Brent Betterly, Brian Church and Jared Chase, via The Huffington Post.

The old trope of the bomb-throwing anarchist is back in the news, with a round-up in Ohio on May 1 and the three would-be NATO protesters arrested on Wednesday who are now charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism. While the impression that appears in the media is one of remnants of the Occupy movement verging toward violence, the driving forces behind these plots are the very agencies claiming to have foiled them.

The five activists arrested in Cleveland, Ohio, are facing multiple charges for conspiring and attempting to destroy the Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge on May Day to protest corporate rule. According to the FBI press statement released shortly after the May 1 arrests, FBI Special Agent in Charge Stephen D. Anthony said “the individuals charged in this plot were intent on using violence to express their ideological views.” But that is only one side of the story.

The mainstream media and blog reports, both nationally and in Cleveland, have emphasized that the young activists were part of Occupy Cleveland and self-identified anarchists (here, here, and here). The men — Douglas L. Wright, 26, of Indianapolis; Brandon L. Baxter, 20, of nearby Lakewood; Connor C. Stevens, 20, of suburban Berea; and Joshua S. Stafford, 23, and Anthony Hayne, 35, both of Cleveland — were arrested and remain in jail after they attempted to detonate a false bomb that they had set, in conjunction with the FBI.

It’s an old script: Violence-prone anarchists devise a nefarious plan and, just before they can carry it out, law enforcement swoops in to save the day, catching them red-handed. But there’s another script being acted out here too, one much more sinister, complex, and morally and legally dubious: Agents of the state infiltrate an activist group and, through techniques of psychological manipulation, lead its most vulnerable members into a violent plan — for which explosives, detonators, contacts and case mysteriously become available — until SWAT teams and prosecutors suddenly arrive and haul the accomplices off to jail for the rest of their lives. In both cases, at the end of the story, officials congratulate each other for their bravery and bravado and the public breathes a sigh of relief as more of their civil liberties are stripped away.

I recently spoke with Richard Schulte, a veteran activist who has known the Five from groups like Food Not Bombs and is helping to organize their legal and jail support. Schulte explained that under the influence of undercover federal agents and informants, the activists — particularly the youngest, Baxter and Stevens — found themselves increasingly vulnerable and reliant on their informant. Baxter’s lawyer, a public defender named John Pyle, recently identified the informant working with the group as Shaquille Azir, a 39-year old ex-con.

“[Azir] became something of a role model, stepping in as a father figure, offering guidance on emotional and social stuff,” said Schulte. “Connor and Brandon thought he was a rad dude but getting more and more pushy.”

Collectively, according to accounts from friends and associates, statements from lawyers, and the FBI affidavit, members of the Cleveland Five have backgrounds that include mental illness, substance abuse, homelessness and social marginalization.

Brandon and Connor had been part of the full-time occupation over the winter in Cleveland’s Public Square. After having grown frustrated with what they perceived as the Occupiers’ timidity — Schulte called it “passive gradualism” — the a group broke off from Occupy Cleveland and form their own, much smaller group, the “Revolutionary People’s Army.” At first it was mostly just a graffiti crew — tagging the phrase “rise up” around the city and putting up stickers, said Schulte.

Azir would give them a case of beer in the morning, according to Schulte, have them work outside on houses all day, and then give them a case of beer at night. He gave them marijuana and would wear them down by keeping them up late into the night with drinking and conversation — all the while urging them to break away from other groups, keep their arrangement secret and not to trust other activists.

Looking back, Schulte said Azir and the FBI used “security culture against activists” and “developed patterns of trust to seem legit.” The Cleveland Five, he explains, “were coached by the federal government.”

In a letter Stevens wrote from jail, Schulte told me, he described the feeling of helplessness he experienced right before the bust: “We saw this coming,” Stevens wrote.

“Brought to the edge of the swimming pool”

Andy Stepanian knows a thing or two about state repression of activists. As one of the animal-rights activists known as the SHAC 7, Stepanian has served three and a half years in federal prison after having been prosecuted under the Animal Enterprise Protection Act for costing animal testing laboratories more than $380 million in lost profits simply by operating a website. While the SHAC 7 case did not involve FBI entrapment or property destruction, the specific targeting of activists because of their anti-capitalist activism was reflective of a new era of post-9/11 state surveillance and repression.

When I talked to him on the phone about the Cleveland Five, Stepanian surmised, “These folks would not have gone out and done this if not brought to the edge of the swimming pool by federal agents and urged to jump in.”

The FBI affidavit — analyzed here by RT — confirms, again, what many have warned about regarding the growing surveillance and security agencies in the United States: To keep themselves employed and justify their budgets, people in agencies like the FBI are orchestrating plots to catch “terrorists” who, otherwise, seem to be quite unable to do anything on their own. Last fall, Mother Jones reported on FBI efforts against Muslim extremists and concluded that many of those were instances of entrapment as well.

In activist circles, there are a series of notorious cases of entrapment by federal authorities. In 2006, for instance, environmental activist Eric McDavid, encouraged by an informant known as “Anna,” was convicted on conspiracy charges. Another more notorious case is that of Brandon Darby — a well-known anarchist and activist-turned-informant — and his entrapment of David McKay and Bradley Cowder. The award winning film, Better This World, tells the story of how McKay and Cowder were convicted on charges of conspiracy to commit terrorism.

“In most cases,” said Stepanian, “this is not one coordinated crackdown with a puppet-master. It’s a bottom-up [phenomenon] where special investigators are creating things for themselves to do. They go to potential targets to justify their position and create work for themselves.”

Perhaps even more troubling than the manipulation of vulnerable individuals — whether they be political activists or members of mosques — is the way in which law enforcement meanwhile manipulates public discourse about terrorism, Islam or, in this case, a growing social movement.

According to Schulte, the operation in Cleveland appears to have been part of a pre-planned narrative meant to paint Occupiers as a group with terrorist thugs in their midst, discouraging others from joining the movement. The FBI had a media statement prepared for immediate release on May Day after the arrests, and it hosted an unusually high-profile press conference the following day. There have been more than 300 pleas involving FBI informants in six years and such kind of overt media blitz from the feds is rare. Rolling Stone reporter Rick Perlstein observes, comparing two different anti-terrorism operations at the end of April, “that the State is singling out ideological enemies.” He reports that authorities are much less likely, for instance, to use tactics of entrapment against violent white supremacist groups.

Investigative journalist Will Potter is an expert on state-sponsored targeting of radical activist groups who has testified before Congress on FBI entrapment and is the author of a book (and an accompanying blog) titled Green is the New Red. Potter calls the Cleveland Five conspiracy “part of the ongoing focus on demonizing anarchists.” Just a cursory look at the headlines in Chicago and Cleveland confirms a growing association of anarchism with violence and terrorism while alienating radical movements from potential supporters.

Occupy Cleveland responds

Each of the Cleveland Five entered pleas of not guilty in federal court last week. As the trial of these young men plays out, their fates rest in which story is more compelling — their own victimhood, or the cunning of the federal agents. Although they were not taking action in the name of Occupy Cleveland, the future of Occupy and related movements in the United States is at stake in which story the public chooses to believe.

Occupy Cleveland, one of the movement’s longest-lasting encampments, had the remnants of its occupation removed by police in the middle of the night on May 3. There was little public outcry, when the city revoked its permit after the May 1 arrests.

