We’d attracted a dense crowd by street speaking against the Vietnam war. I got off the soapbox to allow someone else a turn. A young man in army uniform stepped in front of me. He was trembling with the effort to keep it together as he confronted me, barely a foot away. “How can you protest the Vietnam war when we’re over there to keep you free?” Then he showed me his knife.
I remembered that confrontation when I read about the attacks on the Minneapolis demonstrators from Black Lives Matters on November 22. Every incident is different, but the trend felt familiar. The movement pushes, then encounters violent retaliation. The 1960s again.
The young soldier gripping the knife seemed about to snap, so I looked steadily into his eyes. “You don’t want to do this,” I said quietly. “You’ll be in big trouble, and you won’t stop us.” People around us were paying attention to the new speaker on the box. No one had noticed the knife yet. The soldier considered for a moment while we locked eyes, then put his knife away.
In the ‘60s and ‘70s American social movements forced the greatest progressive changes in my lifetime, despite sometimes violent resistance. Activists developed ways of increasing our safety and — when we did get hurt — maximizing the change potential of those incidents. One of the tools was used again brilliantly last month, after five members of Black Lives Matter Minnesota were shot while protesting. Overnight they organized a disciplined march to City Hall in which a thousand people joined to demand racial justice, not swerving from their original issue.
With this inspiring action fresh in our minds, it might be a good time to review some of the other tools activists have used to counter violent resistance, and prepare to add to the toolbox.
Unarmed peacekeeping
In the ‘60s, we routinely had medics with us at our demonstrations, as well as trained marshals to head off trouble when possible. Marshals in the midst of a larger crowd often found it possible to isolate a fight between attackers and demonstrators. Sometimes the marshals encircled the fight and kept the fight from spreading, then de-escalated. Groups expecting trouble routinely trained marshals/peacekeepers for each action and trained the demonstrators as well. For a heated antiwar demonstration in Berkeley a large church was used overnight to train 3,000 demonstrators.
Training for Change trainer Erika Thorne witnessed such nonviolent intervention in Minneapolis on November 28. She and other people from white solidarity group Showing Up for Racial Justice, or SURJ-Minnesota, responded to the shooting of the five Black Lives Matters protesters. They went to a busy mall to ask white shoppers to join them in taking responsibility for the attitudes that support white supremacy. They gave out yellow slips of paper with the county attorney’s phone number to call, urging action. A white man went into a rage and began screaming at two of the SURJ women. As he continued to yell, some white shoppers who had been neutral when first approached came over to join the group. One mother stood directly in front of him despite his continued raging.
The Minnesota shoppers were responding in a natural human way, but protesters can’t always count on that. It’s possible to recruit people ahead of time. I remember a Catholic nun who, long after her religious order had given up the black habit, kept hers to wear to demonstrations where tension was expected. This was one precursor of what became a field with even international application, called “unarmed peacekeeping,” or third party nonviolent intervention.
Stay in the game
During the 1950s Algerian struggle for independence, French pacifists had a rough time protesting their government’s war. They faced assaults by police and civilians. They learned to shorten the attack and reduce injury by sitting on the ground when it began. They told me they memorized these words: “When in doubt, sit down.” The tool was mirrored by the U.S. civil rights movement with success. Decades later in Thailand, I learned activists there found the tool useful during the nonviolent insurrection of the early ‘90s.
Keeping the initiative is important. Being calm and restrained may not be enough – look for other moves you can make. As shown in the movie “Freedom Song,” civil rights activists learned to go to each others’ aid in non-threatening ways, like putting their bodies between the attacker and the demonstrator. This can be done even if you have already been hit, if you’re not disabled. Stay in the game. Start a song – your group might pick it up.
Discipline as a deterrent
All these positive micro-behaviors are more likely to be performed if a demonstration is well organized. In fact, a disciplined action is itself a deterrent to violence. Canadian trainer Karen Ridd and I worked with an annual Cambodian peace march in which marchers had recently been killed. Buddhist monks led the long-distance march through territory where government and Khmer Rouge soldiers fought. The march’s goal was to strengthen peasants who were exploited by both sides.
