Messaging, media, fight for the frame

Messaging and media liaison work

Seven days a week I grasped for every handle I could in order to pump words from movement centers into the circuits of the news media.[1]

--Mary E. King, communications worker for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the Civil Rights Movement (photo from 1964)

Arguably, few activities are more crucial to the success of any campaign, any movement, than messaging, which both crafts and disseminates the messages that create, validate, and develop a base of support for the campaign. Social movement researchers stress the need to craft messages that demonstrate a problem, promote viable alternatives, and convince the general public that ordinary people can bring about the needed changes.[2]

Thus, one of your campaign’s first tasks is to form a media committee, as the linchpin of campaign recruitment. The skills required of media committee members include developing a perceptible narrative, distinguishing what will make astute timing, and creating a broad, realistic understanding that it is the campaign or movement that must manage all publicity problems, not the media outlet personnel.[3]

Our job was to change the public narrative.

--Reverend Barber[4]

Some activists seem to believe that, along with Oscar Wilde, there is “no such thing as bad publicity,” but in campaigns of nonviolent action that is false. Merely one maladroitly distributed message can harm the image, dampen recruitment, foster a perception of hopelessness, drive away the as-yet uncommitted, and reduce “people power” human agency. 

On the other hand, a carefully created and masterfully managed public information effort can project a positive profile, engender hope, attract fence-sitters, and present a picture of strength that presages victory for civil society. 

The media team that maintains a tight two-way communication with the core organizers will more likely avoid missteps, especially the fatal flaw of promulgating a message that runs counter to that of the core of leadership. It is in the nature of popular (meaning of the people) campaigns that in the absence of an intentional strategy, it will not work to have one person doing this and another performing that, one committee presenting this but another undertaking that. In any effective campaign the media teams will bear in mind the “One band, one sound” agreement. 

A media campaign is strongest when it reveals participation by large numbers and masses of people, rather than a weak-appearing handful of scattered activists who are easily sidelined, thereby stamping the campaign as marginal. Avoiding outreach to media outlets until your internal strength shows strength and unity. As Reverend Barber wrote, “While they are ignoring you, you have time to build power.”[5]

This is not to suggest that acts of inspiration by a sympathetic individual or small group are not important to publicize—they are. When a Rosa Parks offers civil resistance as a lone compelling and moral figure, all publicity efforts are important. A sympathetic figure who takes a moral stand will generate interest, sympathy, and participants if the communications workers do a good job of crafting a message that appeals to most people.

Prepare media lists that match your objectives. For example, if your campaign is directed at pressuring a state legislature and governor to pass a measure that will uplift vulnerable people, a state media list should include all newspapers, radio producers, television reporters and producers, and social media. Deciding how to approach each event or story is important. 

For example, researcher Janjira Sombatpoonsiri[6]researched the use of media in Serbia under extremely state-dominated repressive authoritarianism. She found that there was still competition to scoop rival media outlets and that activists could use that rivalry to induce competition for campaign stories. Otpor! (Resistance!) student activists assured editors that they had the scoop, which put double pressure on the editors to not only use it because they wished to outdo other media outlets, but to also feature the campaign story prominently to encourage the activists to view them again as being worthy of an exclusive angle. 

On the other hand, broad dissemination of a media release is often preferred, in the hope that some media will use it and some may follow up. Each media team, in consultation with the core leadership, must make each of these decisions based on best assessments of real time factors. 

Framing is key. When, for example, the Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan was advised to tone down his strident objections to drafting young men to fight in Vietnam, Berrigan’s response was, “If the government were coming for TVs and cars, then you’d be upset. But, as it is, they’re only coming for your sons.”[7]Recasting your narrative to illustrate its urgency and moral necessity is critical. 

Multiple vectors are more effective than single outlet messaging. Nonviolence analyst Shaazka Beyerle wrote of the anti-corruption people power movement in Addiopizzo, Italy, that messaging was launched via “stickers, sheets and banners, T-shirts, websites, web banners, social networking (Facebook, YouTube, blogging, Internet mailing lists, e-newsletters, leaflets, advertising (billboards), children’s rap songs, poster contests in partnership with Solidaria (a civil rights organization supporting Mafia victims), theatre skits, and media coverage and interviews.”[8]Toss in any of the newer social media platforms for expanded outreach.

