The Future of Non-Violence
A few summers ago, not long after it opened, we visited the Holocaust
Museum in Washington,
D. C. Someone in charge had decided that it would be more meaningful if
tourists
would identify with the people who had actually suffered under the
madness of the 1930's and '40's; so we were each given a card with a
brief biography of one of the
victims on it; then we were herded into a blank-sided, cargo-like
elevator which
took us to the top floor where the tour of the museum began. The all
but overcrowded
elevator and corridors through the exhibits were also designed to give
us some sense of
the experience as it had been for those who had been deemed
less-than-human by the
prevailing social and political mind-set of their time and place.
So far as I could see, the notion that 1990's tourists on vacation
could thus be
urged to identify with those who had been starved, terrorized and herded
like cattle
to the slaughter-- that conceit did not make it. Despite the profound
sadness some
of us felt, there were younger folk who chattered and nagged as they
often do when you
take them to something "educational." They wanted to hurry on to get
ice cream or
ride the merry-go-round or climb on the dinosaur.
What was so poignant for me was that our son, who was then working in
Washington,
had gotten the tickets for us and was with us on our tour of the
museum. And knowing
the nature of his work, I could not help thinking that a Holocaust
Museum for a future
generation might well look like a mock-up of the neighborhood where he
worked, doing
everything he could in an all but desperate attempt to help young teens
of African-American
descent to escape the holocaust that burns in the center of that city
and cities all over this country, a madness based to some extent on race
and color, but even
more, on the poverty and desperation to which they are born-- the near
impossibility
of having access to the otherwise "normal" resources of the human
community.
With the opening of the Holocaust museum, the publication of histories
of the era,
and the distribution of movies like, "Schindler's List," there always
surfaces some
who doubt, denying that the Holocaust of the 30's and 40's ever
happened. Unfortunately I am not so sure why that should seem so
bizarre when we know and practice a similar
sort of violence in our country and continue to conspire to deny or
ignore it.
Perhaps we think we solved the problem in the 60's. Certainly that was
a period when
the conscience and consciousness of the country was challenged over and
over again.
The decade of the sixties was such a period of transition, of beginnings
and endings,
of highs and lows--for me personally, as well as for the larger
society-- that I
still find it difficult to realize that our four children only know
about it from
written reports and other documentaries. And yet their beginnings were
curiously intertwined
in one way or another with the earth-shaking, world-shattering moments
that occurred
so frequently during that era.
Our first-born was giggling at me from his playpen while we awaited his
Dad's lunchtime
return from theological school classes when the media announced the
assassination
of President Kennedy.
Our second son was due to be born in just two months when the
congregation sent
his Dad, their minister, as one of its representatives to the Civil
Rights March
in Selma in the early spring of 1965.
Our third son, though we weren't aware of it at the time, made his entry
into the
world almost in tandem with the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement
in Chicago
in 1966. (We didn't know it, because we didn't meet him until later
that year when
the social worker on our adoption case decided that our Unitarian
Universalist milieu would
be safe enough for the then African-American ward of the State of
Illinois to grow
up in. Fortunately for us, that same social worker, an African American
himself,
didn't join the Black Power militants until after we had adopted
Stephen.
Members of the suburban Chicago Unitarian Universalist congregation
David was then
serving had worked hard to desegregate housing in their town before we
got there.
And then, a group of them during our tenure, mounted what became a
traveling Reader's
Theater production of Martin B. Duberman's "In White
America." It was meant to be an
educational device within the local community, but somehow it just kept
on going,
eventually being performed in several states for some 50 performances or
so by our
interacial group--we were descendants of African, Asian and European
immigrants to North
America. I was only able to participate in about half of those
performances because
the advent of our daughter made it necessary that I relinquish the white
blouse and
black skirt costume of our Readers Theater Company for maternity
clothes, and then retire
from the company for the few months surrounding her birth. When word
came that terrible
April day in 1968 as we were about to leave for another performance that
Dr. King
had been shot in Memphis, she was just one month short of her first
birthday; her
brothers were two, almost three, and seven. They may not remember the
events I associate
with their beginnings, but the world they now must deal with as adults
reflects in
its reality and in its potential the events, activities, personalities
and ideas of
that awesome and terrible decade.
This weekend as we mark the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
martyr--or so
we tell the children-- to the cause of civil rights for people of color,
it is time
to look more closely at his all-encompassing legacy which indeed grew
out of his
experience of having been born black in white America.