Karen and I learned that the march stopped each night to camp and hold prayers. After breakfast the leadership typically began marching before clean-up was finished. Some participants would follow, then others, in a long, straggling procession. We led a succession of role-plays for 30 of the leaders in which she and I created difficulties that they found could have been met effectively if they were organized and disciplined. They worked out a culturally appropriate system for marching down a road as a tight-knit, united band. Future treks proceeded without fatalities.
Postponing confrontation
In the film “Selma” we see a dramatic example of choosing not to proceed into danger. On the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Martin Luther King, Jr., sensed a trap. He famously turned the march around, setting off a furious tactical debate. In the film, however, we see the brilliant execution of the turn-around: orderly, unhurried, with dignity.
It is no disgrace to postpone confrontation, to let tactics be led by strategy — which, in King’s case, were probably augmented by divine inspiration. The question is how it is implemented. The signal sent by the demonstrators needs to be one of self-possession, of empowered decision rather than fear.
The point of the attacks, after all, is to scare us. While we feel our fear we can also summon our courage, remaining in control of ourselves. We retreat, when useful, in good order. In effect, we refuse to play their fear game.
Refusing to let fear run us builds the movement in at least two ways. It enables us to keep pushing for our original goal rather than back off or shift our target, as when Occupy Wall Street shifted focus from the 1 percent to the New York police. Second, the violence can lead to the “paradox of repression,” when additional participants and allies step forward. That’s what happened in Minneapolis.
Learning from the hardest challenge successfully met
Swarthmore’s searchable Global Nonviolent Action Database has the largest known published collection of civil rights campaigns: 72. Most of the campaigns were attacked, often by angry people not in uniform. Remarkably, nearly all found ways to continue their campaigns despite the violence. About half of the 72 campaigns used the violence to increase their size and strength by inducing the paradox of repression.
For successful movements, the most extreme sustained exposure to risk in my lifetime was in Mississippi in the early 1960s. The “freedom houses” of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, were surrounded by people who wanted SNCC workers dead, and who had an organized instrument for making that happen, the Ku Klux Klan. In 1964 I asked Bob Moses, head of Mississippi SNCC, how so many SNCC members survived. He told me, “It’s because we don’t have guns in our freedom houses, and everyone knows it.”
Seeing the puzzled expression on my face, he explained. The terrorist KKK was a working-class organization, and did the dirty work of white supremacy. The middle and owning-class White Citizens Councils were the controllers, and protected the KKK members from arrest for church burnings and lynchings. The leaders of the White Citizens Councils knew that negative economic and other consequences would happen to Mississippi if nonviolent SNCC members were murdered, so they told the KKK to hold off. If SNCC had tried to defend itself violently in that context, all bets were off — members would simply be killed in what would be branded a “shootout,” with minimum consequences for KKK and maximum negative outcome for SNCC.
If ever there were a time when young adult activists can usefully watch “Eyes on the Prize” and other films about the civil rights movement, this is the time. In situations more polarized than ours, black people and their white allies faced terror and won victories. Today’s activists will add creative new movement tools for handling threat. I’m guessing that the best tools are invented as we live into the exercise of courage. The legacy we have already is a good place to start.
A good article about how movements can handle threats and attacks – applicable today to Black Lives Matter and to anti Muslim violence
In David Hartsough’s vivid memoir he describes many personal experiences with threats and attacks, including a hair-raising 1960 civil rights sit-in and multiple times since. WAGING PEACE: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist. Published by PM Press in 2014, it received the 2015 Skipping Stones Book Award.
George
Thanks George. My hope is that the stories in my book, Waging Peace, will help readers understand that nonviolent responses to threats and attacks can really work and can help movements for change be successful.
Our lives are indebted to the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In addition, I love Waging Nonviolence, I love George Lakey, and I really appreciate this article at this time. It is, as our dear George writes, a crucial time to look at the lessons of past movements to figure out how Black Lives Matter and their allies can work in as strategic and effective a manner as possible.
