bahru, the closest Malaysian city. Organizers said that over 150 people made the trip.

Once in Johor Bahru, they assembled at Waterfront City for a photo session with Singapore’s skyline in the background — the closest they could get to Singapore without being arrested. The group also sang their national anthem, “Negaraku,” before heading towards Dataran Bandaraya to join their fellow Malaysians for Bersih 3.0 in Johor Bahru.

“Turning up today … is such a small thing to do, but it means something,” Johanna Lau, a student at the National University of Singapore, who is originally from Penang, told me as she followed the long line of yellow-clad protesters. Cars zipped by as we trudged along the road under the merciless sun. Many honked their horns, shouted their encouragement through open windows and gave a thumbs-up in support.

With the main part of Dataran Bandaraya occupied by a rock concert and the field taken up by a football match, Bersih 3.0 was relegated to a corner of the square right under the clock tower. Some suspected that both the match and the concert had been hastily organized to prevent protesters from being able to take over the whole space, but Bersih organizers and volunteers made sure that no one intruded upon the other activities.

Tan Tack Poh, a volunteer wearing a black T-shirt with “SECURITY” printed on the front, explained his role to me. “I’m here to make sure that no one messes with anybody,” he said. “We watch out for people. We have to be prepared in case there are thugs or troublemakers trying to stir things up.”

In addition to Bersih’s volunteers, local police also made their presence felt in the square but made no move to stop or obstruct any of the proceedings. During their speeches, leaders indicated that the rally had no intention of breaching the newly-enforced Peaceful Assembly Act, which prohibits “assemblies in motion.” In keeping with Bersih 3.0’s call of “Duduk Bantah,” or sit-in protest, people sat on the grass, shielding themselves with multi-colored umbrellas.

Over the course of the afternoon, the space was flooded by a sea of yellow. Flecks of green — representative of protesters against Australian rare earth plant Lynas — were seen amongst the crowd, and welcomed. “We want a clean Malaysia. Clean elections and clean environment,” said a protester who noticed me reading his “Stop Lynas!” sign.

“All we want is free and fair elections. The government media doesn’t tell us the full story, but alternative media spells out cases of fraudulent activity during voting. The government just gives us excuses,” said volunteer Munikrishan s/o Ponnan. “The people are serious about reform. We don’t want words, we want action.” His colleague Murugan s/o A. Kaliappan agreed: “This is for the good of our country. We’re here for our children’s future.”

At the designated end-time of 4 p.m., everyone got to their feet to sing the national anthem once more, then dispersed, thanking the volunteers and policemen as they left the square.

It was estimated that 4,000 people had turned up at Dataran Bandaraya in peaceful protest, a far cry from how things eventually unfolded in the capital city of Kuala Lumpur, where the main Bersih protest saw at least 25,000 people swarming the streets.

After the sit-in was declared a success and the crowds were asked by Bersih co-chairperson Ambiga Sreenevasan to disperse, a group of protesters broke through the barricades, preventing people from entering Kuala Lumpur’s Dataran Merdeka. Police retaliated by using water cannons and tear gas on everyone, and mayhem erupted in the capital. A police car crashed into the side of a building after being attacked by protesters, hitting two people. Hundreds were arrested and many journalists were manhandled, their cameras smashed and memory cards confiscated.

The violent way in which Bersih 3.0 in Kuala Lumpur eventually ended led Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak to characterize the protest as an attempt by opposition parties to make the government look bad in the international community.

Yet, in most other parts of Malaysia and around the world, Bersih 3.0 was like what I observed in Johor Bahru: a peaceful gathering of Malaysians seeking to change systems they deem corrupt.

An article published by CounterPunch yesterday, “Inconvenient Truths about Tar Sands Action,” argues that the grassroots campaign targeting the Keystone XL pipeline was nothing more than “a manipulated charade, funded and run with loads of money from pro-Obama Democrats through non-transparent organizations like the Tides Foundation.” It follows, then, according to the article, that the real goal of Tar Sands Action “was to manufacture Obama a ‘green victory’ during his first term in the run up to the 2012 election.”

In short, for those thousands of you who participated in the White House sit-ins or encirclement and became “True Believers in the mission,” you were duped. What you took part in “was not social change, nor was it grassroots empowerment.” You became nothing more than a name on an email list. You were “converted into clicktivists who will hopefully contribute money to the Obama ‘I’m In’ 2012 Presidential campaign, ecological landscape be damned.”

I’d ask you how it feels, but I should know. I’m one of you. The article mentions Waging Nonviolence along with the socialist group Solidarity and author Naomi Klein as being among the “principled radicals” who “drank the kool-aid.” So how do I feel? Well, for someone who has supposedly been drugged, I feel remarkably sober and unconvinced.

To believe that the Democrats mobilized thousands of people to get arrested as part of an effort to manufacture an environmental win for Obama is to ignore the fact that he rejected this gift-wrapped, hand-delivered win. He never fully acknowledged the claims of the campaign, and has recently spoken positively of the pipeline, thereby ensuring neither an environmental win nor the support of environmentalists.

Despite the joyous rhetoric  (“BIG NEWS: We won. You won.”) that emerged from the campaign after Obama’s November announcement that he would be delaying a decision on the pipeline until 2013, excitement has waned in the months since. More recent emails from organizer Bill McKibben have focused on the hard realities of the pipeline — for instance, Obama’s recent trip to Oklahoma, where he “lauded his administration’s fast-tracking of the southern leg of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.”

That doesn’t exactly sound like a campaign or a president working in cahoots. Yet, according to the author of the CounterPunch article who goes by the pseudonym The Insider, the two have been in lock-step, tricking environmentalists into doing the Democrat’s bidding. Never mind that the president hasn’t kept up his end of the bargain; the evidence of deception is clear to The Insider. For starters, there’s the fact that tar sands oil will be flowing into this country with or without the Keystone XL. So, since Tar Sands Action (TSA) is not targeting all entry points at once or trying to smash the whole industry at once, it is clearly just a sham. From The Insider’s perspective, TSA’s effort to build a mass movement from scratch through a series of concrete victories is irrelevant. What’s important is ideological purity.

This is where the Tides Foundation conspiracy comes in to play — which is where the article starts sounding like a Glenn Beck rant. While neither TSA nor its organizational affiliate 350.org received any Tides money (at least according to the document cited by The Insider), many of the groups that supported it did — for instance, the Sierra Club, NRDC and Friends of the Earth. Why does that matter? It boils down to Tides having “Democratic allied funders.” That’s the smoking gun. And apparently we can just take it on good faith that anyone who accepts money from Tides is actively working to reelect Obama. The proof is in the fact that some people showed up at the White House sit-ins and encirclement wearing Obama pins and shirts.

The Insider draws out this idea of co-optation further. “Tar Sands Action was a sophisticated, extremely well-funded model for creating the illusion of movement building, complete with mass civil disobedience,” the article contends, “but the real goal, mirroring its cousin, ‘The 99 Spring,’ was (and is) to hammer Republicans and fire up grassroots enthusiasm for Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.”

Co-optation is always a legitimate and serious concern, but as Nathan Schneider noted in regards to the 99% Spring, it’s important to ask, “Who’s co-opting whom?”

The logic of a civil resistance movement is always to co-opt the existing structures of the society around it, to radicalize them, to drive them away from the status quo and into doing something truly revolutionary. And it is precisely by co-opting these institutions that the movement is generally able to build enough capacity to make real change.

That’s how I’ve always seen Tar Sands Action: as a campaign that recognized the power of grassroots action but knew it needed the reach of the big green NGOs to be effective. As Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, authors of the 2011 book Why Civil Resistance Works, point out, “The tactical and strategic advantages of high levels of diverse participation explain — in large part — the historical success of nonviolent campaigns.” So, to ignore the big greens and their massive base of supporters is to make your job as an organizer much harder. But to co-opt them, their email lists and their political influence is to give your campaign a huge boost.

