As we evaluate the successes and errors of past organizations in order to shape more effective movements today, it is vital to be careful and precise about what lessons remain relevant. Certain organizations, such as the Black Panthers, have amassed so much interest and subsequent mythology that it is often particularly difficult to sort through the hype. White nonviolent activists, furthermore, have an added burden; if we are to be valued participants in building successful mass movements for social change we must be extremely careful to provide as much principled solidarity as we do criticism.

George Lakey’s recent essay, “The Black Panthers’ ‘Militarist Error,’” spotlights an important fact, delivered by a person with many years of anti-racist experience: Many leading former Panthers recognize a strategic error in their glorification of the gun. Even amongst those Occupy Cleveland supporters who were recently accused of plotting to blow up an Ohio bridge, the message is clear: If a movement is going to be built for the long haul, “those kinds of tactics just don’t cut it.”

There are other vital insights, however, which must be brought to light if peace advocates are to further engage in drawing lessons from the Panther legacy.

For starters, the Black Panther Party (BPP), though centered in Oakland, Ca., beginning in 1966, always understood their Southern roots, taking their name from a Lowndes County, Ga., electoral organization which had been supported by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC Chairman Kwame Ture (then known as Stokely Carmichael) had campaigned in Lowndes and worked with Revolutionary Action Movement leader Max Stanford to form the first Northern Panther chapter in New York City, some months before the Oakland branch got its start. They evolved from black nationalism only insofar as they admired the later teachings of Malcolm X, who — in his last years — was much more of an internationalist and pan-Africanist than a narrow nationalist.

The Panthers were always aware of the need for revolutionary coalition-building, forming early alliances with Chicano, Puerto Rican and Native American groups, and with colleagues in the predominately white student organizations of the time, including Students for a Democratic Society. Because of critiques of opportunism by whites, including in groups like SNCC and the campaigns led by Martin Luther King, the Panthers were careful to forge principled alliances, working cautiously with only small groups of whites whom they felt they could rely upon. This simple set of cautions did not make them nationalist.

It is also historically misleading, as Lakey does, to call them “an outright alternative to the civil rights movement” at a time when that phrase was already beginning to lose favor amongst many participants. In the years previous to the start of the BPP, many communists, nationalists and other radicals had begun to emphasize the phrase “human rights” over civil rights, as a more tactically useful moniker to frame the movement (which some, from the start, had more simply called “the freedom movement”).

Just a few months after the BPP was birthed, Stokely Carmichael helped popularize the phrase Black Power, which became — along with the idea that “black is beautiful” — the most utilized phrase to describe political self-definition, at least amongst young people of African descent. From “colored” to “Negro” to “black” to “Afro-American,” “African American,” “New Afrikan” and just plain “African,” words were in great contest (especially then but also now), and most accounts make it clear that the Panthers saw themselves not as an alternative but rather as an improvement — the next generation taking up what needed to be done where the last had left off. It is striking, in that respect, that Oakland was one of the very few Northern cities which had no riots in the days following the assassination of King. Though the Panthers were only a few years old, their influence in the city of their founding was enough to keep calm; resorting to angry looting and violence, they urged, was no way to honor the martyred King.

It is very true that not enough notice has been taken of the Panther’s most intensive legacies: founding community-based institutions which were borne of the need for survival as well as self-determination. The mix of these two ingredients made the BPP medical, educational and food programs much more than charitable hand-outs. They were based upon people’s empowerment for liberation and revolution. Therefore it is critical that white progressives take note when black radical researchers make essential new contributions to our fields of understanding. One such example is the recent publication of Alondra Nelson’s Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Struggle Against Medical Discrimination. Nelson chronicles and details the BPP’s efforts at Sickle Cell anemia testing and treatment, the setting up of free neighborhood clinics and other initiatives.

Similarly, Donna Murch has built on contemporary research about the pedagogical basis for and work of the Panthers in the 2010 book Living for the City: Migration, Education and the Rise of the Black Panther Party. In fact, a veritable cottage industry of books has come out in the past five to 10 years documenting aspects of Panther history. As far as the community structures they were instrumental in setting up, Panther co-founder David Hilliard helped publish the 2008 retrospective Service to the People Programs, which gives evidence to the long-lasting nature of the those grassroots BPP campaigns. It is hard not to think that these efforts are amongst the closest and most successful U.S. answers to Gandhi’s call for de-colonized constructive programs.

The questions concerning the role of self-defense — including the use of arms — during the black liberation movement (or black-led freedom movement, as historian and close King associate Vincent Harding has suggested we say) have also come under some serious and thoughtful study. Pure Fire: Self Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era, a 2005 book by American studies scholar Christopher Strain, breaks down the dichotomies of much of the mainstream history texts on the “civil rights” era, carefully examining the daily realities (and contradictions) faced on the grassroots level, especially in the South. Strain suggests that “in order to grasp the subtleties of this activist approach to self-defense,” we must stop creating false divisions between a “pre-1965 era” and a “post-1965 era,” between rigid definitions of integration and segregation, between Malcolm and Martin and violence and nonviolence. These oversimplifications, Strain suggests, have not served our current movements well — “blurring” the distinctions between the violence of racial animosity and limited acts of self-defense, and equally contributing to the popular misunderstanding of nonviolence as passivity in the face of danger.

An even more difficult argument, on the potential dialectical connections between violence and nonviolence, is made in the well-researched 2007 release by Simon Wendt, The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights. More than a simple, theoretical call for a “diversity of tactics,” Wendt has carefully examined the actions and reactions that led to various positive anti-racist changes in the midst of the 1950s through 1970s. He documents quite candidly the differences, for example, between groups like the armed Deacons for Defense, which helped defend southern civil rights workers, and the Panthers and Black Power advocates, who were often seen as too provocative and militaristic by their Southern counterparts. Wendt readily admits that, even with his own extensive research, “there is too little evidence to argue that actual, as opposed to rhetorical, black violence aided the nonviolent movement on a widespread basis.” He also brings us the important perspective that a non-nuanced, one-sided explanation of social change in the 1960s — emphasizing only nonviolence or armed struggle, with little distinction for the often-tough calls of when a given act of movement “violence” began — “will only obscure our understanding of the civil rights era.”

This obscuring has been a major factor in our movement’s inability to properly assess the lessons of that period.

Amongst those lessons, I would also add, are that solid organizations committed to lasting social change do not leave anyone behind — locked in prison or destitute or forgotten. True reconciliation and peace requires nothing less. That is why most mature movements around the world place a good deal of attention on the political prisoners of previous generations of struggle — so as to maintain continuity, appreciate and learn from history, and show current and future activists that state repression will not be successful in breaking the back of current endeavors. U.S. movements for justice and peace have much to learn in this regard.

