The Lost Massey Lectures (25 page)

The Negro freedom movement would have been historic and worthy even if it had only served the cause of civil rights. But its laurels are greater because it stimulated a broader social movement that elevated the moral level of the nation. In the struggle against the preponderant evils of the society, decent values were preserved. Moreover, a significant body of young people learned that in opposing the tyrannical forces that were crushing them, they added stature and meaning to their lives. The alliance of Negro and white youth that fought bruising engagements with the
status quo
inspired each other with a sense of moral mission, and both gave the nation an example of self-sacrifice and dedication.

These years—the late '60s—are a most crucial time for the movement I have been describing. There is a sense in which it can be said that the civil rights and peace movements are over—at least in their first form, the protest form, which gave them their first victories. There is a sense in which the alliance of responsible young people which the movement represented has fallen apart under the impact of failures, discouragement, and consequent
extremism and polarization. The movement for social change has entered a time of temptation to despair because it is clear now how deep and systemic are the evils it confronts. There is a strong temptation to despair of programs and action, and to dissipate energy in hysterical talk. There is a temptation to break up into mutually suspicious extremist groups, in which blacks reject the participation of whites, and whites reject the realities of their own history.

But meanwhile, as the young people face this crisis, leaders in the movement are working out programs to bring the social movements through from their early, and now inadequate, protest phase to a new stage of massive, active, non-violent resistance to the evils of the modern system. As this work and this planning proceed, we begin to glimpse tremendous vistas of what it might mean for the world if the new programs of resistance succeed in forging an even wider alliance of to-day's awakened youth.

Non-violent active resistance to social evils, including massive civil disobedience when there is need for it, can unite in a new action-synthesis the best insights of all three groups I have pointed out among our young people. From the hippies, it can accept the vision of peaceful means to a goal of peace, and also their sense of beauty, gentleness, and of the unique gifts of each man's spirit. From the radicals, it can adopt the burning sense of urgency, the recognition of the need for direct and collective action, and the need for strategy and organization. And because the emerging program is neither one of anarchy nor of despair, it can welcome the work and insights of those young people who have not rejected our present society in its totality. They can challenge the more extreme groups to integrate the new vision into history as it actually is, into society as it actually works. They can help the movement not to break the bruised reed or to quench the smoking wick of values that are already recognized in the society that we
want to change. And they can help keep open the possibility of honorable compromise.

If the early civil-rights movement bore some international fruit in the formation of a peace corps, this new alliance could do far more. Already our best young workers in the United States are talking about the need to organize in international dimensions. They are beginning to form conscious connections with their opposite numbers in other countries. The conscience of an awakened activist cannot be satisfied with a focus on local problems, if only because he sees that local problems are all inter-connected with world problems. The young men who are beginning to see that they must refuse to leave their country in order to fight and kill others might decide to leave their country, at least for a while, in order to share their life with others. There is as yet not even an outline in existence of what structure this growing world-consciousness might find for itself. But a dozen years ago there was not even an outline for the Negro civil-rights movement in its first phase. The spirit is awake now: structures will follow, if we keep our ears open to the spirit. Perhaps the structural forms will emerge from other countries, propelled by another experience of the shaping of history.

But we do not have much time. The revolutionary spirit is already world wide. If the anger of the peoples of the world at the injustice of things is to be channelled into a revolution of love and creativity, we must begin now to work, urgently, with all the peoples, to shape a new world.

There is nothing wrong with a traffic law which says you have to stop for a red light. But when a fire is raging, the fire truck goes right through that red light, and normal traffic had better get out of its way. Or, when a man is bleeding to death, the ambulance goes through those red lights at top speed.

There is a fire raging now for the Negroes and the poor of this society. They are living in tragic conditions because of the terrible economic injustices that keep them locked in as an “underclass,” as the sociologists are now calling it. Disinherited people all over the world are bleeding to death from deep social and economic wounds. They need brigades of ambulance drivers who will have to ignore the red lights of the present system until the emergency is solved.

Massive civil disobedience is a strategy for social change which is at least as forceful as an ambulance with its siren on full. In the past ten years, non-violent civil disobedience has made a great deal
of history, especially in the southern United States. When we and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference went to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 we had decided to take action on the matter of integrated public accommodation. We went knowing that the Civil Rights Commission had written powerful documents calling for change, calling for the very rights we were demanding. But nobody did anything about the Commission's report. Nothing was done until we acted on these very issues, and demonstrated before the court of world opinion the urgent need for change. It was the same story with voting rights. The Civil Rights Commission, three years before we went to Selma, had recommended the changes we started marching for, but nothing was done until, in 1965, we created a crisis the nation couldn't ignore. Without violence, we totally disrupted the system, the life style of Birmingham, and then of Selma, with their unjust and unconstitutional laws. Our Birmingham struggle came to its dramatic climax when some 3,500 demonstrators virtually filled every jail in that city and surrounding communities, and some 4,000 more continued to march and demonstrate non-violently. The city knew then in terms that were crystal clear that Birmingham could no longer continue to function until the demands of the Negro community were met. The same kind of dramatic crisis was created in Selma two years later. The result on the national scene was the Civil Rights Bill and the Voting Rights Act, as President and Congress responded to the drama and the creative tension generated by the carefully planned demonstration.