Of course, doing so is not easy, despite what The Insider thinks about the Tides money that somehow made all the pieces fall into place. I recently spoke with Linda Capato, who handled recruitment for TSA, and she explained just how much the big green groups had to move outside their comfort zone to support the two weeks of civil disobedience.

We’ve always been told don’t do something that’s too nuts. Mass civil disobedience in front of the White House gates for two weeks, that’s crazy. Sierra Club isn’t going to sign on because of course they can’t. They have those mandates. NRDC isn’t going to be supportive. All these big greens are not going to come to the table and it was like okay, we can do it without them. And so it was this moment of let’s try. And then, as it was happening and as we were organizing, everyone was jumping onboard because it was a smart idea, it was the time to do it, it was the right target, the right strategy, and the right tactic.

That, ultimately, is what The Insider is overlooking. The Keystone XL was a strategic target which had a major leverage point in the president, since the decision was his alone to approve or reject. It was not meant to bring down the tar sands industry. To fault it for not doing so is like faulting the lunch counter sit-ins for not ending segregation. Furthermore, to say that “Martin Luther King must be turning in his grave,” is to deny that King not only appealed to the moral rhetoric of Lyndon Johnson but also met with him.

The TSA sit-ins and encirclement of the White House were hardly Obama campaign rallies. They were strategic actions meant to draw in a diverse crowd. A few radicals on tripods or in armlocks are wonderful, but to succeed, the effort needed a much broader coalition. Make no mistake, though, most of the organizers who helped guide TSA come from radical organizing backgrounds; for them, using the Obama rhetoric was a way to underscore the gap between the president’s lackluster record and his inspiring rhetoric.

That kind of messaging has far more potential to stimulate a mass movement than the kind of angry screaming that often takes place at protest and is why McKibben at one point said, “We are not going to do President Obama the favor of attacking him. We are going to hold the Obama campaign to the standard it set in 2008. Denying this pipeline would send a jolt of electricity through the people that elected this president.” That, to me, sounds like an attempt by TSA to co-opt one of the largest political movements in recent years and galvanize it into acting for the environment. But all The Insider hears is “well-funded, political theater and public relations.”

The problem with conspiracy theories in general is that they dismiss the contributions of ordinary people. Instead of giving credit to the participants in TSA for shaping their own campaign, which involved significant sacrifices both of time and body, the conspiracy theorist disparages those who took part as “rank-and-file day-to-day worker-bees.”

That’s simply not the case for Tar Sands Action. The reality is that as much as the campaign was about bringing thousands of people to the White House, it was also about empowering local communities to take their own action against the pipeline. ”A lot of the communities along the pipeline route are working together that haven’t before,” Linda Capato told me. “Folks in Nebraska who have been dealing with imminent domain are working with folks in Texas on the same issue. If the zombie pipeline does come back, at least we’ll have a lot more power and part of that power is these communities are talking to each other.”

The Insider concludes by quoting activist John Stauber, another skeptic of TSA, who says, “I would love to see the real people who have bought the hype and taken these civil disobedience trainings, and who have gone through the arrests, rise up and seize control of their own movement.” Perhaps he just needs to open his eyes.

When the Egyptian Revolution began, Sharif Abdel Kouddous was at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, covering independent film for Democracy Now!, where he was a producer. Four days later, Kouddous was in Cairo, where much of his family lives, documenting the unpredictable twists and turns of the occupation of Tahrir Square. Day after day, Kouddous returned to the square, reporting from the heart of the action, often amidst outside skepticism about the movement and its strategies.

By early March, Kouddous had left Democracy Now! and was reporting on the revolution for various news outlets as a freelancer. Being a reporter for alternative media, free from the corporate media’s expectations of what he calls a “false sense of objectivity,” has been crucial to his success in telling the story of the uprising from close up. Additionally, Kouddous’ Egyptian roots — though he has lived most of his life in the States — not only helped him connect to people in Tahrir but also gave him insight into the way the revolution in Egypt was reshaping class boundaries, as people from diverse backgrounds came together to bring down a dictator.

Revolutions are messy and difficult to follow, whether you’re an active participant, an interested outsider or a journalist. The traditional way for a reporter to approach any story is to get quotes from a variety of sources, including experts and people in positions of power, so as to provide some measure of perspective and balance. But the revolutions that swarmed over the Arab world in early 2011 posed — as perhaps all grassroots politics poses — a challenge to the relevance of journalism’s standard toolkit. Could the governments of Tunisia or Egypt, so anxious to hold onto power in the face of populist revolt, really tell journalists anything that could be trusted, or anything that would help the world understand how the movements were progressing on the ground? Meanwhile, pro-government mobs were attacking foreign reporters, making it difficult for them to speak with pro-Mubarak loyalists and hear their version of things.

In our conversation, Kouddous explains why being an independent journalist proved to be an ideal position for reporting on the Egyptian Revolution. He has remained in Egypt since then, reporting with the support of grants from The Nation Institute and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. Kouddous was the subject of a recent HBO documentary, In Tahrir Square, which chronicles the first 18 days of the sit-in. He continues to appear on Democracy Now! and writes frequently for The Nation and The Egyptian Independent.  Kouddous’ own website is EgyptReports.net.

Journalism goes way back for you and your family. Tell me about that.

My father is always very proud of the fact that I’m a fourth-generation journalist. My great-grandmother was a renowned magazine publisher, an actress and a leading feminist. Her son was a famous journalist who exposed corruption in the pro-British monarchy and was jailed by the government for speaking out after Nasser, and he became a famous author after that. His son, my uncle, is a leading dissident in Egypt, a well-known writer and a protester as well. So, it’s an honor to carry on that family tradition, and try to speak truth to power as my uncle and great-grandmother and grandfather have done.

How did your background impact your reporting in Tahrir Square?

When the revolution broke out, those twin strands of covering it as a journalist and being a part of it as an Egyptian citizen — I think if you looked at my reporting at the time, there’s no question as to where my allegiances lay. But I also think there’s a false sense of objectivity that permeates the corporate media that actually hurts their coverage, where they give equal weight to both sides regardless of where the truth is.

How did you see that “false sense of objectivity” play out in the coverage of Cairo?

I think you saw that, in the beginning of the revolution, when people weren’t sure where things were going, you had the corporate TV network reporters saying, “Well, the Mubarak regime says this, and the protesters say this,” and kind of equating the two. But a few days into the revolution there was an attack on many Western reporters by the Mubarak regime, most notably Anderson Cooper. So immediately after that, their coverage changed, and they were saying, “This is a popular, pro-democracy uprising that’s being attacked by a 30-year autocrat.” That’s what is important — calling things as they are. And I don’t think that I, being an Egyptian citizen who supported the revolution, wasn’t able to also cover it in a professional, journalistic way. It was a challenge to strike that balance, but a rewarding one for me personally.

You’re from a wealthy, highly-educated family. How did your class background affect your view of what was taking place?

I was born in the U.S., but I grew up in Egypt from the age of 4 until I went to college in the States. I’ve visited Egypt every year, and I was never connected with any social movements or political circles in Egypt. This was a big opening for me to see this world in Egypt that I hadn’t been exposed to. Egypt is a very stratified society, class-wise, and I was from the upper class. There’s very little mixing of social classes. But that was the beauty of that first sit-in in Tahrir — and since then, really — it brought a lot of these stratified classes together. It was an eye-opener to be sitting, talking to people from all walks of life, from all across the country, who were united in a similar goal. It was a very rewarding experience, and I think it’s one that existed in Egypt before, just one that I wasn’t exposed to, because I hadn’t really moved in those circles. But I think the revolution broke a lot of those barriers, and those barriers would be hard to re-erect again. Reporting from the square at the time was amazing; it was amazing to get Egyptians from all walks of life in one place. People had very different upbringings, very different desires, but were supporting each other and uniting together to topple a regime.

How did you pinpoint whom to talk to when there was so much uncertainty and ambiguity?

