Week 52: 'I think of love as something strong that organises itself in politics'

Wonder spawned in: 1968

Wondered into being by: Martin Luther King Jr.

Wonderspan: 5 minutes

To experience this wonder at its best: Make sure you can hear the sound and click 'full screen' icon.

So your brother is a garbage collector in Memphis, Tennessee, on 99 cents an hour.  He says it’s not right that when it rains, he’s sent home with no work, while his white workmates who drive the trucks are paid for doing nothing.  So today he’s on the picket line.

This is just the latest.  Your people have endured every privation you can think of.  You’ve been kept out of shops by signs on the door comparing you with apes, refused work because of the colour of your skin, told you haven’t the right to vote or go to university, and kept from eating at the same café counter as the white folks.  And when your people resisted, you were beaten by mobs, people disappeared, the law stood idly by or worse – they turned water hoses against you and your children, or set the dogs on you.

Your brother was on strike yesterday, too, and in the afternoon the police taunted him and hit him in the head.  He didn’t retaliate, though, and he’s gone back to the picket line today.

You and your brother heard Dr. King talk about his dream: ‘with this faith… we will be free one day’.  You have read Dr. King’s open letter, written on scraps of newspaper from a cell in Birmingham jail: ‘We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, … I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.’  You have seen your people rise up in Atlanta, Georgia, to put this into practice, claiming back their dignity and not letting the brutality of the state bow their heads.

Times sure are changing.  It’s 1968.  The segregated schools are gone or going.  Those ‘No Negroes’ signs are now illegal.  More black people are voting now, some are going to university.  Black and white can all eat at the lunch counters.  You can now wait with the white folks in the station waiting room and when the bus comes, take whichever seat you like, although you still get the abuse whatever you do.  Times are changing, not because your people waited for those in power to hand you freedom, but because your movement arranged boycotts, sit-ins, public education campaigns, rallies, radio and TV interviews and legal action.  You made it happen.

Dr. King has a dream, you do and your brother does too.  He’s proud to be a part of it by being on strike today and you are proud of your brother, especially today, for Martin Luther King himself is coming to town to speak.

The Mason Temple is packed, you've never seen it so full.  Your whole family is here and you have to stand at the back.  You can’t see from where you are that Dr. King is physically and mentally exhausted.  You don’t know that he’s supposed to be in Washington but insisted on supporting the Memphis garbage collectors, though his aides told him it wasn’t important enough.  You don’t realise, either, that yesterday there was a credible threat against Dr. King’s life – a bomb scare.  And no-one knows yet that tomorrow they will finally get to him, though Dr. King knows the time is coming.  You know he knows.  ‘We got to see it through,’ he says, 'I may not get there with you':

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oehry1JC9Rk

The next day Martin Luther King was assassinated by gunshot while he stood on the balcony of his motel, the Lorraine.  The killer was apparently James Earl Ray, a life-long petty criminal and escaped convict.  The FBI was accused of a conspiracy.  The evidence for this is patchy but they had a motive; when King won the Nobel Prize for Peace (at the age of just 35), the FBI called him a ‘vicious’ fraud and ‘an evil, abnormal beast’.

(There was a slightly longer clip on YouTube but the multinational corporation EMI had it taken down saying it was their own intellectual property: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL4FOvIf7G8

But a grainy version of the whole speech with a brief introduction is here: http://vimeo.com/3816635 )

Letter from Birmingham Jail

Dr. King’s letter from Birmingham jail was an open reply to a criticism from six white clergy denouncing the movement’s acts of civil disobedience in the city.  It was written on scraps of newspaper and smuggled out because he was denied anything to write with.  He was but one of 3,000 or so protesters jailed for nonviolence resistance in Birmingham.  ‘We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people,’ he wrote, and:

‘Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.’

The whole thing is well worth a read: http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

‘Nonviolence’ – what is it?

I don’t know anyone who actually thinks ‘nonviolence’ is a suitable word for what it is supposed to mean.  It looks like it means ‘not violent’ but that is only part of it and not the main part at that.  'Nonviolence' is an attempt to translate a Hindu word coined by Gandhi, satyagraha, meaning something like the power (agraha) of truthfulness (satya).  One way of interpreting satyagraha is as the power of holding faith with the dignity of life – your own and others’ – when it is threatened.  For the truthfulness which makes a claim on the nonviolence activist is not just any old truth, but to the dignity of being.  Satyagrahis are people who try to do this.  While satyagraha implies a commitment not to be violent, in the first place it suggests a certain kind of commitment to social change and, most importantly, to the means of change through a kind of faithfulness to one’s self and to others.  Gandhi turned this insight into a movement based on nonviolent civil disobedience to British rule and oppression of India.

