In a Nation Under Protest, Everything Old is New Again
It was hard Saturday to watch Florida police officers pulling on the arms of protestors sitting on the grass near the state capitol, and dragging them off to jail.
I wasn’t heartbroken, however, to see the arrests of peaceful protesters for the dastardly crime of violating an order not to stray from the sidewalk. I’ve gotten used to such awful demonstrations of just how low we have fallen in this season of our discontent.
Mostly, I was pained that these young people -- protesting about the lack of police brutality charges against accused local cops -- were using tactics I’m convinced are smartest, but which didn’t seem to be working for them.
They were passively sitting down, presumedly showing that they were willing to take whatever the authorities were willing to dish out in furtherance of their cause.
They were, basically, protesting in the way I have come to believe it should be done in 2020: Sit down, or walk peacefully, quietly or chanting in unison. Touch nothing and no one. Look serious and be serious. And always do it in broad daylight.
Otherwise, how can the naysayers separate them from the rioters and looters who have become the parasites of legitimate protest?
Protesters should protect themselves and increase their effectiveness by comporting themselves like the civil rights activists of the 1960s, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
I’m so sure it’s the right way to go that I have personally started Kingian nonviolence strategy training on Zoom.
Though I was originally negative about the Florida protest, it was probably more successful than it had appeared at first. I cheered up a little when I looked at the Tallahassee videotapes more carefully.
Yes, the protesters were arrested, but that’s not so bad. Mass arrests strain the system, and King always saw that as a positive.
And the protesters didn’t seem to have been beaten on their way to jail. And they seemed to win the moral upper hand.
They could have done even better, however, if some of them hadn’t been such weenies about their arrests.
“Get off of me!” “Let me go!” “I can’t breathe!” No one should claim they can’t breathe if they indeed can. Not anymore.
The fourth of King’s six principles of nonviolence: Nonviolence holds that voluntary suffering can educate and transform. Practitioners accept violence if necessary, but never inflict it. Suffering can convert the opponent when reason fails.
This is how the civil rights movement of the early 1960s moved forward. For winning over people still on the fence, you can’t top images of defenseless but brave partisans being attacked with billy clubs, firehose streams and police dogs, and not raising a hand.
In 1963, King, short of adults who could get off work to protest segregation in Birmingham, Ala., led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in training hundreds of children, 6 to 18, in nonviolent tactics. On May 2 and 3, the kids marched calmly toward City Hall, and Eugene “Bull” Connor, Birmingham’s head of public safety, did the movement its biggest favor. He ordered his cops and firefighters to attack the Children’s Crusade.
The whole world was watching, and Birmingham’s institutional segregation ended in a week.
It was brought to a close by relatively calm negotiation. The stage was set by King’s third principle, which he outlined, like the other five, while he was jailed in Birmingham: Nonviolence seeks to defeat injustice, not people. King maintained that “evildoers” are not necessarily evil people, but are probably also victims. The nonviolent resister seeks to defeat evil, not individuals.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
There are several big differences between the protesters of 1963 and 2020. For one, today’s bunch is mostly untrained in nonviolence tactics.
They’re considerably older than most of the kids of Birmingham were, but the two generations of protesters are not so dissimilar in age, taken as wholes.
But they look a lot different.
The biggest difference in appearance is not that so many more of today’s activists are white. The most glaring disparity is in their apparel.
The 1960s marchers almost all dressed conservatively, underlining their seriousness. The ladies wore modest dresses, and the gentlemen wore white shirts and slacks, usually with suit coats and thin ties. Even the Birmingham kids dressed nicely.
Most of today’s protesters wear shorts and T-shirts and other clothes that look like they were chosen because they were the first things they found that morning. That’s fine for the dorm cafeteria, but it doesn't play well on Fox and CNN.
Wear a tie. They still sell those.
The clip-on kind is better because they can’t be used to drag you around. That’s why cops buy them.
Dressing up to protest may seem silly. But rioters and looters don’t wear suits.
Protesters’ interest in ensuring everybody knows they’re protesters may become more important soon.
Well-armed do-it-yourself white militias are now players in this drama, and no one wants to be around if they start using their weapons in earnest. We have already seen that the police tend to allow them to move freely, while instead confronting the protesters.
This is reminiscent, to some extent, of the practices of American police in the early part of the 20th century, I’ve read. While white men rioted and murdered Blacks, the police almost always walked past the white guys to arrest the Blacks, or beat them with their truncheons and shoot them with their guns.
Something changed just over 100 years ago, in 1919. As whites led race riots across the nation, Black men in two cities, Chicago and Washington, D.C., armed themselves in self-defense. They fought back, and they were supported in court and in the court of public opinion by a burgeoning NAACP. The organization’s growth was spurred by the feeling among Blacks that they had had enough.
Many had served their country in World War I, and assumed that lynching and abuse and inequality would be stemmed, at least to some extent, upon their return. They found, instead, that they would have to fight for every bit of respect and fairness and safety.
Blacks are probably not going to be caught defenseless if the trouble really starts now, either. According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, Black men and women bought 58.2 percent more firearms in the first six months of 2020 than they did in the same period the year before.
They’re worried something bad might be coming.
They should be. White supremacists have been longing and planning for an American race war for years. Some of them have recently been caught trying to instigate that kind of conflict. So the fire and the fuel are both ready to go.
The answers might have to be found on the streets.
Those who are there already could do worse than learning what civil rights leaders taught a half-century or more ago. Nonviolence might get results before the real trouble has a chance to start.
King’s first principle: Nonviolence is active resistance to evil. It is a way of life for courageous people.
Turning the other cheek is not a sign of weakness. It’s the brave thing for protesters to do, if they’re up for it.
I agree with everything you’ve written so elegantly. More!