• At least a thousand Peruvian activists and provincial politicians marched into Lima on Thursday to protest billions of dollars in government-backed mining projects proposed by foreign firms.

• A strike by Israel’s largest labor federation shut banks, ports, the stock exchange and most government offices on Thursday to protest conditions for contract employees.

• Thousands of Jordanian teachers went on strike Wednesday for the third consecutive day to demand a sharp increase in their salaries, forcing a closure of classrooms across the kingdom.

• Hundreds of New York City students walked out of school on Wednesday to protest planned education budget cuts.

• Thousands of protesters rallied outside Athens Parliament on Tuesday, as the nation held another 24-hour strike against austerity measures.

• On Tuesday, families of Palestinian prisoners, held in Israeli jails, held their relatives pictures during a protest in front of the International Committee of the Red Cross offices in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

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.

Occupy Wall Street organizer Austin Guest carrying a police barricade during the New Year's Eve action at Zuccotti Park. AP photo.

WNV contributor Jeremy Kessler has a new essay at The New Republic, an Occupy Wall Street-inspired reflection on the relationship between protest movements and the crafting of the First Amendment’s right to assembly in American legal history:

Only as massive labor unrest roiled the country during the Great Depression did the federal judiciary begin to put meat on the bones of the First Amendment’s “right to peaceably assemble.” In 1939, in Hague v. CIO, the Supreme Court invalidated the mayor of Jersey City’s attempt to bar labor organizers from meeting on public property. Public spaces such as streets and parks, the Court wrote, “have immemorially been held in trust for the use of the public and, time out of mind, have been used for purposes of assembly.” In vindicating the right of the CIO to assemble, the Court described a new legal space—the public forum—in which certain kinds of expression could not be restricted. Ironically, in later years, the public forum concept, and the equation of a particular act of assembly with the more general category of “expression,” would become ways of limiting rather than liberating assembly.

In the 1960s and early ’70s, however, civil rights activists pushed the boundaries of the Haguedecision, assembling out of doors and sitting where they didn’t belong, often in violation of public safety and trespass laws. The Supreme Court responded positively to these efforts, reversing dozens of local convictions, including that of five African-American men who staged a silent protest in the “whites-only” public library and eighty-five demonstrators who protested school segregation outside the home of the mayor of Chicago. The simple fact that local officials found the use of public land by civil rights activists to be a threat to public safety did not give them the authority to disperse the assembled protesters.

For more, read the rest of the essay, and see the video of Jeremy and me on a panel together at Columbia Law School.

Occupy Wall Street's "Declaration Flowchart" by Rachel Schragis. Click to see an enlarged version.

The question of demands has been contested ever since Occupy Wall Street began last September. Do the Occupiers have any? Should they? Does making demands confer undeserved legitimacy on the powers that be? The word “demand” can mean something different for every ear that hears it. It may be clarifying, therefore, to make a distinction between two different kinds of demands a movement might make, transactional and transformational.

Transactional goals are immediate and concrete achievements that can be won relatively rapidly: saving a home, or reaching agreements with banks about certain reforms. They are changes that take place in the here and now, benchmarks, successes that can propel a movement forward, unifying and sustaining the involvement of participants. Transformational demands, on the other hand, are longer-term, aspirational and transcendent.

To Jeffrey A. Ordower, director of Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, if some of the groups with whom he works could win $250 billion in principal reduction for homeowners, he would consider it more transactional than transformative—because as he put it, “we are still applying arbitrary pricing to a bundle of bricks and mortar.” Some transactional wins might look like less of a transaction. Take, for instance, Rosa Gudiel’s success in putting her story onto the front pages of Los Angeles newspapers for several days, as she fought for a reduced monthly loan payment after her brother died in the midst of recession. A catchy slogan was heard in southern California: “Let a thousand Rosas bloom.”

While students organizing for reductions on their tuition are making transactional demands, they may simultaneously be working toward the transformational demand of a universal right to free or affordable education. Similarly, while the Occupy movement’s anti-foreclosure actions make the transactional demand that a given family not be evicted from its home, such actions are motivated by the goal of transforming the mortgage system as a whole.

Let me reflect on further examples for each.