THEREFORE, I find one line here more than problematic; it goes along with the “larger than life” myth-making that renders Dr. King – like Gandhi before him and Mandela right now – into impossible-to-match icons. To say, as George does here, that “it is no disgrace to postpone confrontation, to let tactics be led by strategy” is a correct, tricky, and very subtle lesson, one he links to the second of three famous 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches, covered in the recent film SELMA but also available for study in many accessible forms. To add in the following sentence that Dr. King came to this strategic insight “probably augmented by divine inspiration” will, however, hinder many careful readers from actually learning the intended lesson.
Aside from the fact that it is difficult in any case to ascribe miraculous interventions to man-made tactical decisions, in this particular case there is a significant amount of historical evidence to suggest that it was Dr. King’s premeditated collusion with the federal government which led to the events of “Turn-around Tuesday.” (David Garrow and others report, and the archives back up, that he was in deep, secret meetings with LBJ’s representatives about the very process of a symbolic about-face). It was an extremely controversial move on King’s part, and – though there is plenty of room to argue that it was a tactically correct one made in the context of a larger strategic plan – it is counter-productive to couch that decision in theological terms.
It is likely more useful to suggest that there may have been things lost and gained by King’s turn-around decision, as there would have been losses and victories had the marchers proceeded when the Sheriff and his men stepped aside. There are almost always more than one tactical way to move forward – never or rarely just one “correct” tactic or even strategy – in a revolutionary and confrontational moment. I say this here not only for historical accuracy and honesty but because George’s larger point here – that there surely ARE times when turning away and deescalating is the most effective means of building long-term movement – is so very vital indeed.
Many thanks, Matt, for adding nuance to this conversation. (By the way, I love you, too.) I think I’ll be stubborn and hold out for my guess about divine inspiration playing a part Dr. King’s tactical decision, which doesn’t negate the multiple other considerations that must have been playing out in King’s mind, or any of the other points you so powerfully make in your welcome comment. For the past five years the direct action group I’m a member of, Earth Quaker Action Team (EQAT), has been experimenting with a leadership model that explicitly allows for being moved by the spirit during confrontations with police. We plan, we train, we allocate roles — all the thoughtful things a group does — and then, in the moment, still allow for the possible inspirational insight or direction that (depending on one’s theology) can be attributed to the divine.
It’s been working for us. We have no Dr. King among us — our egalitarian inclinations don’t support that model anyway — but Quaker history expects that spirit might very well show up without someone who seems larger than life.
As you and readers of this column know, I’m the last person to argue that anyone needs to be special to see a viable way forward in a tight spot. Antje Mattheus published in this column her report of confronting successfully, while a teenager, a violent threat when isolated with a group of men. You are right to encourage us to de-mystify moments like King’s decision on the bridge, if that will help some to realize that they can also choose wisely in a tight spot.
I don’t see a necessary contradiction between the EQAT experiment and what a strategically wise, tactically smart rationalist might do when having to make a judgement call in the midst of confrontation. My stubbornness has to do with wishing to open the window to the non rational as one more valuable resource; I think of myself here as also fighting for artists and others who find their work enhanced by a friendly relationship to non-rational sources. I’m also defending my personal experience, of course.
However each reader may answer the philosophical question regarding decision-making, you and I agree, I think, that movements need to set aside bravado, old images of masculinity, fear of cowardice, or whatever gets in the way of accepting that there are times when de-escalation is an honorable option. Such a decision may get you strongly criticized by some of your own people, as Dr. King was, but once again this is a chance not to give way to fear. Over and over, courage seems to be useful.