So nonviolence doesn’t mean just ‘not violent’, which lets your oppressor walk all over you.  Rather, it’s a form of active resistance.  It’s neither politics without love, which is violence, nor love without politics, which is sentimentality – it is a loving kind of politics, a political kind of loving.  In the terms of the Civil Rights movement, nonviolence meant being willing to ‘put your body on the line’.  Martin Luther King expressed it like this: ‘I think of love as something strong that organises itself in politics and direct action.’  It put him and thousands of others in jail and it got him and Gandhi assassinated – it’s hardly a soft option.

As a method of social change, nonviolence lays bare a conflict that is already present and then, often, escalates it to create  a crisis point at which change becomes possible.  The authorities of Birmingham, Alabama, unjustly banned the Civil Rights marchers, who decided to march anyway.  This raised the temperature of the conflict because it put the ball back in the authorities’ court.  They reacted with attack dogs, water cannon, and by putting over 3,000 people in jail.  Still the marchers kept marching and did not retaliate with violence.  The result was TV coverage showing state power used in violence against innocent people.  This shocked the nation and the world.  The outrage put pressure on the intransigence of reactionary politicians and gave progressive ones the support they needed to introduce Civil Rights legislation in the next two years.  So, in that case, the determined, concerted, and well-planned nonviolent action of ordinary people brought lasting political change.

Unfortunately the word ‘nonviolence’ still looks like it just means ‘not violent’, when it means so much more than that but until we think of a better word we’ll keep calling these mass expressions of faithfulness ‘nonviolence movements’.  These are at work all over the world – at the gates of British nuclear weapons bases, at tar sands extraction sites in Canada, in the fields of India to resist corporate take-over of the land, and in most other corners of the world.  Every nonviolence movement inspires every other and teaches something new about this very practical, political way of loving.

(By the way, the boat I live on is named ‘Promise’ after the bit in Martin Luther King’s Mountaintop Speech where he says ‘I’ve seen the Promised Land.’)

Extra…

Here is some footage from Gandhi’s Salt March in 1930.  The Salt March or Salt Satyagraha was an act of nonviolent resistance against an oppressive salt tax levied against the Indian poor by the British Raj.  The marchers walked 241 miles through Gujarat to the sea and began to harvest their own, tax-free salt.  This gave hope to millions of Indians who began resisting their British rulers in other nonviolent ways.  It’s a bit too simple just to say that the British panicked, used violence, then gave up, but that pretty much was the outcome.  Eventually they gave up India entirely.  That didn’t happen just because of the Salt March or other nonviolence movements, but these were instrumental to say the least in achieving independence.  In turn, Gandhi’s methods inspired activists in other countries, not least Martin Luther King.  Here is some original footage from the Salt March – the parts don’t quite mesh together but they’re well worth a watch.

• Part I: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln-tid6Q2mA
• Part II: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJdErHQGEHM
• Part III: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POPdanf_F78
• Part IV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVEXCkZp1PQ

The most significant thing about the Civil Rights movement and the struggle for Indian independence was not their (largely) nonviolent character, important thought that was.  What mattered more was that these were a social movements of ordinary people with no unusual power, role or position, who effectively challenged the edifice of state-sanctioned injustice and helped to build a more life-affirming society.  In the following short film the Dongria Kondh people are resisting the multinational mining company Vedanta Resources, which plans to open a huge open-cast mine on the community’s sacred mountain: http://www.survivalinternational.org/films/mine  (Thanks to Sunniva T for suggesting this one.)

P V Rajagopal talks about his work applying Gandhian insights to grassroots social change movements in India to support rural poor people and their right to work the land and resist its takeover by multinational corporations: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHHwNCW5XOU

And what about you and me?  What movement are we part of?

  

Bye-bye!

We’ve reached the end of our year of wonders for Monday morning!  We’ve had 52 ways of loving, from Eva Szasz’s Cosmic Zoom to Martin Luther King’s mountaintop speech.  Thank you for following the blog all this way.  Thanks especially if you suggested your own Monday wonders.  I did get stuck a few times and one or two of your suggestions saved me from despair late on Sunday night.  I’m sorry that I couldn’t include all your suggestions but in a few days I’ll include an entry listing all the bits that didn’t make it.

All the entries are still available at www.waysofloving.com and on the wonder map so you can always go round again if you like.

It’s not a bad thing that it’s coming to an end, though.  YouTube seems plastered with ads now anyway.  The real wonders are out there and not on our screens… but you know that.

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www.waysofloving.com