The question for all those, whether using black bloc tactics or not, who consider adding to the Occupy movement tactics of either property destruction or violence: Do you want the issues of injustice to be talked about, or your bricks? In my own definition, property destruction is not the same as violence—there can be very significant differences between the two. But in this historical-political situation, the impact of either is similar; they give an easy out for people who don’t really want to talk about injustice.

I don’t, however, recommend Chris Hedges’ recent essay, “The Cancer in Occupy,” as a model for how to respond to the black blocs. Demonizing, calling people names, using the giveaway metaphor of “cancer” (I’ve had cancer) is about as far away from effectively opposing a tendency one disagrees with as it’s possible to get.

We have such good models in the tradition of nonviolence. Dr. King, James Lawson, John Lewis and so many others in the Civil Rights movement who had to respond to those willing to advocate violence showed us how to do it. They were themselves mentored by people like A. J. Muste whose largeness of spirit in dealing with defenders of violence went all the way back to the 1919 Lawrence, MA, textile strike.

Dr. King, for instance, famously had a public dialogue with Malcolm X, and I myself was involved in a radio broadcast debate between Malcolm and Freedom Rider Albert Bigelow. But less well-known to the public were the thousands of hours spent by SNCC and SCLC organizers dialoguing with advocates of violence wherever they found them: bars, pool halls, on the street, in church basements.  Bayard Rustin seemed to have unlimited patience in going into the wee hours of the night over whiskey with black comrades who believed the time had come to include violent tactics. Rev. James Orange, a strongly-built staffer for the SCLC, was given the job in the Chicago campaign of winning over the largest and toughest African American gang, the Blackstone Rangers; Jim was beaten up repeatedly by gang members to test his courage and sincerity before he was finally led to the gang leaders who agreed, in the end, to join the campaign and be nonviolent “peacekeepers.”

The issue of the appropriateness of property destruction and/or violence is, like any other aspect of community organizing, not settled by blanket statements or posturing but by getting in there and dialoguing, over and over again.  Advocates of nonviolent action need to learn from the Civil Rights movement and the field of community organizing in this way—there really aren’t any shortcuts.

I personally am as furious as anybody about the oppression that’s dealt out by the 1 percent, and my background as a working class gay person give me plenty of stories I can tell about injustice. But my hope for those now devoting themselves to Occupy is to keep your eyes on the prize. We already have in this country the model provided by heroic African Americans of how to stand up to violence—whether from the police or the KKK—in a way that keeps a city’s or nation’s attention on the real issues.

If, in good conscience, you just can’t stand for what looks to you like ineffective nonviolent struggle, then launch your own campaign with your preferred tactics and see how it works out for you. The public debate between Ward Churchill and me might be useful as you think about strategy. And if anyone else would like to debate me publicly on this subject, let me know.

The Occupy movement celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in force. There was a worldwide candlelight vigil on Sunday night, and then, on Monday, nationwide protests in front of Federal Reserve locations under the banner of “Occupy the Dream.” With the moniker “Occupy 4 Jobs,” protests in four East Coast cities called for a new initiative to counter unemployment. In New York, the vigil was a celebrity-studded success; the next day, Occupy the Dream attracted a lackluster showing in the morning cold. The several hundred who turned out at Union Square to Occupy 4 Jobs made their point by way of a maddening, roving sparring match with the NYPD, by the end of which protesters had distracted themselves from the banks and stores they were targeting with vicious verbal assaults on their police escort. What force they mustered, really, became diluted by fury.

This kind of behavior is not an exception carried out by an errant Occupy copycat, but the rule for the movement as a whole; we at Waging Nonviolence have contended with it again and again. Eventually this movement needs to grow out of its debilitating reactiveness, to grow up, to learn discipline, and to realize that its real power begins where this kind of mayhem ends. I think King would say so too.

By the time I arrived at Monday’s Occupy 4 Jobs rally for its announced 1 p.m. starting time, people were already gathered at the steps of Union Square around a brass band. It was a somewhat more colorful crowd than most Occupy events, ethnically, though there were a good number of regulars too. Jersey City-based organizer Monica Moorehead explained to me that Occupy 4 Jobs is “independent from the Occupy Wall Street movement, but inspired by it.” As I approached the rally, I met several offers to take a free socialist newspaper. “Young people don’t have hope under capitalism,” Moorehead added.

The police presence was far heavier than what I’d seen that morning downtown at the Fed; cops seemed almost as numerous as protesters. By 1:45, a march was called, and off it went, circumambulating Union Square’s busy sidewalks counterclockwise alongside motorcycle police, vans, commanders and Community Affairs officers in friendly blue windbreakers. I asked one officer why there were so many of them. “I just go where I’m told,” she replied, with a smile.

After one lap around the square, the march came to the Bank of America ATM storefront at the corner of 14th Street and University Place. Several protesters entered with signs, while the rest picketed out front. (“What do we want? Jobs! When do we want it [sic]? Now!”) About a dozen police officers followed. For almost 20 minutes, the police kept the storefront open, allowing customers to use the ATMs. Metal barricades were brought in to surround the picketers and keep a section of the sidewalk clear for pedestrian traffic. (Picketers: “We! Are! Pedestrian traffic!”) When four of those who’d entered the storefront were arrested, those outside started singing “We Shall Overcome”—certainly a Kingian moment. But as police ushered the arrestees outside and past the crowd, the protesters themselves were overcome. They started shouting, as is common Occupy practice during an arrest, “Shame! Shame! Shame on you!” And “Your pensions are coming soon!”

But “shame” for what? The protesters were conducting an act of civil disobedience by attempting to occupy bank property. Surely they expected to be arrested. The police officers carried out their orders with far less shouting than the protest directed at them, taking care to ensure the whole thing was as orderly as possible. The protesters seemed intent on making it a mess.

One older man holding a cane and looking disturbed was caught in the ensuing scuffle, and several officers led him to one of the locked glass doors of the bank and began to arrest him. “Let him go!” some in the crowd chanted. A higher-ranking officer came to the scene to investigate. He quickly told the others to stand down, and to hand the man back his cane, and the man was indeed let go. Another point for the cops.

After Bank of America, the march continued on past the Whole Foods and toward the Chase location on 14th and Broadway. Seeing it completely surrounded by police (“Who do you serve? Who do you protect?”), they turned back to the Whole Foods, which several of them entered while chanting against the company’s labor practices. As police tried to drive them away from the store’s entrance and to keep part of the sidewalk clear, the marchers moved east, passing the Chase bank. They stopped in front of Walgreens, and then Trader Joe’s, decrying these businesses’ labor practices as well. (Policeman: “Are you union busters?” Flustered Trader Joe’s employee, standing outside: “Um, no.”) At each stop, police warned them to keep moving or be arrested. The marchers escalated their insults.

First it was “Tell me what a police state looks like! This is what a police state looks like!” Then “No justice! No Peace! Fuck the police!” And then, in a corruption of a well-known Occupy chant: “The pigs! Are not! The 99 percent!”

The police were shouting and barking orders and intimidating people; some of them were being outright jerks. But this kind of sloganeering made them actually look pretty good. As is the usual and questionable NYPD tactic, police were out in overwhelming numbers, and the protesters let that tactic get them all worked up. The NYPD has learned something since its early incidents of mass arrests and hideous abuse of pepper spray with Occupy. Protesters, evidently, have not. They use the same chants and insults that only carry the situation beyond their control and surely make any bystander—read: potential supporter—hope that the comparatively placid police officers will protect her or him from this vicious mob.

Which makes one wonder. What, instead, would Martin Luther King, Jr. do? How would he want his holiday celebrated?

King was constantly speaking out against police brutality against black communities. He experienced plenty of it himself. But he refused to turn the insults that police directed at him and his movement back against them. “To meet hate with retaliatory hate would be both impractical and immoral,” he wrote. “We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love.” Under conditions of police repression far more brutal than what the Occupy movement has experienced, he was always guiding his followers not to fight back in word or action. If they did, he knew, they risked turning the public against them. Civil rights leaders, he stressed, “have a responsibility to maintain discipline and guidance that no one is able to confuse constructive protest with criminal acts, which all condemn.”