It is therefore no coincidence that amongst the longest-held, worst-treated and most obviously political U.S. prisoners are former Black Panthers. Russell Maroon Shoats, at close to 70 years old with most of the past 30 years spent in solitary confinement, is a classic example of the quietly-kept ongoing torture which the U.S. government engages in (and U.S. human rights groups all too often ignore). Still, Shoats remains a beacon of analysis and reflection, providing his own version of the lessons and legacies discussed by scholars far from the front lines. The main contribution of the BPP, in Shoats’ assessment, is that they served as an introduction to radical politics to many youth of the period (both “of color” and others).

Never one to shy away from critical thinking, Shoats acknowledges — by looking at the non-democratic, sometimes sexist and militaristic aspects of Panther practice — that “the methods they chose to use were contradictory to the ends they sought.” Though Shoats is no pacifist, his critiques of Panther “naked terror and violence,” forced on them by an FBI campaign of murderous “counter-intelligence” (COINTELPRO), underscore the importance of just one voice, often unheard but far from muted. His joy at the events of the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement and other recent developments is reflected in his writings that these new, popular movements have come “to the rescue!”

History suggests that the role of the nonviolent activist has got to include raising militancy without accepting militarism, helping to build and defend people’s movements without ever resorting to violence. Solidarity suggests that the role of the white activist should be to promote self-determination before critiquing what others choose as self-defense. We must attend to some basic requirements of history and solidarity, in part through simple acts (like signing an online petition or joining the new campaign to get Russell Maroon Shoats out of solitary confinement, or checking out the work of the Jericho Movement to free all U.S. political prisoners). But we must also go deeper, building future campaigns that learn from the mistakes of our collective past. The glorification of the gun is surely one of them, but unresponsiveness to past and present repression — whether due to ignorance or apathy or over-work, or to disagreements with the methods used by those being repressed — is surely another, with equally dire consequences for us all. With so much at stake, our inability to look carefully at the lessons of recent movements is truly indefensible.

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.

Huey Newton and Bobby Steale, via Wikimedia.

The Black Panther Party was an African-American radical organization founded in Oakland, California, in 1966. Originally it was called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, and even though it emerged in the North, it was responding to the same anger and frustration as the Deacons for Defense felt when watching black people get punished for standing up for themselves in the South.

The Panthers’ immediate goal was to protect black neighborhoods from police brutality. The group evolved from black nationalism to a broader revolutionary socialism. It rapidly expanded to many cities, still mainly in the North, and became influential. It differed from the Deacons for Defense in that it didn’t think of itself as a security force for the civil rights movement. Instead, it offered an outright alternative to the civil rights movement, with goals that included “land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.” Its best-known programs were its armed citizens’ patrols to monitor the police, and Free Breakfast for School Children. Other programs included free medical clinics, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, and an experimental school to develop new methods for educating African-American children.

Not nearly enough notice has been taken of the Panthers’ effort, as a revolutionary organization, to include alternative institutions in their program. Many in the Occupy movement have made the same move. Both are in alignment with a framework that emphasizes “prefigurative work,” which builds skills and creates new ways for organizing life in a future society.

What drew more attention at the time, and still dominates the image of the Black Panthers, was their insistence on carrying weapons and their willingness to use them to defend the community. In 1967, for example, the party famously organized a march on the California state capitol, and the marchers openly carried rifles. So I was surprised in 1976 when two members of the Black Panther Party sat in my living room, which was filled with radical activists, and calmly stated that, looking back, they thought they’d made “a militarist error.”

Some of my friends protested: “You had the right to defend yourselves. Self-defense is enshrined in the Constitution! You weren’t saying you were arming yourselves to do revolutionary warfare!”

The Panthers on my sofa agreed with all of that, and said they were making a point about strategy, not about morality. Militarism, they said, is a point of view that makes violence more powerful than it really is. It makes carrying guns appear to outweigh the realities of color, and the intensity of white racism, and the vulnerability of the black community, and the nature of the racist mass media, and the strength of the apparatus of the modern security state.

Now, knowing about the U.S. government’s COINTELPRO program and its particular attention on groups like the Black Panthers, we see more easily what the two men were talking about. The Panthers’ moral claim to self-defense did not protect them, and carrying guns was a fact easily used as justification to wipe them out. Life isn’t fair, but then they knew that.

The strategic question is: Does defensive violence, or the threat of it, help us or hurt us as we struggle for justice? The inability of the Black Panther Party to protect even itself, much less to survive to protect the black community, speaks eloquently.

In 2012 we need to ask: What has changed since then, to make us believe that this time a strategy of armed self defense would work better than it did in the sixties? Has the national security state weakened in the meantime, its means of surveillance and infiltration become degraded? Has the 1 percent become more liberal, more interested in the well-being of all? Since the sixties, have potential allies become more attracted to violence as a means of struggling for justice?

I respect the Black Panthers’ launching a response in the North when the civil rights movement was reaching a point of self-evaluation, and that their response included creativity and an ideological inquiry. Note the mood of the period: By 1965, after 10 years of amazing victories in the most violently racist part of the country, the Deep South, many people in the North who identified with the movement carried mixed emotions. They felt disgust with the amount of suffering that it had taken to achieve those victories, and at the same time an expectation that those victories should by now have transformed America in a more profound way.

I was among the activists, both black and white, who toured the country in those days doing workshops at the request of local people. I remember an increasing number of complaints in the North: “Why hasn’t our situation changed in this community? Racism is going on just like before. All this nonviolent stuff and it’s still the same — maybe nonviolence doesn’t work!”

In response I would ask them to tell me about the direct action campaigns they themselves had waged in their communities. All too often the answer was, “Well, none yet.” Gandhi, tough old bird that he was, in my place would have asked, “You expected someone else to liberate you?”

I understood the complaint in cultural terms. From the national media coverage of the movement, Northerners could believe that this was a national movement about racism and poverty everywhere. Yes, to some degree it was national. But mainly it was a Southern movement focused on regional issues like that cup of coffee at a lunch counter and the right to vote.

Rather than wait for someone else to liberate them, the Black Panther Party started to act in the North. They found it hard going, but made some gains. Martin Luther King also turned to the North in that period, and began to address new challenges both culturally and politically. The nonviolent part of the civil rights movement saw some progress in the North, but found the intersection of race and class to be very tough, as did the Panthers. The Panthers added class struggle theory to help them, and King did so as well, only more slowly. (By the time he was killed, King was challenging capitalism as a system as well as building a cross-race, cross-class coalition to focus on poverty.)

From the point of view of the 1 percent, things were not going at all well in the mid-sixties. The machinations of the FBI to divide the civil rights movement weren’t very effective. The movement was growing and more people were raising a question that alarmed the 1 percent: Do we want a bigger piece of the American pie or does the pie itself need to be re-made? The country as a whole was polarizing; National Rifle Association membership was climbing as an expression of white anxiety. Escalating the war in Vietnam wasn’t working to marginalize the civil rights movement and restore overall unity, which was disappointing, considering that a historic function of war is to reduce internal divisions.

