MLK got his ideas from Gandhi, and I can promise you Gandhi wouldn’t have put up with it.

Marching around in goofy, sometimes raunchy, costumes and carrying signs ridiculing one’s opposition is several light-years away from Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violent resistance. I can’t believe anyone who pretends to know something about MLK
wouldn’t understand that. Non-violence means non-violence in one’s mind and speech, not just refraining from punching someone out.

I have not and do not dispute the transformative power of Dr. King’s moral witness on white folks. What I do dispute is a narrowness of perception that focuses on this aspect of his legacy to the exclusion of all else.

I’m NOT excluding all else. In situations where civil disobedience is appropriate (such as the Mennonite woman I mentioned, who got herself arrested for praying in front of the White House) then go for it. But it’s the demonstrators who are “excluding all else,” I say.

You are a gasbag, sir. Lots of words, no understanding. We’re done here.

I am not African American, I am a white Southern boy whose paternal grandfather was a textile mill worker who at one time belonged to the KKK and whose maternal great grandfather served with R.E. Lee from Second Manassas through Appomattox. My family were all rural people prior to my generation. I spent 7 years first infilitrating Klan gatherings and later organizing against them. I think I can say that I am intimately acquainted with white racism, its dynamics and its many faces.

I have had the privilege, as I indicated above, to know veterans of the Civil Rights struggle who were trained by Dr. King and who, in turn, imparted their knowlege to me.

I have not and do not dispute the transformative power of Dr. King’s moral witness on white folks. What I do dispute is a narrowness of perception that focuses on this aspect of his legacy to the exclusion of all else.

I dispute this in particular when it is used to suggest that people attending peace marches wearing t-shirts and shorts, or costumes, or carrying puppets for goodness sake, are somehow at odds with his vision.

That vision and the means by which Dr. King pursued it, cannot be parsed according to our personal likes and dislikes or according to what seems politically expedient. Neither can the aspects of King’s legacy that you invoke be separated from his advocacy of moral confrontation through civil disobedience. It simply cannot be argued that Dr. King pursued a strategy of success through inoffensiveness.

I find your suggestion that I am simplifying the struggle rather baffling. How is recognizing the multifaceted character of that struggle more simplistic than viewing it from the perspective of a small town white community?

I understand your expressed concern that self indulgent behavior at Peace protests might spark a backlash. But in lumping flamboyance or exhuberance together with violence and vandalism I think you cast far too wide a net.

As I said, you can argue for your viewpoint anyway you choose but I don’t believe Dr. King, or Ghandi for that matter, would weigh matters quite as you do.

You are oversimplifying the dymanics of the MLK civil rights movement.

I grew up in a legally segregated town in southern Missouri, the sort of place where everybody hung a Confederate flag in the back window of his pickup. My high school’s team name was “the Rebels” and our pep squad showed up at games waving Confederate flags (I graduated high school in 1969). Some of my teachers in elementary school actually gave us lectures on the importance of segregation.

During the 1960s lots of the town folk lived in terror that MLK would show up there someday. If someone had tried to segregate the town then there would have been violence.

Now, let me tell you what effect MLK’s marches had on my town. The folks there were racist before, and they were racist after, and they were still segregationists. But they watched on television, and I saw plainly that many of them (for the first time!) felt uncomfortable about their racism. They saw the marchers, just walking, in their good clothes. They saw them walk past screaming bigots without retaliating. They saw the attack dogs and fire hoses turned on peaceful people. And time and time again, when people talked about what they saw, they’d say something like “of course I don’t want them moving here … [then, in a lower voice] but, you know, that wasn’t right, what the white people did. The blacks hadn’t done anything to deserve that.”

And that, my friend, was the beginning of the end of Jim Crow. For the first time, a big chunk of the white middle class was confronted with the ugliness and unreasonableness of racism, and it made them squirm. There was a measurable change in the way people talked about race. The “n” word didn’t come out of peoples’ mouths quite so easily. Even when people said something in support of segregation, it was said in a defensive, even apologetic, way. The unrepentent racists suddenly found themselves in the minority.

This is what we used to call “consciousness raising.”

