This photo shows the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in Washington, D.C. Today, MLK's nonviolent action campaign remains an aspiration for nonviolent movements across the globe. ( Photo: Gotta Be Worth It, Pexels )
Nonviolent action can be a powerful tool for social change and peacebuilding. An example of what can be accomplished using nonviolent strategies is the US Civil Rights movement. Watch the video below to learn why civil rights leaders applied nonviolence and why it was so impactful. As Dr. King noted, nonviolent action was not just a form of social protest and mobilization but was "waging conflict constructively." Of nonviolent action, King stated: "It is the way of the strong, it is not a method of stagnant passivity....It does not seek to humiliate or defeat the opponent but, rather, understanding and the awakening of a sense of morality....It is aimed at the evil that one is trying to remove, not at the persons involved."
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent action was a powerful mobilizer of change during the civil rights movement. Although some members of the Black Panthers criticized King's tactics as being passive, the success of the movement helped transform the United States, ended legal segregation, and contributed significantly to the achievement of landmark civil rights and voting rights legislation in the United States. Ultimately, the perseverance of nonviolent activists led to more civil rights for Black Americans. It also inspired many movements to come.
The late conservative newspaper columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote in The Washington Post on December 12, 2002:
Martin Luther King succeeded in taking a liberation movement that could easily have turned irredeemably divisive and deeply anti-American…and dedicated it instead to a reaffirmation of American principles. The point is not just what King and his followers did for African Americans, but what they did -- by validating America's original promise of freedom and legal equality -- for the rest of America….Perhaps even more important than the civil rights movement's ends, however, were its means. That was its other great gift to America. The civil rights movement transformed nonviolence from a notion into a norm -- an act of astonishing political creativity whose legacy has been so thoroughly assimilated into contemporary American life that today we hardly appreciate it.
Can you think of a current movement that uses the nonviolent action tactics you saw in the video? Describe the movement in the discussion below.
In the United States, the Black Lives Matter movement has brought some essential questions to the surface. Some advocates for justice and minority rights contend that the Civil Rights Movement in the United States was limited in its successes and failed to bring about structural changes necessary for racial equality. One criticism, attributed to "Critical Race Theory," is that by focusing on the most egregious forms of discrimination or racism, there was no remedy for the common, everyday racism experienced by most people of color. While laws addressed the worst aspects of racism, the structures, systems, and root causes of racism and injustice remain in place and there are few incentives for the dominant groups in society to change that. Would you agree with that contention? Or does that minimize the significant legacy of Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement as Charles Krauthammer noted above?
