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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.
[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.
[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)
[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.
