skye-is-blu: Really? You’re advocating violence? Civil disobedience works, just look at history. Nonviolent protests work. Look at Ghandi, Montgomery bus bycott, women’s suffrage, MLK washington march. There are so many examples of peaceful protests that have either sparked conversation about the way we do things and treat others or have even contributed to the end of the injustice in question altogether.
I’m gonnna quote Peter Gelderloos How Nonviolence Protects the State here because he said it better than I ever could:
The pacifist history of India’s independence movement is a selective and incomplete picture. Nonviolence was not universal in India. Pacifists white out those other forms of resistance and help propagate the false history that Gandhi and his disciples were the lone masthead and rudder of Indian resistance. Ignored are important militant leaders such as Chandrasekhar Azad, who fought in armed struggle against the British colonizers, and revolutionaries such as Bhagat Singh, who won mass support for bombings and assassinations as part of a struggle to accomplish the “overthrow of both foreign and Indian capitalism.”
The pacifist history of India’s struggle cannot make any sense of the fact that Subhas Chandra Bose, the militant candidate, was twice elected president of the Indian National Congress, in 1938 and 1939. History remembers Gandhi above all others not because he represented the unanimous voice of India, but because of all the attention he was given by the British press and the prominence he received from being included in important negotiations with the British colonial government.
The common projection is that the movement against racial oppression in the United States was primarily nonviolent. On the contrary, though pacifist groups such as Martin Luther King Jr.‘s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had considerable power and influence, popular support within the movement, especially among poor black people, increasingly gravitated toward militant revolutionary groups such as the Black Panther Party. Pacifist, middle-class black activists, including King, got much of their power from the specter of black resistance and the presence of armed black revolutionaries.
In the spring of 1963, Martin Luther King Jr.‘s Birmingham campaign was looking like it would be a repeat of the dismally failed action in Albany, Georgia Then, on May 7 in Birmingham, after continued police violence, three thousand black people began fighting back, pelting the police with rocks and bottles. Just two days later, Birmingham — up until then an inflexible bastion of segregation — agreed to desegregate downtown stores, and President Kennedy backed the agreement with federal guarantees. The next day, after local white supremacists bombed a black home and a black business, thousands of black people rioted again, seizing a 9 block area, destroying police cars, injuring several cops (including the chief inspector), and burning white businesses. A month and a day later, President Kennedy was calling for Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act, ending several years of a strategy to stall the civil rights movement. Perhaps the largest of the limited, if not hollow, victories of the civil rights movement came when black people demonstrated they would not remain peaceful forever. Faced with the two alternatives, the white power structure chose to negotiate with the pacifists, and we have seen the results.
Privileged white people were instrumental in appointing activists such as Gandhi and King to positions of leadership on a national scale. Among white activists and, not coincidentally, the white-supremacist ruling class, the civil rights-era March on Washington is associated first and foremost with Martin Luther King Jr.‘s “I Have a Dream” speech. Mostly absent from the white consciousness, but at least as influential to black people, was Malcolm X’s perspective, as articulated in his speech criticizing the march’s leadership:
“It was the grassroots out there in the street. It scared the white man to death, scared the white power structure in Washington, DC, to death; I was there. When they found out this black steamroller was going to come down on the capital, they called in…these national Negro leaders that you respect and told them, “Call it off.” Kennedy said, “Look, you all are letting this thing go too far.” And Old Tom said, “Boss, I can’t stop it because I didn’t start it.” I’m telling you what they said. They said, “I’m not even in it, much less at the head of it.” They said, “These Negroes are doing things on their own. They’re running ahead of us.” And that old shrewd fox, he said, “If you all aren’t in it, I’ll put you in it. I’ll put you at the head of it. I’ll endorse it. I’ll welcome it….
This is what they did at the march on Washington. They joined it…became part of it, took it over. And as they took it over, it lost its militancy. It ceased to be angry, it ceased to be hot, it ceased to be uncompromising. Why, it even ceased to be a march. It became a picnic, a circus. Nothing but a circus, with clowns and all…. No, it was a sellout. It was a takeover….They controlled it so tight, they told those Negroes what time to hit town, where to stop, what signs to carry, what song to sing, what speech they could make, and what speech they couldn’t make, and then told them to get out of town by sundown.”
The end result of the march was to invest significant movement resources, at a critical time, in an ultimately pacifying event. Demonstrators received premade protest signs with government-approved slogans; the speeches of several protest leaders, including SNCC chairman John Lewis, were censored to take out threats of armed struggle and criticisms of the government’s civil rights bill; and, just as Malcolm X described, at the end, the whole crowd was told to leave as soon as possible.
Even Gandhi and King agreed it was necessary to support armed liberation movements where there was no nonviolent alternative, prioritizing goals over particular tactics. But the mostly white pacifists of today erase this part of the history and re-create nonviolence to fit their comfort level.
King’s more disturbing (to white people) criticism of racism is avoided and his clichéd prescriptions for feel-good, nonviolent activism are repeated ad nauseum, allowing white pacifists to cash in on an authoritative cultural resource to confirm their nonviolent activism.
Further reading: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-how-nonviolence-protects-the-state