Still, the 1 percent had more cards to play. They could mount a bogus “War on Poverty” that co-opted smart young black organizers by giving them jobs in self-help agencies. (I heard Bayard Rustin say cynically, “It’s the first time the U.S. ever went to war with a BB gun.”) They could also make illegal drugs and weapons more easily available in Northern black neighborhoods, and it has been alleged that they did so.

Then the power-holders got a couple of big breaks. The civil rights movement itself divided over Black Power and the question of violence. The second big break came in the form of the riots that tore up people’s neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Detroit, Newark, Watts and elsewhere.

The movement stopped growing. White activist allies left for the more welcoming territory of anti-Vietnam war organizing, and emboldened racists took up their refrain once again but in the coded language of “law and order.” Because the movement lost the moral high ground, a minor bill introduced into Congress for an appropriation for urban rat control was openly laughed at in open session — an unthinkable act two years earlier. The urban ghetto doesn’t need rat control, said the attitude of the now-bolstered right wing, it needs more police and larger prisons!

The power-holders no longer needed to make significant concessions to the civil rights movement. The interest in armed self-defense and the flirtation with violence, beyond dividing the movement, went nowhere.

Left holding the bag most tragically were those black inner-city neighborhoods where the riots took place. A study found that, 40 years later, those neighborhoods across the country had still not fully regained lost ground. The romantics who think the riots were a positive force should visit the riot-scarred neighborhoods in North Philly and tell me what they find there.

Illustration of self-defense, from James E. Homans' 1908 New American Encyclopedia of Social and Commercial Information.

We have a moral right to defend ourselves against violation; there’s no doubt in my mind about that. Persons and groups have boundaries for a reason, and integrity generally requires that we defend them. Gandhi said that this is an obligation that trumped his call to experiment with nonviolent action; if you can’t think of a way to defend yourself nonviolently, he said, use violence. I believe Gandhi would have sympathized with the Deacons for Defense, for instance, an armed civil rights group in Southern U.S.

Of course Gandhi also believed that, with sufficient creativity, there is always a way to devise a nonviolent defense. He also recognized that either violent or nonviolent defense might fail in an immediate sense; there is such a thing as overwhelming force.

I think it’s no accident that the question of self-defense has been coming up in some circles in the Occupy movement at this time. Having the discussion reflects how many people are realizing that moving the 1 percent out of the driver’s seat is a revolutionary mission. The person who doesn’t feel fear at the prospect of revolution is out of touch with their feelings. It’s only natural at such a moment to wonder if there is some way to act boldly — and at the same time stay safe.

The reality is that there is no way to guarantee safety. What we can do is to increase the chances of survival for our comrades and ourselves while building a movement that can win. Activists have for at least a century been creating methods for consciously increasing the chances for survival. Some of these methods are similar in both violent and nonviolent strategic struggle. Everyone can learn from them.

It helps first of all to accept our primal human programming: When deeply threatened, we’re driven to fight or flight. There are pacifists who want to avoid this choice, and they with others have invented the field of conflict resolution; many useful things have come out of that world. Nevertheless, when the troops or thugs are sent to kick your butt, the choices are fight or flight.

While both military commanders and nonviolent organizers believe there is such a thing as strategic retreat, participants in both kinds of struggle are trained to fight, not run away. Running away usually means the loss of the battle and a weakening of one’s forces, whether violent or nonviolent. Even though the point of running is to try to be safe, flight often increases the number of casualties for our side.

I remember Andrew Young, a key organizer working with Martin Luther King Jr. telling a group of us in the North that we were probably misreading the frequent tactic in the Southern civil rights movement of bringing a group of people to the point of violent confrontation and then having them get on their knees and pray. “You probably thought we were praying for divine intervention,” Andy smiled, “and we were, but we also knew that if those people facing the guns and dogs broke and run, more of them would get hurt! And we’d lose that battle.”

“The thing about praying is,” he said as his smile broadened, “you can’t run on your knees!”

Fight or flight. How many soldiers in combat have heard a loud voice inside them urging them to run away from a situation where they are likely to get hurt or killed? The same is true at hard moments in nonviolent movements, probably in an equal percentage of heads. Unless a strategic retreat is sensible, which means of course an organized retreat, the smart choice is to stay and fight.

I saw how unsafe the flight response can be during the first campaign in which I was arrested, a civil rights struggle in which the state police were called in to back up the local police. As the Chester, Pa., freedom struggle of 1963 escalated, more people joined who had no idea what their black sisters and brothers had learned in the South. Sometimes the Chester people met ugly police charges with courage and stood their ground, out of sheer grit. But sometimes they broke and ran, and the police went crazy, sometimes chasing them upstairs and into their apartments to beat them mercilessly with their nightsticks and guns.

A few years later I saw the largely white demonstrators in the 1968 Chicago Democratic Party convention make the same mistake. In my experience white activists are even less likely to learn from the actual experience of the civil rights movement than black activists, so I wasn’t at all surprised when the demonstrators broke and ran from scary police charges. As in Chester, but on national television, the police chased the demonstrators, even to the point of soaking carpets with blood in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel. The convention demonstrations were largely a strategic loss for the movement, as almost all convention mass confrontations have been, but at least thanks to television coverage the police behavior was roundly criticized as well.

The history of flight is not a pretty one, so let’s go on to the “fight” option. We can choose one of the most dangerous nonviolent campaigns in U.S. history, the 1961 entry of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee into Mississippi, the hardest of the hardcore segregationist states of the South. Mississippi was ruled by the White Citizens Councils and, more brutally, that long-lived American terrorist organization the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

For readers who take seriously the question of self defense, I recommend the Danny Glover film Freedom Song, which pulls no punches as it shows what young people experienced in those early days. The staff members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) knew they would get no protection from local law enforcement; men who were police in the day could at night be wearing the white sheets of the KKK. State police were hostile. The FBI was hostile, and Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department was mostly trying to look the other way. SNCC was on its own.

The film shows SNCC workers leading training workshops for young students. At one point the trainers harassed a young man in a role-play to toughen him up. When the student lost control and attacked the harasser, the trainers held him and tried to reassure him. The young man said something like, “I can’t do this. I gotta fight back.”

The reply came quickly: “By joining us, you are fighting back.”

SNCC’s lesson in 1961 was that safety and effectiveness came from fighting back with nonviolent methods. A second big lesson for the young man came a couple of weeks later. He asks the biggest and most muscled SNCC organizer whether he has adopted nonviolence as a way of life. The organizer explains that if someone threatened him at another time he’d beat up the assailant, but he’s adopted nonviolent action as a strategy, in order to win the struggle.

This stance was typical of people I met throughout the civil rights movement; most weren’t pacifists but learned that in highly dangerous situations, nonviolent discipline gave them the best chance to stay safe — and to win.

SNCC workers said that nonviolence didn’t remove the danger – protesters would still get hurt, and some might be killed. SNCC’s first chairman, and now a member of Congress, John Lewis, was beaten dozens of times, and very narrowly escaped death. He and others in SNCC said the stakes were too high to expect racist privilege to give up easily. But the nonviolent discipline removed the pretext justifying long-term and widespread repression. In fact, the repression most often worked against the perpetrators, just as in jiu-jitsu the savvy warrior uses the violence of the opponent against him. Typically, when white racists used violence against the movement, it grew, and allies appeared, and the racists started dividing among themselves, and the campaign won in one more town.