Nonviolent independence movements in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania became visible in the late 1980s. In 1939, Hitler and Stalin colluded in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, containing a secret protocol that provided for the partitioning of Poland, Finland and the Baltic states between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In June 1940, the Red Army invaded the then-independent republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, putting them under military occupation. The Soviet Union’s forcible annexations were never recognized by international powers. Established national flags, traditional songs and symbols were banned. Of a total Baltic population of 6 million, more than half a million disappeared with deportations eastward. Almost five decades after the pact was signed in Moscow, Baltic citizens began to organize against it.

As I have documented elsewhere, in parallel movements moving at different paces and interacting with other forces, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania would win independence from and take civil resistance into the Soviet Union, beginning its dissolution.

A transactional moment came about soon after November 18, 1988, when local officials in Lithuania’s communist party-state legalized their old national anthem and historic flag. The Lithuanians went on to grant themselves the freedom to commemorate Christmas for the first time since the shroud of Stalinism had descended. When darkness fell on Christmas Eve, the people of Lithuania doused their houselights and lit candles in their windows. In unlit cities and villages across the country, hundreds of thousands of tapers flickered with a symbolic Christmas unification. A referendum in every way but name, this coordinated action made clear their desired independence from the Soviet Union. Pulling together, they aroused their energies to continue, while indicating that further mobilization followed. Enacting freedom of worship signaled noncooperation with Soviet hegemony. The transformation of Lithuania could be said to have begun on March 11, 1990, when it became the first Soviet socialist republic to declare its independence.

Years before the Lithuanian candles sputtered, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., Martin Luther King, Jr., on May 17, 1957, spoke on the third anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision desegregating public schools. He said that by giving the vote to African Americans, who had been legally disenfranchised in the southern U.S. states, the entire region would be transformed: “Give us the ballot and we will transform the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs into the calculated good deeds of orderly citizens.” In referring to the white-supremacist vigilantes and terrorists whose random violence could strike at any time, terrorizing whites or blacks, he discerned that the entire southland of the United States would thus be changed and bettered for all of its citizens. While the civil rights movement was transactionally seeking basic constitutional reforms for black citizens, the South as a whole could be transformed, reconstituted in another form, so that all of the parties could benefit.

Within SNCC, in our endless debates on strategy and policy, we often talked of how ultimately (despite severe reprisals meted out to local black communities) racism could one day be more effectively lifted in the South than elsewhere in the nation. Although it took a decade to achieve the most elementary reforms and codification of rights for African Americans, whole states across the southern map ultimately profited, as did finally the entire nation. Certainly, white southerners such as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton could never have been elected from an un-altered South.

Nonviolent action is intrinsically transactional and interactive, changing the power relationships between the parties, and under certain circumstances it is capable of substantially transforming a conflict. It had the capacity to aid the ending of military occupation in the Baltics and the Eastern bloc, and it can help people to avoid what Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Lincoln Memorial speech, abhorred as “the temptation of being victimized with a psychology of victors.” Successful nonviolent action often depends on having both transactional and transformational demands working in concert; all the better if the difference is internally debated.

This distinction may be useful for Occupy and its countless spinoffs. Each specific group may need to make its own definitions. Seeking transactional steps could mean fortifying networks of co-ops, adopting local currencies and strengthening other alternative economic systems; prosecuting those who have created situational poverty and made a Dante’s inferno of housing and mortgage markets; or testing whether legislated regulations work. Transformational calls may be harder to articulate: when one grows accustomed to injustice, the words with which to hope for even basic rights can seem elusive.

• South Korean protesters calling attention to the women forced into sexual slavery during WWII reached their thousandth weekly demonstration on Wednesday. Marking the occasion, a statue honoring the victims was erected in front of the Japanese embassy.

• Chicago activists progressively interrupted a school board meeting on Wednesday in an act of nonviolent resistance—eventually forcing the board members to retreat out of the room—in protest of proposed changes to low-income schools.

• Demonstrators opposed to the Keystone XL pipeline staged a ‘human oil spill’ in front of Speaker John Boehner’s office in Washington D.C. Wednesday.

• Portugal’s top trade union confederation CGTP on Monday launched a week of protests against the government’s austerity policies.

• Employees of the Lahore College for Women University in Pakistan held a boycott of classes for the second day on Tuesday, demanding better terms for school workers.

• Thousands of taxi drivers in Guinea Bissau went on strike Tuesday to call for an end to police extortion.