It wasn’t hard to report during that first sit-in because all the action, all the organizing, the whole story, was very localized in Cairo, in Tahrir. If anyone was getting arrested outside the square you could find out inside the square — there was an information center. You could see the sit-in develop into people manning the outskirts of the square — until the so-called “Battle of the Camel,” when Mubarak sent in his thugs. You could see them organizing clean-up crews. It was easy to go around and just talk to people. And I think that’s one of the benefits of independent journalism: You can talk to people and hear people’s opinions, why they are there, their hopes and desires, as opposed to getting experts or so-called pundits to explain to people why they are there.

Did you try to follow key organizers?

The strength of the revolution — some say it’s a weakness now, but I don’t agree — was that it was leaderless. There were definitely key groups who had laid the groundwork, and key activists who had been struggling for years. My uncle was one of them. But decisions were very de-centralized. It was almost an organic decision-making system, where the combined intelligence of the square kind of knew what to do best, and there wasn’t really any one organizer.

How, then, did you decide which stories to tell and which people to follow? 

I did link up with some activists who had been demonstrating for many years, and were kind of at the heart of the revolution. They had their own space in Tahrir Square, and I would go visit them every day to find out whether there were any plans to do any tactics or any marches. An activist gave up his apartment that overlooked the Square, where people could go to get online and get the word out. There were different ways, different people to talk to. The square kind of became divided. There was a Muslim Brotherhood area. The Mubarak regime was trying to meet with different people from Tahrir, and some actually did go and meet with the regime, although many disagreed with their actions — so I talked to those people. There were various ways of getting in touch with those at the heart of it.

What kinds of debates were they having?

I think people forget that there was, at various moments, a lot of pressure on the protest movement to end the sit-in — that enough concession had been given, that the point had been made and now it was time to return to some kind of formal political process. My personal view was that the sit-in was the way to go.

Did you, then, feel any contradiction between having ideas about what the movement should do and reporting on it fairly?

I suppose you have to kind of distance yourself and try to assess it in a journalistic way, or speak to different people and get different points of view. But it’s a challenge to do that in any story, regardless of what you’re covering. Everyone has their personal point of view about any issue. But I think I managed to do it.

So, not objectivity, perhaps, but distance. What are you reporting on now?

There are a million stories in Egypt, all the time. There’s an elected parliament that’s dominated by Islamists. There’s a splintering of many different protest groups by strategies and ways of moving forward, because after a year of protesting and sit-ins, people are looking for different tactics. There’s also a burgeoning independent media movement in Egypt that I find very interesting and very powerful. There’s this whole issue of the NGOs that are being cracked down upon; while the Western media covers the U.S. and German organizations that have been raided and stand accused, I think the real danger is the Egyptian human rights organizations that are getting much less international attention but are also being shut down — this is a real attack on civil society. These next six months are going to be pivotal for the future of the country. And whenever there’s direct action and protest, I go to cover that, because that seems to be the front lines.

How so? From here, it seems like a lot of the action in Egypt right now is at the ballot box.

The only achievements this revolution has gained so far have been on the streets. This may change going forward. But the Supreme Council of Armed Forces has said, “We won’t respond to any pressure,” even when they’ve demonstrated that that’s the only thing they respond to. So, this has been the main tactic for revolutionaries over this past year. Now that we have what’s widely regarded as a legitimate parliament, that may change. But over the last few months there’s been a significant crackdown; over one hundred protesters have been killed, and they’re using live ammunition and rubber bullets. The stakes have gotten higher. The army issues complete denials of wrongdoing despite clear video evidence to the contrary; when they run over people with APCs [armored personal carriers], or shoot people with live ammunition, they deny it. I think it’s very important that you have credible reporters on the front lines to give an account of what’s happening.

You mentioned the burgeoning independent media there. Are people in Cairo getting the kind of news that they need about the movement? 

The vast majority of Egyptians get their news from television — 90 percent, I think — and a lot of that is dominated by the state media, which is essentially a propaganda arm of the government, and the government right now is ruled by the Supreme Council. But the independent media movement has been using video to document activism and getting testimonies from activists.

So does that provide a counter-narrative to the “false objectivity” of corporate media that you spoke of?

What’s happened is these videos have circulated so widely online, and have had such an impact, that the traditional media starts to report on them. You’ll find the private television channels, which have significant reach, speaking to the activists who are documented in a video or the ones who shot it — so there’s a trickle-up effect in journalism. There’s also been an interesting reclaiming of public space through media — because these activists are all but banned from appearing on state media. There’s been this campaign called The Generals Are Liars, where activists go to neighborhoods, set up a screen on a sidewalk and just air footage of army abuses on the sides of a building, and people gather around and watch. A lot of people have never seen this footage. Then there’s some kind of a Q&A or debate afterward. It’s really grown, and it’s very decentralized — anyone can be a part of this campaign — and there’s now a few happening each day in Cairo. It’s a creative reclaiming of public space to reclaim the media.

• Trayvon Martin protesters on Monday blocked the front doors of the Sanford Police Department in Florida for nearly five hours but walked away peacefully after convincing city officials to hold a community forum.

• In Tunisia, police fired tear gas Monday to disperse a rally of hundreds on a central Tunis avenue where demonstrations are banned.

• Pilots for Spanish airline Iberia, part of International Airlines Group, went on strike on Monday, grounding 150 flights in the first of 30 one-day strikes to protest against the start-up of low-cost carrier Iberia Express.

• Egyptian train drivers staged a sit-in in Cairo’s Ramses Train Station on Monday, bringing rail traffic across the country to a halt for more than seven hours, to demand an additional allowance for working on Saturdays, bonus increases and risk allowances.

• Opposition supporters wearing white ribbons walked in a circle during a Red Square protest against the rule of Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Sunday. At least three activists were arrested after pitching a tent near Lenin’s Mausoleum.

• Thousands of Shiite Muslims from Islamabad and Rawalpindi on Sunday participated in a sit-in outside the parliament to protest the killings of Shiite Muslims in Pakistan and government crackdown against the innocent people of Gilgit City.

• Bahraini security forces fired tear gas and water cannons at thousands of protesters marching Friday in support of a jailed human rights activist whose nearly two-month hunger strike has become a powerful rallying point for the tiny nation’s Shiite-led uprising against the Sunni monarchy.

• On Friday, police in India dispersed protesters who staged a sit-in protest against the gang-rape of a woman.

“There’s an illegal demonstration going on in San Francisco and I just don’t think it’s appropriate to do that,” Joseph Califano, the Secretary of the then-Health, Education, and Welfare Department (HEW) under Jimmy Carter, said to a reporter as he loped through a nondescript government hallway. It was April 5, 1977, and protests by the disability rights movement were going on across the country demanding that the federal government sign regulations to activate Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Once signed, this historic legislation would extend civil rights protections to the disabled and remove obstacles to services from universities, hospitals and other entities receiving federal funds. In San Francisco, the group had decided to stay the night in the old federal building. Califano, a longtime Washington insider, was disgruntled. When the reporter pointed a microphone at the secretary and asked if it was true that he had agreed to a meeting with the organizers and then canceled it, Califano promptly skirted the question and sidled into a waiting elevator.

Captured in all of its grainy, hand-held authenticity, this exchange is a scene from “Lives Worth Living,” a documentary on the disabilities rights movement that aired last fall on public television’s series Independent Lens. Califano was the latest in a series of administration officials and members of Congress who had determinedly ducked putting teeth into legislation that had languished since the early 1970s. Back then, Senator Hubert Humphrey had tried to amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include people with disabilities, as David Pfeiffer recounts in a fascinating overview of the struggle. Several years of Congressional machinations, legislation without regulatory authority and HEW dithering followed. Finally, the board of the American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities had had enough. It voted to launch nonviolent demonstrations in HEW regional offices across the U.S. if the regulations were not signed by April 4. The next day, with no regulations in place, the demonstrations and sit-ins began.

The San Francisco occupation became the longest sit-in ever in a federal office.

