Nonviolent Direct Action
From Social Justice Wiki
Contents |
Introduction: Nonviolent Direct Action
When Bayard Rustin was born, the United States had a small tradition of pacifism among groups like the Quakers. Growing up in a historically Quaker Pennsylvania town, Rustin was influenced by their pacifist philosophy. The nonviolence he developed and implemented as an effective tactic for the Civil Rights movement, however, differs drastically from the pacifist tradition. Pacifism is largely associated with nonparticipation, for example, refusal to fight in a war, and is in that sense passive. The nonviolent tactics used during the Civil Rights Movement, though based on the same moral principle that violence is wrong, were active. Nonviolent direct action confronts, disrupts, and actively opposes that which is wrong, albeit without violence. Boycotts, sit-ins, and marches were all tactics meant to disrupt and challenge racism and Jim Crow segregation, without bringing harm to white people. Nonviolent direct action during the Civil Rights Movement was intellectually and philosophically indebted to Mohandas Gandhi and the India Freedom Movement against Britain. Bayard Rustin’s main contribution to the Civil Rights Movement was his development and adaptation of nonviolent tactics to the American black freedom struggle.
(Information from: Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement).
Rustin's Early Life: Biographical Context
Rustin was born in West Chester Pennsylvania in 1912, and raised there by his mother’s parents. Rustin has said that his grandmother, Julia Rustin, had the biggest influence on his early intellectual life. She was devoutly religious, a member of the African Methodist Church who had been raised as a Quaker. Julia Rustin instilled religious teachings in Bayard from a young age, supplementing the traditional church message with her own, often geared towards social justice and black liberation. As Bayard recalled “my grandmother was thoroughly convinced that when it came to matters of liberation of black people, that we had much more to learn from the Jewish experience than we had to learn out of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.” (9)
Julia Rustin also taught by example. As blacks migrated to Northern cities for industry jobs during the “Great Migration,” the Rustin household took in Southern families for a night or two. Julia was a highly respected and active member of the community, and member of the NAACP. Bayard learned about lynching, Jim Crow, and racism through his grandmother and her NAACP associates. West Chester was officially segregated when Bayard was young. Despite this, in part due to the Quaker history of the town, with its tradition of progressive politics, Bayard’s childhood was free from much overt antagonism between blacks and whites. In West Chester, blacks and occasionally whites combatted racism and segregation without fear of violent reprisal. Rustin learned African American history from a progressive black teacher. He was friends with many whites from his neighborhood, and was very popular and successful (in academics, athletics, and music) at the integrated high school.
This background is significant to understanding Rustin’s later political action and thought. He grew up in a relatively middle class, integrated environment, and had close relationships with whites. He also was raised with a strong sense of social justice, and awareness to African American history and American racism through the intellectual and strongly moralistic teachings of his grandmother. His sense of justice, and dedication to non-violence was deeply steeped in the Quaker and African Methodist religious traditions. Rustin's intellectual orientation concerning activism throughout his life stressed unification of interracial groups with common goals, whether they were dedicated progressives fighting Jim Crow, or white and black workers organizing for economic justice. Furthermore, his dedication to nonviolence was not merely tactical, but based in his philosophical and theological commitment to pacifism.
(Quotation and other biographical information from: Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement).
Nonviolent Direct Action, 1942-1955
During this period of his life, Rustin’s dedication to pacifism and the civil rights of African Americans was deeply intertwined. From 1941 until the mid 1950s, he worked for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a Christian pacifist organization run by the white Quaker AJ Muste. During the 1940s, FOR’s main objective was to combat World War II through non-violent protest. It later took on civil rights as well, but always was dedicated primarily to the international peace movement. Later, Rustin left FOR and largely abandoned his work for international peace, most infamously when he did not take a stand against the Vietnam War. During the 1940s, however, pacifism and civil rights work were interwoven for Rustin. This was before the Civil Rights Movement had really taken off, and Rustin’s work with FOR often involved finding a way to adapt nonviolent action from Gandhi's India, to black America’s struggle for freedom.
Conscientious Objection, World War II
Rustin was a Conscientious Objector during World War II, and was jailed for it. In his 1943 Letter to the Draft Board, he writes “Today I feel that God motivates me to use my whole being to combat by nonviolent means the ever-growing racial tension in the United States” (12, page numbers from Time on Two Crosses). This sentence reveals how intertwined pacifism and desegregation were for him at the time, and how his commitment to both was deeply moral, and rooted in Christian theology.
Rustin writes that war is fundamentally wrong, as it is “inconsistent with the teachings of Jesus” (11). He also opposed the racial segregation of the military. He writes in the same letter that “the Conscription Act denies brotherhood” not only in promoting war, but also because “it separates black from white.” Finally, Rustin writes that “separation is also based on a moral error that racism can overcome racism, that evil can produce good…” (12). This assertion, that evil cannot be overcome by evil, is one of the philosophical underpinnings of nonviolence, and was often asserted by King in later years. Rustin was more explicit when he wrote in The Negro and Nonviolence, “The Negro can attain progress only if he uses, in his struggle, nonviolent direct action—a technique consistent with the end he desires” (9). In his Letter to the Draft Board, the moral and religious underpinning of that idea is evident.
