Concern 7

Didn’t The Civil Rights Movement Win Because It Was Nonviolent?

This section asks the question WWMD (What Would Martin Do?).  Many people, from elected politicians to family members, have invoked the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. to denounce their perceived notions of recent protest, arguing that Black Lives Matter protests are different and more violent than the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 60s. These readings will illustrate the continuities and similarities between the two movements.

01

Rosa Parks on Police Brutality

By Say Burgin, Black Perspectives (January 23, 2020)

In this piece, historian Say Burgin examines the ideals of Civil Rights icon Rosa Parks, and what she would have had to say about police brutality.  Burgin examines Parks’ work as an activist against police brutality and how the movement’s limiting ideas of ‘who’ could lead those arguments robbed us of a qualified voice in history.

“Thus were the narrow grounds for rejecting Parks. She might be among the most devoted activists, but she lacked charisma. Besides which, banter or not, the line about her weight indicated expectations about what kind of embodiment Black female leadership should take, and Parks clearly didn’t fit the mold.”

“Imagine the power of the “mother of the civil rights movement” speaking out against the violent over-policing of Black communities, North and South, of police abusing their powers in order to quash dissent and intimidate those who did speak out, of the lack of justice for Black victims of white people and police.We lost this chance. Armed with limited ideas about what kinds of Black women could lead, NSM shot itself in the foot when it denied Rosa Parks’ potential to move people to act on police brutality. To be sure, though, NSM’s blindness is our own. Then as now, Parks’ radical vision is rarely understood in its fullness.”

02

How Today’s Protests Compare to 1968, Explained By a Historian

Interview by Dylan Matthews, Vox (June 2, 2020)

In this interview, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Heather Ann Thompson explains how the current protests are similar to and different from civil unrest in the 1960s.

“Because racial injustice just seems to be baked into the DNA of this country, periodically and throughout history there come these moments when people just can’t take it anymore. They feel that the injustice is so particularly glaring or there’s such a compendium of unjust events one right after the other that they explode.”


“...not only is the wanton murder of Black men by racist whites similar to what has happened before in history, but [so] is today’s collective uprising. It’s a mix of protest in terms of carrying signs and slogans, but also rage and tears and lashing out.”

“There’s much that’s different too though, and it’s all pretty scary. We have a president who has no regard for the First Amendment, the press, for calming dissent, for doing concrete things that could make this a better situation rather than worse.”

“Not protesting at all would not keep white racial violence at bay. . . . Protests keep happening precisely because white supremacy is never sufficiently reined in.”

03

What Would Martin Luther King Jr. Say About the Current Civil Unrest?

By Peniel E. Joseph, The Washington Post (June 1, 2020)

A quick and sharp takedown of the tendency to quote Martin Luther King Jr. in order to declare the “right” way to protest, leaving out his revolutionary ideas about social and economic change.

“King responded with action to what critics called riots, activists described as rebellions and the government labeled civil disturbances.”

“King’s well-documented commitment to nonviolent social change remains one [of] his most important legacies, yet this portrait of the man is woefully incomplete without a discussion of his revolutionary political thought and practice.”

“King, while never giving up on nonviolence as a personal philosophy and political tactic, came to embrace envelope-pushing demonstrations of civil disobedience as critical to redeeming America’s racially wounded soul.”

“King would not denounce the looters, but focus on the economic, social, and political conditions that produced mass protests contoured by bursts of violence. He would find our age of racial division, white denial and spreading wealth inequality and violence an all too familiar artifact of his own time. His response, then, would be to speak on behalf of the indigent, to help feed the poor and to organize for the revolutionary policy changes that will finally make the kind of uprisings we are now experiencing a thing of the past.”

04

This article counters arguments proclaiming Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have been critical of contemporary protests, drawing on historical context to show how violence is often an  established consequence of challenging racial bias.

“As much as BLM’s opponents and supporters (who insist that ‘this ain’t yo mama’s civil rights movement’) differentiate it from the 1960s effort, these two historical moments have a lot in common. Both have been opposed by more than half of Americans, both have needed violent confrontations to attract national media attention, and both have been criticized for their combative tactics.”