• Disabled persons in Athens held a rally on Tuesday to oppose further austerity measures being considered by the Greek government.

• Inmates at seven Kyrgyzstan prisons coordinated a hunger strike on Tuesday to agitate for better living conditions and meals.

• Around 200 Los Angeles high school students walked out of classes on Tuesday and marched several miles to stage a sit-in at district board meeting, decrying cuts to school budgets.

• Thousands of public sector workers in Cyprus staged a three-hour stoppage Tuesday in protest over government moves to freeze salaries for two years as part of an austerity drive to avoid an EU bailout.

• A network of progressive South Korean Christian groups began a four day hunger strike on Monday to protest vote buying and corruption in the country’s largest Protestant association.

• Arab and Bedouin Israelis held a state-wide general strike on Sunday as several thousand demonstrators gathered at the Prime Ministry to express their outrage at a government plan that would relocate Negev Bedouins out of their homes into impoverished townships.

• In cities all across Russia, unauthorized demonstrations were ongoing Sunday after anti-Putin protesters escalated their dissent in Moscow at a massive rally on Saturday as tens of thousands marched for free elections.

• On Sunday, Syrians in some regions observed the opposition’s call for a general strike, despite reports that police in the capital forced shop owners to reopen.

• After leading scores of protesters inside of Durban climate talks on Friday, Greenpeace activists posed as representatives of wealthy corporations on Sunday to call attention to the beneficiaries of failed action at the ICC.

• Bangkok, Thailand saw a rare second rally in two days Saturday as a throng of marchers engaged in a ‘fearlessness walk’ reiterated their objections to laws that punish those who speak out against the monarchy.

• A flash mob erupted in a Pittsburgh Target on Saturday as Occupy organizers briefly flooded the store in protest of the company’s hiring policies.

• For the second day in a row, hundreds of Indian teachers in Bangalore boycotted classes on Friday in protest of low wages.

• Demonstrations condemning the NATO airstrike in Pakistan have been ongoing for two weeks across the country, and were sparked anew after prayers Friday.

• Tens of thousands of Yemenis took to the streets again Friday chanting ‘no partnership with the murderers’ after a new Cabinet—half filled with pro-regime politicians—was announced.

• In the Dominican Republic on Thursday, hundreds of activists rallied against the government’s practice of confiscating or annulling birth certificates for those of Haitian descent.

• Building on the largest opposition rally in years Monday, Russian protests spread to more cities on Tuesday as demonstrators denounced federal election results—resulting in hundreds of arrests.

• On Tuesday, thousands of young Yemenis in Sanaa continued their sit-in, despite President Saleh’s signed agreement that he would step down, declaring that their revolution is far from over. This followed demonstrations which erupted on Sunday, as residents of Taiz marched in protest of immunity provisions given to the outgoing President.

• Greenpeace activists infiltrated a French nuclear plant Monday and hung a banner on a reactor building in an attempt to expose nuclear national security weaknesses.

• Dozens of Occupy D.C. members were arrested late Sunday in an act of civil disobedience when they refused to dismantle a structure that they were building for shelter.

• Thousands protested at the UN Climate Conference in Durban, South Africa on Sunday, calling for a strong international plan to address climate change.

• Animal rights advocates in Taipei, Taiwan gathered by the hundreds on Sunday, condemning the conditions of animal shelters throughout the country.

• In India on Sunday, thousands marched and several began a hunger strike to show their support for the decommissioning of a damn in the interest of protecting local farmers.

• Kashmir witnessed protests and sit-ins on Saturday as residents of Srinagar decried the police’s use of pepper guns in breaking up demonstrations the day before.

• On Saturday, secular Tunisians held a counter-rally in front of Parliament, opposing a group of Islamists who were calling for female university students to wear a full-face veil.

• Thousands in India blocked train tracks Saturday, agitating for compensation to be given to victims of the industrial accident at Bhopal in 1984.

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.