In 1942, Rustin’s opposition to the war and his dedication to domestic racial issues were not incompatible, as both were based in the same moral and religious commitment to nonviolence. This would not be true in later years, as the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum and its objectives changed, while the international peace movement lost steam. Rustin’s moral commitment to interracial brotherhood, which remained constant throughout his life, would later pit him against black nationalists like Malcolm X in arguments over intergration v. separatism.
Nonviolence v. Jim Crow, 1942
Over ten years before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, when Martin Luther King was still in high school, Rustin was beaten by police for sitting in the “whites only” section of a bus. His account of the incident in Nonviolence V. Jim Crow (1942), in addition to making the same moral and religious arguments for nonviolence, presents the practical rationale for nonviolence as a tactic. Rustin description of his non-violent response to police brutality is mainly one of transcending relations and behavior established by the police. He sees police hatred as meant specifically to incite violent behavior in blacks, which is met with simply more police violence. Rustin’s account is both about the dignity of practicing nonviolence, and the effect it has on white observers. At a time when nonviolent direct action was not widespread, Rustin’s act mainly greatly surprised the whites, and opened up the possibility of understanding. He suggests that nonviolence allows police officers to become “aware of the injustice being done”(3). Rustin recounts how several whites who observed the incident came to his support. When Rustin explained the philosophy of nonviolence to the District Attorney, he was treated with great respect and allowed to go free.
In these early, experimental years, Bayard used nonviolence as a surprise tactic aimed at jolting whites into thinking about injustice, by treating a familiar situation with a new strategy. This was the hearts and minds approach: reaching out to white people to show them the brutality of Jim Crow, while simultaneously asserting the dignity of black people. Jim Crow tactics like segregation and police brutality were designed to deny blacks’ their dignity. By practicing nonviolence, Rustin turned Jim Crow on its head. His 1942 experimental insurrection proved to Rustin that nonviolence was a powerful tactic, but it was an isolated incident which, in and of itself, effected no real change. It would only be successful if it became a mass movement.
More Experiments in Nonviolence
Rustin was a youth director for the 1941 March on Washington to challenge segregation in the armed forces, organized by A. Philip Randolph. Randolph called off the march when President Franklin Roosevelt passed an order against discrimination in the defense industry. Over 20 years later, in 1963, Rustin would be the chief organizer of a new March on Washington, which would become his crowning achievement. In 1941, though, the time was not right.
In 1947, Rustin helped organize a “Journey of Reconciliation.” Co-sponsored by CORE and FOR, the Journey saw a group of black and white men travel together through the upper south on interstate buses, to test a recent Supreme Court desegregation ruling. The Journey of Reconciliation made barely a ripple on the nation’s radar screen, but was the precursor to the 1961 Freedom Rides, which garnered national attention and forced legislative change.
All of these are early examples of Rustin fighting segregation through nonviolent action before the Civil Rights Movement had taken hold. With the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycotts, nonviolent direct action became a popular tactic, and the Civil Rights Movement took off. These later achievements had been paved by the earlier experimental work of Rustin and the FOR, among others, but could not have happened without the popular support of black Americans.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-1956
"I went to Montgomery, Alabama after the bus protest began, because I saw this as an opportunity not only to help black people get their independence, but a way for me to justify a method of peaceful change that I think is going to be essential throughout mankind's history." -- Bayard Rustin (from Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement, 125).
Sparked by Rosa Park's arrest in December of 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott desegregated the city's buses, garnered national attention, brought Martin Luther King to prominence, and began to turn Civil Rights and nonviolence into a mass movement. Rustin was one of the few outsiders who was invited into the local movement, because he was experienced in nonviolent tactics. At the outset, King was interested in Gandhi and his tactics, but was by no means dedicated to nonviolence. Rustin had already been to India for a peace conference, and mentored King in the philosophy and theology of nonviolence. He also advised King on practical tactics. It was Rustin who urged King to remove the armed guards from his home, and to be fully dedicated to nonviolence as a philosophy, not just a means to a successful boycott. By the end of 1966, when the Boycott ended with a Supreme Court ruling and the successful integration of the Montgomery buses, King and nonviolence had captured the nation's attention. The Civil Rights Movement was underway. SNCC's charter, the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins, and the Freedom Rides were based in nonviolent direct action, and all contributed to the demise of Jim Crow.
The success of Montgomery also set up a shift in Rustin's own understanding of the goals of the Civil Rights movement. Once desegregation had been achieved in the South, Rustin turned his attention towards economic injustice in both the North and South. Protests, sit-ins, and boycotts were effective in challenging segregation, but their efficacy declined once the political and economic goals of African American people and leadership changed. New tactics were needed to advance black liberation. By 1963, Rustin had a new project that would take nonviolence to another level: The March on Washington.
(Historical and Biographical Information from Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement. Rustin quotes from Time on Two Crosses.)