Occupy Cleveland spokesperson Katie Steinmuller stressed that it was only a matter of time before the camp was evicted, and that it wasn’t entirely a result of the bomb scare. “There was a casino planned to be opened in view of the tents,” said Steinmuller referring to Occupy Cleveland’s camp when I spoke with her by phone about the eviction. “This [conspiracy] was just a good excuse to get us out.”

In a media statement following the arrests of the Cleveland Five, Occupy Cleveland affirmed its commitment to “active non-violence.” Individual occupiers have chosen to join the support team for the Five, but Occupy Cleveland as a whole is steering clear of commenting on it further.

“The FBI was successful in … what they set out to do,” said Schulte about the initial negative reaction the Occupy movement and other activists experienced in Cleveland. “People were exploited and trapped.”

“When you take away a space of legitimate protest,” adds Stepanian, “less legitimate forms of protest become more prevalent.” Events like the arrests of the Cleveland Five can create schisms within movements, which the state exploits to create a climate of fear within and about activist groups. The NATO 3 arrests and bond hearing, for instance, just before this weekend’s mass No NATO demonstration, will serve to deter people from participating and obscure the reality of the protest’s message.

In Chicago, the NATO 3 are each being held on $1.5 million bail. More details will emerge in the coming weeks, but Michael E. Deutsch, legal counsel for the NATO 3, has said that two of the 11 arrested during a house raid in Bridgeport were Chicago Police Department informants and have since disappeared. The truth of what really happened in Cleveland and Chicago may or may not emerge in the courtroom. But it is clear regardless that Occupy is now being exposed to a new level of state repression, and that it is taking a toll on what has still remained a nonviolent protest movement.

Correction 5/22: The article originally reported that Azir had been the impetus behind the Revolutionary People’s Army and that Wright appears to have been the first in contact with Azir until the spring of 2012. For information on supporting the Cleveland Five, visit www.Cleveland5justice.org

Original headline about Operation Spectrum.

On May 21, 1987, 16 Singaporeans were arrested and detained in a crackdown called Operation Spectrum. About a month later, four of the original 16 were released, and another six arrested. They were branded as Marxist conspirators out to “subvert Singapore’s political and social order using communist united front tactics” and detained without trial. Most of the detainees were lawyers, community workers or entrepreneurs. As the 25th anniversary of the crackdown approaches, activists are using the opportunity to raise questions anew about the repression of dissent in the country.

In Singapore, the Internal Security Act (ISA) allows the government to arrest and preventively detain individuals deemed to be threats to national security. A person can be detained for up to 30 days, after which a detention order must be issued. Although the ISA’s original purpose was for the protection of Singapore’s security, the government has long been criticized for using it as a tool to stifle activism and political opposition.

Unable to defend themselves in a court of law, those arrested in Operation Spectrum were made to appear on national television to give apparent confessions, admitting to plots to overthrow the government and establish a classless society. When nine of the detainees published a press statement upon their release recanting their confessions and accusing the government of ill treatment, they were swiftly re-arrested. Francis Seow, a former solicitor general, stepped in to represent one of the detainees. He, too, was arrested upon arrival at the detention center and held for over two months.

No public evidence – apart from the confessions – was ever produced to prove that any of the detainees were really threats to national security.

A similar spate of arrests and detentions — codenamed Operation Coldstore – occurred about two decades before Spectrum. Both events are rarely covered in Singapore’s primary and secondary school syllabi. But as Singaporeans begin to seek out alternative sources of information to the traditional media, ex-detainees are finding new platforms on which to tell their side of the story, raising awareness of the darker moments in Singapore’s history.

Several books have been written on the events of Operation Coldstore and Operation Spectrum, such as a collection of accounts published in 2009 under the title That We May Dream Again and Teo Soh Lung’s memoirs, Beyond The Blue Gate. When Ms. Teo stood as a candidate in the 2011 general election, fellow ex-detainee Vincent Cheng spoke in support of her at rallies and gave an account of his time in custody.

Whereas Singaporeans once only had access to the perspective of the government in the media — regarding Operation Spectrum, the national broadsheet The Straits Times simply carried the press release from the Ministry of Home Affairs — the stories coming from the detainees have revealed troubling abuses of power. Now, more and more Singaporeans support the abolishment of the ISA.

Calls for abolishment were further strengthened when Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak announced last fall that he would repeal Malaysia’s ISA. Since Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong had said in 1991 (when he was deputy prime minister) that Singapore would consider abolishing the ISA should Malaysia do so, many Singaporeans looked forward to the continued existence of the ISA being debated both in public and in the parliament.

However, a day after Malaysia’s announcement, the Ministry of Home Affairs put out a press release stating that “the ISA continues to be relevant and crucial as a measure of last resort for the preservation of our national security.” With that, the government signaled that there would be no talk of abolishing the ISA in Singapore.

Still, the campaign to abolish the ISA continues to press forward, hoping to slowly chip away at its public support until the government is left with no choice but to act. Emphasis is now being placed on educating Singaporeans and filling in the gaps left by schoolchildren’s history textbooks.

With the 25th anniversary of Operation Spectrum coming up, the anti-ISA initiative Function 8 and the human rights NGO Maruah are jointly organizing an event called “That We May Dream Again: Remembering the 1987 ‘Marxist Conspiracy’” on May 19. It will be held at Speakers’ Corner — the only outdoor place in Singapore were cause-related activities can be held without a permit — and will feature exhibitions, performances, speeches and testimonies from ex-detainees.

In a statement released by the organizing committee, four main objectives were identified:

1. Raise awareness on the misuse of the ISA in the past;
2. raise awareness of the danger of the continued existence of the ISA which may lead to complacency of the authorities in dealing with real security threats to our country;
3. work towards the abolition of the ISA; and
4. press the government to welcome the return of those who have been forced into exile because of the ISA, such a move being the first step towards national reconciliation and healing for all parties.

As of right now, the campaign against the ISA progresses in fits and starts — the topic comes up from time to time, events are organized and then the issue once again fades to the background. To have a greater, lasting impact on Singaporean society, the campaign requires much more participation, but is often confined to the same group of passionately supportive activists. This group of people usually finds it difficult to sustain the campaign as they are more often than not also involved in other causes such as the death penalty, migrant workers’ rights, LGBT rights and more.

Perhaps the ISA itself makes other Singaporeans hesitate to join the struggle; one only needs to speak to the ex-detainees to be reminded of the price activists in Singapore have had to pay.

UPDATE 5/17/12: 

On May 17, 2012, Function 8 and Maruah posted a note on Facebook saying that their May 19 event had been postponed. They had been informed by the police that due to a by-election being held in one of Singapore’s constituencies, Hougang, “the exemption granted under the Public Entertainments and Meetings Act to Speakers’ Corner, Hong Lim Park has been revoked with effect from 16 May to 26 May 2012.” This means that anyone who wants to hold an event at Speakers’ Corner in that period will be required to apply for a police permit. In their statement, the organizers wrote:

Owing to the short notice and uncertainties in obtaining a police permit, as well as the prospect of inconvenience to our guests and contractors should the permit be refused, we are sorry that our event at Speakers’ Corner, Hong Lim Park, has to be postponed. We deeply regret that a by-election in the single-member constituency of Hougang, has disrupted and inconvenienced Singaporeans from enjoying activities at Hong Lim Park which is not part of Hougang.