While most of the other demonstrations ended at closing time on the first day, the occupations in Washington, D.C. and in San Francisco, led by Judith Heumann, dug in for what turned out to be the long haul. One day led to the next, and then the next and then the next. An interview with a HEW representative conducted years later (also featured on “Lives Worth Living”) offers a sense of what official Washington was thinking: “They had taken over the federal building in San Francisco — and we were under the gun to do things quickly, to make this stop, to make it go away.” This brief peek behind the curtain of officialdom is a heartening and instructive glimpse into what policymakers often are actually calculating in such trying circumstances, even when a movement believes that nothing is happening and it is not making headway.

At the same time, the film conveys the gumption that was growing among the occupiers, as in a riveting scene from the San Francisco protest in which a young woman in a wheelchair explains, “It’s the first really militant thing that disabled people have ever done, and we want people to listen to us. We have tried negotiations, and at this point, we are not negotiable, we want those regulations signed.” And so one hundred people stayed put for twenty-three days until Califano relented — and signed.

Not only was this legislation a forerunner of the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act passed in 1990, it helped to catalyze the diligent organizing that would help make the ADA a reality. Two clips from “Lives Worth Living” derive from the dramatic action that helped clinch its passage: scores of people with disabilities crawling up the steps of the U.S. Capitol, and then their subsequent arrest in the Capitol rotunda.

Other dramatic waves of nonviolent action followed the 1977 sit-ins, including ADAPT’s campaign focused on access to public transportation, with highly visible civil disobedience actions in which people in wheelchairs chained themselves to city buses. Since its initial campaign, ADAPT has led many direct action efforts, a few of which can be found on the Global Nonviolent Action Database: preventing budget cuts to Medicaid Home-Health Services, 2002; winning support from Governors for Medicaid reform, 2002-2005; and campaigning for affordable and accessible housing in Chicago, 2007. Today, the struggle for full equality for people with disabilities continues; ADAPT, for example, is staging a national action in Washington on April 21-26.

The thirty-fifth anniversary of the launch of the federal office sit-ins offers us an opportunity to pay honor to the women and men who, through their stubbornly bold actions, utterly transformed the architectural and psychological landscape of our society (and, increasingly, other societies as well). Accessibility became three-dimensional, as buildings and transportation everywhere were remolded so that the visible and invisible barriers to inclusion began to be razed. It also began the slow process of uprooting ancient scripts of exclusion and re-writing history.

As the lineage and growing experience of nonviolent resistance suggests, this very metamorphosis of building codes on the one hand and social codes on the other flows directly from the grit and determination of taking action — including staying put in the very buildings you long to change.

I am grateful to “This Week in History” for listing the April 5, 1977 sit-in at the San Francisco federal building on its online peace calendar.

• In a march themed with fanciful allusions to Little Red Riding Hood, thousands of protesters swarmed Hong Kong’s streets on Sunday in the first large display of protest since the city’s elite tapped a Beijing ally to become the Chinese territory’s next leader.

• In the Dakotas, members of the proud Lakota Nation began a 48-hour hunger strike on Sunday in opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline — and all tar sands pipelines — they say will destroy precious water resources and ancestral lands in the U.S and in Canada.

• Jordanian authorities arrested more than two dozen political activists during protests Saturday critical of King Abdullah II that called for a change of government.

• An estimated 800,000 homeowners in Ireland joined a tax boycott by refusing to pay a new flat-rate $133 property tax by Saturday’s deadline.

• On Saturday, nearly 100 people wore hoodies in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to protest the killing of Trayvon Martin.

• Thousands of Palestinians protested on Friday against Israeli policies of land seizure and control of Jerusalem, leading to clashes with Israeli troops in which a 20-year-old was killed and scores of others were injured.

• Three protesters were arrested Thursday at the UC Board of Regents meeting, when a few dozen activists, some stripped down to swimsuits, called for more transparency in state funding talks and an end to tuition hikes.

• On Thursday, hundreds of Bahrainis staged a sit-in outside the offices of the United Nations in Manama demanding action over the “excessive” use by police of tear gas against protesters.

• Some 50 students at the all-boys Frederick Douglass Academy in Detroit were suspended Thursday after walking out of classes in protest of absent teachers, inconsistent classroom instruction and other issues.

A tent held up on a pole over re-occupied Liberty Plaza at 10:30 p.m. on March 17.

Occupy Wall Street celebrated its six-month anniversary yesterday in Zuccotti Park with a fast-forward replay of last fall: re-occupation, carnival, violent eviction, defiance. A morning chalk-in for families and an early afternoon march around the Financial District (actually, two: one silent and one rowdy) began a day of reunion at the movement’s New York home. As re-renamed Liberty Plaza (or Square or Park) became full once again with hundreds of people, the hardy organizers who’ve spent the winter in meetings and arguments were drowned out by joiners, curious visitors, drummers and reporters. A 24-hour re-occupation was called, and new nonviolent defensive formations were rehearsed en masse. They danced, chanted and held a General Assembly. Numbers swelled to close to a thousand when marches from the nearby Left Forum conference joined later in the evening. The whole day was a welcome reminder that in occupation a magic dwells.

Around 10 p.m., tents and tarps went up in the park, among them several tents held high in the air above the crowd. Defenses went up too, including yellow police tape marked “Occupy” and a similarly rebranded roll of orange netting—just like what police have used to surround and trap OWS marches before.

Occupiers use orange police netting as a defense against police.

But, around 10:30, more than a hundred police and Brookfield Properties private security poured into the park. They seemed intent on clearing people while minimizing arrest numbers, though dozens of Occupiers were beaten and arrested for holding their ground, and were taken away in police wagons and a repurposed city bus. Not until almost 45 minutes later did two ambulances arrive for the injured, including a woman who appeared to be suffering a seizure. At least two glass bottles were thrown and shattered near police.

Some Occupiers remained, but others set out on a march to Union Square, throwing bags full of trash into the street and chanting against the police and the state, with a few arrested in skirmishes along the way. The rest arrived at Union Square, holding up a yellow “Occupy Wall Street” banner on the square’s main steps, facing a line of several dozen police officers standing shoulder-to-shoulder. The crowd began to dissipate as the early morning wore on.

Familiar feelings, all over again: courage, awe, exuberance, rage, sadness, pain, fatigue. The city succeeded once again if its purpose was to keep the protesters’ attention on the police, rather than, for instance, on the financial institutions for which it continually assures support. The Occupiers succeeded if their purpose was to celebrate, reenact and make a blip in the media. What good either success does the world outside Lower Manhattan still remains to be seen, this spring and beyond.

One hundred years after the birth of human rights icon Bayard Rustin, his complicated legacy pushes us to analyze our own complicated times. Vilified in the 1950s for his open homosexuality and again in the 1960s for “selling out” the radical black liberation movement, Rustin’s own history has been recently rescued by the books and movie correctly extolling his incredible gifts as a grassroots organizer, a charismatic orator and a visionary thinker. As preparations proceed for the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (of which Rustin was the chief architect), and the dreams and nightmares of a new generation are being forged against a backdrop of pepper spray and tear gas, it is time to take a deeper look at the relationship between the movements for peace and for justice — movements which are no more “integrated” now than they were 50 years ago.

It is important first to note that, just as the foundations for much of the 1950s tumult around civil rights were laid by the Tuskegee Airmen and other members of the U.S. Armed Forces of African descent, Rustin was a part of another grouping of World War II veterans. When the black vets who helped liberate Europe from fascism and open the doors of the concentration camps came home to find that democracy and equality was not forthcoming despite their heroic efforts, Rustin and his World War II conscientious objector colleagues had spent their war years behind bars. Many of them, including Rustin, Dave Dellinger, Ralph DiGia, George Houser and Bill Sutherland, were active in efforts to desegregate the federal prisons they were held in, a daring effort 10 years before the widespread lunch counter sit-in and bus boycott campaigns.

It must be understood as no coincidence that this generation, whose skills were honed and tested at a time when mass sentiment was neither anti-war nor particularly progressive, produced activists whose life-long commitments to fundamental social change led them to become long-term advocates for radical alternatives. Many of the most respected and serious leaders of the civil rights, Pan-Africanist, solidarity, anti-Vietnam War, anarchist, socialist and disarmament movements of the following five decades came out of the small cadre of World War II conscientious objectors who put organization before ego and linking struggles before leftist turf wars. These same activists, coming out of the religious as well as the secular pacifist movements, were amongst the first to label their brand of nonviolent action as explicitly revolutionary — and worked to take over and increase the militancy within the existing groups of their time.