Leymah Gbowee, Liberian activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

One of the most extraordinary nonviolent, transnational movements of the modern age was the women’s suffrage movement of the first two decades of the 20th century. New Zealand first extended the franchise in the late 19th century—after two decades of organizing efforts. As the new century began, women’s suffrage movements gained strength in China, Iran, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Russia, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), and Vietnam. Another 20 years and women were enfranchised in countries around the world, from Uruguay to Austria, the Netherlands to Turkey, and Germany to the United States. Few if any of those leading the campaigns for the ballot for women would have identified their approach as one of nonviolent action, nor would they have known its philosophical underpinnings or strategic wisdom. Like most who have turned to civil resistance, they did so because it was a direct method not reliant on representatives or agencies and a practical way to oppose an intolerable situation.

What exactly is the link between the rights of women, gender, nonviolent action, and building peace?

The word gender originates with Old French and until recently pertained mainly to linguistic and grammatical practices of classifying words as either masculine, feminine or (in some languages) neuter. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the earliest English usage in 1384. Chaucer used the French spelling gendre in 1398. UNESCO’s Guidelines on Gender-Neutral Language note that a person’s sex is a matter of chromosomes, whereas a person’s gender is a social and historical construction—the result of conditioning. I would further define the “feminist” project as the struggle for women’s emancipation, the insistence that women should be free as human beings to make fundamental choices in their lives.

Gender is not women’s lib by another name. Nor is it to say, with respect to nonviolent action, that women exude maternal attributes or possess a reflexive interest in peacemaking. Notions that women have a “natural” inclination toward conciliation and peace delegitimize the voices of women in policy and international relations. Rather, as Susan Moller Okin shows, the “social institutionalization of sexual differences” goes to the heart of politics, and therefore, peace.

At the University for Peace (UPEACE), where I teach, the gender and peace building department has persistently recognized the importance for young peace builders of studying nonviolent action. This recognition is partly related to an insight explained by Pam McAllister, who argues that “most of what we commonly call ‘women’s history’ is actually the history of women’s role in the development of nonviolent action.”

Programs and procedures for the empowerment of women have increasingly been recognized as fundamental to achieving durable peace. Data gathered over the past three decades show that improvements in the education and status of women stabilize and elevate the whole of societies. The uplift of women and their participation in public policy is now widely understood to be essential to economic growth, health status, reducing poverty, sustaining the environment, and consolidating democracy in all societies, including those long bent by authoritarianism and despotism.

Essential to the building of peace is an understanding that the ideologies and structures of patriarchy are among the most resilient systems of domination in human history, and are explicitly related to the socialization of men as warriors and exclusion of women from policy. The longevity and entrenchment of this social system has benefited from justifications of itself as “natural” and divinely sanctioned. Patriarchy has permeated structures and assumptions of power and economics, including forms of labor, presumptions of representative parliamentary bodies, religious dogma and the orthodoxies of faith traditions and leadership, military services, and concepts of the meanings of security.

In Africa, the exclusion of women is now being inferentially linked to the root causes of acute violent conflicts. For example, their customary invisibility in Rwanda is part of the background to 100 days in 1994 in which nearly one million unarmed persons were slaughtered. Crimes went unhalted. The international powers remained silent. (It should be noted that women participated in the genocide as well, killing other women or inciting men to rape and kill Tutsi women—as in the case of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, now on trial in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, in Arusha, Tanzania.) In 2002, Rwanda’s secretary general for the ministry of gender, M. Claire Mukasine, now an elected senator, told a visiting UPEACE delegation of which I was part that Rwandan governance had traditionally excluded women from public affairs. “Rwanda had no tradition whatsoever of women being able to speak in public,” she said of the colonial period and onward.

It was assumed that the father, brother, or husband speaks for the women; in the past, women never took a stand in public. They were not permitted to speak out at community meetings or the elders’ sessions. We think the exclusion of women is connected to the sad events in Rwanda.

The results of this recognition are striking. Today, Rwanda has more women on an absolute and proportional basis of its parliamentarians than any other such legislative body worldwide.

The awarding of a 2011 joint Nobel Peace Prize to a Liberian woman, Leymah Gbowee, embodies the links between gender, war, peace, and nonviolent struggle. Miriam O’Reilly’s interview of her for the BBC World Service illustrates the connection. In the midst of civil war led by the warlord Charles Taylor, Gbowee’s Women and Peace Network in 2000 brought together thousands of Christian and Muslim women to sit-in in a football stadium, exerting their popular defiance against “all the violence around us.” They had to protest, she maintains, because “there were no other possibilities. We had no option of being invited to the peace talks. We put ourselves out there as a symbol.” The women called for an immediate ceasefire. When it was violated, the network turned to another nonviolent method: Lysistratic nonaction, refusing sex with their husbands.

