Great lessons can still be learned from the work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — not just for Americans but for people staging protests in other countries.
Looking back from today, people assume it was inevitable that Dr. King would become the leader of the civil rights movement, and that it would proceed in the largely peaceful way it did. In particular, we take for granted that the civil rights revolution — which started with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and ended with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — would be overwhelmingly nonviolent.
It didn’t have to happen that way. The civil rights struggle could very easily have been extremely bloody and deadly. Of course, there were the deaths of Medgar Evers, Viola Liuzzo and others. But by the standards of today’s Middle East, the death toll in the civil rights struggle was amazingly small.
It’s important to remember that racial or ethnic oppression can be maintained only by violence. Southerners learned this very early, because most African Americans lived in the South. According to a fascinating study by the U.S. Census Bureau, 93 percent of all blacks in the United States lived in the South in 1830. In Louisiana and South Carolina, they made up almost 60 percent of the population and constituted almost half the population in Florida, Mississippi and Virginia. Across the South, blacks averaged 38 percent of the population.
But even these figures understate the problem for whites, because Southern cities were overwhelmingly white, and the vast majority of blacks lived in lightly populated agricultural areas. According to historian C. Vann Woodward, in 1860, only two percent of the slave population lived in cities.
This meant that whites were a distinct minority of the population throughout the vast bulk of the South’s geographical area. Consequently, they lived in constant fear of a slave revolt and went into full-scale panic whenever one occurred, even in a foreign country like Haiti.
In order to maintain control, a slave patrol system was established throughout the South. All adult white males, including non-slaveholders, were required to participate. These patrols would ride throughout the countryside at night, stopping any blacks found on the roads, demanding a pass and an explanation for their being out and about, and breaking up any unauthorized meetings among slaves.*
These patrols existed for as long as slavery did. After the Civil War, they seamlessly morphed into the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Shirts and other extra-legal organizations with the same purpose: to keep the black population cowed and under control. Fear of the black population is also why Southern society long accepted brutality in law enforcement to a greater degree than other parts of the country did.**
The point of all this is that Dr. King knew perfectly well that there was enormous physical danger in pressing for civil rights in the South. There was every reason to believe that the effort would be suppressed with the most violent methods imaginable. And it would be worse if blacks responded with violence of their own, as many thought was necessary, because it would justify an even more brutal response.***
From the perspective of today, one can easily imagine the kind of violence throughout the South that we witness daily in Iraq. And it is only because of Dr. King’s leadership that such violence didn’t happen. His great insight was that, in holding the moral high ground, civil rights advocates had a very, very powerful weapon, but a fragile one that could be easily lost if the movement succumbed to violence of its own.
Dr. King’s brilliant strategy was to mobilize the power of nonviolence that Mahatma Gandhi had used in India to win victory over the British, who were not shy about using force to maintain their power. What both men understood is that those with legitimate moral claims must use moral methods to achieve their goals, lest they debase themselves to the level of their oppressors and thereby cede the high ground. Moreover, they both understood that while nonviolent methods can be extremely effective, they require incredible patience and self-discipline.
Thus Dr. King’s achievement was not only in recognizing that nonviolence was the best way to achieve the goals of the civil rights movement, but in convincing everyone else in that movement to follow his lead. We forget now how much time and effort he expended calming down the hotheads in groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Young people, after all, are always impatient and prefer action to obedience.
This is not to say that Dr. King was completely opposed to using violence for the achievement of civil rights. On the contrary, violence was essential — but had to come only from the other side. In King’s famous “Letter From Birmingham Jail” in 1963, he explains that he went to that city precisely because it afforded the greatest likelihood for violent confrontation. King knew that Birmingham’s police commissioner, the infamous Eugene “Bull” Connor, would not be able to restrain himself and would respond to the demonstrations with dogs, nightsticks and fire hoses, which he did. When images of these attacks on peaceful demonstrators came into the living rooms of white America on the nightly news, it led to an outpouring of empathy that made the victory of civil rights inevitable.
I have often wondered why people like the Palestinians haven’t learned from Gandhi and Dr. King. I believe they would have done far more to advance their cause if they had chosen nonviolent protests instead of suicide bombings. Those driven to martyrdom would send a clearer message if they avoided committing violence against others. Imagine if all the suicide bombers had taken their lives the way Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc did on June 11, 1963, to protest Vietnamese oppression — by pouring gasoline on himself and lighting a match — rather than killing innocent victims. They would have died in a way that brought sympathy to their cause instead of hardening opposition to it.
We owe Dr. King a great debt of gratitude for peacefully bringing about a revolution in race relations in this country that could easily have been extremely deadly. His genius and his success still point the way to victory over oppression everywhere.
* Here’s a link to a discussion of slave patrols in Georgia. A recent book on this neglected subject is “Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas,” by Florida State University historian Sally E. Hadden.
**See Sheldon Hackney, “Southern Violence,” American Historical Review (February 1969), pages 906-25; and John Shelton Reed, “To Live—and Die—in Dixie: A Contribution to the Study of Southern Violence,” Political Science Quarterly (September 1971), pages 429-43.