Setting the Record “Straight”

The 1947 Journey of Reconciliation.

The classic Journey of Reconciliation photo of nine smiling men, black and white, suitcases in hand, has been used repeatedly to educate the generations since that corner-turning 1947 moment about the “first freedom ride.” When, in 1942, the U.S. Supreme Court (twelve years before Brown vs. Board of Education) ruled that state segregation laws did not apply to interstate bus travel, the stirrings for a campaign began. The precocious James Farmer, who by age 21 had earned two college degrees and had developed a friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, appealed to the religious pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) to help him set up a group focusing on racial justice. Though the FOR did not agree to directly sponsor the new organization, their Executive Secretary — A.J. Muste, himself a minister and a former labor leader — helped provide the basic support to birth the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Farmer had been FOR secretary for race relations; when he left FOR staff to create CORE, fellow FOR staff members Bayard Rustin and George Houser played a major support role.

The 1947 journey, then, an integrated trip through the upper South directly challenging the new rulings on bus travel, was formally sponsored by CORE, largely organized by FOR staffers Rustin and Houser and made up of a total of 16 men. Of the nine in the well-known photo, Rustin and four others—Igal Roodenko, Jim Peck, Wally Nelson and Ernest Bromley—ended up playing key roles in the leadership of the secular pacifist War Resisters League (WRL) in the decades to follow; Houser and Rustin co-authored the FOR-CORE report on the journey, We Challenged Jim Crow! For defying southern custom, the bus riders were arrested several times, with Rustin eventually authoring “22 Days on a Chain Gang,” a much-read pamphlet on his experiences.

Having served as an organizer of various Free India activities in support of Gandhi and the independence movement, Rustin traveled to India in 1948 for a long-planned conference that ended up taking place shortly after Gandhi’s assassination. Rustin and Sutherland also made regular contact with the burgeoning anti-colonial movements in Africa, with special emphasis on contacts in Nigeria and South Africa. In 1951, the two of them joined Houser in setting up the Committee to Support South African Resistance, which evolved into the American Committee on Africa, for four decades the key U.S. African solidarity network. Working with a small group of existing contacts within the War Resisters International, Sutherland was able to travel to the Gold Coast in 1953 — the British colony that would soon achieve independence through nonviolent civil resistance, and change its name back to the historic kingdom long developed in that West African territory: Ghana. Sutherland remained in Africa for 50 years, an unofficial ambassador of revolutionary nonviolence working closely with the ideologically and tactically diverse liberation movements. But Rustin’s life in 1953 was to take another turn: though never secretive about his sexuality, he was arrested in a car with two other men during a Quaker conference in Pasadena (in California, in part, to raise money for a planned trip to Nigeria). Charged with vagrancy and lewd conduct, he pled guilty to the single, lesser charge of “sex perversion,” as consensual homosexual activity was referred to in California at that time.

Back in New York, the officers of FOR were worried about the reputation of the organization given the new attention which Rustin’s arrest brought up regarding matters of sexual orientation. FOR policy regarding Rustin had been that he remain both quiet and abstinent — refraining from discussing or engaging in any sexual activity whatsoever, publicly or privately. With the California “incident” suggesting an inability to comply with this policy, the FOR asked Rustin to resign from staff; Muste threatened Rustin with firing if he did not comply. His resignation was also marked by a letter of resignation from the Executive Committee of the War Resisters League, but the WRL refused to accept Rustin’s stepping down. In a short period of time, in fact — by August of 1953 — the officers of the WRL (in many ways a sister organization to FOR) decided to offer Rustin a position on their staff, recognizing in him the talents that would later dazzle the young Martin Luther King, Jr. and a new generation of southern blacks looking to intensify the battle against segregation. WRL’s process of hiring Rustin, however, was not without its own controversies.

Though WRL Chair Roy Finch and WRL Executive Secretary Sid Aberman came to a joint agreement that hiring Rustin would provide “a unique opportunity” for the organization, and a proposal was put into place to hire both Rustin and Quaker leader Arlo Tatum as co-executive secretaries, there was much internal debate within the WRL Executive Committee and Advisory Board. Muste and Houser held roles as WRL executive members as well as their staff positions in FOR, but their individual feelings were split about the proposal. Arlo’s own brother Lyle Tatum, executive director of the Central Committee on Conscientious Objection at the time, wrote that Rustin had greater abilities to lead the work of the nonviolent movement “than any other person with even a remote possibility of availability.” Despite this, Tatum called to question whether WRL would be open to public attack if Rustin were to be hired, and whether future American Friends Service Committee and FOR cooperation with WRL could continue with Rustin on staff; he objected to the proposal “solely because of Bayard’s public record of homosexual practices.” Frances Witherspoon echoed the common refrain that “the psychological and physical trouble from which he suffers is not a recent one, but of fairly long standing, and I do not feel that the recent regrettable episode is far enough in the past.” And WRL Advisory Committee member George W. Hartmann, the university psychologist for Columbia University and professor of psychology at Roosevelt College voiced the prevailing “professional” opinion of the time. “Bayard’s ‘malady,’” Hartmann noted, “is a peculiarly obdurate one (according to most clinical experience) and I should be violating my psychological insights did I not enter a plea at this time for persistent vigilance, so that organizationally we do not suffer from any possible ‘relapse.’ I confess I know no easy way to make such ‘preventive hygiene’ effective, but it seems only fair to Bayard that we be as intelligent and humane in helping him—and the Peace Movement—as we possibly can.”

The proposal to hire Rustin prevailed, with some interesting insights expressed amongst the majority. Within the field of psychology was an advisor offering a more forward-looking view in the person of Herbert Kellman, at the time a post-doctoral research fellow of the U.S. Public Health Service at the Psychological Clinic at John Hopkins University. Kellman, now a long-standing professor at Harvard and innovator in the field of mediation, wrote to WRL Chair Finch that “it would be a shame for the pacifist movement to waste the talents, skills, and experience that Bayard has … there is little question that Bayard will be able to handle the job successfully despite his so-called ‘emotional problems.’” Fellow World War II conscientious objector Dave Dellinger, not yet himself an iconic anti-war figure, offered four pages of prophetic support for Rustin, stating that though Rustin’s sexual orientation might be going against the “dominant sexual mores,” there could be “no sense in trying to force on Bayard a Puritanical abstinence from the form of sex which apparently is natural to him.” Suggesting that the WRL and the movement as a whole should be wiser than to continue the position of “rigid abstinence,” Dellinger also noted that “the power of nonviolence works … through dedicated people” and those so dedicated should be educated about the importance of what Rustin had to offer. Comparing the nonviolent positions of groups such as the WRL and FOR with mass-based electoral campaigns, Dellinger wrote: “I would rather take a chance of losing a thousand votes and winning a hundred pacifists, by having Bayard work for us.” Concerned that an irrelevant nonviolent movement could suffer “the unity of the grave,” Dellinger concluded that what Rustin’s “exceptional talents and dedication” brought to the WRL, and what FOR was now lacking, was “a grass-roots, dynamic pacifism.”

So it was, in the fall of 1953, that Bayard Rustin became executive secretary of the War Resisters League.

For Jobs and Freedom

Bayard Rustin’s first years on the staff of the War Resisters League marked a period which historian Scott Bennett has called “the rebirth of the peace movement.” Undoubtedly a good portion of that energy came from the work of Rustin. In addition to directing the League’s general disarmament and anti-war work, youth and student outreach, and general organizational maintenance, Rustin helped the WRL found Liberation magazine in 1956 and pushed for further engagement with the growing civil rights campaigns. Some saw Rustin’s public profile as too controversial to handle, as evidenced by the absence of his name on the influential 1955 American Friends Service Committee booklet he helped to author — Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence — a primer on nonviolent solutions to the Cold War. February 1956 saw the publishing of the first of a series of WRL reports written by Rustin about the movements in the south, called “Report from Montgomery, Alabama.” In case there was to be any doubt about Rustin’s effectiveness, a preface to the pamphlet quoted Unitarian minister Homer Jack that Rustin’s counseling and trainings were especially crucial in the weeks following the mass arrests, and that “his contribution to interpreting the Gandhian approach to leadership cannot be overestimated.” A year later, Rustin authored and WRL published a new report, “Non-Violence in the South,” which outlined the deepening work being done against Jim Crow.