Quoting now from PARTING THE WATERS, America in the King Years
1954-63
by Taylor Branch in reference to an early '60's session of the Southern
Christian
Leadership Conference:
...[Dr.] King...was reminding his audience of major SCLC events
ahead... when one
of the white men in the audience walked to the stage and lashed out with
his right
fist. The blow made a loud popping sound as it landed on King's left
cheek, He
staggered backward and spun half around.
The entire crowd observed in silent, addled awe. Some people
thought King had
been introducing the man as one of the white dignitaries so
conspicuously welcome
at Birmingham's first fully integrated convention. Others thought the
attack might
be a staged demonstration from the nonviolence workshops. But now the
man was hitting King
again, this time on the side of his face from behind, and twice more in
the back.
Shrieks and gasps went up from the crowd... . People recalled feeling
physically
jolted by the force of the violence--from both the attack on King and
the flash of hatred
through the auditorium.
The assailant slowed rather than quickened the pace of his blows,
expecting,
as he said later, to be torn to pieces by the crowd. But he struck
powerfully.
After being knocked backward by one of the last blows, King turned to
face him while
dropping his hands. It was the look on his face that many would not
forget. Septima Clark,
who nursed many private complaints about the strutting ways of the SCLC
preachers
and would not have been shocked to see the unloosed rage of an exalted
leader, marveled
instead at King's transcendent calm. King dropped his hands "like
a newborn baby,"
she said, and from then on she never doubted that his nonviolence was
more than the
heat of his oratory or the result of his slow calculation. It was the
response of
his quickest instincts. This impression struck a number of others,
including perhaps the
assailant himself, who stared at King long enough for...others to jump
between them.
"Don't touch him!" cried King. "Don't touch him.
We have to pray for him."
His words, signaling an end to the immediate crisis, released a flood
of noise...
. One of [the preachers] jumped to the microphone to hold back the
crowd, saying,
"We can handle this on stage." ...King kept talking quietly to
the white man, saying no one
was going to hurt him, and the man said very little except to mumble
that he believed
in white supremacy and that Sammy Davis, Jr. had married a white
woman. (pp.653-4)
That happened in September 1962. Martin Luther King, Jr., scholarly son
and grandson
of southern Negro Baptist ministers, himself a Baptist minister with a
theological
education from an integrated seminary and a Ph. D. from Boston
University, had been
pressed into the leadership position of the eventually successful
Montgomery Bus Boycott
that consumed a year of his first pastorate in the mid-fifties. Early
in 1959, as
the organizer and head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
who had carried his concern over the plight of Negroes across the
country and beyond, he had visited
India, meeting and talking with followers of Gandhi and, in the process,
deepening
his understanding of and commitment to the use of nonviolent resistance
as the most
powerful instrument of change available to the oppressed. The following
year, arrested
with 33 young people during a lunch counter sit-in in his native
Atlanta, he had
been jailed for the first time but championed by presidential candidate
John F. Kennedy.
The year following the convention attack King was jailed again.
This time, from
his solitary confinement in the Birmingham jail, he wrote in a long
letter on the
margins of smuggled-in newspapers a statement of his philosophy and his
commitment
to active nonviolence. In and out of jail, in and out of favor with his
peers and contemporaries
--black and white-- spied on by the FBI, now courted, now shunned by
governmental
leadership, the next five or so years --what proved to be be his last
years--were filled with marches and speeches and protests and
demonstrations as he sought the
reconciliation of black and white, of oppressed and oppressor. He was
awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. And his concept of the scope of the social
ills resolvable
by active nonviolence expanded: in April of 1967 he announced his
opposition to the war
in Viet Nam; as leader of the Poor People's Campaign he was in Memphis
in support
of the sanitation workers' strike when a sniper's bullet felled him in
his thirty-ninth
year.
Branch summarizes the legacy of the two murdered leaders:
The reaction to Kennedys' assassination pushed deep enough and wide
enough in the
high ground of political emotion to enable the movement to
institutionalize its major
gains before receding. Legal segregation was doomed. Negroes no longer
were invisible, nor those of normal capacity viewed as statistical
freaks. In this sense, Kennedy's
murder marked the arrival of the freedom surge, just as King's own death
four years
hence marked its demise. New interior worlds were opened, along with a
means of
understanding freedom movements all over the globe. King was swelling.
Race had taught
him hard lessons about the greater witness of sacrifice than truth, but
there was
more. Nonviolence had come over him for a purpose that far transcended
segregation.