That We May Dream Again: Remembering the 1987 ‘Marxist Conspiracy will now be held on 2 June 2012.

Image from "Advice for avoiding Stop and Frisk" blog post at Raid My Words.

On Saturday, May 12, several hundred people rallied in front of the New York City Police Department headquarters to protest the NYPD’s “Stop and Frisk” program, considered by many to be a prime example of modern-day, institutional racism. But with approximately 40,000 officers and a nearly $5 billion annual budget, the NYPD is the largest police force in the U.S. and, some say, the most powerful on earth. So how does one try to change an ongoing policy enforced by such an entrenched institution? According to some activists at the rally, the way to begin is twofold: by educating people about their rights during police searches and by mounting a community effort to do surveillance on the NYPD.

The “Stop and Frisk” program instructs officers to stop and question people at random — resulting in apparent racial profiling throughout the largest city in the U.S. According to the NYPD’s own statistics, out of 684,330 people stopped and frisked in 2011, 90 percent of them were black or Latino. The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) found that mostly-black neighborhoods were heavily targeted by police, such as East New York in Brooklyn (50 percent black and 3 percent white), which had the highest number of stops last year with 27, 672. In contrast, Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood (57 percent white and 3 percent black) had the fewest stops, with 1,843.

However, Mayor Michael Bloomberg insists that the Stop and Frisk is making the city safer. “[The] stops are a deterrent,” he has said. “They prevent people from carrying guns in the first place. If you think you may be stopped on the street, you are a lot less likely to carry a gun. It’s that simple.”

But Bloomberg’s simple reasoning simply doesn’t add up. Despite the NYPD having its highest number of stops last year since the program officially began, 2011 saw a nearly 3 percent of shootings, according to The New York Times. An analysis by Forbes magazine shows that murder rates during the past decade of Stop and Frisk remained much the same as the previous decade. And although Bloomberg insists gun confiscation is the goal, the NYCLU report found that whites were more likely to be found with a weapon, even though 90 percent of people the NYPD stops are not white.

The harmful and wasteful program also preys on the public’s lack of knowledge regarding their rights, and that is how activists hope to start enacting change. Alfredo Carrasquillo of Vocal-NY — a group that helps people affected by HIV-AIDS, drug use and mass incarceration — and José Lasalle of Stop Stop and Frisk are both helping people in NYPD-targeted communities to learn what rights they have when dealing with police officers in order to fight back with the law.

Police have been accused of tricking people into allowing searches and even incriminating themselves. For example, having under 25 grams of marijuana is not a criminal act — as long as it is not “in public view.” However, the law is broken once a person carrying marijuana takes it out of their pocket and it is “in view.” Therefore, if a police officer stops somebody and forces them to empty their pockets and he or she takes out a joint, that person is now guilty of a misdemeanor — even though they did not legally have to empty their pockets and were not breaking the law by possessing a small amount of marijuana. The tactic takes advantage of the fact that people are intimidated by police power and do not know that they have a choice.

While growing up, Carrasquillo thought police stops were something one had to comply with. “I thought you had no authority to say police can’t search you,” he told me on the phone a day before the rally.

Working with everybody from churches to local high schools, Carrasquillo leads know-your-rights trainings to educate those especially affected by the Stop and Frisk policy: young black and Latino teenagers, as well as adults aged 18 to 25 — the NYPD’s primary profile of discrimination. It’s sometimes a challenge to convince people in those areas that they have recourse under the law. “A good portion of the communities feel they’re not even part of the American dream,” Carrasquillo said.

He has found, however, that education like this leads to further empowerment. “Kids take that new knowledge and they’re able to advocate in their communities,” he added.

At the May 12 rally, José Lasalle of Stop Stop and Frisk told me that he is frustrated with how the NYPD’s program has spun out of control.

“I’ve been a victim of Stop and Frisk all my life,” Lasalle said, referring to the longstanding history of police targeting low-income neighborhoods for drug searches before it became an official NYPD policy. “And then seeing it happen to my son, and then seeing it happen to my nephew, and then seeing it happen to the kids around my neighborhood, little 10-year-old kids getting thrown against the wall — it makes no sense. It’s got to stop.”

Lasalle has helped start new Stop Stop and Frisk chapters in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Harlem that offer know-your-rights education as well as cop-watching programs in which people can learn how to observe, document and report police activity in their communities.

The cop-watching programs that Stop Stop and Frisk have started are not intended to simply document police officer wrongdoing and put videos online. They are also intended to protect residents from inexperienced police officers. According to Lasalle, many of the neighborhoods that the NYPD targets for Stop and Frisk tactics are considered “impact zone areas,” which is where many inexperienced cops are placed. (See AllThingsHarlem.com for several videos of officers “practicing” on Harlem residents.)

“In the impact zone areas, the NYPD sends rookie police officers who don’t know how to deal with the community,” Lasalle said. “So we are there, making sure that they carry out their duties with professionalism and respect. We observe them and we document the things that they do. [The police officers] see us observing and documenting them and they relax and don’t get out of hand when they stop somebody.”

Much like Carrasquillo of Vocal-NY, Lasalle has found that fear of police can be a hindrance to mobilizing people and encouraging them to challenge police authority. But legal organizations such as the National Lawyers Guild have helped quell some of those fears by providing legal help and jail support in case cop-watchers are arrested.

People like Carrasquillo and Lasalle have helped push the NYPD’s Stop and Frisk tactics to the forefront of political debate in New York City, bringing national attention to the department’s policy. While Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD insist that the policy saves lives despite the lack of statistics that prove their claims, activists insist that the bullying, harassment and overzealous actions of police officers are a greater threat.

“That’s what we’re trying to do, too,” Lasalle said. “We’re trying to save lives.”

What do you call a law that allows a person to shoot and kill another human being when they could otherwise walk away safely?

I can only call it immoral.

With George Zimmerman soon headed to a pre-trial hearing to evaluate whether he will be protected by the “Stand Your Ground” law in Florida, it is important to understand exactly how the law has made permissible the use of lethal force and legalized acts of murder that previously never would have been deemed “justifiable homicides.”

In the wake of Zimmerman’s slaying of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin, I have frequently heard people claim, “The ‘Stand Your Ground’ law does not allow you follow someone!” Often, the people claiming this are the ones responsible for the law, like the bill’s sponsor, Florida House Representative Dennis Baxley and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who signed it into law.

But, of course, Zimmerman had been carrying a gun and following — some would say stalking — young black men in his community for months before he ever encountered Trayvon Martin. He even notified police when he did so. More important, however, is the fact that Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law removes an individual’s duty to retreat from a conflict in public even when he can safely do so:

A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.

Prior to the enactment of these laws, Americans always had a right to “stand their ground” on their property and use lethal force against home invaders. Centuries of English and American common law have long recognized that there is no place to retreat to when cornered in one’s own “castle.”

The law did, however, require individuals to retreat from physical confrontations in public if they could safely do so. If you were cornered in an alley, pinned to the ground or otherwise out of options to retreat, you could defend yourself with lethal force. But if it’s possible to just turn around and walk away, go home and sleep it off, and avoid escalating the conflict, the law required you to do so.

That’s no longer the case in the 25 states that have enacted “Stand Your Ground” laws at the behest of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). In those states, if you’ve had a terrible day, if you just don’t like the other guy very much or if you want to try out that new handgun you just bought, you can feel free to escalate the level of violence in a physical altercation by shooting him. Even if you kill him, the law has got your back. You’ll be immune not only from criminal prosecution, but also from any potential civil lawsuits.