The best-known leader of the armed Deacons for Defense, Charles Sims, was quoted in The New York Times as favoring nonviolent direct action as the best way to gain civil rights. The Deacons could be found without their guns inside demonstrations. At the same time, Sims believed that nonviolent demonstrators should be protected by guardians carrying guns, accompanying protests to deter the KKK and others, and the Deacons did exactly that.

As I flew in from Illinois, the thunderstorms over Birmingham cleared long enough to let us land in good order. I had come to Alabama to attend a retreat featuring Narayan Desai, one of the last living disciples of Mohandas Gandhi, who made the trip there from India at the invitation of longtime activists and authors Shelley and Jim Douglass. Born in 1924 in Gandhi’s ashram, Desai has consistently undertaken Gandhian work for eight decades, and has recently published a 2,300-page biography of Gandhi. It was not only deeply moving to spend three days last week in the presence of this life-long Gandhian, but to do so in Birmingham, the site of one of the civil rights movement’s most iconic struggles.

Even as several friends and I were collected at the airport and driven to the retreat center, I was vividly aware with each passing mile that we were traversing holy ground. This terrain resounds with a process for freedom set in motion a half century ago: a decision by African-American children, women and men to join together in concerted and bold nonviolent resistance for full and equal participation in society.

I believe that places where human beings band together for transformative justice become sites of enduring power. I first felt this in the 1990s when I was part of a bicultural team leading nonviolence retreats with Latino youths in California’s Central Valley. The land itself seemed imbued with the determination, courage and creativity of the migrant poor who, against very long odds, built the United Farm Workers and engaged in protracted — but ultimately successful — strikes and campaigns that sought the right to organize, increased wages and improved working conditions. In celebrating what would have been César Chávez’s 85th birthday this Saturday, we also honor the thousands who took action with him in the fields. This is only one of many struggles around the world that not only worked for concrete outcomes but left a legacy that seems to inhere in the land itself.

Such an inheritance can reframe how we see such land: from a terrain of oppression to a topography of liberation. This alternative overlay doesn’t erase the facts of injustice. Rather, it retrieves and holds dear the creative and stubborn ways injustice has been challenged through time. I suspect that virtually every acre on earth has not only been subject to domination and injustice, but also to struggles for justice. One of our jobs as agents of change is to rescue the memory of this seen and unseen resistance.

Birmingham has done this through the magnificent Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, which captures the history of oppression that the self-styled Magic City lived for decades, as well as the intricate details of a movement for nonviolent change that rose up to challenge it. The museum is situated directly across the street from the 16th Avenue Baptist Church, where four little girls — Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley — died when the church was bombed on September 15, 1963. During the pivotal Birmingham campaign that took place earlier that year, thousands of young people gathered in that same church and headed out to make history. In watching films over the years from that momentous protest, I had somehow thought that they had processed quite a ways before meeting the police. I was wrong; directly across the street is Kelly Ingram Park, where a storm of water cannons and German shepherds was turned on the youth of the city. The park is now studded with sculptures and statues memorializing the turning point that in many ways helped re-map Birmingham and the nation.

Gandhi’s Indian independence movement was also about re-mapping: transforming a terrain of colonial conquest to a nation under self-rule. Over the weekend, Narayan Desai shared his experience of this geographical and spiritual re-inscription. The three gifts of Gandhi that Desai illuminated were ashram observances (the vows and principles that Gandhi developed and served as the source for action, by which one can “convert personal virtues into social values”), the constructive program (18 comprehensive social programs), and Satyagraha (soul-force, truth-force and love-force activated for nonviolent social change). In both constructing new institutions and organizing many large and small Satyagraha campaigns — including the 240-mile Salt March in 1930 — the Gandhian movement was slowly reframing how one saw and understood India.

As we know, the power of this re-mapping went far beyond the Subcontinent. In the U.S., Gandhi’s vision and practice inspired numerous key figures in the civil rights movement, including Howard Thurman, Bayard Rustin and James Lawson. A few years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, where Gandhi’s ideas had been seminal, Martin Luther King Jr. journeyed to India to immerse himself even more fully in Gandhi’s vision of soul-force. Gandhi’s grandson Arun Gandhi tells the story that, during this trip, King visited a museum which had previously been a private home where Gandhi often stayed. During the tour, King became fascinated with the sparse room where Gandhi slept and abruptly announced that he would be spending the night there. The museum official showing him around was bewildered and resistant. No one was allowed to stay in this room, he told his guest; besides, there were no amenities for him here. But King insisted and, after the official made a call to his superiors in the Indian government, he prevailed.

Apparently, King was eager to make contact with the spirit of Gandhi as he prepared for the next phase of his work. Just before leaving India, Dr. King was interviewed on national radio, and he said:

Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of non-violent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity. In a real sense, Mahatma Gandhi embodied in his life certain universal principles that are inherent in the moral structure of the universe, and these principles are as inescapable as the law of gravitation.

Just as King seized the opportunity to grow closer to Gandhi during his Indian pilgrimage, those of us who were in Birmingham last week had a chance to grow a bit closer to him through Narayan Desai, as we prepare for the next phase of our work for a nonviolent world.

For decades, Desai has carried on Gandhi’s mission in many ways — such as collecting three million acres of land for the poor as part of Vinobe Bhave’s Land Gift movement, and organizing Gandhi’s Shanti Sena or “Peace Army” along the northern border when there were tensions with China — but, after being in his presence for a few days, it seemed to me that he has done this most profoundly by, over many decades, imbiding and sharing Gandhi’s spirit.

Forty-seven years ago this week, Martin Luther King Jr. set out with 3,200 civil rights activists from Selma to Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, to call on the state and the nation to dismantle the structural obstacles to suffrage for African Americans. Two weeks before, on Sunday, March 7, 1965, hundreds of marchers had been brutally attacked on the Edmund Pettus Bridge by Alabama state troopers and local police officers on horses wielding clubs and whips amid a storm of tear gas.

“Bloody Sunday” horrified the nation and motivated a reluctant Lyndon Johnson to provide federalized National Guard protection for a renewed march, after the movement succeeded in getting a court order to allow the demonstrators to proceed. As federal judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. ruled, “The law is clear that the right to petition one’s government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups … and these rights may be exercised by marching, even along public highways.” Over the next four days, the marchers walked 50 miles, sleeping at night in fields alongside Jefferson Davis Highway. Over 25,000 people arrived at Alabama’s Capitol building on March 25. Less than five months later, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law.

Though this watershed moment took place nearly five decades ago, its power remains undiminished. For years this event has been marked with gatherings, speeches and reenactments of this now-archetypal journey for justice. Nonviolent change is often a journey that is new and uncharted—breaking new ground, setting a new direction; at the same time, its power can also derive from retracing and giving new meaning to a past path for freedom. It can be improvisational and creative. And it can be rooted in acts of remembrance and reenactment. A word that works for both of these realities is “pilgrimage.”