After black protesters threw rocks at police in Albany, Georgia, in 1961, King declared a “day of penance” that put demonstrations on hold. He called for supporters “to pray for our Negro brothers who have not learned the way of nonviolence.” The nonviolence he’s talking about is not passivity or cowardice. It’s courage, unalloyed. When you exude calm and dignity while taking radical action, the violence directed against you looks all the more monstrous and absurd, and the justice of your cause shines through.

Learning to do this takes discipline. As Mary King wrote over the weekend, Martin Luther King always advocated James Lawson’s workshops in nonviolent action, and he would be sure to arrive at them early himself to stress their importance. He tried to make sure that as many people as possible who participated in his marches had gone through such training, which taught them how not to retaliate against clubs, fire hoses and dogs. The Occupy movement, which faces much less police abuse, needs to go to school like that.

There has been a growing discussion in the movement—growing since the first day, though with little result—that the usual style of protest actions needs to change. “I want us to challenge what it means to be badass,” said one woman at a recent meeting of the feminist bloc in Occupy Wall Street’s Direct Action Working Group. She and others felt it’s time to “find ways of doing direct action without it being so fucking macho.” They’re sick of what they see in the news reports about the movement—“it’s usually just men confronting the police.”

Too many people taking the streets as part of the Occupy movement have come to think, if they’re thinking at all, that their strength is in their rage. But it isn’t. Their strength has always been in their courage—the courage to think big, to take public spaces, and to create the glimpse of a better world within them. Rage has always been a weakness. Those in the movement who perpetuate the repertoire of fits and tantrums implicate everyone else in it too, as those at the feminist Direct Action bloc well know. King would stand in solidarity with such anger, as he did even with rioters, knowing that it comes from an honest sense of injustice. But every day that those setting the mood for these marches refuse to learn discipline, and even love, they take that shared cup of solidarity and spike it with poison.

Martin Luther King, Jr. beside a picture of Gandhi. © Bob Fitch, all rights reserved.

How does one learn nonviolent resistance? The same way that Martin Luther King Jr. did—by study, reading and interrogating seasoned tutors. King would eventually become the person most responsible for advancing and popularizing Gandhi’s ideas in the United States, by persuading black Americans to adapt the strategies used against British imperialism in India to their own struggles. Yet he was not the first to bring this knowledge from the subcontinent.

By the 1930s and 1940s, via ocean voyages and propeller airplanes, a constant flow of prominent black leaders were traveling to India. College presidents, professors, pastors and journalists journeyed to India to meet Gandhi and study how to forge mass struggle with nonviolent means. Returning to the United States, they wrote articles, preached, lectured and passed key documents from hand to hand for study by other black leaders. Historian Sudarshan Kapur has shown that the ideas of Gandhi were moving vigorously from India to the United States at that time, and the African American news media reported on the Indian independence struggle. Leaders in the black community talked about a “black Gandhi” for the United States. One woman called it “raising up a prophet,” which Kapur used as the title of his book.

While a student at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, King was intrigued by reading Thoreau and Gandhi, yet had not actually studied Gandhi in depth. A friend, J. Pius Barbour, remembered the young seminarian arguing on behalf of Gandhian methods with a reckoning based on arithmetic—that any minority would be outnumbered if it turned to a policy of violence—rather than on principle.

The more that King read Gandhi, though, the less he doubted the validity of a philosophy based on “Love,” which in turn was central to his preparation for the Christian ministry. “As I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi,” he later wrote, “my skepticism concerning the power of Love gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time its potency in the area of social reform.” His serious contemplation of Gandhi’s fundamental approaches for organizing a movement began in Montgomery, soon after becoming pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in April of 1954.

When Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to yield her seat on a public bus to a white man on December 1, 1955, JoAnn Robinson, a leader in the Women’s Political Council, worked through the night to organize an action of mass economic noncooperation. King was unanimously elected to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association, which would sustain the boycott of city buses.

With the start of the Montgomery boycott, a number of activists, pacifists, reformers, radical Christians and socialists arrived in town. Elated by King, they believed that he could take the fight for justice to a new order of magnitude unlike anything the United States had seen since the abolition of slavery. Among them was 44-year-old Bayard Rustin, 17 years King’s senior, who went on to help King build the Montgomery boycott into a mature campaign. The War Resisters League let Rustin work for King full-time for this assignment.

The black community in Montgomery, as elsewhere in the South, was armed, and there was concern that it could turn to violence in the struggle. Rustin was worried that King himself might falter without deeper foundations. Plying him with books at night, he helped him to analyze Gandhi, and was the first tutor to teach King the essentials of nonviolent struggle systematically.

The boycott’s success—recognized when the Supreme Court ruled on November 13, 1956, that local laws obliging segregation on buses were unconstitutional—raised hopes for comparable abolition of other discriminatory practices in the South. That the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1960s would be based on Gandhian strategic nonviolent action partly resulted from the success of the Alabama city’s exquisitely unified black community. “While the Montgomery boycott was going on,” King said, “India’s Gandhi was the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change.”

In February 1957, at Oberlin College in Ohio, King met a black Methodist minister named James M. Lawson, Jr. Lawson had served 13 months in U.S. federal prison for refusing to cooperate with conscription during the Korean War. While locked up, the Board of Missions of the Methodist Church successfully petitioned the court for Lawson to be handed over to them. They assigned him to teach at Hislop College in Nagpur, India. Arriving there four years after Gandhi’s death, he spent the next three years teaching. He also met numerous individuals who had worked with Gandhi and learned of the Indian campaigns firsthand from participants. King was impressed by Lawson’s background and experience, especially considering they were both just 28 years old. He asked Lawson not to wait to finish his studies to come South: “Come now! You’re badly needed. We don’t have anyone like you!” As I have documented elsewhere, Lawson became a human bridge, connecting knowledge from India to the fledgling U.S. civil rights movement and contemporary struggles.

James Lawson and Martin Luther King during the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike. Photo by Jack E. Cantrell.

After Lawson met King in 1957, he contacted A. J. Muste, a foremost Christian pacifist then still at the helm of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Muste offered Lawson the position of southern field secretary of FOR, and by January 1958, Lawson was settled in Nashville. Upon arrival, he discovered that the Reverend Glenn Smiley, another of King’s tutors and national field director of FOR, had arranged for Lawson to conduct a full schedule of workshops—including one arranged for early that year at the first annual meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Columbia, South Carolina. There, King enthusiastically introduced Lawson. “Be back promptly at 2:00 p.m.,” he declared, “for Brother Lawson’s workshop on nonviolence!” Before the agreed time, King seated himself in the first pew, waiting attentively for the three-hour session to start. Lawson once recalled in an interview with me:

Martin did that at every SCLC meeting as long as he lived. He would ask me to conduct an afternoon workshop, usually two or three hours, and he would arrange for it to be “at-large” so that everyone could attend, with nothing else to compete. He put it on the schedule himself.  A few minutes early, he would show up and sit alone, as an example, in the front row.

In Nashville, throughout the autumn of 1959, Lawson led weekly Monday-evening meetings in which he and interested students analyzed the theories and techniques that he had encountered in India. His workshops scrutinized the Bible, and writings of Gandhi, King and Thoreau. They practiced test-cases, including small sit-ins. Lawson’s workshops lasted for several months before news broke on February 1, 1960, of the Greensboro sit-ins. Hearing of the Greensboro actions, seventy-five Nashville students followed suit, creating the largest, most disciplined and influential of the 1960 sit-in campaigns. In working with Lawson—who was always calm and self-effacing—the Nashville students were not only being trained by one of King’s own instructors, but they were benefitting from direct acquaintance with Gandhi’s experiments. The sit-ins would give the overall movement its regional reach, and the Nashville students would become a cornerstone of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, of which I was a part.

In commemorating Dr. King’s birthday, it is worth remembering that everyone can learn nonviolent action as he did. King may not have invented the nonviolent strategies that he advanced, but he was an apt student, and his understanding of them would in the decades to come encourage other movements on the world stage. He became one of history’s most influential agents for propagating knowledge of the potential for constructive social change without resorting to violence. How he himself learned the theory and practice of civil resistance is a reminder to each of us that these methods are neither intuitive nor spontaneous; they’re a system of logic, skills and techniques that must be learned.