This method is named for Aristophanes’ farce of 411 B.C.E., first performed in an Athens exhausted by the Peloponnesian War. His hit play, Lysistrata, featured a sex strike by the war-weary women of both sides to end hostilities. Gbowee told the BBC that the idea of a sex strike came from frustration, as a means of pushing Liberian men, who had been silent and thus complicit with the war and violence. Maintaining that they would be fasting as an act of denial, the Liberian women held that as long as they were protesting and fasting, they could not be intimate with their men.

“We said let’s place our already battered bodies into the streets,” Gbowee remembers. “Let’s show the world that with our broken selves we can heal the nation.”

In 2006, the newly elected President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, another of the 2011 Nobel Peace laureates, formally requested Taylor’s extradition. Upon arrival in Monrovia, he was transferred to the custody of the United Nations. He is still held in the U.N. Detention Unit in The Hague, where he is on trial for his role in the civil war.

Taking gender seriously in the process of building peace, finally, is the job of everyone, not just of women. A former student of mine is the gender officer for the Nigerian parliament, and he, along with several other male, West African former students of mine, are doing important and strategic work. A Pakistani woman student, having completed her doctorate in gender at the London School of Economics, soon returns home to teach with these multiple areas of strength. An Israeli former student completed her doctoral studies, works for a civil-society organization, and is active in the peace movement. Each in different ways recognizes that building lasting peace must include taking questions of gender seriously.

“Popular resistance” is the English terminology that the Palestinians have chosen to describe their choice to struggle nonviolently for independence, statehood, and the lifting of the military occupation. Abbas repeated the words “popular” and “peaceful.” It is not at all surprising that the Palestinians who have adopted the technique of nonviolent action have laid claim to their own nomenclature for describing it in English. No appropriate term for “nonviolent” exists in Hebrew or Arabic. It is worth noting that the Arabic word intifada means “shaking off,” an action that does not involve violence. It was used in the 1987 uprising to explain the Palestinians’ approach to ending Israeli military occupation, which was remarkably nonviolent, and had a meaning similar to the catchphrase “take back”—as in to restore, not destroy.

Settling on self-referential terminology like this is important and defining for any social mobilization that intentionally refuses to take up violence in its quest, whatever the specific goal. This choice can be shaped and constrained by language and culture.

A few other examples:

• The word nonviolent does not translate well in the Polish language, so, in 1980, as shipyard workers and their allies joined forces to fight for free trade unions within the communist system they chose social self-defense to portray the work of their union, Solidarność (Solidarity).

• Burma’s democracy movement, symbolically led by Aung San Suu Kyi, has preferred political defiance as most compatible with the Burmese language.

• Tibetan resistors to Chinese rule often use wise action.

As discussions about Palestinian statehood continue in the weeks to come, it is important for international and regional powers to think more deeply and deliberatively about how people and societies build the capacity for independence and self-governance. Such a capacity can be enhanced by the practice and understanding of nonviolent struggle. The same cannot be said for guerrilla or armed struggle with its centralized military command structures that operate at cross purposes with participatory democratic principles.

During the course of nearly the entire past century, the Palestinians were promised an independent state, first by the British, then in U.N. General Assembly resolution 181 (the Partition Plan), and later by U.S. presidents of both political parties. Moreover, starting in the 1920s, the British and Zionists responded to violent upsurges of Palestinian action but not to their more common efforts at nonviolent resistance in trying to protect their way of life, as described in my book A Quiet Revolution. This pattern has been short-sighted. Responding when Palestinian factions adopted armed struggle, while ignoring, downplaying, or denying the Palestinians’ use of nonviolent action—a policy that continues into the present era—has not been in the interest of any of the peoples in the region, least of all the Israelis.

Hard data now confirm that countries that experience bottom-up, grassroots nonviolent struggle are more likely to sustain human rights and democracy once established than when violence has been used, as Adrian Karatnycky and Peter Ackerman show in “How Freedom Is Won: From Civic Resistance to Durable Democracy.” Scholars have also documented that nonviolent movements succeed more often than violent insurrections, as explained by Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth in their new book, Why Civil Resistance Works.