Why is the NRA pushing “Stand Your Ground” laws? For the same reason it pushes a number of other laws meant to deregulate the purchase, possession and use of firearms — to sell more guns. Gun ownership has declined dramatically in the past 30 years, to the point that only one in five Americans now owns a firearm (and only one in 10 women). The gun industry’s challenge is to sell to men who already own multiple firearms. Industry marketing is focused on doing this by aggressively promoting military-style firearms (such as semiautomatic AR-15s and AK-47s) and “carry” guns (compact, semiautomatic handguns with “stopping power”).

By pushing “Stand Your Ground” laws, the NRA sends a clear message to the hotrods and wannabe vigilantes that’s it’s okay to buy yourself that new carry gun, bring it out into public and even use it without fear of legal repercussions. Then, when the rest of us realize that we are walking our streets surrounded by armed individuals with questionable backgrounds and terrible judgment (like Zimmerman), the NRA is hoping that we too will feel compelled to arm ourselves in public. It is a strategy that is both cunning and sick.

The NRA has shown us a roadmap to a society that relies solely on private violence — and the threat of private violence — to keep its citizens in line. Such a society absolves people of the responsibility to learn how to manage conflicts nonviolently, without escalating them. It’s not a society I want to see my daughters grow up in.

This morning, in anticipation of Mother’s Day, the Second Chance at Shoot First campaign has released a special video from Trayvon’s mother, Sybrina Fulton. Second Chance at Shoot First is a national movement launched by Color of Change, the NAACP, the National Action Network, the Urban League and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. In the video, Sybrina Fulton asks viewers to “spare other mothers the pain” she has experienced by “calling upon the governor of your state to reexamine … ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws … to keep our families safe.”

You can heed her call right now by signing and sharing the following online petition from Second Chance at Shoot First.

No one should ever be allowed to walk our streets with a hidden handgun and kill at will. If we don’t start standing up to the NRA and ALEC, however, Zimmerman will be far from the last gun-toting vigilante to spill innocent blood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Amnesty International's replica of a cell at Guantanamo Bay. Photo by Mushroom and Rooster, via Flickr.

On Thursday, April 19, the Pentagon announced the transfer of two men from Guantanamo to El Salvador. Abdul Razakah and Hammad Memet tasted freedom for the first time in 10 years last month and began a new life in their new home.

El Salvador is a long way from China’s Xinjiang Province, where they were born. In 2001, Abdul and Hammad — along with 20 other Uighurs — fled China. As members of that country’s ethnic Muslim minority, they faced growing repression due to a military crackdown on an armed separatist movement in the region. The men ended up in Afghanistan — a place where they thought it would be safe to be Muslims — but it was the fall of 2001 and the United States had declared war. When a U.S. bomb destroyed the house where they were staying, they fled again, this time to Pakistan. There, they were arrested late in 2001 and turned over to the United States military as suspicious foreigners. They ended up in Guantanamo in 2002, where they have been ever since.

Beyond the hardship, dislocation, terror and confinement of Guantanamo, the Uighurs faced another particular challenge while in custody: an illogical legal limbo. The Bush administration determined early on that the men were not enemy combatants, that they had no ties with Al Qaeda or the Taliban, and that they should not continue to be held. But U.S. law prohibited their return to China because they faced the threat of persecution or torture there.

The next logical place was the United States, specifically the D.C. suburbs in Northern Virginia, which is home to a large, wealthy and well-established Uighur population eager to welcome their brethren and help them settle into a new life. The United States arrested these men without cause and held them for years without charge, so letting them into the United States seemed like the least we could do.

But it was not to be. A fierce anti-Guantanamo sentiment took hold of Congress, and in the deluge of ignorance, cowardice and recalcitrance on Capitol Hill, the Uighurs and others cleared for release but unable to be repatriated were caught in a terrible trap.

Five were eventually released in 2006, but they were settled in Albania (of all places). Over the next six years, the majority of the Uighurs have left Guantanamo and settled in Bermuda, Palau, Switzerland… and now El Salvador. Three remain in Guantanamo. According to The Washington Post, El Salvador would have taken all five of the last Uighurs, but three of the men decided that they wanted to live where they could practice Islam openly and with fellow believers.

In preparation for their new life, Abdul and Hammad have learned Spanish. Susan Baker Manning, a member of their legal team, told the Associated Press, “They are well and very happy … We are extremely pleased that the government of El Salvador has taken them in and granted them refuge.” As part of the release agreement with the United States, these former prisoners will not be granted passports or be allowed to leave the country.

Along with two friends, Luke Hansen, a Jesuit seminarian, traveled to Bermuda in 2010 to meet the four Uighur men transferred there from Guantanamo. Bermuda is a beautiful place, but it is not home. Luke said that in his conversations with the men, it became clear that their life on the island constitutes

another form of imprisonment. In Bermuda, a tiny island in the North Atlantic, the Uighur men can travel only as far as they can swim. Upon their arrival in Bermuda, an overseas territory of Great Britain, the Uighur men were promised British passports. Nearly three years later, it is believed that the men will never receive passports. Even though an ocean has replaced the prison walls, the separation from community and family remains the same.

On hearing the news of the United States’ latest transfer, Luke wrote:

I feel shame and outrage that our government has forced two more detainees into such a tragic and inhuman choice: continued imprisonment or “freedom” in an entirely foreign land — without community, family, or (presumably) the ability to travel beyond El Salvador’s borders.

Another participant in that Bermuda trip, Jeremy Kirk, wrote:

I am joyful that they no longer live in indefinite detention in cages at Guantanamo. I am outraged that it has taken so long for this relocation to occur and am concerned how little control these men may continue to have over their future; their ability to see their families, to travel and to start families of their own.

The tiny Central American nation of El Salvador was the site of a brutal civil war throughout the 1970s and 1980s, in which the United States backed the iron-fisted oligarchy with weapons, money and advisers against FMLN guerrillas. Tens of thousands were killed in the decades of war and many more fled the country. Now, the president is a member of the FMLN, and El Salvador has not forgotten that the world offered its people sanctuary during the war. Their foreign-affairs office issued a statement that the invitation was offered on “humanitarian grounds and in recognition of the fact that other countries have taken in their citizens as refugees in the past because of the 1980–1992 civil war.”

Abdul and Hammad are already having an impact on their new home. Just a week or so after they came to El Salvador, Archbishop José Luis Escobar of San Salvador called for closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. After a Sunday mass, he gave a press conference, saying “Let’s hope that the whole Guantanamo prison ends. It would be ideal for the good of the world, of democracy and of liberty. It is an issue of humanity, it is necessary that we have a solidaristic and positive attitude in face of situations such as these.”

Amen, Padre! Good news. But incomplete. Imperfect. A very small step toward justice.

ACT UP's 25th anniversary demonstration on April 25 in New York City. Photo by author.

Long before the red ribbon became an innocuous symbol of AIDS “awareness” and celebrity philanthropy, there was the pink triangle and there was ACT UP and there were thousands of people taking to the streets for their lives. Once a symbol used to mark suspected queers for death in the Holocaust, ACT UP appropriated the pink triangle for themselves, now flipped on its base, pointing upward on a black field, away from the grave, signed with the call to arms, “SILENCE = DEATH.” 