Be aware of hooks on which to hang your story, especially as they relate to the roving attention of mainstream media. So, for example, when radical nonviolent humanitarian group Voices in the Wilderness (VitW) wanted to bring food and medicine to Iraq in violation of sanctions in the 1990s, they did many of their aid actions when international attention was focused on the sanctions-driven hunger and healthcare crisis that UNICEF estimated killed a half million Iraqi children under five years old. The timing of VitW actions and messaging was greatly enhanced by bringing it all into the international spotlight already shining on Iraq.[9]That angle greatly advanced the participation of civil society in breaking those killer sanctions.

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[1] King, Mary E. (2010). “Getting out the news,” (pp. 332-344), in Holsaert, Faith S.; et alia (Eds.) (2012). Hands on the freedom plow: Personal accounts by women in SNCC. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press (p. 335). 

[2]Maney, Gregory M., Patrick G. Coy, and Lynne M. Woehrle. 2009. "Pursuing Political Persuasion: War and Peace Frames in the United States after September 11th." Social Movement Studies 8, no. 4: 299-322.

[3]https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/resource/pressing-case-nonviolent-movements-media-part-1/

[4] Barber (p. 85)

[5] Barber (p. 55)

[6]Sombatpoonsiri, Janjira (2015). Humor and nonviolent struggle in Serbia. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. 

[7] Polner, Murray, and Jim O’Grady (1997). Disarmed and dangerous: The radical lives and times of Daniel and Philip Berrigan. New York, NY: HarperCollins (p. 189).

[8]Beyerle, Shaazka (2014). Curtailing corruption: People power for accountability & justice. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner (p. 127). One might add sidewalk chalk, murals, projected images onto buildings, Reddit AMA, Twitter, Instagram, phone banks and door-to-door canvassing.

[9] Kelly, Kathy & Rai, Milan (2009). “Voices in the Wilderness: Campaigning against sanctions on Iraq, 1995-2005)” pp. 143-149 in Clark, Howard (Ed.). People power: Unarmed resistance and global solidarity. New York, NY: Pluto. 

Campaign design, logistics, sequencing

Campaign design, resistance logistics, sequencing

Movements teach you to make plans and then remake them on the go.[1]

--Reverend William Barber II

Young nonviolent resisters in war-torn Serbia started a group, Otpor! (Resistance!) and they held to several strategic perspectives as they organized, trained, did actions (rinse and repeat). In 10 months, they had overthrown the dictator. “Strategy,” they write, “is the conception of how best to act in order to achieve objectives, given limited resources and condition of uncertainty.”[2]Put another way, writes nonviolent theorist Gene Sharp, “Directed action in accordance with a strategic plan enables one to concentrate one’s strengths and actions to move in a determined direction toward the desired goal.”[3]

A movement, writes Reverend Barber, is created in 14 ways: indigenous grassroots organizing, use moral language, commit to nonviolent civil disobedience, lift the voices of everyday people, race is central, broad and multi-faith coalition, seek unlikely allies, build long-term relationships, commit to empirical analysis, coordinate all social media, register and educate voters, gather a strong legal team, fuse culture, move from moment to movement.[4]

This is a complex and daunting list, yet very helpful to bear in mind. This is not a sequential list; the any movement may punctuate many activities with song or art or film or dance to build that fusion culture, just as movements have done throughout history and around the world.[5]

Some campaigns employ an affinity group structure. The advantages of such an organizational option include a deeper level of camaraderie, trust, and an innate inoculation against agents provocateurs.[6]

Affinity groups only operate within all mandated codes of conduct; for example, no independent affinity group actions should occur without express approval from state and national leadership if that is the scope of the campaign. 

Within the context of the larger campaign, affinity groups can bring together tight units of participants who share profound religious or philosophical beliefs (e.g. Sufi, Buddhist, evangelical Christian, anarchist), or who approach their involvement with the campaign from a particular personal or professional identity (e.g., transgender, nurses, hearing impaired, members of a particular union). 