Now, pay attention: Had any of the marchers retaliated, fought back, thrown a rock, yelled an obscenity — the white folks of my town would have decided they deserved whatever bad treatment they got. No sympathy, no respect, no consciousness raising. I know these people through and through, and I promise you that’s what would have happened. It would have set the civil rights movement back years.

In 1970 a few African American students enrolled in the local junior college (they were recruited to play for the basketball team) and the student body accepted them. A lot of the townspeople stopped coming to the games, but the students themselves were cool with it. One of the young men (the star of the team) actually was elected homecoming king in 1971. This was huge. I remember the yearbook picture of a very black king and a very blond queen standing side by side, and nobody made a big deal out of it. Ten years earlier, there would have been riots. Well, ten years earlier, it wouldn’t have happened.

Yes, people were still racist, but the change in attitude from 1960 to 1970 was huge, Huge, I say.

It was clear to me that attitudes changed largely because of the way the civil rights movement conducted itself in the early 1960s. Yes, people were still racist, and they still didn’t like MLK, but they respected him. They recognized moral authority when they saw it, however they might have resented it. The civil rights movement raised consciousness and changed attitudes among white, and that made the civil rights legislation of the early 1960s politically tenable.

So when you say “What Dr. King understood was that simply organizing black folks to confront white supremacy gave the bigots all the amunition they required,” this tells me you don’t get it. You didn’t see what happened among the white bigots. I saw it.

In answer to your last question, yesterday I had a lovely conversation with a Mennonite peace advocate who was arrested last weekend for praying in front of the White House. I kid you not. I took notes and plan to write it up today or tomorrow, so check back. This was grand, and she had a lot of very wise things to say about demonstrations that I would like you to read.

“That’s true; but the demonstrating thing is tricky. Martin Luther King understood that the civil rights marchers didn’t dare give the bigots ammunition.”

What Dr. King understood was that simply organizing black folks to confront white supremacy gave the bigots all the amunition they required.

“Yeah, very likely I’m overreacting. Mostly I think marches and demonstrations are a waste of time. They aren’t changing minds.”

Perhaps hostility was not the best discriptive for the attitude expressed above but it certainly isn’t inapplicable.

“I assure you, had an African American stepped one foot wrong, then most of white America would have sided with the segregationists with attack dogs and fire hoses.”

Maha it isn’t at all clear that the majority of white folks ever “sided” with Dr. King and his tactics of confrontation through civil disobedience. What can be said is that a majority of white folks got sick of the violence and disorder and concluded that it was not going to end until Jim Crow was terminated and the voting rights of African Americans secured. Even as they drew this lesson many, if not most, whites continued to oppose King’s strategy of non-violent civil disobedience.

The point is to gain sympathy among the public. But in our current political climate I’m not sure mass demonstrations have much effectiveness at all, no matter how well they are done.

Again perhaps hostility is the wrong word but your disapproval is plain.

Mass demonstrations that are dignified and focused (not about 20 different leftie issues at once) could be very effective, but the people who show up for these things do NOT want to be told to leave the costumes and giant puppets at home. I’ve given up trying to talk to them. And there are a few people who think that acts of vandalism or use of naughty language is just the thing to get attention. Well, yes, it gets attention, but not all attention is good attention.

From this I think it is fair to conclude that you do not approve of demonstrations that present more than a single point of view, where people wear costumes or carry giant puppets and that you view such behaviors as only slightly less objectionable than vandalism and naughty language . I won’t assume that by coupling these last two you intended to equate them because I’m sure you didn’t mean that.

Conversely, I think it fair, in context with your other remarks, to conclude that you will tolerate, if not endorse, protests where participants observe some sort of dress code, speak with a single voice and never give way to passion or flamboyance.

The first photo is of some people (including Martin Sheen) carrying a flag-draped coffin. I’ve seen those in antiwar marches, and the display is pretty effective. But why are most of the people in the photo dressed as if they were going to the beach? Why aren’t they wearing suits, or at least something understated, as Sheen is?

Possibly because it’s LA and temperatures were likely in the mid 70s? It was warm. Did the kid in the tie dyed shirt bring up bad memories?

If I’ve gotten any of this wrong please, correct me.