A 1959 WRL fundraising letter penned by Rustin spoke of the “vast changes” which were taking place in the years of the bus boycott and beyond. Speaking about a nationally-publicized North Carolina incident which raised the question of armed self-defense, Rustin wrote: “When the NAACP dismissed Robert Williams as its President in North Carolina because he advocated that ‘Negroes should return violence with violence,’ the Negro community was gravely split and much of the education on nonviolence was undone. Immediately our staff … helped arrange for articles on the subject by both Mr. Williams and Rev. Martin Luther King in the pages of Liberation. We are also bringing Mr. Williams to New York to debate with pacifists on October 1. This will be the first public discussion of the question at which the War Resisters League point of view will be presented in the middle of one of the hottest issues of today.” The “WRL position” was framed and articulated by Rustin — whose commitment to nonviolent direct action was matched by his willingness to dialogue and debate with those who disagreed.

By the end of 1959, however, the anti-segregation and southern empowerment work was too pressing to have Rustin remain based at WRL headquarters in New York. With the intervention and assistance of labor leader A. Philip Randolph, whose Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was amongst the first unions to successfully organize black workers and challenge the racial divides within the American Federation of Labor, Rustin was asked to work directly as a full-time advisor to Rev. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). SCLC actually emerged as an organization to support King’s work with other clergy and lay people throughout the South, growing out of an idea developed by Rustin and implemented by Rustin and legendary organizer Ella Baker (who went on to help found and mentor the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, the “youth division” of the civil rights movement). A 1960 letter from Randolph (who had become close to Muste during Muste’s years as a socialist union organizer) to WRL Chair Eddie Gottlieb thanked the WRL for enabling Rustin to fulfill the “supremely important assignment … in the interest of civil rights.” A letter to Gottlieb from Rev. King reiterated his gratitude to WRL, and that “we are thoroughly committed to the method of nonviolence in our struggle and we are convinced that Bayard’s expertness and commitment in this area will be of inestimable value in our future efforts.” An “inner strategy committee” of King, Randolph, Muste, Gottlieb, Stanley Levison (a NY-based businessman who was a friend and advisor to King) and Rustin was set up to review the work as it related to “its contribution to the cause of nonviolence.”

By 1963, Rustin was immersed in the work for a March on Washington, a dream of A. Philip Randolph’s since the 1940s. When then-President Franklin Roosevelt established the federal Committee on Fair Employment Practice in 1941, effectively banning discriminatory hiring in the U.S. defense industry, Randolph called off the mass demonstration intended to pressure the White House. But the late 1950s, however, marked a time when federal action on behalf of disenfranchised blacks was far from a given, and the growing grassroots initiatives throughout the South could well be mobilized into a massive show of political force. Rustin was acknowledged as the best coordinator for such a unifying task, and the March for Jobs and Freedom, or Great March, was set for August on the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Writing as the on-leave WRL executive secretary, Rustin noted that the nation was “in deep crisis in civil rights, North and South.” With the growing popularity of Malcolm X and the black Muslims, the validity and relevance of nonviolence was being called into question. “Fortunately,” Rustin suggested, “the heroic nonviolent resistance in Birmingham has temporarily restored the faith of many black people.” Rustin’s reporting on The Meaning of Birmingham, published in Liberation and reprinted by WRL in pamphlet form as a mobilizing tool for the March, explained that “the mood is one of anger and confidence of total victory … One can only hope that the white community will realize that the black community means what it says: freedom now.”

With 250,000 people assembled on the Great Lawn from every corner of the country, and its apparent direct effects on the halls of power, interest in mass civil resistance increased. As word spread throughout the U.S. of the mighty “I Have a Dream” oratory of Dr. King, and The New York Times focused attention on the radical testimonial in the speech of SNCC representative John Lewis the morning after the March, the full color photo on the cover of LIFE magazine was that of Randolph and Rustin, standing proudly in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

Mixing Politics and Resistance, Peace and Freedom

The months and years that followed must have been a blur for most people working full-time on anti-war and anti-racist issues. On the one hand, the March and the movement seemed singularly responsible for forcing the politicians of the time to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Less than six months after the March, Rustin was responsible for an even more massive display of direct action, as hundreds of thousands of parents, students and ant-segregation activists took part in a one-day citywide boycott of the New York City public school system. On February 3, 1964, an estimated 450,000, mainly-black and Puerto Rican students stayed away from their assigned schools (many attending ad-hoc Freedom Schools at local churches and community centers for the day), calling on the city to set a clear timetable for an integrated system that would end the de facto separate and unequal school districts. Peace groups largely supported the effort (Eddie Gottlieb himself was not only WRL’s chair but a principal in the Department of Education), and though short-term goals were not immediately met, the long-term ramifications of such a broad and activist coalition were daunting to the powers that be.

At the same time, however, with an apparent military incident in the Southeast Asian Gulf of Tonkin, the U.S. “police action” in Vietnam was growing more war-like with every passing day. As some leaders suggested that the time had come for the protest movement to escalate its tactics of resistance, Rustin authored an influential paper, “From Protest to Politics,” which outlined a strategic need for the black-led freedom movement to shift away from militancy and resistance in the cause of equal rights towards forging greater social, electoral and economic alliances with the predominantly white trade union movement, liberal churches and politicians for the development of a movement that would probe and correct the contradictions of President Johnson’s proposed “Great Society” for all working Americans.

In this context, Rustin hoped that his colleagues in the WRL and other peace groups would be able to join in the grand coalition which would work at the very center of the U.S. power structure. “One of the most urgent problems in the peace movement today,” Rustin wrote in April 1964, “is how to ‘relate’ the issue of peace to the other great social issues of our day — Civil Rights, unemployment, automation.” While acknowledging that the WRL, because of its commitment to nonviolence, “has at times been termed dogmatic or inflexible in its consistently radical position,” Rustin commented that, based on its early and creative support of African resistance and its flexibility in aligning with the civil rights movement, he knew “of no other organization — in or out of the peace movement — which has more consistently and effectively done this job of relating.” The problem was, there was no agreement as to where the emphasis on such a series of relationships should be put. For Rustin, the choice was clear; when an institute was set up following the passage of the Voting Rights Act — named after and presided over by his mentor A. Philip Randolph — Rustin accepted the challenge of becoming its executive director working to strengthen the civil rights-labor connection. For the WRL and most other peace groups, the choice was to focus on the war in Vietnam, a decision which brought them into further opposition with the U.S. government.

In the early years of anti-war resistance, these differences in emphasis did not cause significant problems. Still writing as WRL executive secretary in July 1964, Rustin asserted that Vietnam was the U.S.’ “dirty war,” like the bloody war for Algerian independence was for France a decade prior. One of the first major anti-war rallies was held in New York’s Madison Square Garden, and featured both Rustin and Coretta Scott King. In a speech (to be published for the first time in the forthcoming PM Press/WRL book We Have Not Been Moved: Resisting Racism and Militarism in 21st Century America), Rustin exclaimed:

Though Congress refuses to admit it, we are at war. It is a useless, destructive, disgusting war …We must be on the side of revolutionary democracy. And, in addition to all the other arguments for a negotiated peace in Vietnam, there is this one: that it is immoral, impractical, un-political, and unrealistic for this nation to identify itself with a regime which does not have the confidence of its people … I say to the President: American cannot be the policeman of this globe!