At a mass action, then, an affinity group of Filipinas may stay together and may thus recruit more Filipinas by their group solidarity, comfort and cohesion, while losing no connection to the larger mass effort. Their messaging in-between actions to more folks who share their identity may be a strong recruitment strategy or at least one that generates more sympathy for the overall campaign. 

In the Moral Monday movement quite often a large crowd would gather at the state capitol building and when it came time to offer direct action moral witness, the crowd would part and those who had been through the nonviolence training and were wearing specially colored armbands would walk forward together.[7]They would be arrested, a tactic that showed coordination, organization, and discipline. While there are many possible tactical scenarios, it is important to consider each new idea using the filter of recruitment, and thus image that appeals rather than alienates. Looking chaotic and undisciplined will alienate. Preparation and logistics are important. 

A flow chart for shorter-term campaigns can assist campaign workers to plug into task teams when it’s most helpful, to shift their focus when their skills are needed on a different time-urgent task, and can help organizers to delegate and strategize on a reiterative basis. 

The flow chart may show that, for example, media work does not begin until a benchmark has been achieved, for example, 100 people have signed their commitment to risk arrest at the state capitol. When the media team begins to promote the organizing work at a point where something tangible can be noted, they can work with an image of strength, and within a coalition that can legitimately insist on a seat at the table to negotiate a victory. Protracting a campaign’s actions and spacing them periodically is one way to keep media outlets observing and reporting on your group’s actions.

Many campaigns orient, frame, and identify themselves as ideologically consistent and some simply have a goal and a code of conduct. Both can succeed. "Moral direct action" incorporates acts of witness and inspiration even though no realistic assessment would predict any immediate resultant policy change. This is in fact the history of many successful movements, from the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation[8]to the very first Moral Monday. From a launch of moral authority can come a mass movement. From a launch of shared grievance and cohesive leadership can also come a mass movement.

Sequencing is often aligning assessed incremental goals along the path toward the meta-goal. So, for example, the small but powerful acts of black citizens in the South attempting to register to vote helped prompt the Selma campaign of 1965, which helped lead to the Voting Rights Act that year but Dr. King and the other leadership then organized some 1,500 volunteers to actually register voters in 120 key rural counties in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, and Florida.[9]Each sequential step was a herculean effort and each was necessary. The first attempts to register black voters dramatized the need for the legislation and only then was the actual goal a possibility—and had the movement failed to take that final step the entire campaign would have been hollow and only symbolic. 

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[1] Barber (p. 111)

[2]Popovic, Srdja; Djinovic, Slobodan; Milivojevic, Andre J.; Merriman, Hardy; Marovic, Ivan (2007). CANVAS core curriculum: A guide to effective nonviolent struggle. Belgrade, Serbia: CANVAS (p. 78).

[3] Sharp, Gene (2003). There are realistic alternatives. Boston, MA: The Albert Einstein Institution (p. 19).

[4] Barber (pp. 127-130)

[5]McAllister, Pam (1988). You can’t kill the spirit.Philadelphia, PA: New Society Press.

[6]Donnelly, Kate (nd). Handbook for nonviolent action. New York, NY: War Resisters League.

[7] Barber (p. 106)

[8] Dekar, Paul R. (2016). Dangerous people: The Fellowship of Reconciliation building a nonviolent world of freedom, justice, and peace. Virginia Beach, VA: Donning. The 1947 Journey of Reconciliation was an integrated bus trip of 16 both black and white civil rights activists meant to challenge segregated buses on federally regulated interstate travel in the South.

[9]Schulke, Flip & McPhee, Penelope (1986). King Remembered. New York, NY: Pocket.

Target choice

Power research and target choice

The intellectual and other streams feeding the phenomenon of civilian-based nonviolent power are rich and venerable. Etienne de la Boetie in the 16th century formulated the notion of consent as the ultimate source of political power, wrote about the origins of dictatorship, developed the analysis of political power in which the technique of non-violent struggle is rooted and described the means by which people could prevent political enslavement and liberate themselves.