This year, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the Hispanic Council and the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA) joined with countless of other civil rights organizations in the Selma-to-Montgomery march as an opportunity to take a stand against Alabama’s anti-Latino legislation, HB 56, considered the strictest anti-immigrant bill passed by any state in the U.S. The president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Wade Henderson, wrote:

Last week’s 47th commemoration of the Bloody Sunday March of 1965 marks a new phase in the civil rights movement. It represents a turning point for people from all backgrounds, who are joining together, not only to remember our shared past, but also to fight for a shared future. It’s a moment of recognition from all sides that, though our nation has progressed since 1965, we are not yet finished with the struggle to include everyone in the fullness that American life has to offer.

For Henderson, the past and the present are colliding, and just as people took action half a century ago, it is critically important to draw on that same energy and example to continue to struggle: “The state of Alabama … is once again using fear and intimidation as weapons against those without power. This time, the targets are Latinos and the aim is to drive them from their homes and their communities.”

The original Selma-to-Montgomery march was not a choreographed or historically enshrined ritual. It was a radically ad hoc set of strategies that had to be revised over and over again until, improbably, the waters parted. Improvised as it was—playing each new factor by ear—the journey nonetheless was a pilgrimage: “a sacred journey” or “a journey of transformation.”

At the same time, this ongoing pilgrimage deepens the march’s original meaning by using its memory on behalf of unfinished business. Like many geographical nodes of the civil rights itinerary spread across the South and beyond, Selma is a destination that joins past and present in new and creative ways. The route to the capital is even memorialized as the Selma-to-Montgomery Voting Rights Trail, a U.S. National Historic Trail.

The anthropologist James Preston speaks of pilgrimage as “spiritual magnetism.” Theologian Richard R. Niebuhr writes that pilgrims “are persons in motion—passing through territories not their own—seeking something we might call completion.” For me, pilgrimage is a journey to the depths of reality, including its woundedness and sacredness, seeking the power and possibility of healing and transformation.

Pilgrimage, in this sense, is not simply a solo act—it is not simply a quest for individual fulfillment. It is a process of engaging the reality of injustice and violence as well as the potential for nonviolent change, and even reconciliation.

This is why I have a keen interest in the many forms of social change that literally involve movement, including Gandhi’s Salt March, the United Farm Workers’s 1966 march to Sacramento, the decades of nonviolent civil disobedience at the Nevada Test Site (which requires a journey into the simultaneously empty and rich Nevada desert), or innumerable marches organized by the peace, environmental, labor and Occupy movements.

Marches, walks and processions are not simply a way to “be visible”; they are symbolic journeys from A (the grinding present) to B (a more just and peaceful world). They are dramatized expeditions to a center of significance. They seek a metamorphosis of conditions. And they deliver the message in person. Such journeys accrue their meaning by taking each step, by sleeping by the side of the road, by gauging the tremendous dangers and possible opportunities of doing so. No doubt the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or its allies could have rented a fleet of buses to make the trip from Selma to Montgomery in about an hour. The meaning of the experience, though, included the totality of the journey. Without this tremendously symbolic and tremendously physical dimension, the exercise may well have been pointless.

In their book The Archetype of Pilgrimage, Jean and Wallace Clift identify many motivations that spur pilgrims to set out: to experience a place of power; to get outside the normal routine of life so something new can happen; to reclaim a lost or abandoned or forgotten part of oneself; to give thanks; to answer an inner call; to seek pardon; to look for a miracle. While the Clifts are mostly drawing on individual-oriented pilgrimages, many of these elements are at work in pilgrimages of social liberation, like the one to Montgomery in 1965—and 2012.

In 1995, on the 30th anniversary of Selma, then-former Governor George Wallace attended the commemoration. The one who had once staked his political career and national reputation on such inflammatory racist rhetoric as “Segregation then, segration now, segregation forever,” held hands with African-Americans and sang “We Shall Overcome.” Colman McCarthy describes the scene:

It was a reaching-out moment of reconciliation, of Wallace’s asking for—and receiving—forgiveness. In a statement read for him—he was too ill to speak—Wallace told those in the crowd who had marched 30 years ago: “Much has transpired since those days. A great deal has been lost and a great deal gained, and here we are. My message to you today is, welcome to Montgomery. May your message be heard. May your lessons never be forgotten.” In gracious and spiritual words, Joseph Lowery, a leader in the original march and now the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, thanked the former separatist “for coming out of your sickness to meet us. You are a different George Wallace today. We both serve a God who can make the desert bloom. We ask God’s blessing on you.”

In reflecting on this exchange, McCarthy was reminded of what Dr. King had once said:

Forgiveness does not mean ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act. It means, rather, that the evil act no longer remains as a barrier to the relationship. … While abhorring segregation, we shall love the segregationist. This is the only way to create the beloved community.

Dr. King wrote an autobiographical essay entitled “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence.” As it did for him, the pilgrimage metaphor can capture for us the struggles of the journey. But it can also hold out the possibility of arriving at the spiritual center, what he deemed “the beloved community.” Such a move can, if only for a moment, reward those longings that have propelled us forward, including the desire to experience a transforming kind of power, to discover a new reality, to answer an inner call, to reclaim our true selves, to answer a call, to seek pardon—and even to experience a miracle.

El Fondren, © Bob Fitch, all rights reserved.

In Bob Fitch’s photo of El Fondren, the 106-year-old man who registered to vote for the first time in 1966 in Mississippi has his hand raised triumphantly in the air as the crowd hoists him up. Alongside it one also sees the hands of reporters — holding out microphones, snapping photographs, trying to capture the scene for the evening news, grasping for access to El Fondren — and they are all white.

Like many others who documented the civil rights era, Bob Fitch, now 72, was a white man covering a black people’s movement. But unlike many mainstream-media reporters, in his mind this was not just another job. Fitch was a principal photojournalist for the African-American press. He had been hired by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference to provide coverage for outlets across the country who could not risk sending one of their own reporters because the risks for black journalists were too high.

This job meant not only photographing King, the movement’s most prominent leader, but also capturing everyday life among Southern blacks as they built a grassroots movement for freedom. Rather than simply viewing this work as an “assignment,” Fitch — the son of a Christian ethicist — pursued it as a spiritual mission. Documenting the civil rights movement was Fitch’s way of actualizing what he saw as the cornerstone of religion: a commitment to social justice.

Fitch’s career has been propelled by a desire to not simply observe social justice movements from afar, but to be immersed in them, working alongside people who are dedicated to changing society. Some of the most iconic photos of the American civil rights movement, and other movements since, are his. Fitch’s 1966 photo of Dr. King in his Atlanta office, with Gandhi’s portrait nearby, is the basis for the recently-inaugurated King memorial in Washington, D.C. But, perhaps more importantly, Fitch’s work directly contributed to the struggle for racial equality by providing black news agencies with reliable information and images that depicted the progress of their movement.