It’s pretty clear that you don’t think much of mass protest and you dislike much of what you’ve seen at them. You assume (and it is an assumption on your part) that your own bias reflects that of the larger part of the nation. You might be right but seeing as your primary reasons for thinking so are based on the experiences of fourty years ago I have to say that is a rather large assumption.

Returning to your initial post it’s worth noting that you entitled it “Stupid Activism”. Am I wrong in thinking that you’re not refering to the counter protesters? Were you not in fact referencing this passage:

But this is how backfires happen. I saw it time and time again during the Vietnam years. Some small number of protesters would do something stupid, such as vandalism or waving a North Vietnamese flag during a protest march. Then the Nixon Administration would use the incident to discredit the entire antiwar movement and stir up public anger against it. Thus, Nixon used the antiwar movement to deflect much public criticism of his handling of the war. Although the Vietnam War was unpopular, large chunks of the American public hated the antiwar movement even more.

Again, if I’m getting this all wrong please show me where I’ve gotten off track..

I may have been overly passionate in my earlier response to you. If so it is because I take Dr. King’s legacy very much to heart having been inspired by his example. You see I grew up in Atlanta and have been acquainted with and worked with a number of those close to him during the Civil Rights struggle. Like them I am dismayed by attempts to turn him into a plaster Saint or to substitute a sanitized, domesticated legend for his actual legacy.

If I have been unjust to you it is because it seems to me, rightly or wrongly, that your use of King’s life and legacy above partakes of this false iconography. Put simply, the notion that Dr. King’s advocacy of nonviolence was predicated primarily or even secondarily on soothing the fears of white folks is false. First and foremost it was the product of his personal faith. Secondly, it was the only practical course since any resort to violence would have invited the physical extermination of the movement by local authorities, irrespective of national opinion. Third, it was a means by which African-Americans, who had been trodden down by over three centuries of inhuman brutality, could assert their individual and collective dignity and humanity. Just as Dr. King recognized that slavery degraded the slave owner as well as the enslaved, he believed violence degraded those who resorted to it, regardless of the justification. Fourth, by linking non-violence to Civil Disobedience Dr. King was posing a militant moral challenge to a white community that would have, frankly, prefered that the issue simply go away.

None of this, in my opinion, is compatible with a notion of protest as primarily a means of persuasion. Dr. King’s goal was to sabotage the system through noncompliance. To rendered the status quo unworkable by actively violating its strictures. This was the core of Ghandi’s strategy as well.

The only way to reconcile these realities with a view of protest focused on a fear of giving offense, or of appearing less than respectful or respectable, is to ignore them altogether.

So let’s try to clarify things a bit. Maha, would you be happier if people left their costumes and puppets at home and engaged in active civil disobedience against the war effort? Would you support sit-ins at government offices? At military installations? The boycotting of corporations with interests in war industries? Student walk outs such those organized by the newly revived SDS? The non-violent blockades of recruitment centers?

If your answers to these questions are negative, I respectfully suggest that , while you are free to argue for your perspective as you see fit, you cease trying link your views to the examples King and Ghandi. To do otherwise is to appropriate their legacy while emptying it of all substance. Something that the political establishment has been engaged in for the past four decades.

No, I am not. I have taken part in several. And what you wrote proves to me you don’t understand what I said. In fact, much of it reinforces what I said.

Please note: I do not call for a retreat from public abuse; I’m calling for people to apply the principles of Gandhi in how they stand up to public abuse. Not retreating, but not retaliating, either.

If you didn’t read Holly J’s DKos diary about her experiences in Washington last weekend, I urge you to do so. It might open your eyes.

But when you write,

I don’t agree with you because protests are not merely essays in public relations. They are a channeling of people’s righteous indignation at the crimes piled upon crimes committed by those who presume to rule over them.

MLK’s marchers did not return the abuse hurled at them. They accepted arrests withour resistance; they walked past crowds of screaming, taunting bigots and did not scream and taunt back. They must have been seething with anger, but they didn’t give in to the temptation to respond to hate with hate, or to ridicule with ridicule.

Spray-painting a public building or putting a pink tiara on a statue are minor incidents, but such behavior is also childish and self-indulgent. People who are serious about a critical issue really ought to conduct themselves like grownups, IMO.