--Berel Rodal[1]

In the days of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a volunteer professor ran a small shop within SNCC doing research on power structures, interlocking corporate and bank boards of directors, and property ownership in counties and towns. What we now call “power research” looks for actual beneficiaries when thinking about harmful policies, and seeks to discern not merely the official levers of power and the known elected officials who might make public decisions, but also to seek deeper knowledge about oppositional forces and tangible influences large and small.

Before you get loud, be sure you’re not wrong.

--Reverend William Barber II[2]

Oxford historian Paul Kennedy researched the fall of great empires and identified one of the primary factors as “imperial overstretch,” that is, trying to control too much for the mounting costs involved. Empires fell.[3]And as lifelong civil rights organizer Bernard Lafayette notes, it is important to impose new and challenging costs by your resistance. A member of the 1960 Nashville student sit-in campaigns, he recalls that the effort was intended to “be a burden on the system.”[4]

Advance research into ownership, the powers-behind-the-powers, and unseen controlling influences can help in choosing short, medium-term, and even longer term targets. While the emotional content of a liberation struggle has multiple levels, so too does the research into the deeper control layers of power over domineering and unequal societal institutions. Veteran organizer, professor, and author George Lakey notes that figuring out who you can ask to make the change you want must focus on the one who can actually do that or your campaign is impotent.[5]

And so, bear in mind that the agenda is not the target. The Moral Monday movement, for instance, had 14 agenda items but focused on one target at a time, just as Dr. King had eliminating racism, militarism, and materialism as his agenda but moved from target to target as others requested his presence. He was assassinated, after all, working for the betterment of Memphis garbage haulers. 

When the Women’s Strike for Peace spun off of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in 1961, it did so in response to the publicly known health risks from open-air nuclear testing. That agenda drove their varying target choices, which included Congress and the President, but also all American men, American business, and American society. They expressly took to the streets during business hours, withdrawing their paid and unpaid work in an urgent bid to push for a treaty banning the tests that were spreading airborne radiation around the world. Their effective choice of targets and powerful messaging help push President Kennedy to sign the historic Partial Test Ban Treaty, ending open-air testing.[6]The agenda may not even be the target if research reveals that works best.

This power research is prefigured by a social power analysis, locating primary power, however latent, in society, and secondary power as held by the political elite, which seems far more monolithic than it really is, once social power is exercised.[7]

But power research needs to also turn to involved communities and develop clear pictures of demographics, income levels, and asset maps, that is, understanding of potential resources and untapped strengths.[8]Developing asset conversations, surveys, and assessments can reveal possible capacities. For participants already involved, what do they do professionally? What areas of campaign organizing might match their skills? Who do they know who can help? 

In the case of the attempt to roll back the gains made in the Wake County school system since the Brown v Board of Educationdecision of 1954, the precursor organization to Moral Mondays did their dual research, first tracing the influential huge donations back to the Koch brothers and even noting that the Koch brothers’ father had led the effort to try to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren after Brown. They also examined the data that showed the dramatic improvement in educational achievement metrics as a result of the mandated desegregation.[9]This gave them the push and pull needed to launch a people power vs money power struggle.

Identifying the powers-behind-the-powers, if done in ways that are demonstrably valid, can not only help campaigns focus limited resources more effectively and achieve results more swiftly, it can help a campaign’s image as credible. Every action that increases the legitimacy of a campaign or coalition lowers barriers to recruitment.[10]

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[1] Rodal, Berel (2007). Bottom-up, inside-out: The record and potential of civilian-based nonviolent power to win freedom and respect for human rights. http://www.voltairenet.org/article163267.html

[2] Barber (p. 18)

[3]Kennedy, Paul (1987). The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. New York: Random House.

[4] York, Steve (2000) (Director). “We were warriors,” Episode 1, A Force More Powerful (film). 

[5] Lakey, George (2018). How we win: A guide to nonviolent direct action campaigning. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House. 

[6] Foster, Catherine (1989). Women for all seasons: The story of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

[7] Sharp, Gene (2013). How nonviolent struggle works. Boston, MA: Albert Einstein Institution. Sharp focuses most of his prodigious body of work on analyzing and diminishing the power of the political elites, helping via strategic decisions and campaign targeting to find hidden cleavages in that “monolithic” power elite and using nonviolent action to drive wedges into those fissures, splitting rulers and overcoming them via that induced division. This is exactly what anti-apartheid activists did in South Africa with mass boycotts, causing the business community to split off from the racist ideologues and thus accelerating the end of apartheid. 