Contagious literally means “communicable by contact” and, of course, it generally signifies the transmission of disease. The earliest appearances of the word in the English language, while hundreds of years before the germ theory of disease was worked out in the nineteenth century, signified illness and infection (but also, by extension, moral corruption or defiling influence) flowing from a particular place, the air, or specific people.

Then there is this more recent connotation: the rapidity with which something spreads. The dictionary offers this quaint example—“Contagious laughter ran through the hall”—but no doubt this meaning also had its roots in disease, mirroring the exponential spread of epidemics (and the concomitant rise of the science of epidemiology) in the modern era. Contagion is a 2011 film from Steven Soderbergh that draws all of these meanings together as it tracks the rapid progress of a lethal contact transmission virus that kills within days and sparks worldwide panic. The movie’s tagline? “Nothing Spreads Like Fear.”

The people in Fort Lauderdale are tapping into another side to contagiousness.

Beginning in the seventeenth century, the sense of “influence” that contagion had acquired along the way was increasingly applied more positively, with references abounding to the contagion of sympathy and loyalty, of repentance and even adventure. “A contagion of goodness, of enthusiasm, of energy… almost impossible to resist,” is a line in a book published in the 1860s and included in the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition. More recently “contagion diffusion” names how innovations spread quickly and, increasingly, there is talk of “contagious compassion.”

Both negative and positive poles of this word share the dynamics of contact, influence, and rapid dispersal. The difference between these two senses, though, is monumental.

One signifies an overwhelming, implacable, mysterious phenomenon of destruction that threatens our well-being as individuals, communities, and even whole societies. The other connotes the spread of a more benign power and potential.

The first leaves us leery of contact. The second welcomes it.

The first implies that we are victims of a force out of our control. The second suggests that, while this goodness, enthusiasm, and energy is “almost impossible to resist,” we have a choice. Something about this spreading idea or vision or action touches us deeply and inspires us, but we still get to choose how or even if we will respond.

The Arab Spring and the American Autumn (and almost all the countless initiatives for deep social change over the past twelve months) are a contemporary form of this positive contagion that inventively interweaves the tangible (physical communicative contact, as growing communities have gathered and occupied space together) and the intangible (the virtual networks and interlocking cyber-meridians crisscrossing the world and helping people power to go viral).

As the people in Fort Lauderdale suggest, the nature of nonviolence itself is contagious. In its fullest incarnation nonviolence is, as Kenneth Boulding put it, integrative. It thrives as it connects and unifies, and it offers a compelling contagion of hope and unexpected power.

This nonviolent contagion is not new—indeed, it has been brewing for centuries, and has accelerated in the past 100 years. As we ready for the King holiday, I am reminded again of the contagion that Dr. King and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement unleashed. The Occupy movement is the latest case of this dissemination.  It carries on a struggle from 40 years ago in a way that, in an odd twist, echoes and seeks to build on the legacy of Dr. King. As art historian Matthew Jesse Jackson suggested in 2006:

Let’s say it’s the year 2300 and we’re looking back at the art of the 20th century. My guess is that the most influential artist of the past hundred years will not have been Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, or Pablo Picasso. That distinction will belong to Martin Luther King Jr., a visionary performance artist with an impeccable sense of timing who achieved the virtually unthinkable for a critic of social inequality: He shut down Wall Street every year.

When Wall Street is closed on Monday, we can thank Dr. King and company’s people-power movement for this fact—and for the contagious example it has bestowed on a new movement tackling monumental inequality.

Vincent Harding is a professional historian who also made history himself. In 1960 he and his wife Rosemarie Freeney Harding immersed themselves in the Southern Freedom Movement (a phrase Harding prefers to the Civil Rights Movement), working throughout the South in the anti-segregation campaigns of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Since then he has tirelessly chronicled the movement in a series of books—including Hope and History and Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero—and was the senior academic advisor to Eyes on the Prize, public television’s definitive documentary history of the movement.

Dr. Harding’s drive to tell the story of this movement was never a simple matter of buttressing its place in American history—though, in itself, this was a vital undertaking in a nation that tends to erase the experience and achievements of people of color.

More important than this for Vincent Harding has been the critical importance of harvesting the improvisational wisdom of what happened. How it caught fire, how it sustained itself, how it wove a resilient canopy of meaning and transformation, often at exceedingly high cost.

Why remember with such tender but steely precision? Because clear-sighted memory can sometimes help us scratch out the tactical lessons and the existential gumption that is needed to continue the monumental work that people like Vincent Harding, who turned 80 this past summer, set for themselves back then: creating a multiracial, democratic, egalitarian and nonviolent society.

In a strange way, “back then” is “now.” Not that the America of 2011 looks exactly like America of 1963. No, the Southern Freedom Movement made sure of that. But there is much unfinished business. The return of the repressed can only be forestalled so long.

This reverie on our past colliding with our present—and the notion that there is less separation than we might think, that the present crisis is a continuation of previous ones, and that the lessons of one “experiment with truth” are available for another—came into sharp focus as I watched a YouTube video of Dr. Harding addressing Occupy San Francisco on November 20. It was a chilly Sunday evening, and he spoke into a bullhorn, amplified by Occupy’s human mic:

I am here tonight

I am here tonight

Because I have been in places like this before.

Because I have been in places like this before.

I was a dear friend of Martin Luther King, Jr.

I was a dear friend of Martin Luther King, Jr.

We were in many places like this before

We were in many places like this before

And I know that, in some way, Martin Luther King is here with you tonight.

And I know that, in some way, Martin Luther King is here with you tonight.

I come here with the Council of Elders

I come here with the Council of Elders

Just to let you know

Just to let you know

That we are with you.

That we are with you.

By now, this call-and-response communication has become a commonplace feature of the Occupy movement. Nevertheless, it is symbolically indicative of Dr. Harding’s life’s work: sharing the reality of another time and place so that it is “channeled” and made use of here and now. In San Francisco he evokes another struggle—in many ways, the founding struggle—and some of its power is present here in this frosty encampment, including the spirit of the great Occupier, Dr. King.

Vincent Harding—joined by Dr. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, Cornel West, Rev. John Fife, and Daniel Ellsberg—were here to lend their support to the burgeoning Occupy movement. But their appearance was also part of a nationwide rollout of a new project entitled The Council of Elders. On November 20, the Council of Elders made its public debut at Occupy Wall Street in New York, Occupy Los Angeles, and Occupy Oakland in addition to Occupy San Francisco.

For a couple of years Dr. Harding, Rev. James Lawson, and his brother Rev. Phillip Lawson had been ruminating on this initiative. James Lawson was the pioneering nonviolence trainer of the Southern Freedom Movement; his brother had long been a pastor and community organizer engaged in numerous struggles for justice and peace. Together they dreamed of tapping and sharing the stories, insights and power of some of the leaders of what they deemed “the defining American social justice movements of the 20th century.”

Much had been learned—in success, in failure, and in the unfolding journey—in U.S. movement building across the decades of the 20th century. Could this somehow nourish and contribute to present struggles for a better world?

As they discussed this among themselves and with others, they began to envision a Council of Elders designed to “connect together the continuing flame of the democratizing movements of the 20th century with the powerful light of the emerging movements of the present time” and to offer “the knowledge, the discipline and vision to the nonviolent movements of this day.”

Slowly this vision solidified, and an Organizing Committee for the Council of Elders emerged, composed of a host of powerful catalysts for social change: Dolores Huerta, Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, Dr. Grace Lee Boggs, Dr. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, Sister Joan Chittister, OSB, Marian Wright Edelman, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Rev. Dr. George (Tink) Tinker, Rev. John Fife, Dr. Mel White, Rev. Nelson Johnson, and Joyce Hobson Johnson, as well as the three initiators.