It touched evils beyond color and addressed needs more human than
status or possessions,
Having lifted him up among rulers, it would drive him back down to die
among garbage
workers in Memphis. (p. 922)
Perhaps Branch was right: the freedom surge was only four years in
duration. But
it did bring about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights
Act of 1965
and endowed many people of color with a new sense of self-worth while
embarassed,
awakened-- guilty--European Americans began to perceive a new definition
of fuller humanity.
But, the riots which immediately followed the King assassination, the
controversy
that raged on over our adventure in Viet Nam, the continuing bent toward
conspiracy,
intrigue and dirty tricks in high governmental circles and the the
various attempts we
have made through military means to mold the world at least to our
leaders' liking,
to say nothing of what passes for public entertainment! still bespeak a
monstrously
violent society.
Martin Luther King, Jr., catalyzed and initiated a movement toward
freedom and dignity,
reconciliation and peace. But, for the most part, since his death what
remains of
that movement has been owned by and restricted to African Americans,
except, of course for his birthday which so cynically is used as yet
another holiday to boost retail
sales.
The realities of the sixties-- the beatings, the bombings, the murders,
the protests,
the sit-ins, the marches over the issue of racial segregation certainly
did not result
in the complete conversion of this nation to the just society it
purports to be.
In his last year or so even Dr. King began to realize that the issues
of race and
poverty were but specific symptoms of a larger social ill. He said:
"For years I laboured with the idea of reforming the existing
institutions of society,
a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite
differently. I think
you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution
of values."
And, in good prophetic style, he pointed:
"The greatest irony and tragedy of all is that our nation, which
initiated so much
of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world, is now cast in the mold
of being
an arch antirevolutionary."
The realities of our current decade beset us with continuing
inequalities on racial
and ethnic bases, with reports of child abuse and battered women, with
homelessness
and joblessness, escalating poverty and widening class divisions, and
with a leadership that continues to see only arms and police action and
prisons as solutions to social
and political problems rather than placing a priority on our corporate
responsibility
as a nation for feeding the hungry, providing shelter and education and
access to
the resources that insure the welfare of all the people for all the
people. These
realities bespeak a society permeated by-- invested in, violence no less
than the
impoverished German nation that once played into the hands of a mad
demagogue, whose
insanity was so meagerly echoed by the near-witless American Nazi
"lieutenant" who accosted
Martin Luther King, Jr., that late September afternoon in 1962.
In some ways, it is a bleak and frightening world this January 1997.
But the potential
for change, the possible direction that would build a more responsible,
gentler nation
that could extend its hopeful and helpful influence around the globe was
revealed in the teachings and in the "transcendant calm" of
the self-styled "drum major"
of the march for justice and peace whose birthday anniversary we
celebrate this weekend.
Not that Martin Luther King, Jr., was a god, or even a saint. He did
not know certainty and success in all his ventures, nor was he able to
break out of the patriarchal
mold which infects religion and politics and cultural expectations as we
know them.
But as an exemplar of nonviolent resistance, he demonstrated that we
are not inherently, genetically, inexorably doomed to be ever
characterized by violence against ourselves,
each other, our planet home. Rather in the life and career of Dr. King
we may discern
our own human potential for constructing a future of nonviolence.
Curiously and perhaps understandably, we have no positive word for the
concept of
reconciliation-through-pacific-confrontation that is alluded to by the
term , "nonviolent
resistance" or "active nonviolence." But we have Dr.King's example
as well as that of many who worked with him-- all very human
individuals-- who endured violent physical
and spiritual assaults but were nonetheless capable of caring for their
oppressors
and able to respond without rancor even unto death.
Ever the prophet, King knew that the Promised Land of a nonviolent
future was not
likely to be realized quickly or soon. We still hear his resonant
sermonic voice
intoning: "I may not get to the promised land with you," he
said on the eve of his
assassination, "but ...we as a people will." His Dream
continues despite the nightmare world
we inhabit alongside the gentler one which resides in each of us. Our
choice of
which we will nourish to fruition will determine how many monuments to
holocausts
coming generations must raise, be they museums or Birthday holidays or
graveyards for the
homeless and outcast of society. Our choice will determine whether or
not there
will be a future of nonviolence.
The sermon in a Unitarian Universalist setting is never the last word
on any subject, but rather an invitation to further dialog.
You may want to read other visitors'
comments on Beverly Bumbaugh's "The Future of Non-Violence"
.
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Bill Griffeth
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