[8]Ohmer, Mary L. & DeMasi, Karen (2009). Consensus organizing: A community development workbook. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

[9] Barber (p. 76)

[10]Walker, Henry A., and David Willer. 2014. "Legitimizing Collective Action and Countervailing Power." Social Forces 92, no. 3: 1217-1239. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed March 4, 2018).

Building coalitions, building momentum

Decision-making, building your coalition and recruitment

A diverse coalition of liberals and conservatives, Christians, Jews, and Muslims, the documented and the undocumented, black, white, and brown sisters and brothers were learning that we could trust one another.

--Reverend William Barber II[1]

Every organization, every coalition, develops its own decision-making style. Doing this early is exceedingly helpful and making it less vulnerable to frequent reversals is highly desirable. 

There should be early major decisions that are firmly made and are not open for any revisiting. The most robust civil resistance campaigns decide on an immutable code of conduct and a robust decision-making process before inviting large numbers to join. 

Deciding how to decide can be challenging and is often best done with fixed yet flexible parameters.[2]A coordinating council, for example, may be empowered to determine that a particular decision lends itself to council consensus while another decision is best made using some agreed upon form of direct democracy. Often in national campaigns the national leadership can be expected to frame these options and thus give state organizers rails that can identify areas of great freedom and areas which require strict adherence. 

If love does not drive out the fears that so easily divide us, we will never gather together in coalitions strong enough to challenge those who benefit from injustice…Only a fusion coalition representing all the people in any place could push a moral agenda over and against the interests of the powerful.

--Reverend William Barber II[3]

In the American struggle for justice and freedom, moral dissent has always seemed impractical when it began.

Reverend William Barber II[4]

Nothing succeeds like success, to borrow what may sound like redundancy. In social movements, it has long been noted that every victory generates raised expectations—hope—and that this is one of the strongest factors in recruitment.[5]

The power of creating new relationships and the coalitions that can emerge sparks small victories in the long struggle toward the big goals—ending poverty, eliminating racism, transforming militarism and living without destroying our environment. These small early victories are critical to developing momentum.

Coalition-building is the art of recognizing and reifying shared interests and shared objectives. Marcus Braybrooke asserts that “the survival of life on this planet depends upon humanity realizing its oneness.”[6]To the extent we can find that oneness we can create unstoppable coalitions. It is the heart of John Lewis’s memoir, that even children holding hands can create power in unity that can resist the winds of oppression.[7]Rabbi Everett Gendler of the Jewish Peace Fellowship wrote, “Direct communication must not cease among men, however greatly they may differ in outlook.”[8]Unity is tough but doable.

Recruitment can be viewed as changing or evoking the social norm of duty. How do we help others to evoke and activate that sense of obligation? 

Sometimes a serious challenge from someone who has demonstrated leadership, dedication, and accomplishment can ignite the next ones. Congresswoman Barbara Lee, the voice of peace and courage in the US Congress, the only US Representative to vote against going to war in Afghanistan in the highly charged xenophobic atmosphere immediately after 9/11/2001, wrote of being a young single African American mother in college in 1972 and feeling like social activism was hopeless because white men controlled everything. Then she met Shirley Chisholm, the African American Congresswoman running for US President as a peace and justice candidate. Lee wrote that Chisholm convinced her “if you don’t like ‘the system,’ then you have to work to change it.”[9]

The wish to emulate strong committed resisters can indeed attract the next ones—and when they are oppressed with others for that good cause it can seal their commitment. When the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee helped lead the voter registration drives they inspired younger and younger volunteers. Roychester Patterson was a 17-year-old black student in Carver High School in Georgia. SNCC came to his county in 1962 and asked for volunteers. Patterson was struck by their commitment and made his—only to be arrested for his efforts and expelled from school. So he “went to work for SNCC on Voter Registration,” becoming a young leader “because I am deeply attached to my people and I want them to know freedom.”[10]

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[1] Barber (p. 66) Barber later goes on to assert that, “our intersectionality creates the opportunity to fundamentally redirect America” (p. 122).

