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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.
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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Between Libya, which has endured more than 2,000 NATO bombings, and Syria, where more than 2,000 civilians have been killed by their own government so far, we see the two traditional responses to a perceived need for intervention by the international community in regimes gone wrong. It’s a grim picture—invaded Libya and abandoned Syria—and a sad comment on the paucity of human imagination, at least when that imagination is squeezed into the narrow confines of “realism.”

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

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

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In his 2008 book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell frequently cites a theory known as the “10,000-Hour Rule,” which he says refers to the amount of practice time it takes to succeed at a specific task. For instance, the Beatles performed over 1,200 times in the four years preceding their international invasion.

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

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

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The forthcoming dedication of the national memorial monument honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., affords an opening for considering the complexity and meaning of his leadership. He was not the tamed and desiccated civil hero as often portrayed in the United States around the time of his birthday, celebrated as a national holiday. He was until the moment of his death raising issues that challenged the conventional wisdom on poverty and racism, but also concerning war and peace.

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

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