After King’s death, and after Fitch had photographed his funeral, he continued photographing the foot soldiers of social justice, including the Catholic Worker movement, the United Farmworkers, the anti-Vietnam and draft-resistance movements, and more. As he had with civil rights, Fitch worked for the organizations he was documenting, which kept him close to the people doing the everyday, nitty-gritty work of social change.

Even in his 70s, Fitch is unstoppable. When we spoke recently over the phone, he emphasized that he carries on that work today in Watsonville, California, where he resides and works for Latino immigrants’ rights. His journey as a photojournalist has also been a pilgrimage toward a world in which ordinary working people — whom Fitch sees as the real heroes of social change — receive recognition for their struggles and sacrifices. At the end of our conversation, Fitch seemed keen to discuss today’s Occupy movement. Before we got off the phone, with a sense of hope in younger generations, Fitch told me to continue the work — as King had once said to him in a vision. I hung up thinking of what Fitch had captured, of lives risked and lost so that a 106-year-old black man could vote, and wondering whether Occupy Wall Street’s archives would one day boast an image like this.

What motivated you to begin documenting social movements?

I always worked for the organizations I was documenting. Early on I worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and more recently I photographed an electoral campaign in the emerging Latino community in California. I worked as the photographer of Luis Alejo, who was elected the state assembly member for our district.

While I have been employed occasionally by magazines and newspapers, I am always an ally of the cause in which I believed. The root of that goes back, I would say, ironically, to my conservative Christian upbringing. My father was an oft-quoted conservative professor of Christian ethics. I personally tossed most of his institutionalized and ritualistic beliefs, but I was deeply moved by a few sections in the New Testament, such as the Beatitudes of Jesus: someone’s hungry, duh, feed them. If they need clothing, give them clothing — duh. If they are lonely, they need company, be company — duh. Those very simple words and the words of “treat others the way you want to be treated” had a profound impact on me as a kid and drew me toward issues of injustice.

On top of being raised by a conservative family — which was a very unemotional family, very cold, with no hugging and not a lot of laughter — I spent my high school and junior high school years in Berkeley in the 1950s. At that time, Berkeley was the nesting ground for socially committed people who had bailed out of the autocratic culture of the communist and socialist parties. So, in spite of my parents’ inclinations, I grew up in this community of socialists and communists, who started the co-ops in Berkeley, who started KPFA, the first community-supported radio station in the U.S., with whom I sang in song circles every month at the home of this old lady, Malvina Reynolds, who wrote great songs but had a terrible voice. And once in a while this tall skinny kid with a banjo — Pete Seeger — or this huge black woman with a powerful voice — Odetta Holmes — would come and sing with us.

Unlike my own family, which was cool and cold, the empathy and warmth and acceptance of that community was quite overpowering. My self-created Berkeley family was also receptive to my ideas about social justice. So, it was there that I was nourished in my teen years. I worked at KPFA as a volunteer, and we had very radical and exciting programs; it was a very exciting community. That was my springboard.

How did those experiences in Berkeley end up affecting your outlook?

To give you an idea of how high I jumped — when I was age six, ten years before then, I had been asked by my Presbyterian church to go home and write about things for which I was thankful. And as a very young child I wrote a prayer which said, “Thank you God that I’m a boy, thank you God that I’m white, thank you God that I’m born in America, thank you God I live in Eagle Rock which is near Hollywood.”

So, I had, at a very young age — which I believe is true for most kids — a very clear sense of my entitlement. But by the time I was 16 I’d been exposed to an entirely different environment and had taken some grasp of my own internal beliefs about justice and what fairness is. Throughout my life I have almost always had leaders and bosses who were women and men of color, and they turned out to be my mentors and heroes. Were I to write a prayer today, I would give thanks for those leaders, mentors and communities to which I was introduced by my Berkeley family.

But religion remained important — you went on to become a minister.

After college, I went on and trained to be a clergyman at a liberal theological seminary, Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. I enrolled not really because of the gospel or the theology but because of the fieldwork. I worked in juvenile halls, I worked in rural communities, I was one of the first interns for the brand-new Glide Foundation, which transformed from an old, Evangelical Methodist church to an inner-city organizing center. I lived and worked with gangs in the Mission district of San Francisco. I worked with the gay, lesbian and transsexual empowerment movements in San Francisco. In those seminary years, thanks to their outreach, I was exposed to, embraced and learned from a wide range of life.

Also, for about four or five years, I brought a lot of speakers from the black civil rights movement to the Bay Area, sent workers to the South and developed a series of strong friendships with people working in the movement. My opinion was then, and is now, that the best thing to do was not spend money for personal trips but send the cost-of-travel money to the organization, and let them decide how to spend it.

So work for the cause from wherever you are and send them your travel money?

Well, I’ve gone when I’ve been invited. It’s better to support the people there in the community doing the work than it is to go down and check it out as a stranger; some call this “zoo tripping.” After five years of supporting civil rights work I was invited to be the permanent SCLC staff photographer. I had finished college and graduate school; I’d done everything my parents wanted me to do, so now — what do I want to do?

Two years before graduation I had a strange vision. I had read James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time straight through one night and early morning. At the end of that reading I was entranced; I had a vision of myself being engaged with what I had encountered in the book in some sort of aesthetic manner. I didn’t know what that meant. I decided the next morning that the “aesthetic” would not be writing — writing’s too hard — and it wouldn’t be as a painterly artist — I couldn’t draw for shit — but maybe photography, since I had developed those skills as a hobby. A year and a half later, or two, I was invited to be photojournalist for King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. This was just after the Selma march, and everybody had left just when workers were needed for the first viable electoral voter rights and election campaigns.

When you say “everybody had left,” do you mean the activists, or the media, or both?

Well, not completely everybody. But after Selma, and the new Voting Rights Act, the work that remained was drudgery — knocking on doors, phone-calling, driving, teaching, education. And that big crowd that marched to Montgomery didn’t stay for the drudgery.

Local organizations needed people to do that work of finding candidates, training candidates, supporting candidates, through the whole election process. There were roughly 50 African-American candidates for various offices in Alabama in ’66. That meant a lot of work.

There’s a certain kind of irony — I mentioned the Latino campaigns in Watsonville, where I live now. Watsonville reminds me of some of the work in Alabama because it is an 80-percent Latino community, and we’re transitioning from an agro-business, Anglo, old-guard power structure to a more representative government. We’re knocking on doors, we’re making phone calls, we’re getting people to the polls, we’re training and running empowerment campaigns. By “we,” I mean a progressive coalition of multi-age, multi-ethnic people — and the drudgery work is much the same as the black civil rights campaigns.

How did you come to be the person that the SCLC invited to document them?