[2]Dressler, Larry (2006). Consensus through conversation: How to achieve high-commitment decisions. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.

[3] Barber (p. 26, 28)

[4] Barber (p. 22)

[5]Alinsky, Saul D. (1971). Rules for radicals. New York: Random House.

Kriesberg, Louis, & Dayton, Bruce W. (2017). Constructive conflicts: From escalation to resolution. (5^thed.) Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

[6]Braybrooke, Marcus (2002). “The interfaith movement: The present reality,” (pp. 245-251) in Mallick, Krishna & Hunter, Doris (Eds.) (2002). An anthology of nonviolence: Historical and contemporary voices. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press (p. 246).

[7] Lewis, John (1998). Walking with the wind: A memoir of the movement. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace.

[8]Gendler, Everett E. (1981) “¼therefore, choose life” (pp. 7-16) in Schwarzchild, Stephen, et al. Roots of Jewish nonviolence. Nyack, NY: Jewish Peace Fellowship (p. 13). Rather than make modernizing or movement-evolving changes to exclusive language, we simply note in our footnotes that we have moved beyond gender exclusivity now, but the author quoted used his own word choice when he wrote it and each reader can perform her own translation as she wishes.

[9] Lee, Barbara (2007). “Foreword,” pp. xi-xiii in, Stassen, Glen Harold & Wittner, Lawrence S. (Eds.). Peace action: Past, present, and future. Boulder, CO: Paradigm (p. xii).

[10]Patterson, Roychester (1962). “Statement by a high school student,” pp. 247-248, in Lynd, Staughton & Lynd, Alice (1995). Nonviolence in America: A documentary history(2^nded.). Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books (original 1966) (p. 248).

Code of conduct

Code of conduct

Moral dissent is still necessary, even when there is no reasonable expectation of political success.

--Reverend William Barber II[1]

A nonviolent code of conduct is not a general vague declaration that a participant prefers nonviolence. It is a set of ironclad commitments, if not for one’s entire life, at least for the duration of the campaign or movement, and for all actions and communications relating to that campaign. It is a code that may be formulated by a core of campaign leadership or it may be a negotiated agreement, but it is most crucial that this code be promulgated early in any campaign that hopes for clarity and credibility. 

Elise Boulding, a co-founder of the academic fields of both Peace Studies and Women’s Studies, created a process of envisioning a future, and working backward, creating a line of sight toward the world we hope to live in.[2]The idea is to transform a fantasy into a vision by thinking about beginning and ending principles and the steps needed along the way to turn that dream into reality. The chosen endpoint is the achievement of the meta-goal and the timeline is rigorously investigated to create a step-by-step plan.

A signed commitment is best, all the more so a signed document carried on the person of nonviolent resisters. Each campaign may have its own code, often dating back to Gandhi’s list of behaviors, desired and prohibited. The code may be simple, as with the 2015 Campaign for Nonviolence, with its written code and a place for the signature of the participant.[3]

When preparations are centered on coordinating behaviors consistent with the agreed-upon code, these practices become second nature for participants. Neural pathways are created and widened, mental muscle memory is developed, and old instincts can give way to new ways. This is how emergency workers learn “natural” instant responses to presenting calamities—emergency medical technicians, firefighters, emergency room nurses, social workers in dangerous neighborhoods—these professions and many more learn by first grasping the theoretical concepts, then by training, and finally by drills. Each simulation strengthens rock-solid commitment to a code, as emotional and psychological default settings alter and are deepened toward “automatic” nonviolent response to threat, to actual attack, and to assaults on one’s pride or identity. 

When a movement is truly versed in and committed to a disciplined code of nonviolence it possesses unique strength and resiliency. The code is key. It is a document to inform every participant, every nonviolent resister, every member of the media, every agent of law enforcement, and as many others as possible. 

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[1] Barber (p. 20)

[2]Ziegler, Warren L. (1982). A mindbook of exercises for futures-invention.Denver, CO: The Futures-Inventions Associates.