Death didn’t just come in the form of a virus, even and maybe especially in the early days of AIDS, when ACT UP (an acronym for AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was founded in New York. Government neglect and corporate greed made AIDS an epidemic, and they also gave birth to a raucous and creative network of direct action activists. For ACT UP, death was the drug maker, and the drug profiteer, and the drug regulatory bodies who refused to release them. When ACT UP’s members first laid down their bodies in protest, therefore, it was against the already-booming business of AIDS, and for their debut action in 1987, they brought their rage and their grief straight to Wall Street.

On the morning of April 25, 2012, ACT UP took back those same streets, alongside activists from the Occupy movement, itself aspiring to be the kind of umbrella that can gather and propel young queers and allies to work together. Hundreds of people carried those trademark ACT UP banners (with some homemade signs for that Occupy touch) in a march down from City Hall to the New York Housing Administration to Trinity Church. A break-out action took the intersection at Park Street, where activists set up house with sofas and chairs, chaining themselves together with the cry, “Housing saves lives!” Another group dressed in Robin Hood green locked down an intersection at Wall Street, demanding a 0.05 percent tax on financial transactions to funnel to AIDS relief. I imagined each person I saw in a fading ACT UP shirt — the seriously garish image of Ronald Reagan in neon branded AIDSGATE, and countless pink triangles now on a field of soft grey — to be a surviving elder, or standing in the garment of a lover or friend who should have lived to walk alongside them.

Reclaiming that story — of greed and neglect, and also of resistance and loss — is what drove Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard to produce their film United In Anger, using footage drawn from their joint archive, The ACT UP Oral History Project. Schulman recalls that the film’s origins were in her visceral response to an NPR story on the 20th anniversary of AIDS that she heard while driving a rental car through Los Angeles:

“At first America had trouble with people with AIDS,” the announcer says in that falsely conversational tone, intended to be reassuring about apocalyptic things. “But then, they came around.”

I almost crashed the car.

She didn’t crash. She did call up Hubbard, though, and their work began. The film premiered this February at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, coinciding with the 25th anniversary of ACT UP.

Now, just a few months after the birth of another direct action protest movement on Wall Street, it is difficult not to connect these familiar images through a quarter-century-long struggle. Here are the throngs of young people linking arms along Broadway, the high sheen of cop uniforms as police push their way into crowds, locked arms being wrenched apart in the grip of twice as many cops as there ever are activists, and the way — as he’s being loaded into a cop wagon — one of the activists turns his head to call back to the others, to the cameras. It’s a performance, and a sincere one, that’s become part of so much protest, and it’s captured here well before the YouTube age.

ACT UP hit the streets just as cheap consumer video did, defining the visual and tactical conventions of activist video. Through the late 1980s, ACT UP spawned several activist video crews, like DIVA TV, or Damned Interfering Video Activists. In addition to serving as witnesses at actions, DIVA produced compilation tapes to educate and inspire ACT UP activists around the country and the world, who then shared them with each other at parties, bars or through the mail.

Captured in all that glorious 80s footage is a raw, life-affirming anger. For all the comparisons drawn between Occupy and ACT UP,  Occupy has yet to fully embody this urgency, or this rage, that transforms pain into action and back again. The most moving sequences of United In Anger are set to a funeral march, a low drumbeat that carries through political funerals in Manhattan and Washington, culminating in a group funeral procession to the White House, where several ACT UP members requested their remains be delivered as a final demand.

As powerful as ACT UP’s tactics are to observe — banner drops at Shea Stadium and Grand Central Station, storming the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration — it’s the testimony of ACT UP members that provides real depth, humor and contradiction to these victories and contentious setbacks.

The most dramatic of these was ACT UP’s legendary Sunday-mass protest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which turned even some of their supporters against them. For many in ACT UP, that was no failure. “We said for years in ACT UP that our job was not to be liked,” said Ann Northrop, an early member. “We were not doing what we were doing to get the public to like us. We were doing what we were doing to accomplish something about particular issues, and I think we did that, enormously successfully.”

What cannot be ignored, in this film or in our attempts to make sense of the early years of the epidemic, is the power of people to organize in the face of death, to claim expertise, to lead. As the gatekeepers in medicine and government struggled to catch up with the virus, ACT UP took caring for their communities into their own hands and took their fight to the doors of those in power. Through United In Anger, we meet activists who worked to redefine AIDS, to take account of their lives and what could be done to preserve them, and to hold those who abandoned them to death accountable. “In my view as a witness, people did not die of AIDS,” Shulman said in a recent interview. “They died of government neglect and indifference. These are political deaths.”

Huey Newton and Bobby Steale, via Wikimedia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still from the 2005 Showtime movie "Deacons for Defense," via imfdb.

I didn’t catch up with Bob Moses until 1964, when I joined the training staff for Freedom Summer. Bob led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s entry into Mississippi in 1961, which meant three years of facing a repressive situation that makes the U.S. of 2012 seem like a cakewalk for activists by comparison. In those days, even registering to vote in Mississippi could get you killed in the broad light of day if you were African American. SNCC workers often lived together in houses, sometimes in isolated rural areas. They had no official protection; local police were likely to be members of the Ku Klux Klan. They took precautions of many kinds, but they shunned security culture, believing it would reduce their safety and effectiveness.

I remember asking Bob the question that was on many activists’ minds across the U.S. then: How had SNCC workers survived for three years in the most terrifying situation in the country?

“The only way we’ve stayed alive,” he said, “was that we didn’t keep guns in our Freedom Houses, and everyone knew it.”

“I don’t get it,” I replied. “I don’t see the mechanism. I don’t see how that actually protects you.”

“Maybe this story will help you understand,” Bob said in his low-key, patient tone of voice. He was interested in teaching math; I guess he was used to students not getting it.

“A worker in a small town hardware store shows up at the store one morning all excited. He tells his boss, the owner, that ‘the guys’ — meaning the local KKK — have decided to kill the SNCC workers and burn down their Freedom House on the outskirts of town. They plan to do it that night. His boss says, ‘No you’re not.’ The worker is stunned, knowing that his boss is active in the White Citizens Council and hates SNCC as much as he does. The boss goes on: ‘You guys have no idea what the consequences would be. Mississippi already has enough economic trouble. Getting investment from the North is really tough. So you kill up a bunch of niggers, and it’s all over television in the North, and Mississippi looks to the banks up there like an out-of-control shithole of an investment. There’s no way I’m going to let you do it.’”

I walked away from Bob marveling at the political sophistication of the SNCC strategy. They were using their own vulnerability to force the middle and owning class White Citizens Council to control the working class KKK and keep them — the hated SNCC workers — alive.

We had that conversation during the 1964 training at the beginning of the summer, and I saw that this extremely dangerous project — an “invasion” of Northern white college students into Klan-ridden Mississippi — was an extension SNCC’s proven strategy. 1964’s Freedom Summer was designed by SNCC to add the vulnerability of Northern (mostly white) students to the equation, increasing the space for SNCC activity by drawing even more attention from state and (finally) federal power holders to the task of letting freedom fighters survive.

Freedom Summer did exactly that, with only three civil rights workers killed and a far more robust civil rights movement by August. In fact, the project was so successful that the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party became able by August to contest nationally with the state’s all-white, traditional Democratic Party.