As I said, I’ve participated in some big anti-Iraq War demonstrations, and most of the other participants were sincerely dedicated to the cause. But there’s always a large contingent who try to turn the demonstration into an exercise in self-indulgence and who behave in ways that are disrespectful to other participants and humanity in general. That spoils the whole effort, IMO.

This is something that Dr. King understood. It is why he chose the course he did. It is why he would never countenence a policy of quiesence based on a fear of unpopularity.

Nor do I. I say again, the Right is going to hate us no matter what we do. That doesn’t matter. In fact, that could be used to our advantage, but I doubt the vocational protesters would stop using demonstrations as an exercise in ego gratification.

What’s being overlooked in your referencing of the movement that Dr. King led is the fact that it was never soley or even primarily a movement of mass marches. This false impression has been bred by the yearly recycling of footage from the 1963 March on Washington that has become the hallmark of the annual King Day rememberance..

That was indeed a very disciplined action but it was not the essence of the movement or Dr. King’s strategy. The essence of the movement was confrontation. The strategy was civil disobedience. That is, the conscious, willful violation of existing civil laws in the service of a greater moral law.

It is only within this context that the aspects of the movement that you emphasize can be properly understood. Dr. King was not about pandering to the comfort zones of the complacent. He was not about soothing the bad conscience of America or showing respect for the status quo in hopes of extracting concessions. Had he been, he would never have taken leadership of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, since that movement was a direct repudiation of such an approach. As an African American and a southerner Dr.King was well aware of the ramifications of organizing black folks in a direct confrontation with Jim Crow. He wasn’t seeking an accomodation with the white supremacist system, he was seeking its destruction.

Its difficult for people who have not experienced that system first hand to understand the profoundly radical, even revolutionary character of the challenge Dr. King and the movement he led posed. Just as it is difficult at this remove for people to comprehend that in his time Dr. King never commanded the degree of respect in the white community that he does today, however hypocritical that respect may be.

In his time, far from being celebrated, Dr. King was reviled by whites North and South. He was labeled a trouble maker, a subversive, a Communist dupe or an actual Communist as well as far worse things that I needn’t repeat here. In short, he was the target of the same sort of unreasoning anger and hatred that was on display on the Mall in Washington this past weekend.

How did he respond? As a Christian, Dr. King would not return hatred for hatred or violence for violence, but neither would he retreat in the face of them. You may search his writings and his speeches from now until judgement day and you will discover no instance where he ever suggested that the moral onus for such malignant hostility lay with those who confronted the nation with its sins. Nowhere will you find him arguing that the root of such hatred lay in the behavior of those who refused to be silent in the face of an overwhelming moral evil. He would not placate or temporize with the corrosive forces of oppression and saw no equivilance between them and those who opposed them, whatever the failings of the latter. He had no patience with any who would trim the sails of justice before the winds of popular dissapproval.

At the time of his death Dr. King was preparing to lead the Poor Peoples Campaign which sought to link the causes of racial and economic justice with a condemnation of the War in Vietnam and the national policy on which it was based. This had caused him to lose support in both the white and black community. The centerpiece of the campaign was to be Resurrection City, a shanty town erected on the Mall in Washington to be populated by the poor and dispossessed so that the Nation could no longer avert its eyes from them. Does this sound like the sort of person who would tuck up his skirts and flee from the prospect of a pink tiara being placed on a statue or paint being sprayed on some steps?

As I said at the beginning Maha, you have some good points, despite your hostility to public protest. I don’t agree with you because protests are not merely essays in public relations. They are a channeling of people’s righteous indignation at the crimes piled upon crimes committed by those who presume to rule over them. An indignation so profound that, left unexpressed, it will either choke the heart with dispair or erupt in a flood of violence. This is something that Dr. King understood. It is why he chose the course he did. It is why he would never countenence a policy of quiesence based on a fear of unpopularity. His entire life is a witness to this. Which is why I do not believe he would agree with you.

to read my personal account of the event check out Kos

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/3/19/205752/755

http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/police-chief-defends-actions-during-protest-2007-02-01.html

Their language makes me think that the message was spray-painted on the black asphalt area, not the white steps.

Thanks again for this post and the blog. I’m in full agreement with you re the counter-productiveness of actions like this.