[3]Butigan, Ken; Hall, Ryan (2015). Campaign nonviolence: A grassroots movement for a culture of peace and nonviolence free from war, poverty, racism, climate destruction and the epidemic of violence. Pace e bene.

Gold in the ground

Gold in the ground

 The most important word in the justice vocabulary is always ‘we’.

--Reverend William Barber II[1]

One of the civil rights activists in the South in the 1960s said, “Finding nonviolence was like finding gold in the ground.” Why did she say that? Because apathy does not work, as Frederick Douglass noted more than 150 years ago.[2]Because violence is costly in blood, in the fruits of our labor, in the spirit and soul, and in destruction of our infrastructure and environment. Finally, because nonviolence will bring victories more often and faster than violence. The research, the studies comparing methods, are robust, rigorous, and clear. Nonviolence succeeds twice as often as does violence, in shorter periods of time on average, and is far more inclusive. A small elderly grandmother with a walker or an innocent middle schooler or a young man in a wheelchair are all legitimate nonviolent resisters. As Reverend Lawson says, “Everyone can do the work.” 

Although Gandhi and King emphasized the moral force of nonviolent discipline, their call for nonviolent discipline was due to a combination of strategic and moral reasons.

--Kurt Schock[3]

Studies also show that nonviolent methods result, on average, in much better sustainable metrics of democracy, civil rights, and human rights, with far less likelihood of a reversal to violent oppression or brutal conflict.[4]As conflict practitioner scholars Louis Kriesberg and Bruce Dayton offer, “constructive conflict can create virtuous cycles.”[5]For all these reasons and more, we choose nonviolence. It is morally, ethically, spiritually and pragmatically the superior method of waging social conflict. Even the majority of people who are not pacifists agree with the ethics, generally. 

Nonviolent struggle is identified by what people do, not by what they believe. In many cases, the people using these nonviolent methods have believed violence to be perfectly justified in moral or religious terms. However, for the specific conflict that they currently faced they chose, for pragmatic reasons, to use methods that did not include violence.

Only in rare historical instances did a group of a leader have a personal belief that rejected violence in principle. Nevertheless, even in these cases, a nonviolent struggle based on pragmatic concerns was often still viewed as morally superior.

--Gene Sharp[6]

As Jack DuVall and Peter Ackerman note in their volume, A Force More Powerful, “The greatest misconception about conflict is that violence is always the ultimate form of power.”[7]The misconception endures but we will correct it until it stays corrected.

It also requires planning, discipline, resilience, and unity. Gandhi called nonviolence the first article of his faith and the last of his creed. Dr. King said it’s the way to defeat the horrific triplets of racism, poverty, and militarism. We offer this manual as a guide to the complexities of this approach. The principle of nonviolence is simple. Witnessing is simple. Creating and executing a successful nonviolent campaign is not simple, nor is it easy. Reverend Lawson has been engaging with this complexity in the 1950s and ever since. Reverend Barber launched his Moral Mondays movement with 16 others on 29 April 2013, as they were arrested at the North Carolina statehouse in protest of the poor public policy hurting so many.[8]

As founder of the Sojourner community, Reverend Jim Wallis notes, “Our public life reflects our moral values, one way or the other.”[9]The objectives of the Poor People’s Campaign meld faith-based moral commitments to nonviolence and justice with the best winning strategies, two objectives falsely portrayed by some as mutually exclusive. In reality, faith can enhance strategic advantages in many ways, including strengthening resolve, aiding recruitment of large blocks of the citizenry, and provision of organizational infrastructure. 

When Jesus said, “Love your enemies,” he wasn’t simply stating a spiritual ideal to strive toward; he was also offering strategic advice for long-term success in any freedom struggle.

--Reverend William Barber II[10]

Co-founder of the reawakened Poor People’s Campaign, Reverend Barber, notes that, “While realism cannot determine the goals of our faith, it must shape our strategy in movements of moral dissent.”[11]

The Poor People’s Campaign connects us all. Indeed, the Fundamental Principle #2 is: “We are committed to lifting up and deepening the leadership of those most affected by systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, and ecological devastation and to building unity across lines of division.”[12]Applying nonviolent civil resistance together to these struggles is a way to further that unity. 