Rural and small town Louisiana in 1965 was, like Mississippi, Klan territory. Local black people in Jonesboro and Bogalusa, assisted by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), struggled to make gains in civil rights against racist resistance. A group of black veterans found themselves unable to tolerate the violence they saw perpetrated on the nonviolent demonstrations, and worked out agreements to bring their guns to demonstrations and serve as security guards, threatening violence against whites who wanted to hurt the activists. The group’s name became Deacons for Defense, and they gained various degrees of recognition from CORE and SNCC.

It is clear that this group of bodyguards did, on multiple occasions, deter white violence and protect demonstrators. Moreover, they sometimes shot their guns to chase away perpetrators. Historian Christopher B. Strain relays this report from Joanne Grant’s book on Black Protest:

On a sultry July evening in 1965, a cavalcade of cars driven by members of the Ku Klux Klan barreled into a predominately black neighborhood of Bogalusa, Louisiana, as they had done on countless nights before. The twenty-five car motorcade sometimes sped, sometimes cruised ominously through the streets. Leaning out of car windows, Klansmen taunted black residents, hurled racial epithets, insulted black women, and brandished pistols and rifles. When the Klansmen fired randomly into the homes of black Bogalusa residents, a fusillade of bullets met them in return. The unwelcome visitors quickly fled the neighborhood. It was the Klan’s first encounter with the Deacons for Defense and Justice.

The Deacons were reportedly careful not to step over the line from protection to retaliation; there are no recorded instances of them attacking whites for previous assaults on blacks. They offer a clear experiment of boundaried service analogous to that of security guards, with careful regard for lawfulness even though they knew that, as blacks, they could not themselves expect equal justice under the law.

Most people looking at that experiment would find no problem with it. The pacifist James Farmer, then leader of CORE, made a public statement saying he was not about to offer a moral challenge to local people for accepting the protection of the Deacons. Even if we accept Farmer’s point, we will learn more from the experiment if we ask not moral but strategic questions.

There’s no doubt that threatening violence has stopped many people from doing bad things; probably every reader of this article can name incidents from their own experience. That’s the snapshot: Someone is about to do something bad and stops because violence is threatened if they carry it out.

Strategy, however, is not about snapshots; it’s about the movie. The film starts with a snapshot and then shows the unfolding of events, the series of consequences caused by the dynamics unleashed in the initial snapshot.

The strategic difficulty about deterrence is that it works… until it doesn’t. Everyone knows stories in which a threat did not stop a bad thing from happening, and most of us know stories of a threat leading to a counter-threat, leading to a larger counter-threat, and so on.

What the Deacons’ story doesn’t show us is what happens when the other side organizes a more violent counter-move, and the local situation shifts from a social movement pressing for equality to become a war between two racial groups. No one wanted that, including Charles Sims, the best-known founder and leader of the Deacons, who believed that the most effective way to gain civil rights was by pressure from nonviolent direct action. His vision was for the Deacons to be a sideshow, not the main attraction. Keeping it a sideshow, however, depends on a lot of rationality on the other side, and on white racists holding on to that rationality if the anti-racist movement is getting stronger and closer to winning. To me that sounds more like fantasy than strategy.

The Global Nonviolent Action Database includes civil rights campaigns that failed (most notably, the Albany, Georgia, campaign of 1962) because they didn’t find a way to use the jiu-jitsu that sociologists call “the paradox of repression” — the use of the segregationists’ violence against their own privilege. Yet SNCC survived in the most dangerous period of its presence in Mississippi, 1961–63, by using a sophisticated nonviolent strategy. SNCC and its allies went on to win with a minimum of casualties in 1964 when they took power in Mississippi politics by using the presence of hundreds of Northern white students to protect them.

The more deeply we look into the actual history of the civil rights movement, the more puzzling becomes the choice of some to adopt violent defense. A decade before the Deacons for Defense appeared, in Montgomery, Alabama, the KKK decided to do an intimidation caravan during the Montgomery bus boycott. The black neighborhood got wind of it, and chose a different tactic: The residents sat on their porches drinking lemonade, in party mode, as if watching a pleasant and amusing parade going by. The Klansmen turned away from the neighborhood in short order.

Why, after 10 years of success for a nonviolent strategy when the resistance was most hardcore, was there a shift in 1965 to a violent defensive strategy, with SNCC inviting the Deacons of Defense to guard the Meredith March Against Fear? Why give up what was working?

The "Raging Bull" in New York's Financial District being barricaded on the first day of Occupy Wall Street. By David Shankbone, via Flickr.

On March 24, after yet another wave of violence against the Occupy movement, Occupy Wall Street and allies staged a march through Lower Manhattan, targeting both New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly specifically and the police in general. We demanded the resignation of Ray Kelly because of his involvement with a sustained campaign of violence against Occupy, surveillance of Muslim communities and widespread corruption. But it is our belief that any coherent analysis of poverty in this country must also critique the institution of the police as a whole. Regardless of your position on police officers as individuals, the existence of an armed paramilitary organization at the disposal of the state — and therefore the corporations and wealthy elites the state is beholden to — should be incompatible with any work related to economic or social justice. The often-stated idea that “the police are the 99 percent too” is an erasure of the open war that the state has waged against the poor and people of color in this country for hundreds of years.

The police as an institution upholds the status quo through brutal violence, including all the racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, transphobia that the status quo entails. The police will always side with power. The wave of repression against the Occupy movement, in the context of resistance movements in this country, is neither surprising nor exceptional. The American Indian Movement, the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, and Earth First! — among many, many others — have been targeted for repression if not outright obliteration by the state with the police as its front-line protector.

We live on occupied, colonized land and the police are the occupying army. This is not just in the historical sense that they represent the state that murdered and displaced the indigenous people on this land, which continues today, but also in the sense that they keep the poor and people of color colonized. Colonial forces use fear, intimidation and forced separation to keep populations in a state of disorder and under control. Which explains the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” policy, anti-Muslim surveillance, and raids against undocumented immigrants. More black men are currently incarcerated than were ever enslaved during the North Atlantic slave trade in this country; one in three black men will be incarcerated during his lifetime, making a young person of color more likely to go to prison than college; 30 percent of the trans population of the United States is incarcerated.

These facts all shed light on our real relationship to the police. By randomly searching, intimidating and arresting people of color, by incarcerating them more often and for longer, by patrolling poor communities constantly, by dangling the threat of deportation over people’s heads, whole segments of the population are kept in a constant state of disruption. Because violence from the police is constant, it is unremarkable; it is also one of the central organizing experiences of our lives. Their authority is constantly leveraged against us, even in their absence. The police ride the subways with us, walk up and down our blocks; they can at any moment stop us and sort through our belongings.

For all the many being targeted by police violence, meanwhile, some are being protected. There are few better signs of this than JPMorgan Chase’s gift of $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation, which constitutes the single largest contribution in the foundation’s history. Colonialism, after all, is always about resources. The resource in question has changed over time — from bananas, to gold, to beets, to sugar, to cotton, to oil, to real estate, to ill-gotten capital. But the colonizer’s method remains the same: disruption, systemic violence, forced labor, fractured families, scattered communities and militarization. This is true whether the colony is external or internal. Which brings us, inevitably, to the prison-industrial complex (PIC), of which the police are an essential part.