I first heard about the Council of Elders eighteen months ago from Dr. Harding, when it was still in the brainstorming stage. What struck me in his articulation of the project was the emphasis on dialogue and the longing to listen, especially to and with young people. While he was convinced that movement organizers from the last century have something enormously valuable to offer the present generation, he seemed to be also saying that this sharing could be a contribution to a mutually enriching conversation and partnership with those immersed in the crises of the present. The Elders, Dr. Harding seemed to suggest, are not safely confined to the past. They are engaged with the now as much as anyone.

This comes through in Vincent’s resolute love letter delivered in person in San Francisco, and the one Phil Lawson and others delivered the same day in New York.  A tone of support and gratitude is struck, as well as the sense that the energies once unleashed in a spectrum of movements over the past 60 years is being unleashed in a new and largely unforeseen way, thanks to the creative and multiplying initiatives of the Occupy movement.

This past April I experienced a mini-Council of Elders in the spirit and presence that Dr. Harding brought to a one-week course he and I taught at Soka University in Southern California entitled, “Eyes on the Prize: Whose Eyes and What Prize in 2011?” It was a marvel to experience the space Dr. Harding created, which was deeply dialogical and reverential of every student’s history, questions, and wisdom. It was in this atmosphere of respect and dignity that Dr. Harding, using videos from the Southern Freedom Movement, was able to communicate the deep truths he had witnessed and experienced in that challenging, tumultuous, and transforming time. To a person, the ten students shared how their lives had been changed by this unforgettable experience.

One of the days we were at Soka was devoted to a Council of Elders Organizing Committee planning meeting. It was powerful to observe this visioning process at close range. If my experience of Dr. Harding’s interaction with the students that week is any indication, this growing network of wise and experienced catalysts for change will offer all of us future opportunities for mutually-transformative collaboration rooted in the power of the past and the challenges of the present.

To learn more about The Council of Elders, click here.

A prophetic sign from Occupy Boston (albeit with a mispelling of Gandhi).

Remembering the agonies I went through when the tanks moved in on Tiananmen Square in June, 1989, I was relieved that most (I wish it were all) of the protestors who make up today’s amazing Occupy movement do not intend to occupy the symbolic spaces they are in indefinitely. This struggle is not about particular pieces of real estate but the institutions that may be associated with them—iconically, of course, Wall Street. And it would be a bad strategy—it’s always bad strategy—to hold on to symbols, especially when they make you an easy, concentrated target.

The movement has empowered youth (and others) in their hundreds of thousands to demonstrate in some 1,500 locations in 82 countries, creating in the process a beautiful culture of consensus decision making. But that was the easy part.

Now it is time to overturn and replace the obnoxious institutions and behaviors that have (at last) brought us together. For this, I think, three things will have to happen.

1) This has been largely a nonviolent movement; but we must realize that there’s nonviolence and nonviolence—or more conveniently put, nonviolence and non-violence, i.e. the mere absence of physical harm. The latter was well expressed by the words of a Yemeni protestor: “They cannot defeat us, because we left our guns at home.” In other words, not to irritate your oppressor is smart strategy. But the other degree of nonviolence, non-hyphenated if you will, can be heard in a ringing challenge of Gandhi’s: “It’s not nonviolence until you love your enemy.” He also characterized what he called “perfect ahimsa” (in today’s lingo, principled nonviolence) as “freedom from ill-will,” not just from weapons. In this degree of nonviolence, not to irritate your oppressor is not just strategic—useful as that may be—but a deep principle.

We need to awaken this principle if we want telling, long-lasting and deep change; and to do that the protestors will have to seperate the people from the behaviors they will no longer tolerate. Cursing “cops” as was done in Oakland  last week weakens us. Gratifying as they fall on our ears, labels like ‘bankster’ will have to come off, revealing people like us who got themselves into a fix because of the climate of alienation and greed in which we live.

As we’ve been urging at the Metta Center for some time, every individual who wants to make her or his maximum contribution to the great change we all need should stop patronizing the mass media that got us into this mindset of alienation and greed in the first place. She or he should replace that culture, with its desperately low image of the human being, with the culture—for it is one—of nonviolence. Read all the Gandhi you can get your hands on. We have “moved our money.” Beautiful. But we’ll be amazed what happens when we move something much more powerful than money: when we move our minds.

Happily, judging from the idealistic young faces I’ve seen first-hand and in YouTube videos, I don’t think this is at all impossible. I actually think it’s the challenge we’ve all been waiting for.

2) It is clear that the time is now to step back and come up with a long-term strategy. We should be no more stuck on one tactic or mode—protest—than we should be on one piece of real estate. Furthermore that strategy, as Rabbi Michael Lerner has pointed out, will have to grow past protest to include serious nonviolent resistance, e.g. civil disobedience. We are up against very serious entrenched interests backed by virtually limitless money and physical force. It can be overcome, because evil is always vulnerable, because money and force are limited instruments; but we must be prepared to meet it with an equivalent force of commitment and sacrifice.

The protestors, as the media point out, have a bewildering array of issues. Well, just about all of them are valid, because the malevolent energy of the system by now reaches almost everywhere. But we will have to understand the core of that malevolence and figure out how to confront and purify it. We will have to decide on what I call a keystone issue—something that’s winnable and well-aimed enough that succeeding at it will weaken the entire system.

Driving this strategy must be an overview that pulls together the innumerable economic and other alternatives that are already happening into a coherent picture. This is, if anything, more important than the protest piece. Nonviolence, as King said, is not just non-cooperating with evil but cooperating with good—Gandhi’s “constructive program.” And finally,

3) Let’s remember what we’re really fighting for. When we call for the dignity of every person, does that not imply, as I suggested above, that we need to vastly improve our image of the human being per se? We should all be conversant with the way both modern science and the world’s spiritual traditions agree that we are not separate, material creatures doomed to compete for scarce resources; we are deeply interconnected, with one another, all life, the planet that nourishes and houses us. Our fulfillment comes from relationships, not consumption; our security comes from turning enemies into friends, not from eliminating them.

Six years ago I stood with a large group of young people on the roof of the student union building on the Berkeley campus, ticking off the ways they were better off in their understanding than we had been in the heady, but not very sophisticated days of the Free Speech Movement. It was exhilarating to see that improvement. It’s even more exhilarating to see it on the move.

I thought of that strange proximity when I read Wednesday’s New York Times article on how little U.S. students know about the civil rights movement.

All throughout my schooling, February was devoted to memorizing interesting facts about influential and important African Americans. Matthew Henson (explorer), Benjamin Banneker (mathematician, inventor and Baltimore hometown hero who—among other things—made the first American clock), Crispus Attucks (first to die in the American Revolution), Madam C.J. Walker (entrepreneur), George Washington Carver… and of course Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and Malcolm X. But this learning was scattershot and somewhat random—not a comprehensive look at a movement that shaped the city in which I was growing up—a city that could celebrate a former slave and a Southern army general.

The inventor of peanut butter, the inventor-ess of the scalp treatments for women and many others all squeezed into the shortest month of the year. All these years later, I find it easy to recall their names (and dozens more) but hard to sum up their accomplishments or explain the when, why and hows of their struggles. I would get an F (or at least a D) on whatever test the Southern Poverty Law Center gave to schools.

The Center documents their findings in a report entitled Teaching the Movement: The State of Civil Rights Education in the United States 2011, which was timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of highlights of the Civil Rights Movement—like the freedom rides that involved thousands of young people in desegregating the trans-state bus routes.

Who is Medgar Evers? Emmett Till? Or women like Septima Poinsette Clark? Fannie Lou Hamer?

But this report is not a trivia contest or a “name that civil rights luminary” quiz. Instead it looks at how the civil rights movement is taught in all fifty states and the District of Columbia. It took on a huge and difficult task in that there are no common standards or widely accepted curricula. The SPLC examined:

all current and available state standards, frameworks, model curricula and related documents archived on the websites of the departments of education of all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It focuses on standards for social studies, social science, history and related subjects like civics or geography.

It looked at how the history of the civil rights movement is taught across a variety of grade levels and through more than a dozen commonly assigned American history textbooks and tried to “set out an approachable span of core knowledge that a competent citizen needs to gain a reasonably full understanding of the civil rights movement.”