George
I have no idea whether Dr King was inspired in that moment or not, but I agree with George’s allowing for the possibility of divine inspiration, at any time, but especially in direct action. I think moments that are scary are times when people may be especially in need of or open to feeling connected to something greater than themselves, however they define that. Dick Taylor has written movingly of some of his own direct action experiences being deeply spiritual in a Pendle Hill pamphlet on that subject. One of my own experiences occurred during Earth Quaker Action Team’s civil disobedience action against the Keystone XL Pipeline. As our voices were getting hoarse from hours of singing, I felt inspired to call for a few minutes of silent prayer. The entire crowd of 200 fell into silence, including the police, who turned off their radio. After a number of minutes, another EQAT leader felt inspired to end the silence with the civil rights song, “Guide My Feet,” while another prompted us to start walking in a circle–reclaiming our command of the space. When I first called for prayer, one of the action leads whispered to the other that it was “not strategic,” but in the end it asserted our power in a different way and was greatly appreciated by many of the Quakers who showed up to an EQAT action for the first time.
I also like naming this quirky variable because, decades after King, we are so used to hearing a stereotype about a religious right and a secular left, when many progressive activists I know are brought to their progressive politics through their understanding of spirituality and/or religion. I think many of us don’t talk about this openly enough, so I appreciate it being lifted up along with strategy smarts, which inspiration can complement, rather than compete with.
Wow, I am now loving this conversation – George and Ellen’s additions and the implied invitation to think deeply about them – and I’m not using the word “loving” loosely! It is a near-blissful delight to use these strange electronic forums to bring us closer together in both personal and “strategic” ways…and a gift to be able to think in nuanced ways about the past, present, and future. So thanks.
I won’t add much, because there is nothing I disagree with in George’s and Ellen’s additional comments. Part of what I think is fascinating and powerful about the Quaker movement – and now, for me, including this new information about the work of EQAT – is that Friends create encouraged space for everyone to “hear the divine” and act upon it – in both practical and immediate as well as more theoretical and long-term ways. So surely we must all learn from that history and on-going experimentation in our lives and our movement work.
Also interesting is a comment a close friend of mine who is at the center of the Ferguson movement just made in regards to learning from the past and building for the future. On the one hand, he (David Ragland, a founder of the Truth Telling Project) noted all that he has learned from nonviolence trainings and elders and historical context. On the other, he wrote that, as far as Black Lives Matters and related current uprisings, “this movement must not seek to be brought into the fold. The fold can only hold a few & we no longer want the morphine of acceptance.” There is no contradiction between these realities.
Finally, in strong agreement that we must “allow for the possibility (and power) of inspirational thoughts,” I’d like to cite another example using only slightly different terminology from what could by some be (incorrectly) seen as a very different source. Former political prisoner and NYC Black Panther leader Dhoruba bin-Wahad, after being released following 19 years behind bars for a crime he did not commit, noted that folks in “the old days” were always emphasizing the need to be more and more objective. Reflecting upon the lessons he learned during all his years of struggle and incarceration, Dhoruba came out energized to continue to build the movement – a fiery energy he still maintains today – and noted how important it also is to value and understand the SUBJECTIVE. Subjective factors, Dhoruba noted, were sometimes what gave the campaigns their dynamism. Some may call it divine (Dhoruba himself is a devout Muslim), but however one views it, we must – as George and Ellen so clearly note – make space for and recognize the strategic necessity of being open to non-rational and very visionary dynamics.
Great to connect with you online, Matt. I love the phrase “the morphine of acceptance!”
This just in from South Korea, where there is a huge campaign going on to challenge the government’s recent moves against democracy, worker security, and farmers. Three weeks ago 70,000 people turned out for the largest rally Seoul has seen in a decade. Yesterday campaigners staged a march of many thousands despite fear of a repeat of injuries last time.
“Dozens of protesters were injured in clashes with police during the Nov 14 demonstration, but there were no immediate reports of any clashes or injuries on Saturday. … Organizers had vowed to keep Saturday’s rally peaceful. Opposition lawmakers, Buddhist monks, and Christian priests and pastors joined the march to help prevent clashes with police.”
Associated Press report by Kim Tong-Hyung, published in Phila Inquirer today.
Thank you all for sharing your thoughts, experiences and hopes. Much learning for me.
Thanks for this post, George. Really thought-provoking!
I realize I no longer have your current email. Would you mind reaching out to me at “micahbales” at gmail, so that I have your contact info?
Thanks!