I was told, “Bob, we can’t send African-American journalists and photographers into the field ’cause they’ll get beat up and killed, so we’re going to send your little white ass out there. Every week you’ll come back with a news story in print and photos, and you’ll send them to the major black print media around the nation.” There were at that time about 20 major African-American newspapers all the way from Oakland to Harlem to Chicago to Atlanta.

So I took the photos, wrote the notes, typed up an article, mimeographed the article, developed the film, printed the pictures, addressed the envelope, put the story and the photos in the envelope, bought stamps and put them on the envelopes, and sent it off. It was me. I was the Afro wire service! By then, the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC) photographers’ group that emerged out of the Mississippi Summer pretty much diminished — so, at that time, I was the only movement photographer in the field.

Sounds like a lot of work — but what did it entail?

SCLC would announce a list of the African-American candidates running for office and declare that a picture of all candidates and their families was needed for leaflets to be distributed in local communities. I would go hunt down farms with no address, people who were in the fields or teaching at schools or an attorney, and take pictures, and get those back to Atlanta and develop those. That was a typical assignment.

We had another campaign where we were identifying contemporary lynching: African-American people who were killed because they had crossed the cultural line, in some manner, by not smiling at whites, or resisting in a march or demonstration. We had 16 of those murders in Alabama in one year, in 1966, and I simply followed through to photograph and write on those as they came up.

A photojournalist knows that three-quarters of the work is waiting, or getting there, and planning or re-planning, double-checking supplies and schedules. My entrée into the situation was very simple. All I had to say was “I’m Dr. King’s photographer,” and it opened doors in the black community — or shut doors in the Anglo community — or evoked a response that generated significant word and photo content.

Martin Luther King, Jr., © Bob Fitch, all rights reserved.

Berkeley had a powerful impact on you personally. Did working in the South have a different sort of impact?

The experience in the black civil rights movement set up my life. After Dr. King was murdered, and after I went back to Atlanta to photograph the funeral at the invitation of his family, I returned to the Bay Area. I went to a retreat on racism where blacks and whites were meeting to see what programs they could come up with. It got very contentious, and it was fueled by alcohol, and I didn’t like the mood. So I went out and sat on a log in the forest. And there in the wilderness, a very strange thing happened: Dr. King appeared to me! He was as real as the lamp that’s two feet from my eyes right now. I don’t believe in ghosts, nor do I really believe in the afterlife. But he was there, and he spoke to me and said, in his deep voice, “Bob, continue the work!” Then he left.

Wow. What do you think caused you to see him in that way? It sounds like you needed inspiration to keep going after he was gone.

I don’t know where it came from. It may have come from inside me. But the next day I began to think, Okay, the people I most follow and respect are being jailed and killed. It’s important to document their work and their workers. I made a list, which at that time included Chavez, who was emerging with United Farmworkers Union; David Harris who was a leader of the West Coast anti-Vietnam draft resistance movement along with his partner Joan Baez; Daniel and Phil Berrigan, two of the Catonsville Nine who were part of the war resistance movement on the East Coast; Dorothy Day, titular parent of the anarchist nonviolent Catholic Worker movement; Pete Seeger, who has been the life affirming “bishop,” spiritual guide and mentor for all us Anglos for decades; and Ron Dellums in Alameda County who was running for Congress with the endorsement of Coretta King — kind of a first post-King’s-death political connection.

I had this list of figures — some well-known, some not — and I literally mapped out how to connect with them, how to begin the work, how to fund the work. I acted as advised: to “continue the work” right up to today’s community campaigns for social justice.

Has anyone else inspired you the way King did?

I’ll tell you a story. I was in Eutaw, Alabama, photographing a segregated Anglo high school. Stepped out of my car, took the photograph. A cop car pulls up behind me, four cops got out and grabbed me, saying, “You’re going to jail.” I asked, “For what?” They said, “Trespassing — you stepped on the lawn.” So I was in jail four days before they even let me make a phone call, and finally they opened the cell to release me. It was one of these old jails where the bars clang — I hate that sound. And they said, “Bail’s made, you can go.”

I looked at the documents to see who would put up their own property to bail my ass out of jail. Maybe Andrew Young, who was the field organizer — no, his name’s not there. Maybe Hosea Williams, my immediate boss — no, his name was not there. The names that were on that bail document all had the same last name, probably three brothers — Kirksey, a local family in Alabama, farmers whom I had never even met. They put up their precious land to get my white ass outta jail. And I had an immediate flash, a kind of experience I’ve had many times, but at that time a lightening bolt of consciousness.

Whereas King and Stokley Carmichael and Floyd McKisick all appeared to be heroes, they stood on a scaffold of Afro-American property owners, workers and families who maintained their hope and values for roughly 350 years prior to the emergence of the civil rights movement. My heroes were the Kirkseys, and today, my heroes are communities of people like them.

I was loved and inspired by Dr. King. He was a brother and a friend. But the real heroes for me have always been those people who nickel-and-dime for their community organizations, who build that scaffold which promotes and allows the historical justice movements.

So here I am again in Watsonville, a member of a progressive democratic coalition whose members are those people — cooks, parents, lawyers. They run emergency shelters, they’re political officers, they drive trucks, they work in the fields — and they are my heroes. I try to choose heroes who are not people I couldn’t be. King really was a genius, or David Harris, an extraordinary tactician. I’d rather have heroes whose lives I can emulate.

Of all your photos, do you have a favorite? 

The photo I took in 1966 of the 106-year-and-9-month-old man who registered to vote for the first time. It was during the Mississippi Meredith March, named after James Meredith, who integrated the University of Mississippi, where the words “black power” were first used. This was in Batesville. El Fondren, this man, was probably born in slavery, so imagine the courageous fullness of his experience, from that slavery to registering to vote in the same lifetime — he survived it all. When I was photographing — I photographed him registering to vote, and then we came outside, and the crowd threw him on their shoulders — I had a moment I’ve experienced a few times, where the image was such a perfect representation of all I was feeling at the time, I disappeared!

The only way I can describe it is in mystic terms: I became one with all. I photographed automatically for the few moments it took me to get through the roll of film. And whenever I have that experience, the photos always turn out very well. El Fondren was not only a hero, not only engaged in a courageous act of personal empowerment; he did that with his community — those people who threw him on their shoulders. That moment for me was the life and work we must nourish and continue.

New York City subway ad for a Diego Rivera exhibition, modified for Occupy Wall Street. By Poster Boy NYC.

Occupy Wall Street is similar to many movements in contending that its opponent—for Occupy, the 1 percent—is maintaining a system whose structural, systematic violence far exceeds any violence exhibited by the movement itself. For example, movements will say that class oppression or sexism or racism hurt people in the daily course of life, pointing to statistics like each percentage point of unemployment resulting in increased suicide, homicide and domestic abuse. However, especially when the movement is still young and only beginning to get its message out, the powers that be in politics and the media will often succeed in dismissing such charges and in blaming every appearance of violence on the campaigners. Reversing this narrative in the public perception is one of a growing movement’s most important challenges.