When institutionalized politics and constitutional processes—such as elections, political parties, parliamentary action, or even lobbying and interest groups—fail, it is essential for citizens to know how to exercise their inherent political power through nonviolent collective action. The construction of a liberal democracy, with representative governance and accountability in civil institutions, can be helped by civil resistance.

A healthy civil society is increasingly recognized as integral to modern political nation-states. Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato maintain that civil disobedience, one method among many in civil resistance, is actually critical to modern civil societies, because it keeps alive the vision of a just and democratic civil society. They contend that civil disobedience may actually constitute civil society.

The Palestinians’ popular peaceful resistance is also important for their appreciation of how they can prevent despotism, tyranny, or oppression in the leadership of a future Palestinian state—without violence. For this reason alone, it is worth encouraging the Palestinians in their increasing turn to the practice of what they call popular resistance. In any future Palestinian state with limited arsenals and armed forces, it will be important for the Palestinian people to know how to take corrective action if violent groups emerge from within what will be at best a fragile civil society. Having strong associations that can offer a way for fight for rights and justice without armed struggle and terror is imperative for the future of both the Palestinians and the Israelis. Michael Randle writes, in his post-Cold War survey Civil Resistance, that “to resist the encroachment of basic rights by a duly elected government is not to deny democracy but to uphold it.”

It would have been helpful in recent times to recognize and reinforce the groups that have since the late 1980s adopted nonviolent means of struggling to protect their land, water, and rights. In this sense, the Israelis and Palestinians who have been working together for years in the West Bank village campaigns of civil resistance are already enacting the civility, tolerance, and exertions of cooperative power that are the bedrock of democracy. They are acting out procedures for fighting for rights that are respectful of all people involved. As the work of April Carter shows, nonviolent direct action is fundamental to democracy, can function in its absence, and also acts as a means of democratic empowerment. According to Carter, direct action is an expression of active citizenship, and “the key element … in inspiring participatory democracy is the sense of mass popular empowerment and liberation.”

Popular peaceful resistance represents democracy in the process of becoming.

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.

Justin Wedes being arrested. Photo by Juan Carlos Hernández.

There have been several arrests each day among those occupying Liberty Plaza/Zuccotti Park in New York’s Financial District, and a certain ritual has developed for when it happens.

At the first sign that police officers are moving in—usually a pack of dark-blue shirts led by one or two in white with a bullhorn—the shouting begins. “Cameras up!” (Everything must be recorded. Among the officers, too, is someone from TARU with a video camera.) Protesters start variously calling out insults at the police and pleas for them to stand down, sending a schizophrenic, even panicked message. But soon, they coalesce into unity with chants, some holding up their fingers in a peace sign. The NYPD motto: “Courtesy! Professionalism! Respect!” A reminder of the cameras: “The Whole World Is Watching!” And, if necessary, simply, “Shame!” Repeat. They remain peaceful to a fault, but loudly and combustibly so.

A terrific storm gathers around the phalanx of police, who shove protesters with hands and sticks, then grab one or two out of the crowd, throw them to the ground, bind their hands in plastic cuffs, and take them away. You can tell who has had nonviolence training before—they go limp, they make no sign of resistance. But others, especially the youngest, will squirm and cry out in pain, inviting the police to push more, hit harder, drag more ruthlessly. There’s the feeling—surely intentional—that anyone could be next. This escalation only reinforces what the police seem to have been told: that what they’re seeing is the beginnings of a riot. And they use it to scare away all-important bystanders. On Wednesday, police made a surprise arrest on the northwest corner of the plaza and dragged the protester, together with a chanting crowd, right past the people gathered along the north edge who had been quietly, intently reading protesters’ signs. It didn’t work in the end—people stayed—but it could have.

Might there be a better way?

On Thursday night, with police massing after a surprise march and several arrests, Liberty Plaza had a visitor: Ivan Marovic of the Serbian resistance movement Otpor!, which helped bring down Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. Joined by Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno from The Yes Men, he made a speech expressing his solidarity with the occupiers and reminded them that the world is, indeed, watching. Afterward, while talking with some of the occupation’s organizers, he suggested how to take a different approach in encounters with the police.