Though critics of Rustin claim that his opposition to the war was unclear at best, and that the alliances he made with the AFL-CIO neutralized his nonviolent politics, at the crucial early stages of anti-war movement-building in 1965, the links he made were more than clear: “The actor Ossie Davis,” Rustin recalled, “recently pointed out that we must say to the President: ‘If you want us to be nonviolent in Selma, why can’t you be nonviolent in Saigon?’” There was no restrained militancy in Rustin’s reminder that “the civil rights movement begged and begged for change, but finally learned this lesson — going into the streets. The time is so late, the danger so great, that I call upon all the forces which believe in peace to take a lesson from the labor movement, the women’s movement, and the civil rights movement and stop staying indoors. Go into these streets until we get peace!”

Nonetheless, the strategic and tactical differences in direction proved to be too great. On November 16, 1965, Bayard Rustin formally resigned from his executive position within the War Resisters League, in part because of his “distress and concern” over WRL policies regarding Vietnam. Rustin’s resignation was set in the context of the “great affection” which he felt for the organization, and he agreed less than two months later to serve on the WRL Advisory Council; seven years later, when many contentious splits in the left had occurred during the long course of the extended war, both Rustin and Randolph nevertheless agreed to serve on the League’s 50th Anniversary Commemoration Committee. But the close and consistent contact which had marked over two decades of communication between Rustin and his radical pacifist comrades was, for a time, now broken.

Rapprochement and Renewed Resistance

The late 1960s were at best a trying time for the coalition which had brought together moderate civil rights groups from the South, northern liberals (including the mainstream trade union movement), and radicals who saw the importance of working against the most overt and dramatic instances of racism in U.S. society. With the assassination of Muslim minister Malcolm X, and the ever-escalating war in Southeast Asia, the idea that fundamental change and equality could come about through nonviolent means seemed incredulous to many. Even the greatest symbol of nonviolence (and perhaps its most strategic practitioner) — Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., now a Nobel Peace prize recipient — was, by 1968, sounding a bit more open than usual to supporting the national liberation movement of the Vietnamese.

The inroads that Rustin had made with the massive 1964 schools boycott put him closer to the activities of Al Shanker and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), which had just won the right to collective bargaining a few years earlier. In 1967, when rumblings about community control of the schools in black neighborhoods began spreading throughout the New York City, Rustin made the fateful choice to side with his labor allies — a move that in many ways defined his split with parts of the black movement. The local autonomy of black-led schools was contrary to the UFT notion of inter-racial worker’s rights and the need for united fronts against the always-recalcitrant Board of Education. In Rustin’s words, Black Power in general and community control in particular were impediments to “authentic revolution,” and a “giant hoax” which “would bring about the opposite of self-determination, because it can only lead to continued subjugation.” Neither fighting against the war, nor working to empower the black community was as important as working with the UFT to ensure the gains of the “integrated” working class. At Rustin’s suggestion, King sent words of support and a donation to Shanker’s bail fund when Shanker was jailed for leading a strike for smaller class size.

Many of the young activists of the SNCC were already harshly critical of Rustin, as the 1964 conflicts at the Democratic National Convention with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) caused many to lose faith in “the system” altogether — and Rustin’s tepid support of the MFDP and collusion with President Johnson caused a similar loss of faith in him. As historian Clayborne Carson described in a recent presentation, his own more balanced analysis of Rustin took years to develop, after his initial negative feelings as a young person in SNCC. Stokley Carmichael’s moving of SNCC away from nonviolence and towards Black Power intensified these divisions, which were to be solidified in short order. The demoralization which swept the peace and civil rights movements following the April 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King further set the tone for the disunity and confusion which were to follow. In a note from Rustin to Bill Sutherland in Tanzania shortly after the murder, he confessed to being “too discombobulated to write a coherent letter … Martin’s death leaves a fantastic vacuum that nobody — not me and ten others combined — could fill.”

When a fall 1968 UFT strike took place against the abridgement of due process rights of several white teachers by the black-led Ocean Hill-Brownsville community-controlled school district, the historically positive and mutually supportive relationship between New York City’s progressive Black and Jewish communities was torn asunder. A few short months earlier, Rustin accepted the UFT’s prestigious John Dewey Award with a speech on “integration without decentralization.” Rustin was alone amongst black leaders in standing with the union and supporting the strike.

Seventeen years later, this writer — a newly hired social studies teacher whose father was a UFT Chapter Leader throughout the tumultuous 1960s strikes (but whose years as a young activist had led me to significant criticism of the racism in the UFT and elsewhere) — understood the irony and significance of heading towards the main headquarters of the now-powerful teacher’s union, to the offices of the A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI) and its director, Bayard Rustin. Throughout the 1970s, Rustin’s connection to the mainstream labor bureaucracy was solidified through a number of positions and actions. As public spokesperson of the Social Democrats, he helped lead the push for increasing AFL-CIO work on overall economic justice issues — while simultaneously taking strong anti-communist positions and criticizing some liberal positions as well. As a vice chairman of the International Rescue Committee, Rustin traveled around the world on behalf of the rights of refugees, including five trips to Thailand between 1978 and 1987 to spotlight the plight of Vietnam’s “boat people.” As Executive Committee chairman of Freedom House, he was an election observer in Zimbabwe, El Salvador and Grenada; Rustin was central to organizing the Black Americans to Support Israel Committee. Now, my own work in the anti-apartheid movement and interest in the Gandhian legacy in India was dovetailing with a renewed interest on Rustin’s part in reaching back to his radical pacifist roots.

At the end of 1985, the War Resisters International held its triennial conference in the province of Gujarat, India — home to Gandhi, his ashram, and so many of the institutions set up by the nonviolent movements of the last half century. A special guest, attending not as a speaker or presenter or honoree, was Bayard Rustin, interested in checking out the organization he had been so integral to. As a public non-registrant who had just become the youngest national chairperson of the WRL, I was in attendance as convener of the theme group on conscientious objection and resistance to conscription. I had also recently developed a special relationship with the newly-formed End Conscription Campaign (ECC) of South Africa, the coalition which was bringing together unprecedented numbers of whites into nonviolent confrontation with the racist regime. ECC’s national director, Laurie Nathan, was with us as part of the theme group, as was ECC activist Peter Hawthorne, South African Council of Churches representative Rev. John Lamola, and a representative of the women’s organization Black Sash. Laurie, Peter and I had traversed northern Europe, England, and India to spread the word of the connections between resisting racism and militarism, but were especially interested in meeting that man who had such a rich but controversial history in making those same links. The interest was unmistakably mutual, as Rustin took a keen notice of the work of ECC and the developments on the ground in South Africa.

In the months that followed, Rustin became a key fiscal and political supporter of the ECC, helping to funnel funds from the Quaker New York Friends Group with whom he had maintained a close connection. The meeting at the APRI offices in the UFT headquarters was one of a growing number of discussions and reunions I took part in, with Bayard’s old colleagues Ralph DiGia and David McReynolds in attendance. At one such get-together, we learned of the forthcoming 75th birthday celebration, planned to fete Bayard at New York’s famed Hilton Hotel. The invitation showcased the sometimes unlikely partners in commemorating the achievements of this complicated man. Germany’s socialist Willy Brandt joined with the AFL-CIO’s arch anti-communist president Lane Kirkland; Indian pacifists Narayan Desai and Devi Presad served as international sponsors alongside Israeli militarists Yitzhak Shamir and Shimon Peres, Norwegian actress Liv Ullman, and many others. For us, a rag-tag group of nonviolent campaigners made up a dinner table at the event, including DiGia, McReynolds and I, along with Igal Roodenko and Laurie Nathan — who happened to be in town for a U.S. speaking tour. UFTers Albert Shanker and Sandy Feldman were happily part of the festivities, as we listened to tribute after tribute, including from former SNCC militant turned-U.S. Congressman John Lewis, former Urban League president Vernon Jordan, and recently awarded Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel; U.S. Presidents Ford and Carter each sent greetings. The diversity of attendees and supporters spoke volumes about the ways in which Rustin’s rich life had impacted positively on a wide spectrum of peoples.