In other words, the Southern Poverty Law Center would love it if all kids graduated from high school conversant in the ups and downs of relations between the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X or a granular understanding of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Poor People’s Campaign but that is not the curve they are grading on in their sweeping and comprehensive study. They are looking for coverage of basic historical information and opportunities for young people to get excited and inspired… And they did not find it.

Alabama, Florida and New York were the only states to receive an A (but A does not mean 100% though; it means that these three states include at least 60% of the recommended content). Georgia, Illinois and South Carolina received B grades. These states received high marks for requiring instruction, but the majority of states (35) failed with Fs for either not requiring any instruction on the civil rights movement or having only minimal coverage.

My home state—Maryland received a C grade with SPLC noting that:

Maryland’s civil rights movement requirements cover several major areas but are weak overall… [But] The state does an admirable job of covering diverse tactics, and is one of only a handful of states to include the urban uprisings of the 1960s in its required curriculum.

Whoo hoo for the C grade. Only five other states got a C.

My adopted state of Connecticut failed, with the SPLC concluding that:

Connecticut’s failure to require students to learn about the civil rights movement is disappointing, but not especially surprising given the overall lack of rigor and content in the state’s history standards. Still, it is a shame that a state whose rich history includes the Amistad case and a long tradition of abolitionism does not require students to learn about the civil rights movement at all, let alone its substantial and important history.

Hmm, The Amistad? I did not know there was a Connecticut connection (it is almost like I went through CT public schools).

I was fascinated by these assessments and remembered my own shock and excitement when I was invited to dig more deeply into the story of Rosa Parks—who I learned about in school and from the Neville Brothers song “Thank you, Sister Rosa.” Paul Loeb was the person who introduced me to the trained activist Rosa Parks, the one with a long history in the movement. His writings also opened a window on the long struggle of the Montgomery Bus Boycott—the thousands of men and women who walked to and from work for months and the tens of thousands who supported them throughout the nation.

Yep, I was well into my twenties before I learned about this (despite having activist parents and being encouraged to read books like People’s History of the United States. I was too busy trying to sneak a peek at Miami Vice and the Dukes of Hazard).

In The Impossible Will Take a Little While, which first exposed me to this fuller picture of Rosa Parks, Paul Loeb quotes an African American activist from Atlanta who commented that:

when people who work for social change are presented as saints—so much more noble than the rest of us… it does us all a disservice…We get a false sense that from the moment they were born they were called to act, never had doubts, were bathed in a circle of light.

Looking at the movement as a whole, learning about its successes and failures and its commitment to continue on in experiments in truth after evaluation and trial and error, means that she (and we) have a ”shot at changing things” even if we are not Rosa Parks.

Teaching the Movement makes the same point.

Parks is justly venerated for her activism in triggering the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Yet too many depictions of her portray a lone woman who was simply tired and did not want to give up her seat on a bus to a white person. In reality, she was a trained participant in a well-organized social movement.

This should be cause for alarm. The reduction of the movement into simple fables obscures both the personal sacrifices of those who engaged in the struggle and the breadth of the social and institutional changes they wrought…. Students deserve to learn that individuals, acting collectively, can move powerful institutions to change.

There is a library full of new books (or e-books) on the civil rights movement and the big personalities that labored in it fields and lunch counters and street corners. The one I am most excited to read is the late Manning Marable’s A Life of Reinvention: Malcolm X. (I know, I know, it came out months ago).

But before sitting down to the thousands of pages of prose, I should have a series of conversations with the young people in my life (and with the young person who still lives inside of me) and ask a lot of questions (and be ready for a lot of answers). Questions like: “What do you know?” “Who are your heroes and she-roes?” “What are you taught?” “What do you want to learn?” “What kind of world do you want to live in?” and “What skills do you need to hone and lessons do you need learn in order to make that world?” I invite you to do the same so that the civil rights movement of half a century ago can inform and inspire and ground the many movements for civil, social and human rights that are needed (and those that are underway) today and tomorrow.

The execution last week of Troy Davis by the State of Georgia on the International Day of Peace was a painful blow to all sensitive people—really to all humanity, not to mention our prestige as a nation. Whatever may have been the “correctness” of the legal procedures leading up to it, it must seem to many no better than a legalized lynching.

Scholar René Girard, with his keen insights into the all-too-prevalent dynamic of scapegoating, ancient and modern (the latter more disguised but no less deadly), often cited lynching as a thinly disguised institutional form of that deadly reflex held over from (even) more barbaric times. By the sheer irrationality of its logic, the death penalty in the United States (and wherever else it is held over) must qualify as ritual. Homicides slightly increase in states where the penalty is reintroduced, and killing in order to show that killing is wrong does not deserve the name of logic.

A California prisoner not long ago who had gotten on in years waiting his turn on death row and had a heart condition by the time it came, told a guard on his way to his execution not to bother reviving him if he had an attack. “Of course we’ll revive you,” the official quickly rejoined, “we absolutely believe in the sanctity of life.”

In fact, we would maintain, all violence is irrational, which is why it is always counterproductive in the long run—and why it can be overcome despite its apparent ubiquity. Truth and nonviolence will overcome unreason and violence if we understand properly how to engage its power.

Just before he went to his death, Davis said to Edward Dubose, president of the Georgia chapter of the NAACP, that this fight is bigger than one person, “whether they execute him or whether he is freed, the fight must go on. Let this case be a crossroad.” If we can make it such, it will be a far better tribute than naming September 22nd after Troy Davis or any of the symbolic observances that have been suggested, however fitting and however much emotional satisfaction they would temporarily offer. Let us think how this could be such a crossroad.

A few weeks ago the death of a three-year-old child in Oakland, CA galvanized an entire neighborhood. Everyone pulled together and succeeded in stopping all violent crime for the time being, which in that neighborhood is an impressive achievement. Every now and then some tragedy, it is hard to predict when or how, wakes people up.

What if these healthy reactions were cumulative? What if, every time there was a salutary shock and a new set of people came to life they would not go back to complacency after the shock wore off but would add their creative energy to a growing movement? It’s not impossible. Gandhi actually felt it was a “law,” one of two that he discovered in his eight-year Satyagraha campaign to raise the dignity of the Indian communities of what is now South Africa—and by extension, he was well aware, their oppressors and eventually all of us. There is no limit to how small movements can start if they stay true to their cause, if it is just; and to their vision, if it is sufficiently inspiring, for if those conditions were met they would inevitably grow. He called it the “law of progression.”

The other was the “law of suffering,” that states that, as he put it, “things of fundamental importance to the people are not secured by reason alone but have to be purchased with their suffering… If you want something really important to be done you must not merely satisfy the reason, you must move the heart also.” We will get back to that law in a moment.

The secret of continuity, Gandhi discovered, is “Constructive Program,” whereby people create parallel institutions if necessary and go on to create the world they want rather than, or alongside protesting the injustices they don’t want and expecting others, especially governments, to do it for them. Constructive programs not only build continuity but put a movement in a stronger position when the time does come for outright resistance.The spontaneous uprising of that Oakland neighborhood was a good, if only beginning example. If those of us who are grieving the death of Troy Davis and are no longer willing to put up with our constant failures to stop such atrocities would commit ourselves to staying together to learn all we can about nonviolent techniques, including the deeper philosophical meaning of nonviolence itself—how it implies a much higher image of the human being than our mass media culture allows—and settle down to a strategic vision for a long term solution, that would be a much bigger example.

I mentioned the “law of suffering.” The forces, mental and other, that cause people to cling to an outlandish, counterproductive form like the death penalty are very strong. At some point when our constructive program has matured—when, for example, we have built up model cases of restorative (rehabilitative) justice here and there and explained their logic to educators, the media, policy makers, and anyone listening—we will nonetheless have to put up a good nonviolent fight against the entrenched superstition around us. At that time we will have to do more than carry a sign and go home, more even than put up with police brutality as others of us are doing right now on Wall Street. We will have to be ready for serious risk in some well-chosen, strategic form.