“Show that you don’t find them personally responsible for what they’re doing, and that you understand the position that the government puts them in,” he said. “Almost feel sorry for them.” That kind of sympathy has been sometimes heard on the plaza and during marches, especially when protesters claim to be fighting for the police themselves and their families. But Marovic also stressed that this takes more than just an attitude—it takes organization. “There needs to be an internal capacity inside the movement that will diffuse these hostile confrontations.”

The strength of a civil resistance movement is not, after all, in the loudness of its chants. The NYPD has the manpower and firepower to deal with a few hundred angry protesters, or a few thousand. But a small number of people can make an outsized impact if they reverse the equation, if they render the weapons of the police inert. This is, for instance, how James Lawson and a small cadre of students were able to desegregate Nashville lunch counters thanks to careful training and a staunch refusal to compromise with what they knew was wrong.

The scholar of civil resistance Hardy Merriman suggests that successful popular movements rely on a “trifecta” of qualities: unity, planning and nonviolent discipline. He writes:

The largest risk for a failure of discipline in a nonviolent movement is that some members may become violent. Therefore, nonviolent discipline—the ability of people to remain nonviolent, even in the face of provocations—is often continually instilled in participants. There are practical reasons for this. Violent incidents by members of a movement can dramatically reduce its legitimacy while giving the movement’s opponent an excuse to use repression. Furthermore, a movement that is consistently nonviolent has a far greater chance of appealing to a broad range of potential allies—including even an adversary’s supporters—through the course of its struggle.

Unity, planning and discipline are also interconnected. When the police make arrests at Liberty Plaza, it tends to divide the protesters. Some want to fall back, some want to fight back. Instead, with more discipline, these incidents could unite them and sharpen their focus. Too often, the protesters are letting themselves forget who their real opponent is—all that Wall Street represents in American culture and politics—by focusing so much on anger against the underpaid, working-class police force deployed around them.

Ivan Marovic points out that this approach often turns out better for everyone. “The police get their arrests, and the protesters get their publicity,” he says. “They can do their job, and we can do our thing.” Serious injury is more likely to be avoided. The arena of conflict becomes no longer one between the police and the protesters, but between the protesters and the system they’re fighting.

Rather than shouting and yelling in officers’ faces, why doesn’t everyone just sit down and be disobedient together? When a march returns to the plaza from a nighttime visit to Wall Street, putting the police on edge with all the excitement, why not greet them with a candlelight vigil? As in the civil rights movement, why not strengthen each other by singing a steady song rather than chanting threats?

The occupation’s Direct Action Committee has already declared its opposition to violence, and that’s a start. The protesters are already, resolutely, not violent. But merely not taking up physical weapons isn’t enough; to oppose a violent adversary, one must learn to wield the alternative weapons of nonviolence.

This, remember, is not passivity that we’re talking about. It’s a different picture of what resistance can look like—a stronger kind, and a kind that will make more and more people want to join the movement. There has been some backfire against police repression already—the widely-circulated videos of violent arrests have only strengthened the occupation—but those videos are also scaring potential participants away. Greater discipline would show the world that the protesters are not merely victims of police abuse, but that they are, in fact, the ones in control, and truly occupying Liberty Plaza, not simply being allowed to stay there.

“If we’re going to get arrested, we should do it on our own terms,” says Jason Ahmadi, an activist from California who has done just that with two arrests on Liberty Plaza in as many days. The first came on Monday when, after watching a woman get apprehended for writing with chalk on the sidewalk, he took up a piece of chalk himself and began writing the word “Love.” The second, on Tuesday, was while holding down a tarp which was protecting media equipment from the rain, and which the police wanted to remove. “I thought everybody would be doing that,” he says—but they weren’t.

Similarly, earlier on Tuesday, protester Justin Wedes was arrested while giving a speech calling on his fellow protesters to have courage. When ordered to put down his bullhorn, he simply continued speaking and was immediately thrown to the ground and cuffed. These moments, even amidst the fear and anxiety that comes with a squad of police entering the plaza, show the occupiers at their best, and they point the way toward being even better.

On Saturday the 24th at noon, a large, public action is being planned. The protesters are getting ready, and the police are on guard. May the nonviolence trainings begin. May the word spread. May protesters know what to do, and may they leave the anger and violence and confusion to the police, if the police so desire it. I doubt they will.

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

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

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

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

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

As the study itself concludes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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