One aspect of Rustin’s interest in rapprochement and the grassroots may have been due to the renewed attention he was receiving from the activist community since appearing on the July 1986 cover of Gay Community News. As the LGBT movement was growing by leaps and bounds, Rustin provided a special kind of solidarity by suggesting that the campaign for gay right was akin to the civil rights movement of its time. Rustin cautioned, however, the wise idea that solidarity must always be a two-way endeavor. “If we want some civil rights advocates to help us,” he proclaimed in the Gay Community News interview, “that means we’ll have to be looked upon by civil rights groups as a group that is going to help them.”

And then he was gone. This high-spirited, flamboyant, funny, brilliant, challenging soul force — this strong and courageous spirit who seemed always filled with energy and passion — passed away less than six months after his birthday dinner. The strain of an emergency operation for a perforated appendix caused a heart attack that his body could not endure. But his legacy, like his entire life, was a beacon of the power of positive action. The typically diverse group of people who packed Community Church for Bayard Rustin’s funeral were treated to the same words pledged by March participants in front of the Lincoln Memorial that fateful August day in 1963. An organizer till the very end, his life partner Walter Naegle made sure that each memorial program spotlighted the words which summarized Rustin’s undying outlook:

I pledge that I will join and support all actions undertaken in good faith and in accord with time-honored democratic traditions of nonviolent protest or peaceful assembly and petition … I will pledge my heart and my mind and my body, unequivocally and without regard to personal sacrifice to the achievement of social peace through social justice.

I’ve often heard it stated flatly at Occupy Wall Street meetings, sometimes with a touch of exasperation, that “occupation is just a tactic.” This can be a hard idea to come to terms with in a movement called “Occupy.” But, to get technical about it, “nonviolent occupation” is #173 on Gene Sharp’s 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action, just before “establishing new social patterns.” As the + Brigades and the Singing Foreclosure Auction Blockades have been showing with aplomb, a whole litany of interesting tactics are available to the movement beyond the now-familiar one of occupying space.

On Wednesday, members of the group Occupy Faith unfurled their first “Parable of an Immoral Budget” in an action that combined a “pray-in” (Sharp’s #167) with “nonviolent obstruction” (Sharp’s #172).

Outside of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office in midtown Manhattan, Christian, Jewish and Muslim clergy used the human microphone to decry homelessness. They called for higher taxes on rich corporations, the closing of tax loopholes and respect among decision makers for the value of human life. Next, as this video shows, Michael Ellick of Judson Church led protestors across the street. (It is illegal to protest directly outside the Governor’s office.) At that point, lay and ordained people obstructed the building’s entrance with cots symbolizing the basic right to shelter, which for so many is not being met. They sang and prayed over their neatly-made beds before the police took them away in handcuffs. Meanwhile, a crowd gathered on the street to watch and office workers peered out.

There are seeds of something big in Occupy Wall Street’s early spring actions. To be sure, occupying space can be a useful method. It gives protestors public visibility and a central location from which to plan other actions. In my view, however, a push to retake public spaces, while perhaps offering some benefits, carries a surplus of risks in the form of confrontational showdowns with police, negative media attention and the loss of public sympathy. If there is a need for outdoor places where people could wander in, pick up some materials, talk to protesters and begin to get involved, then weekly Sunday afternoon assemblies in Central Park, or regular gatherings in parks around the country, would more than meet that need without the tents or the threat of arrests.

Rather than more encampments, what now seems to be needed most are purposeful actions, like Wednesday’s pray-in, that have a well-researched message and the capacity to recruit and retain newcomers into organized units. Actions like Occupy Faith’s “Parable” cost the movement little, while making a compelling moral argument. Faith leaders — whose dress added to their credibility — presented clear policy demands and used symbols and rhetoric onlookers could easily understand.

Let me offer a cautionary tale from South Africa to illustrate my point. In the drought-stricken Eastern Cape in 1921, a few thousand Xhosa-speaking Christians occupied land in expectation of deliverance. They were called the “Israelites” because they particularly identified with the Old Testament. After their annual Passover gathering, they refused to leave the site. Instead, they built a new state there reflective of their beliefs. Their leader was Enoch Mgijima, a preacher recently excommunicated from the U.S.-based Church of God and Saints of Christ for refusing to renounce his prophetic visions. In what were desperate times for black South Africans, Mgijima’s breakaway group found peace and hope in their encampment. They could escape punishing laws and look forward to the apocalypse that would be the prelude to a wholesale restoration of society.

The Israelites toiled to become self-sufficient. They built sturdy brick structures. They had their own craftsmen and builders. They organized a nursing brigade, a police force, and a judiciary. According to historian Robert R. Edgar, “Church elders governed village life with a court to try people for religious violations.” Children went to a special Bible school. Members prayed together four times a day and sang hymns such as Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon … We cannot sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.” In this place, the poor became rich and the marginalized sanctified. Simultaneously, the Israelites withheld taxes and refused to heed government orders. Convinced that the end of the world was coming and it was the only way they would be saved, they clung to what had become their sacred ground.

Several factors contributed to the violence that followed. A fast-growing black labor movement was throwing the state’s control into question. Editorialists urged the government to make an example of this lunatic fringe by air-bombing the encampment, if necessary, to show that flouting the government’s rules would not tolerated. For their part, the Israelites declared they were following God’s law. Both sides dug in. At his wit’s end, a white official asked Mgijima to provide the names of all the occupiers. The preacher refused, saying, “Our names are written in God’s book.” Africans had recently been stripped of major land rights. Only a few Africans could vote. Still, government supporters saw the Israelites not as victims of precariousness and exclusion, but the embodiment of all that was wrong with the “native mind.” Unable to see the other side, the state felt compelled to use force.

After several failed attempts at negotiation, including one attempt by African clergy, armed troops were deployed. Israelite men shielded their women and children. After a standoff subsequently reported on in conflicting accounts, government forces killed at least 183 Israelites by machine gun fire. Another hundred were wounded. All the casualties were on the Israelite side, except for one policeman who received a stab wound. The group’s prophet-leader was arrested and the occupiers were evicted.

The end of the physical violence did not quell the psychological frustrations that motivated this movement, though. A prominent white politician admitted that a new “spirit” had arisen in the people. “By ignoring that spirit they would not kill it; they would merely strengthen it,” said National Party leader J.B.M. Hertzog. “The native had come to a consciousness of independence … to a consciousness of himself that no authority would ever be able to suppress.” Moreover, like other religious movements, the “Bulhoek Massacre” had powerful aftereffects. When weighing matters of tactics, African National Congress leaders in future generations remembered the state’s brutal reaction to poorly-armed men praying to be free. They took that lesson to heart and looked to other tactics.

Occupy is a movement about an idea — valuing people over profits — not any one place. By keeping this vision in view, by maximizing pressure on lawmakers standing in the way of a society that puts people over profits, and by minimizing the blows dealt to the movement, Occupy can win meaningful gains. As Judith Butler writes in the recent issue of the movement journal Tidal, Occupy can advance episodically and retain the trans-issue coherence that has distinguished it from other movements. By appearing here and there, by shedding light on the student debt crisis one week and mass incarceration the next, Occupy can continue to question the legitimacy of the existing social and governmental order. It can keep pressing forward with the claim that today’s urgent social ills are connected at the nodes where money corrupts democracy, human life is violated and greed goes unchecked. And, it can keep awakening people’s imaginations by insisting that equality and freedom are not outlandish formulations but possible states of being.

All of this can be attempted without claiming spaces at a high cost to the movement.

If peaceful resisters do manage to occupy new public spaces this spring, and if their legal rights to assembly are violated by government repression, over-reaction by the state may give Americans the distinct impression that their government relies on violence to silence dissent. Perhaps some spectators will feel an increased sympathy with the movement. However, the O-tactic could easily backfire, especially if protesters get into more skirmishes with the police and the movement begins to look like a smattering of pointless street battles. I’m not the first to make this point. But the point is worth repeating. The stakes are high. There are at least 197 other methods of nonviolent resistance to choose from. Why look back to September? It’s time for Occupy to spring forward.