With solid training and a robust constructive program behind us, with strategy and courage, one can hope that this “redemptive suffering,” as King put it, will be brief and effective. I may be overly ambitious, but I do not believe I am naïve in envisioning that such a movement could go from the barbaric death penalty to our bloated retributive justice system to war itself, carrying out what Troy Davis bequeathed to us in his last letter:

“So thank you and remember I am in a place where execution can only destroy your physical form but because of my faith in God, my family and all of you I have been spiritually free for some time and no matter what happens in the days, weeks to come, this Movement to end the death penalty, to seek true justice, to expose a system that fails to protect the innocent must be accelerated… This fight to end the death penalty is not won or lost through me but through our strength to move forward and save every innocent person in captivity around the globe… Never Stop Fighting for Justice and We Will Win!”

I was among those who were shocked, not to say disgusted, when biologist Garret Hardin argued, in 1974, that the relatively well-off nations were like passengers in a lifeboat surrounded by more stranded people than they could take on board. So, his logic ran, we needed to triage the world and write off some people and lands as too far gone to rescue from immanent starvation. I went on record, along with others, saying that we wanted to be included in that abandoned third; we did not wish to live in a world that turned its back on fellow human beings with such callous disregard.

Words are cheap, perhaps, but our revulsion at “lifeboat ethics” was real. And it’s back. A provocative essay by Bronwyn Bruton, a democracy and governance expert writing for the Council on Foreign Relations has urged the West to withdraw from Somalia [see Ms. Bruton's response to this], and her scheme (which she calls “constructive disengagement”) is finding a resonance with policy elites around the world who now seem poised to wash their hands of Somalia and watch three quarters of a million people starve.

Call it the “Somalia syndrome.” In the 1990s, as a recent New York Times editorial states, “the United Nations urged American forces to disarm the warlords ravaging the nation of nine million, but the Pentagon … did not want to risk more American lives after 18 servicemen were killed in an epic street battle immortalized in the Black Hawk Down book and movie (and video game).” This “epic” battle has been blown up into a specter of media-hyped proportions, leading to the unfortunate image of Somalia as a kind of chaotic black hole in which those who intervene disappear.

According to leaked reports, the reason President Clinton did not intervene even to jam the radio broadcasts that were instigating the appalling slaughter in Rwanda in 1994 was because of the shadow of the Blackhawk. But as far as it goes, Bruton’s sober assessment concludes realistically that, “I don’t think that there’s a case to be made that the famine can be mitigated through military intervention.”

This rings true, or it should, not just because Somalia is in the grip of wanton militias (the Shabab), but because military intervention is designed to kill, not to save life. We are seeing in Iraq and Afghanistan the futility of training, arming, and ordering men and women to kill and expecting them to stay within agreed upon rules—not to mention go on to build stable regimes. At some point we need to recognize that there is a terrible simplicity about life: destructive energy is destructive, positive energy is positive.

What does this mean right now, for Somalia? Policymakers, having recognized that military intervention will not work (one wishes they would recognize this when it comes to war, not just when it comes to humanitarian rescue missions), throw up their hands and say there is nothing we can do.

I say they are wrong. First and foremost, we can not, as they seem to be suggesting, harden our hearts against the suffering of the Somalis: for us, apathy is not an option. Remember the words of Martin Luther King: “I will not let anyone bring me so low as to make me hate him.” Or forget him. In other words, what happens in our own minds and hearts matters; it is the first line of defense or cure for any situation.

Second, if you believe in nonviolence—which implies a belief in the resilience of humanity and the meaningful order of the world—you cannot, any more than I can, accept that if violence doesn’t work (which it does not), there is no alternative.

Of course, we do not have cargo planes and troops of volunteers at our disposal. As a military official said to me at a meeting of the U.S. Institute of Peace when I complained, in the early 90’s, that we had chosen the Marines to deliver food to Somalia, “What other organization can put 30,000 men on the ground in one week?” Certainly not the peace movement. But remember, this has happened before and it will happen again.

When the tsunami struck South East Asia, the U.S. and other states hastened to improve the global tsunami warning system. This did not address the underlying problem—climate disruption due to runaway industrialism—but at least it put in place a system to mitigate the damage of the next event of its kind. But when it comes to famine we seem to learn nothing.

What if every one of us would sign a pledge that we will not turn our eyes away from the Somalis in their suffering, but do everything we can think of to help them?

What if we pledge that from now on we will make every effort to understand what causes not only this famine, not only famine in general, but the culture of cruelty and disregard that makes such disasters possible?

What if we raise funds, call on a group like the Nonviolent Peaceforce to offer an entirely different kind of protection, and pick one area of Somalia where we can arrive, get into contact with the local militia, and at least save one group in such a way that we show the world that care is not dead, that what affects one affects all, and what we have done here could be done on a larger scale?

Even if it is too late to save the 750,000, it is not too late to save the human image.

Fortunately this Hobson’s choice, and the comment it delivers on the creativity of our concern, is not, in fact, all humanity can come up with.

In the 1922, when Hindu-Muslim tensions were threatening to tear down everything Gandhi was building in India, he proposed that volunteers could go to villages in insecure districts and live there as a kind of resident third party to proffer good offices, abate rumors (a frequent escalator of conflict there and everywhere), and in extreme cases interpose themselves between parties in open conflict. He called an important meeting to put this institution, which he called the Shanti Sena (Peace Army), into practice for February, 1948 but, as we know, was assassinated days before it could take place.

Shanti Sena did nonetheless come into being. Despite various problems, it served creditably well in a variety of districts and the 1962 Chinese border incursion. More to the point, the idea spread throughout the world, where it was picked up by organizations as diverse as the World Peace Brigade, Peace Brigades International, India’s Swaraj Peeth, the colorfully named Rainbow Family of Living Light and even the Guardian Angels, known for riding the subways of New York to prevent crime. It also deepened into a force that could intervene across borders: not just in local communities but around the world.

The unheralded growth of this idea and its on-the-ground institutions is probably typical of how the best ideas in the modern world have to grow: from the bottom up. The movement for “protective accompaniment,” for example, which became the main focus of groups like Witness for Peace and Peace Brigades International (the former being explicitly a religiously based organization, the latter explicitly not) was carried out by remarkably few individuals, negligible financing and even less coverage by the press. Nonetheless, it saved lives from death squads in Central America and equivalent forms or terror in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. In one case, that of Guatemala, it seems to have created space for a real peace process to unfold when it saved individuals in a key human rights group from systematic assassination simply by being with them day in and out, so that anyone who did them harm would have to do so before the eyes of the world.

The improbable hope represented by protective accompaniment and other functions of Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping (as it’s now called, or UCP) did eventually percolate upwards to the attention of more official bodies: an international norm (not yet a law) called the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) has come into play after the shame of passivity in Rwanda, stating that “If a State is manifestly failing to protect its citizens from mass atrocities and peaceful measures are not working, the international community has the responsibility to intervene at first diplomatically, then more coercively, and as a last resort, with military force.” While not nonviolence, this does open the door for more UCP activities even as it breaks down the wall of absolute state sovereignty. More to the point, the UNICEF has made a grant of one million dollars to the most ambitious of the UCP organizations, Nonviolent Peaceforce, to do training for child protection in South Sudan and the Philippines.

In the penetrating light of Gandhi’s vision, passivity and violence are really two sides of the same coin. On the spiritual plane, they emerge respectively from fear and anger—both drives of the private, separate self. The only really different coin is that of nonviolence, or selfless love in action (to paraphrase Martin Luther King). The only meaningful choice, then, is not between intervening (with blind force) or not intervening, but between violence and nonviolence as a guiding principle.

As I write these lines, black Africans are being harshly persecuted in “free” Libya, usually for no reason. We should not be surprised. This is what violence does: it cannot but grope blindly after victims, as history so often shows. And it also shows, if we know where to look, that nonviolence does the opposite: it spreads hope and toleration, preventing enemies from oppressing if not actually converting them into friends. And now, as institutions emerging from this principle slowly find themselves and reach across borders into realms that formerly were reachable only by force—or by neglect—we get to choose.