Early visionaries have been making some of the connections for a long while. Many of the 11,996 official Conscientious Objectors to World War II[13]also worked on desegregating prisons, often achieving that even before society around them was desegregated, and some of those pacifists went on to help lead the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King spoke powerfully against the war in Vietnam. Environmental leader David Brower wrote an open letter to Richard Nixon connecting militarism and the environment back in 1970[14]and Margaret Meade did her best to join those issues a few years earlier. 

And the moral and strategic arcs are indeed long. More than a century before Gandhi burst onto the scene with his moral and strategic nonviolent struggle in South Africa, American colonists were innovating nonviolent methods of resistance as they sought independence from Britain, even using the very creative tactic of making their own homespun cloth to boycott British textiles. This, and a decade of other nonviolent tactics, had already achieved de facto independence for nine of the 13 colonies before the Revolutionary War began.[15]Even as our education system fails to teach us of this method of conflict transformation in our history, we can continue to educate ourselves and spread the good news of nonviolence. 

We can go back still further for our obligation to action. The modern historical imperative for nonviolent resistance comes from the theory of the Social Contract, which began evolving during the Scottish Enlightenment, when philosophers and historians such as David Hume were at work in Edinburgh. Hume wrote,  

The people, if we trace government to its first origin in the woods and deserts, are the source of all power and jurisdiction, and voluntarily, for the sake of peace and order, abandoned their native liberty. . . . [G]overnment in its earliest infancy arose from consent, or rather the voluntary acquiescence of the people; . . . even at present [1748], when it has attained its full maturity, it rests on no other foundation. [The people] . . . owe allegiance to no prince or government, unless bound by the obligation and sanction of a promise. . . Such [is] . . the right of resistance possessed by every subject.[16]

We need look no further than the Preamble to the U.S. Declaration of Independence. On June 11, 1776, Congress selected a "Committee of Five" to draft a declaration. Consisting of John Adams of Massachusetts, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, the committee penned the preamble that we honor today: 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

We would prefer that the committee had not used archaic language ignoring women, but the thrust is clear: government authorities obtain their power and authority from the consentof the people. This is the very foundation upon which nonviolent action rests.  

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[1] Barber II, William J. & Wilson-Hartgrove, Jonathan (2016). The third Reconstruction: How a moral movement is overcoming the politics of division and fear. Boston, MA: Beacon, p. xiii.

[2]https://rationalinsurgent.com/2013/11/01/friday-quote-power-concedes-nothing-without-a-demand/

[3]Schock, Kurt (2015). Civil resistance today. Malden, MA: Polity (p. 136).

[4]Karatnycky, Adrian & Ackerman, Peter (2005). How freedom is won: From civic resistance to durable democracy. New York, NY: Freedom House.

[5]Dayton, Bruce W. & Kriesberg, Louis (Eds.) (2017). Perspectives in waging conflicts constructively: Cases, concepts, and practice. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. (p. 184)

[6] Gene Sharp (2005). Waging nonviolent struggle: 20th century practice and 21st Century Potential. Boston, MA: Porter Sargent, p. 19.

[7]Ackerman, P., & DuVall, J. (2000). A force more powerful: A century of nonviolent conflict.New York: St. Martin’s Press (p. 9).

[8] Barber (p. xiii)

[9] Wallis, Jim (1994). The soul of politics. New York, NY: The New Press (p. 15).

[10]Barber (p. 67)

[11]Barber (p. 25)

[12]https://poorpeoplescampaign.org/index.php/fundamental-principles/

[13]Tracy, James (1996). Direct action: Radical pacifism from the Union Eight to the Chicago Seven. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

[14]Brower, David (2017) pp. 269-271 in Smith, Gar (Ed.). The war and environment reader. Charlottesville, VA: Just World Books.

[15]Conser, Walter H. (2013). The United States: Reconsidering the struggle for independence, 1765-1775 (pp. 299-318) in Bartkowski, Maciej J. (Ed.). Recovering nonviolent history: Civil resistance in liberation struggles. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

[16]David Hume, "Of the Original Contract (1748)," in Social Contract: Essays by Locke, Hume and Rousseau(London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1947), 213.