For nearly a year, for example, the Syrian government has been sending its tanks to kill demonstrators while claiming that the violence mainly comes from the pro-democracy forces. The Russian government publicly agrees. The reason why defenders of oppression the world over charge activists with violence—even if they have to make it up—is because it’s a potent accusation. The oppressor doesn’t want the “violence” label to stick to its own side. Those who presently are undecided or passive might move to support the campaigners because they don’t want to support “violence.”

In some circumstances, although not all, who wins the struggle depends on who most believably asserts that the other side is violent. Occupy Wall Street got a tremendous boost in the early days when mainstream media were largely ignoring them, thanks to the blatant violence committed by New York City police. Many influential and uncommitted people swung immediately to the side of Occupy and gave it extraordinary momentum.

Those in power, however, are at an advantage in this contest with campaigners. They usually control or hugely influence the media coverage. They start out with some legitimacy won through elections or asserted through authoritarian cultural institutions—often religious ones. In the Global Nonviolent Action Database, we recount dozens of cases in which oppressive regimes have persisted against activist challenge for years, even decades, before the campaigners’ charge of “violence” finally stuck and key middle groups swung over.

After Martin Luther King, Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize, there was a swell of indignation in many Southern towns and cities. “Our town was peaceful until King came here,” people would say, “and then we had all kinds of trouble and violence, and then he gets the Peace Prize?”

King’s response was to say that those towns had been violent all along. Racism is violence, he said; just look at comparative statistics between whites and blacks of life expectancy, and infant mortality rates, and death in childbirth. He said that the town newspaper didn’t put those statistics in headlines, so (white) people didn’t see clearly the violence of racism. It took an activist campaign that brought out the Ku Klux Klan and police dogs, and blood running in the streets, for people to see that racism equals violence, because racism is a system that, when challenged, must be defended by violence. As we know, once the white people in the middle saw where the violence was actually coming from, large enough portions of them changed sides so that the activists could gain concrete victories.

How, then, did an oppressed people succeed in showing that the violence was actually in white racism, rather than in themselves?

They did it by creating brilliant dramas in which they contrasted their own behavior with that of their opponents. Part of the brilliance was in forcing their opponent into a dilemma in which either choice would put the demonstrators ahead of the game.  The story-line for a lunch-counter sit-in, for instance, was: “I want coffee at this whites-only lunch counter. If you serve me, fine. I win. If you don’t serve me but instead beat me or arrest me, fine. I win because I show where the violence is coming from.” (I was privileged to learn this lesson firsthand; my first arrest was in a civil rights sit-in.)

In other words, at their best, the young people avoided doing what could be perceived as mere provocation—like walking into the streets to stop traffic or hassling shoppers. The students were much cagier than that. They carefully set up no-win situations for their opponents, and therefore, against all odds—including the KKK terrorists—they usually won.

Furthermore, because they knew the stakes were high, the students took steps to heighten the contrast as much as possible. They showed up at the lunch counter with ironed dresses and white shirts and ties and polished shoes, with a textbook in hand.

The danger of such contrast is known well to people whose job is to defend an unjust status quo. When activist behavior reveals so clearly the injustice of the state, it results in a loss of the state’s legitimacy. Dozens of dictators have learned this to their sorrow. Smart managers of repression have therefore come up with a counter-strategy: reduce the contrast in behavior between the activists and those charged with repression. Here are some of their tactics:

• Pay or persuade people to pretend to be activists and do something that can be called violence. This might be property destruction (since a lot of people believe property destruction is violence), but it could also mean attacking police or others on the side of the status quo.
• Accuse the activists of violence whether or not there’s any evidence of it.
• Plant the evidence. In Philadelphia during the 1960s, a young, largely-white anti-racist group couldn’t reach consensus to state publicly that they were nonviolent, even though they hadn’t yet planned any acts of violence. They were increasingly effective in their nonviolent campaign, so the police staged a raid on the communal house where some of them lived, herded everyone into the living room, searched the rest of the house and “discovered” explosives in the refrigerator. With that planted evidence they were able to pretty much destroy the group, and the young people were powerless to defend themselves,

Variations of the repressors’ “minimize the contrast” approach have been employed all over the world: provocateurs used in India by the British Empire, in Serbia to hurt the student opponents of the dictatorship, and on and on. There are steps that activists can take, however, to prevent this kind of manipulation:

• Deliberately heighten the contrast. In France in the late 1950s, the anti-imperialist movement did a lot of demonstrations against the Algerian War, and were faced with notoriously violent police who were quartered in barracks to stay “battle ready.” While working in France in 1960, I was told that many of the French activists knew that the smartest way to reduce their casualties was to remain nonviolent—police in so many countries increase their violence when they experience fighting back—and they wanted to win over more of the French public to their side. They therefore adopted the tactic of when in doubt, sit down. They found not only that they sustained fewer injuries, but also that observers (including media) of the confrontations spread the word about the drama: police standing over activists with upraised sticks; activists sitting on the ground creating the largest possible contrast. Their campaign grew as a result.
• Boldly declare that you are nonviolent, as some Occupy groups have done, and by doing so move to the “moral high ground” in the perception of most people. If critics claim that certain tactics—say, locking arms—activists can challenge such claims on their own terms.
• Start again if there has been an activist lapse into defensive violence. Researcher Kira Kern tells us that when the Omanis jumped into the Arab Awakening on February 27 of last year, their protest immediately turned into a clash with the police, with violence on both sides. The movement pressed the reset button and began a nonviolent campaign, taking care this time to heighten the contrast with the police who used arrests, tear gas and rubber bullets. The assessment of the Omani activist leadership was that the sultan was too well-embedded to replace with democracy in one campaign, so they set for themselves concrete goals that looked achievable: better wages, more jobs, an elected parliament and a new constitution. They used a variety of methods: occupation, obstruction, picketing, limited strikes, graduating to a general strike. In a little over a month, they won most of what they demanded.

The student sit-inners, French war protesters and heroic Omanis remind us that, while enjoying our own creativity, we needn’t re-invent every wheel. We can also learn from sisters and brothers that went before us some ways to heighten the contrast and reveal the violent face of injustice.

The headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer told us last week that, on the other side of the country, a brick hit a police officer in Oakland and sent him to the hospital. Civil Rights organizer Jim Bevel predicted headlines like this in the ’60s when arguing about the then-current version of “diversity of tactics.” He said something like: “We want people to talk about our issues, about the suffering of our people from racism and poverty. When you throw the brick, people don’t talk about our issues, or the thousand black people on the streets that day, they talk about the police officer who was hit by the brick.”

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.

As the Martin Luther King, Jr. national holiday approaches, I was struck by Fort Lauderdale, Florida’s theme for this year’s celebration: “Non-violence is Contagious…CATCH IT.”

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 grew up below the Mason Dixon line. In Baltimore, we have Frederick Douglass High School  (named for the escaped slave become statesman and abolitionist) and Robert E. Lee Memorial Park (named for the Confederate General from Virginia). They were not that far away from one another… less than seven miles.

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.