Another example of this theory at work may be found in the recent discovery that Martin Luther King Jr. developed and spoke publicly on themes of his iconic 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech almost twenty years earlier, at the age of fifteen. As John Llewellyn, associate professor of communication at Wake Forest University and co-author of the paper that revealed this information, explained in an op-ed for the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

Despite extensive scholarly study of King’s life and writings, Wake Forest University student William Murphy recently became the first to identify the striking parallels between King’s legendary 1963 “Dream” speech and an address he delivered in 1944 as a high school student in Georgia. Even as an adolescent, King knew what was right. In “The Negro and the Constitution,” his speech that won the Georgia Black Elks oratorical contest, he revealed the principles that ultimately inspired the most significant and moving American speech of the 20th century.

These two speeches share a powerful and prophetic bond. Though “I Have a Dream” is a more polished text, the timeless ideals, themes and images celebrated in 1963 — including brotherly love, nonviolence and freedom from racial hatred — were first presented in Dublin, Ga., in 1944. He defined the bedrock of the civil rights struggle: Success of the movement required that the enemy be hatred, not Southerners. In 1944, he described scenes of black and white children playing together in harmony, anticipating his 1963 refrain. He also planted the seed for his famous “bad check” metaphor, contrasting the promises of the Emancipation Proclamation with the oppressive reality of race relations.

The study expounds on these similarities, as well as the less obvious binding narrative thread: the story of Marian Anderson, the great African American opera singer who, in 1939, was barred from performing at Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution because she was black. Her story and songs punctuate both speeches beyond mere words.

While King was surely not the speaker at age 15 he would become twenty years later, a period during which he undoubtedly logged thousands of hours of practice, it’s nevertheless remarkable that his ideas were so fully formed as a teenager. In King’s case, preciousness certainly played as much a role in his early success as his dogged determination.

As the study itself concludes:

While King the speaker continued to develop and refine his craft throughout his life, it is clear that “The Negro and the Constitution” and the “I Have a Dream” are cut from the same philosophical and rhetorical cloth. At the age of fifteen, Martin Luther King, Jr. had already developed the central ideas, metaphors, and arguments he would use to write the greatest American speech of the twentieth century.

King was in St. Joseph’s Infirmary, Atlanta, for exhaustion and a viral infection when it was reported that he would receive the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. As Gary M. Pomerantz writes in Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, this was the apparent cost exacted by intelligence surveillance efforts and the pressures of learning that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy had formally approved wiretaps by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. His evolving strength as a leader is revealed in his remarks in Norway that December, which linked the nonviolent struggle of the U.S. civil rights movement to the entire planet’s need for disarmament. Noting that the movement’s most exceptional characteristic was the direct participation of masses of people in it, and crediting Gandhi’s influence on him, King’s remarks in Oslo were also his strongest call for the use of nonviolent resistance on issues other than racial injustice. International nonviolent action, he said, could be utilized to let global leaders know that beyond racial and economic justice, individuals across the world were concerned about world peace: “I venture to suggest [above all] … that … nonviolence become immediately a subject for study and for serious experimentation in every field of human conflict, by no means excluding relations between nations … which [ultimately] make war.” Telling journalists that he would donate the prize money to the movement, he returned home to engross himself in plans for the  54-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, which would be the last major surge of direct action for the movement.

King is sometimes associated with “principled nonviolence,” an approach based on moral constructions and philosophy, in contrast to “pragmatic nonviolence,” resting on grounds of practicality. In real life, however, these are not separate and independent paths. His ethical framework and his practical goals converged in a civil resistance of shrewd political astuteness. He knew that well-sequenced nonviolent sanctions can place adversaries in a quandary that they cannot solve through violence.

Today, across the world, people who have little or no familiarity with details about the civil rights movement know about King. He had not sought leadership for himself—it was thrust upon him. Once entrusted, he drew upon the full depth of his ideals, stature, and presence, of which he possessed more than possibly any other U.S. figure of the 20th century.

Notwithstanding his own preoccupation with his own shortcomings, he had the ability to accept others as they were and was ready to accommodate arrogance, rebelliousness, and egotism from some with whom he worked. His equanimity was remarkable in the midst of a true people’s movement staffed by impetuous and occasionally mutinous individualists.

The rapidity with which alterations occurred not only in the South but across the nation in attitudes, laws, mores, practices, statutory programs, and values can obstruct the perception that for most of King’s short lifetime he was struggling for the simplest, most straightforward recognition of full citizenship for African Americans. He was often attacked for moving too slowly or for not fulminating with outrage and militancy. He himself was well aware that three-fourths of the inhabitants of the globe were people of color, as he wrote in Stride toward Freedom, and understood graphically through trips to Africa, in 1957, and India, in 1959.

The unrealized dimensions of the deep yearning for justice that was embodied in the movement in which I worked for four years have been written about by many by now, and it is appropriate to consider how much remains unrealized and unacknowledged in the pursuit of racial equality. Yet it is also important to assess the fuller measure of King’s leadership: his quest had been for strategies that left no hostility and offered potential for eventual reconciliation. Indeed, usually without notice or news releases, the blatant signs, physical barriers, and customary accessories and protocols of racial discrimination quietly came down or disappeared in the United States. King, as had Gandhi, wanted no declarations of victory and sought to deflect any triumphalism. Mutual respect, he believed, could protect against white citizens feeling defeat or humiliation, while the black community could avoid temptation from what he called “the psychology of victors.” This appreciation of human frailty allowed him to prepare the groundwork so that the United States could continue laboring for a more perfect union.

Since King’s death, nonviolent direct action has ascended in political significance on every continent, yet civil resistance has remained underdeveloped as a political technique. Insignificant efforts have been made to increase our comprehension of its systems and logic, or how it works. Minimal research and planning has been invested to support its study, development, and fine tuning. This stands out against the vast assets allocated in developing and improving military and security studies, and the investments in refining the practices and procedures of representative democracies. It therefore falls to us to make nonviolent action “immediately a subject for study and for serious experimentation in every field of human conflict,” as he bade in Oslo in 1964.

The age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy. Instead of articulating a radical democratic vision and fighting for homeowners, workers and poor people in the form of mortgage relief, jobs and investment in education, infrastructure and housing, the administration gave us bailouts for banks, record profits for Wall Street and giant budget cuts on the backs of the vulnerable.

He highlights four “catastrophes” that King was going to name in the sermon he was planning to preach the Sunday after his death:

Militarism is an imperial catastrophe that has produced a military-industrial complex and national security state and warped the country’s priorities and stature (as with the immoral drones, dropping bombs on innocent civilians). Materialism is a spiritual catastrophe, promoted by a corporate media multiplex and a culture industry that have hardened the hearts of hard-core consumers and coarsened the consciences of would-be citizens. Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse. Arbitrary uses of the law — in the name of the “war” on drugs — have produced, in the legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s apt phrase, a new Jim Crow of mass incarceration. And poverty is an economic catastrophe, inseparable from the power of greedy oligarchs and avaricious plutocrats indifferent to the misery of poor children, elderly citizens and working people.

West ends with nonviolent fighting words:

King’s response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities, a re-evaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens.

In concrete terms, this means support for progressive politicians like Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont and Mark Ridley-Thomas, a Los Angeles County supervisor; extensive community and media organizing; civil disobedience; and life and death confrontations with the powers that be. Like King, we need to put on our cemetery clothes and be coffin-ready for the next great democratic battle.

This country is famous for one of the most organized and inspiring nonviolent movements in modern history. It unfolded sixty years ago in the aftermath of the Holocaust in Europe and focused on the racism that was an unresolved legacy of the Civil War. It was brilliant, but sadly, not enough.

Last week in Mississippi, Deryl Dedmon, Jr. and John Aaron Rice, along with a group of ‘psyched up’ white teens, left a party with the intention of finding an African American to ‘mess with.’ Driving sixteen miles to the other side of town they set upon the first man they saw—James Craig Anderson—and beat him viciously. Eighteen-year-old Dedmon, now charged with murder, stayed behind long enough to run Anderson over with his truck and leave him for dead. To top it off, his lawyer went beyond human decency to protect his client, insisting that it was not a racially motivated crime.