Of course, by now it's obvious that new laws are not enough. The emergency we now face is economic, and it is a desperate and worsening situation. For the 35-million poor people in America—not even to mention, just yet, the poor in the other nations—there is a kind of strangulation in the air. In our society it's murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an
income. You're in substance saying to that man that he has no right to exist. You're in a real way depriving him of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, denying in his case the very creed of his society. Now, millions of people are being strangled that way. The problem is at least national (in fact, it's international) in scope. And it is getting worse, as the gap between the poor and the “affluent society” increases.

The question that now divides the people who want radically to change that situation is: can a program of non-violence—even if it envisions massive civil disobedience—realistically expect to meet such an enormous, entrenched evil?

First of all, will non-violence work, psychologically, after the summer of 1967? Many people feel that non-violence as a strategy for social change was cremated in the flames of the urban riots of the last two years. They tell us that Negroes have only now begun to find their true manhood in violence; that the riots prove not only that Negroes hate whites, but that, compulsively, they must destroy them.

This blood lust interpretation ignores one of the most striking features of the city riots. Violent they certainly were. But the violence, to a startling degree, was focussed against property rather than against people. There were very few cases of injury to persons, and the vast majority of the rioters were not involved at all in attacking people. The much publicized “death toll” that marked the riots, and the many injuries, were overwhelmingly inflicted on the rioters by the military. It is clear that the riots were exacerbated by police action that was designed to injure or even to kill people. As for the snipers, no accounts of the riots claim that more than one or two dozen people were involved in sniping. From the facts, an unmistakable pattern emerges: a handful of Negroes used gunfire substantially to intimidate, not to kill; and all of the other participants had a different target—property.

I am aware that there are many who wince at a distinction between property and persons—who hold both sacrosanct. My views are not so rigid. A life is sacred. Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on; it is not man.

The focus on property in the 1967 riots is not accidental. It has a message; it is saying something.

If hostility to whites were ever going to dominate a Negro's attitude and reach murderous proportions, surely it would be during a riot. But this rare opportunity for bloodletting was sublimated into arson, or turned into a kind of stormy carnival of free merchandise distribution. Why did the rioters avoid personal attacks? The explanation can't be fear of retribution, because the physical risks incurred in the attacks on property were no less than for personal assaults. The military forces were treating acts of petty larceny as equal to murder. Far more rioters took chances with their own lives, in their attacks on property, than threatened the life of anyone else. Why were they so violent with property, then? Because property represents the white-power structure, which they were attacking and trying to destroy. A curious proof of the symbolic aspect of the looting for some who took part in it is the fact that, after the riots, police received hundreds of calls from Negroes trying to return merchandise they had taken. Those people wanted the experience of taking, of redressing the power imbalance that property represents. Possession, afterwards, was secondary.

A deeper level of hostility came out in arson, which was far more dangerous than the looting. But it, too, was a demonstration and a warning. It was directed against symbols of exploitation, and it was designed to express the depth of anger in the community.

What does this restraint in the summer riots mean for our future strategy?

If one can find a core of non-violence towards persons, even during the riots when emotions were exploding, it means that non-violence should not be written off for the future as a force in Negro life. Many people believe that the urban Negro is too angry and too sophisticated to be non-violent. Those same people dismiss the non-violent marches in the south and try to describe them as processions of pious, elderly ladies. The fact is that in all the marches we have organized some men of very violent tendencies have been involved. It was routine for us to collect hundreds of knives from our own ranks before the demonstrations, in case of momentary weakness. And in Chicago last year we saw some of the most violent individuals accepting non-violent discipline. Day after day during those Chicago marches I walked in our lines and I never saw anyone retaliate with violence. There were lots of provocations, not only the screaming white hoodlums lining the sidewalks, but also groups of Negro militants talking about guerrilla warfare. We had some gang leaders and members marching with us. I remember walking with the Blackstone Rangers while bottles were flying from the sidelines, and I saw their noses being broken and blood flowing from their wounds; and I saw them continue and not retaliate, not one of them, with violence. I am convinced that even very violent temperaments can be channelled through non-violent discipline, if the movement is moving; if they can act constructively, and express through an effective channel their very legitimate anger.

But even if non-violence can be valid, psychologically, for the protesters who want change, is it going to be effective, strategically, against a Government and a
status quo
that has so far resisted this summer's demands on the grounds that “we must not reward the rioters”? Far from rewarding the rioters, far from
even giving a hearing to their just and urgent demands, the Administration has ignored its responsibility for the causes of the riots, and instead has used the negative aspects of them to justify continued inaction on the underlying issues. The Administration's only concrete response was to initiate a study and call for a day of prayer. As a minister, I take prayer too seriously to use it as an excuse for avoiding work and responsibility. When a Government commands more wealth and power than has ever been known in the history of the world, and offers no more than this, it is worse than blind, it is provocative. It is paradoxical, but fair to say, that Negro terrorism is incited less on ghetto street corners than in the halls of Congress.

I intend to show that non-violence will be effective; but not until it has achieved the massive dimensions, the disciplined planning, and the intense commitment of a sustained, direct-action movement of civil disobedience on the national scale.