practical peacehow peace in the moment can make peace in the world |
||
In Case We Have Forgotten MLK's Vision of the Power of Nonviolent Direct ActionAug 13, 03:36 pm Martin Luther King’s words to the SCLC, 1967: To dislocate the functioning of a city without destroying it can be more effective than a riot because it can be longer-lasting, costly to society but not wantonly destructive. Moreover, it is more difficult for government to quell it by superior force. Mass civil disobedience can use rage as a constructive and creative force. It is purposeless to tell Negroes they should not be enraged when they should be. Indeed, they will be mentally healthier if they do not suppress rage but vent it constructively and use its energy peacefully but forcefully to cripple the operations of an oppressive society. Civil disobedience can utilize the militancy wasted in riots to seize clothes or groceries many did not even want. Civil disobedience has never been used on a mass scale in the North. It has rarely been seriously organized and resolutely pursued. Too often in the past was it employed incorrectly. It was resorted to only when there was an absence of mass support and its purpose was headline-hunting. The exceptions were the massive school boycotts by Northern Negroes. They shook educational systems to their roots but they lasted only single days and were never repeated. If they are developed as weekly events at the same time that mass sit-ins are developed inside and at the gates of factories for jobs, and if simultaneously thousands of unemployed youth camp in Washington, as the Bonus Marchers did in the thirties, with these and other practices, without burning a match or firing a gun, the impact of the movement will have earthquake proportions. (In the Bonus Marches, it was the government that burned down the marchers’ shelters when it became confounded by peaceful civil disobedience.) King, Martin Luther, Jr. “The Crisis in America’s Cities, Address delivered at the [Eleventh] Annual Convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.” 8/15/67. Atlanta, Ga. |
||
About Katherine PowerI didn’t set out to be a terrorist. As a student activist, I moved from protesting the war in Viet Nam to waging guerrilla war to overthrow the government…. |
||
I’m Following...Kathleen Dean Moore |
||