Maybe, on some level, it’s a positive sign that we do not want to admit that there is still racism in this country, despite the experience of people living in James Craig Anderson’s community, immigrant families in Arizona, farmworkers in California, or sleeping children in Afghanistan. But denial isn’t going to make the problem go away. What will make it finally go away is a recognition that racially motivated crimes have a cause and that we can get to it by shifting our awareness from hate crimes to just simply hate.

Unfortunately, our country takes the opposite route: from hate crime to crime, leaving us with a cycle of retribution and injustice that will never solve the problem. Racism is a form of violence and it isn’t going away until we repudiate violence itself. We demand that our political leaders be “tough on crime,” but forget to ask ourselves, where are the candidates who are “tough on hatred, tough on violence”?

One needn’t look far, then, to see one critical reason why racism doesn’t die—a reason  that we ignore only because so many of us are numbed into insensitivity by its sheer familiarity. We ourselves saw a shocking example the other day on the main street of liberal Berkeley: a graphic poster for a popular television program with the bold message, “LET’S GO KILL SOMETHING.”

Coming as it did right after the very real murder in Mississippi, the echo was sickening. It isn’t just the message that violence is fun, but the enabling denial that makes violence possible, which is dehumanization: you cannot kill something, of course, but someone, some form of life.

There is something we can do, however, if politicians will not: we can start turning our backs on violence as a form of “entertainment.” In one recent study carried out at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig it was shown that children were three times more likely to behave with empathy if they were shown a picture of two dolls in a friendly pose than if the doll images were negative or neutral. There are so many studies now showing our sensitivity to this “priming,” as scientists call it, that the effect is something we can no longer deny but on the contrary can take responsibility for and use it as a lever for pushing back against, and eventually perhaps banishing the violence that’s become endemic in the industrial world.

“Mind precedes action” as the Buddha said, and getting extremely dehumanizing images—the constant fare of our films, books, and video games—out of our minds is the point of leverage from which to start getting real or physical violence out of our lives. Right now we are relying on violence for “security” in everything from individual bullying to criminal “justice” and finally war. It will be a long struggle to rebuild every one of those behaviors and institutions, but that struggle can’t even begin until we detoxify our mental environment and let our native capacity for empathy —which science has recently shown to be well ‘wired’ in our very nervous systems—regain the upper hand.

One advantage of starting this by boycott of violent media is that it doesn’t need to be organized; we can just do it, and we should not overlook the power of even one mind that is concentrated and backed by positive energy. From there, of course, by educating and organizing we can start growing the change into a real movement. Many individuals and many families have borne witness to the healthier, sometimes deeply happier lives they enjoyed soon after they stopped watching television. Once the initial feeling of deprivation subsided, their taste for reality (which violence is not) came back into their lives. Pointing this out and experiencing it will add drive to this key campaign that is surely a sine qua non for racial justice. For this reform cannot take place in a vacuum because as Martin Luther King said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Nor can it take place on the political or even the social level alone because it’s by now too deeply rooted in how some people think and see the world.

Not all media need be renounced, however. One recent attempt to portray at least part of the other side is the film Help, which illustrates what the famous Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung has called the “Great Chain of Nonviolence,” where oppressed, voiceless people—in this case black domestic workers in the south—link up by a chain of relationships to people in power, in this case through friendships that naturally form with the white women they work for. Help is an indifferent success, however; some reviewers have felt it was sappy at best and racist at worst due to the depiction of black men as abusive, alcoholic and illiterate. It may only help to confirm the belief that violence is real (the graphic effect of the “Let’s go kill something” vampire genre), whereas love and nonviolence are only weak and uninteresting imitations.

Much better is a 1989 film, The Long Walk Home, with Whoopi Goldberg, Cissy Spacek, and Dwight Macdonald. It not only stares racism in the face, but it is also one of the few films in history to show an actual representation of nonviolence working against a fierce opponent—something even Attenborough’s Gandhi, for all its sophistication, did not quite do. In the climactic final scene a group of terrified black women penned in by a chanting racist mob conquer their fear by singing a pertinent spiritual and walk unhindered through the confused men trying to stop them. This is realism: many scenes like it actually took place in the Civil Rights movement and elsewhere..

With the likes of Gandhi, The Long Walk Home, or the 1995 political drama Beyond Rangoon we could “reprime” our lives. When we run out of such films—and Lord knows they are rare—we can spend time with friends and family that we would otherwise have spent watching someone else’s idea of entertainment. As Gandhi once said, evil does not exist: it can only make its appearance as long as we cling to it. Why not put that to the test by not clinging to images of violence?

There is nothing wrong with a traffic law which says you have to stop for a red light.  But when a fire is raging, the fire truck goes right through that red light… Or when a [person] is bleeding to death, the ambulance goes through those red lights at top speed…  Disinherited people all over the world are bleeding to death from deep social and economic wounds.  They need brigades of ambulance drivers who will have to ignore the red lights of the present system until the emergency is solved.

Four decades on, his words are as sharp and appropriate as ever.

Dr. King evokes the image of a world on fire. This fire burns on today, at a time of permanent war, the growing economic divide, threats to civil liberties, ecological devastation, and the structural violence of racism, sexism, and homophobia. We can continue to opt for the raging spiral of violence and injustice, or we can band together to build democratic, multiracial, and nonviolent societies where the dignity of all is respected and the needs of all are met.

This will not come easily, Dr. King suggests. This will be risky work.

Nevertheless we can, he implies, accomplish the difficult things that need to be done—even if we have never seen ourselves that way before.

Thus he urges us to try on a new identity: Join a social change ambulance crew. Work the fire hose with others to douse the scalding blaze of structural injustice. Become an EMT dispensing the healing power of love and courage. And get preparedness training to face the personal, psychological, or political consequences for boldly responding to the disaster at hand.

There are many emergencies everywhere, including the sprawling fire tearing through our communities or across our planet. Luckily, from Cairo to Madison and many other places, there is a growing web of “first responders” who teach us how to take the plunge, who inspire us, and who show us their own well-honed moves for nonviolent transformation.

Fr. Louie Vitale

In my own life, one of these people is Louie Vitale, a Franciscan friar who has spent the last several decades clambering aboard one Kingian ambulance after another.

For thirty years, the foremost emergency Louie has focused on has been the terror of nuclear weapons. He has joined other brigades—engaging the catastrophes of homelessness, torture, and the wars in Central America, Iraq and Afghanistan—but his abiding concern has been the testing, production and deployment of nuclear arms.

In the early 1980s he joined a handful of others in building a movement to end nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada Test Site and to create the conditions for the promulgation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

And over the past few years—in between stints in prison protesting torture training at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, GA and Fort Huachuca, AZ—his attention has turned to nuclear and non-nuclear space war testing at Vandenberg Air Force Base north of Santa Barbara, CA.

On June 1, hundreds of us gathered in San Francisco to celebrate Louie’s 79th birthday and his release from jail after serving a six-month prison sentence. Just days later he was before a magistrate in a Southern California court facing charges for a previous nonviolent witness at Vandenberg AFB, and since then he has crossed the line at the facility again.

Louie and a still-small “emergency response team” have repeatedly engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience at Vandenberg AFB with the hope of sounding the alarm at what is going on there—something relatively few people know about. Vandenberg operates the Joint Space Operations Center, a component of the Air Force Space Command, which coordinates data from satellites to support the facility’s mission of “air and space superiority, global attack, rapid global mobility, precision engagement, information superiority and agile combat support.” It is home to the 30th Space Wing, the Western Missile Range (testing nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles) and Space Launch Complexes.

In addition to recent launches of Minuteman III missiles, Vandenberg AFB is scheduled to launch today the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2, which is designed to fly at Mach 20 (13,000 miles per hour) and, the Pentagon hopes, will eventually be capable of delivering a military strike in less than an hour anywhere on the planet.

The machinery of space war is developing apace under our society’s radar. Friar Louie and company are therefore relentlessly clanging the siren about these strategies of “total dominance” by taking one nonviolent action after another on the California coast. He and his friends will be back in court on September 15, willingly facing the consequences of nonviolently “ignoring the red lights of the present system until the emergency is solved.”