“Most people, including Northerners, opposed King’s March on Washington, fearing that it was a call to uprising.”

“King, likewise, faced editorials admonishing him for provoking riots and isolating those sympathetic to his cause with his “excessive” demonstrations.”

“King, we’ve convinced ourselves, is proof that any lingering racism can be eliminated without tumult. Yet the civil rights movement was one of the most violent moments in American history.”

“Black Lives Matter has more in common with the civil rights movement than we’d like to acknowledge. It fights the same injustices and encounters the same resistance. The truth is, if you oppose Black Lives Matter’s tactics, you would have abhorred King’s.”

05

Protests Seen as Harming Civil Rights Movement in the '60s

By RJ Reinhart, Gallup (January 21, 2019)

This article leverages Gallups’ earliest polls to examine the double standard of American sentiments on civil rights protests, and the struggle of peaceful protesters to change perceptions and enact institutional change.

“The 1963 march, where King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech, was an iconic moment for the civil rights movement, having brought 250,000 supporters to the mall in Washington, D.C., in support of racial equality and justice. Less than a year after the march, Americans were even more convinced that mass demonstrations harmed the cause, with 74% saying they felt these actions were detrimental to achieving racial equality and just 16% saying they were helping it.”

“Widespread rioting after King's death contributed to the fundamentally altered landscape for the civil rights movement. And Americans expressed more positive attitudes toward nonviolent demonstrations by civil rights activists, with 63% in a May 1969 Gallup survey stating that Black Americans could win civil rights using nonviolent demonstrations.”

06

This excerpt from Charles Cobb’s 2014 book discusses the tactical uses of violence and nonviolence in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, from his perspective as field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

“...nonviolence and armed resistance are part of the same cloth; both are thoroughly woven into the fabric of Black life and struggle. And that struggle no more ended with the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 than it began with the Montgomery bus boycott, Martin Luther king Jr., and the student sit-ins.”

“There was no meaningful difference between white responses to armed resistance by Blacks and white responses to nonviolent resistance by Blacks. . . . police violence was not a response to either the use of guns or the practice of nonviolence; rather, it was exercised for the sole purpose of crushing Black protest and demands in any shape.”

“NAACP chairman emeritus Julian Bond, who in the 1960s was communications director for SNCC, summarizes this narrative with ironic simplicity: “Rosa sat down, Martin stood up; and then the white folks saw the light and saved the day. This simplistic and conventional understanding of the civil rights movement, however, neglects the many complexities and tensions that defined the movement and that ultimately contributed to its success.”

09

Malcolm and Martin, Closer Than We Ever Thought

By John Blake, CNN (May 19, 2010)

This article provides a brief overview of the history of the relationship between Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Though they only met once, they are often understood as rivals, with King representing nonviolence and Malcolm X a violent radical, but this article takes issue with that characterization. It shows that, especially toward the end of both of their lives, they became more like one another, with King embracing aspects of Malcom X’s cultural revolution and Malcolm X developing his own respect for King. 

“Despite their differences, both King and Malcolm X's political activism flowed from the same source.”

“A year before King died, the journalist David Halberstam even told him he "sounded like a nonviolent Malcolm X.”

10

Letter From a Birmingham Jail

By Dr. Martin Luther King (April 16, 1963)

Written from the Birmingham jail where King was imprisoned for peaceful protest, this letter responded to an open letter written by eight moderate Christian and Jewish religious leaders in Birmingham newspapers. These religious figures criticized both the demonstrations and King himself as an outside agitator. In his response, he calls out moderate white Americans for passively commenting on the sidelines, while he and others risked their freedoms for change.

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is ... the white moderate, … who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"

“I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.”

Extended Readings

  1. Jeanne Theoharis, A More Beautiful and Terrible History; The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights (2018)

  2. Peniel Joseph, The Sword and the Shield (2020)

  3. Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Struggle (2003)

  4. Malcolm X and Alex Haley, Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)

  5. Hasan Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt

  6. Black Panther Party Ten Point Program (1966)

  7. Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (2007)

  8. Watch: Selma (2014), Directed by Ava Duvernay