The PIC is a system of privately owned corporations — the Corrections Corporation of America, for example — and other entrenched interests that house incarcerated people for profit. While incarcerated, people are subjected to forced labor, isolation, torture, sexual abuse and overcrowding. Both public and private prisons are often built in rural and poor communities, where they quickly become the only industry in the area. That phenomenon creates an economic and cultural buy-in for communities that might otherwise resist them. Because these institutions depend on mass incarceration, rather than fostering strong communities or healing, the communities that depend on them will tend to oppose liberation movements or even more humane reforms. The role of the police in that system is, of course, to continually supply people to keep those beds full.

All of this takes form in the violence visited upon people of color, the homeless, trans and queer people, and immigrant communities at the hands of the police every day. Ramarley Graham. CeCe McDonald. Oscar Grant. Sean Bell. Tawana Brawley. Duanna Johnson. Those are just some of the names we know, people who’ve had their stories picked up by the media. As victims of police violence, they are exceptional only in that we know their names. Constantly, nationwide, police forces systematically brutalize, murder and rape. The existence of the police is incompatible with an agenda of justice. This is why Ray Kelly must resign, and why his resignation is not nearly enough.

Memorial in Delhi to Ganhi's Salt March. By Tom Jordan, via Flickr.

What do Native Americans, Costa Ricans, Thai villagers, Hispanic students in U.S. colleges, Indian independence activists and Maasai women have in common? They’ve all organized long marches as part of campaigns for justice. Their campaigns’ very different choices about how to use the tactic raises strategic questions for us today. In some campaigns the long march was used primarily to heighten awareness, while in others it was to gain new allies. Sometimes it was used to launch other kinds of direct action. It has also been used at the end of a campaign, to escalate the pressure (just as a general strike is sometimes used). But what conditions make a long walk a truly effective tactic in a campaign, rather than just a chance to get some good exercise?

For me, that question is personal right now. On April 30, I will begin a 200-mile walk to the Pittsburgh, PA, headquarters of the PNC Bank to challenge its funding of mountaintop removal coal mining. The march is organized by the Philadelphia-based Earth Quaker Action Team as part of its BLAM! campaign: Bank Like Appalachia Matters! For that reason — and with the help of the Global Nonviolent Action Database — I’ve been reviewing the ways in which long marches like this have been used by others, with varying degrees of success.

One of the most recent long walks was taken by four Miami College undocumented students who walked from Florida to the U.S. Capitol in support of the immigration reform proposed in the Dream Act. They called their 2010 march The Trail of Dreams. They not only ended up expanding support for the legislation, but also stimulated five students to add an additional walk of 250 miles from New York to Washington, timed to arrive at the same time as the walkers from Miami. Although the Dream Act was not passed, the action certainly increased the momentum behind it.

In 2009, Tanzanian police set fire to eight Maasai villages to evict 3,000 people who were living on traditional land that the government secretly leased to a wealthy businessman from the United Arab Emirates for his hunting and recreation. Widespread protests were stonewalled by the government. Thousands of women in the region then decided to march back to the village area in April 2010; despite arrests and blockades along the way, 1,500 women made it. The women had as allies a network of NGOs, three leaders of which were arrested as well.

Also in 2010, Costa Rican protesters marched from San Jose to Las Crucitas, over 100 miles, to overturn a government decision that permitted open-pit gold mining. The stakes were high: A Canadian subsidiary wanted to mine an estimated $1 billion gold deposit, even though it would remove 600 acres of yellow almond trees — the main food for the endangered green macaw. The march, along with an occupation, hunger strike and other actions, forced a Congressional vote to ban all new open-pit mining projects, and in a court case the protesters won a ban of the Las Crucitas mine.

Most U.S. activists have heard of the 1965 Selma–Montgomery march in Alabama that brought to a peak a national crisis that forced the U.S. federal government to pass a voting-rights law to allow African Americans to vote in the South. The strategy in the previous cases I’ve mentioned was to use the long march as a “wake-up call” to mobilize a broader campaign for their cause. But in the 1965 civil rights movement, the long march was placed strategically at the end of the campaign, to escalate the pressure when allies around the U.S. were already mobilized.

A variety of tactics had already been used before the march: Alabama blacks showing up at voter registration offices even though they wouldn’t be allowed to register; sit-ins and picketing of white-owned businesses; short marches (sometimes even escalating to night marches — a highly dangerous tactic in that context); and other tactics usually involving tense confrontations and thousands of arrests. The young black protester Jimmy Jackson was shot and killed by police, and the white Unitarian-Universalist minister James Reeb was beaten to death.

The rising storm of protest around the U.S. forced the Attorney General in Washington to begin working on a voting-rights bill. President Lyndon B. Johnson urged Dr. King to de-escalate in view of the increasing violence. King, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and others in leadership believed that more pressure was needed. They planned a five-day march from Selma, which had been the center-point of the campaign, to Montgomery, the state capital of Alabama — since voting laws are usually decided by the state government.

The march would be extremely dangerous, passing through rural areas “owned” by the white terrorist organization Ku Klux Klan. Three hundred trained people were allowed to go the whole way, with the understanding that thousands could join on a day-by-day basis. Eight thousand people left Selma for Montgomery on March 21. Demonstrators marched through rain, singing and chanting, arriving safely on March 25, although the Ku Klux Klan murdered one more protester as she drove back to Selma.

This successful campaign spotlights two important strategic decisions: one was to place the timing of the walk near the campaign’s end, as a functional alternative to the tactic chosen in some labor-based campaigns: the escalatory general strike. The other was to base the campaign in a location other than where the power holders sit (in Alabama, the state capital, and in the U.S., Washington, D.C.). Because empowerment was a fundamental theme for civil rights organizers, emphasizing the grassroots rather than the seat of official power — and forcing the power holders to deal with the results — was often seen as most effective.

The Selma–Montgomery march was directly influenced by knowledge of the March to the Sea in India led by Gandhi in 1930. In that case, the long walk initiated the entire campaign: the Salt Satyagraha. The 240-mile march began at Gandhi’s ashram and ended at the sea, where the marchers made salt in defiance of the British Empire’s monopoly of salt manufacture. While the country was already well-organized and probably didn’t need the march to mobilize, the leadership wanted drama to kick off the campaign. The drama was provided by suspense: would the British arrest Gandhi or not? It was a classic dilemma demonstration. If the British arrested Gandhi they would make him a martyr and prove correct his claim that their presence was repressive and illegitimate. If they didn’t arrest him, he, the “Great Soul,” would be the first to make salt and defy the British. Either way, the British were in trouble; the campaign continued on a mass scale for two years and paved the way for India’s independence.

In Thailand, a rural campaign to re-open the Pak Mun Dam, whose construction had turned out to be an economic and ecological disaster for the region, used the long walk in the middle of the campaign. In 2000 the Assembly of the Poor first did a series of protests that culminated in seizing the dam and building villages there, preventing dam workers from gaining access. Although they had studies by academics and the World Commission on Dams to back them up, they realized that their struggle needed more allies, including among the urban poor, working class and middle class. So 150 representatives of impacted villages participated in a long march of 400 miles to Bangkok to win more allies. Once there, they began a hunger strike, created a mock village outside the seat of government, and did a “die-in” to dramatize their outreach.

Their success in winning allies even among the middle class resulted in the government not only compromising substantially — opening the dam gates four months each year — but also effectively ended new dam construction in the country.

In 1978, 26 Native American activists walked 3,000 miles in what they called the Longest Walk – from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. Thousands of people joined them at various points along the way. Symbolically they were reversing the Trail of Tears that marked the history of so many tribes, ejected from their homes by white supremacy and made to walk westward. Practically, they were walking to catalyze a new level of energy among allies, against the threat in the U.S. Congress. Congress was considering a set of 11 bills that would — once again — injure indigenous people in the U.S. The Longest Walk succeeded in blocking the bills.

The Global Nonviolent Action Database contains more campaigns that used long walks. Many activists have used this method, turning it into a tactic — as militaries use the term — by attaching it to a very specific objective. Campaigners in various situations have placed the long walk in the beginning of a campaign, or the middle or the end, making it serve one or another of a variety of campaign needs. Its strategic flexibility makes it tempting.

A downside is that effectiveness requires a great deal of organization, and many protest groups simply don’t have the infrastructure to carry it off to get what they want. I’ve known long walks that were intended to build allies but didn’t because the walk attracted hyper-individualists with nothing better to do than string along with the walk and alienate the potential allies along the way. Depending on the culture, those who initiate a long walk need to have serious skills in organization and conflict resolution. Depending on the level of danger, they also need skills in training. I was once called in to assist a group whose long walk resulted in several injuries and deaths among the walkers; we worked hard to build the capacity of the organization in nonviolent self-defense. In future walks, no one was killed.

The long walk is not the only method that has advantages and challenges to implement — most do. However, campaigners who rely simply on marches and rallies risk death by boredom, which is one reason why one of the most effective recent campaigns I know of began with a solemn agreement never to hold a march or a rally! Maybe a long walk is for you. Maybe you’d like to join us on ours? Follow #greenwalk and #m16 on Twitter for more details.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

El Fondren, © Bob Fitch, all rights reserved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What motivated you to begin documenting social movements?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Has anyone else inspired you the way King did?

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

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

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

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

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

Of all your photos, do you have a favorite? 

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

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

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

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

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

Setting the Record “Straight”

The 1947 Journey of Reconciliation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Jobs and Freedom

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

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

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

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

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

Mixing Politics and Resistance, Peace and Freedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rapprochement and Renewed Resistance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A protest sign at an anti-Gandhi rally in San Diego last year reveals the tensions that still exist between India's independence leader and minority groups.

When I first heard that Gandhi was viewed as “the enemy” by many Dalits in India (formerly called “untouchables”), I was dumbfounded. How and why could Gandhi be seen as having betrayed the Dalits when he opposed untouchability even in the face of active discomfort on the part of close associates?

Last month, while I was in India teaching Nonviolent Communication to 120 people, including a significant number of Dalits, I had the opportunity to explore this question further. During a session called “Gandhian Principles for Everyday Living,” a topic about which I have written at length, one of the 60 people present expressed anguish, pain and anger towards Gandhi. He was a Buddhist, like many other Dalits who had chosen to follow the Dalit leader Dr. B. R. Ambedkar in leaving behind centuries of mistreatment under Hinduism.

I dedicated much of the two-hour session to hearing and understanding his experience. I learned more about the power of deep empathic reflection than about the issue itself. With the presence and active attention of an entire group, he experienced a profound shift in his perception. In the end he said: “Perhaps it’s personal pain from my childhood and all the experiences I had that I just attached to Gandhi.” He didn’t actually know the details of what Gandhi was held accountable for. Nor did I.

After the training ended, I went on a personal pilgrimage to Gujarat, Gandhi’s home state and the birthplace of the Salt March. I met with the editor of a Gandhian journal in Gujarati, who told me that he believed Dr. Ambedkar saw things more accurately than Gandhi, and that his followers have something to teach the Gandhians. Slowly, the details emerged.

Dr. B. R. Ambedkar

The bitter dispute originated in the 1930s, when Gandhi mounted a “fast-unto-death” in response to a British proposal, based on Ambedkar’s recommendations, to award the “depressed classes” (the Dalits) a separate electorate in the Indian parliament. Frantic negotiations under pressure of saving Gandhi’s life resulted in the Poona Pact which substituted a guaranteed number of seats in the parliament for the separate electorate. Although the pact was signed by Ambedkar, his followers, and many of Gandhi’s followers, the complex provisions elaborated in it appeared to many to deny the Dalits any real access to power.

Despite what Ambedkar said at the time to Gandhi and others, he later said he signed under immense pressure and claimed that Gandhi was actually against equality for the Dalits. Ambedkar suggested in a 1955 interview that Gandhi didn’t truly “deserve” the title of Mahatma (great soul). And yet, a close look at Gandhi’s own words leads me to conclude that his position was based on a deep commitment to fully eradicating untouchability from Hinduism.

I have no difficulty understanding and even sympathizing with Gandhi’s reasoning. Gandhi didn’t see political solutions per se as fundamental and lasting. He sought, instead, moral and spiritual paths. He called on Hindus to atone for and redeem the sin of untouchability. He was concerned that being politically separated from the issue would leave Hindus without the motivation to create the necessary change of heart. He believed that his willingness to die would awaken Hindus to the poison of untouchability. Indeed, following his great fast, scores of communities removed barriers to “untouchables” attending temples and drinking water and eating with others.

Nonetheless, I see Gandhi as having made a serious mistake in pressing the point, and am not surprised that his strong opposition to granting rights to a despised minority has been seen as lack of interest in their equality and empowerment.

Knowing people’s dedication to him, Gandhi used the moral force of his person to call on people to live up to a vision that was not yet possible. In other instances, he accepted purely political and less-than-ideal solutions to work with practical realities. This is what Ambedkar was proposing, and what the Civil Rights movement in the US was able to press for: despite a lack of true change of heart, legal-political solutions can make a tangible difference in the lived experience of disadvantaged groups. The vision of a united Hindu society was so dear to Gandhi that he wasn’t willing to accept a partial solution. This error is one of the reasons why Gandhi ultimately failed. The moral force of a person is not sustainable. The partial gains made at the time of his fast were short lived.

Once Gandhi died, all that remained was what people had internalized and integrated. A true change of heart happened only to a few. The legacy of separation, endemic to most of our human cultures, took hold again, and violence swept the country. Instead of the unity and transformation Gandhi sought, and the empowerment and freedom that Ambedkar stood for, India remains saddled with the weight of untouchability, which is still widely
practiced despite being proscribed since 1950, and the Dalit community is splintered into several religions and still separate from the rest of Hindu society. As the Dalit Freedom Network tells us “In 70% of India’s villages…non-Dalits will not eat or drink with Dalits” who also “constitute the largest number of people categorized as victims of human trafficking and human enslavement in any single nation on earth.”

I struggle with similar dilemmas today, albeit with far smaller ramifications. Hardly anything possible in the present would ever align sufficiently with my large vision for me to support it. I nonetheless know that to remain relevant and respected I need to balance vision with practical reality.

No easy answers, ever. Working for a true change of heart may well be an unaffordable luxury when urgent action is required, such as when global planetary resources as well as social, political, and economic institutions are collapsing. And yet, no matter the urgency, if we want to create sustainable long-term change and establish relationships, structures, and systems that serve all life, we need to augment political and structural arrangements with ongoing efforts to transform how we approach social change work. Gandhi’s fundamental lessons still stand. There is no substitute for an inclusive vision and actions based on love.