Oumar Ndongo and Mary Elizabeth King. (WNV/courtesy of author)

The real-life experience of African nonviolent struggles was important for Martin Luther King, Jr., who drew knowledge and encouragement from the civil resistance of Africans in Ghana, Kenya, Zambia and elsewhere in their quests for independence from colonial rule. In 1957 he visited the Gold Coast (soon to be renamed Ghana), with Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., U.N. official Ralph Bunche and A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. All were to participate in the independence celebrations of Ghana as a new nation, where protracted nonviolent struggle had been pursued in seeking free elections. African nonviolent campaigns, significant in the early and mid-20th century, remain equally so in the 21st century. The rest of the world has a great deal to learn from such campaigns, especially thanks to the central roles of women in resistance and peacemaking.

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2009 poster by Greenpeace.

The more we hear calls for the urgency of climate justice like that of Bill McKibben’s July Rolling Stone article, the more we confront a strategic dilemma: Where shall we put our energy, on the local or national level?

The U.S. presidential campaign going on now is a daily reminder of the vacuum on the national stage. The candidates think it wise to downplay climate change as an issue even though the actions (and non-actions) of the person in the Oval Office have large consequences. Obama, for example, has reportedly saved 70 Appalachian mountains from mountaintop removal coal mining — earning ferocious hatred from Big Coal as a result. But he doesn’t see the pragmatism in talking about it.

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Protesters praying in Tahrir Square on May 27, 2011. By Maggie Osama, via Flickr.

One of the consequences of the Occupy movement’s emergence onto the scene over the last nine months is the escalating disagreement about the role of various strands of nonviolence and nonviolent action in the struggle. In the process, misconceptions about nonviolent strategy are being unfortunately perpetuated by earnest adherents of principled nonviolence and require correction. The phenomenon of nonviolent action is already misunderstood in most media. To see it further distorted by our own colleagues is disheartening.

In an article called “How to Sustain a Revolution” that appeared on Truthout several months ago, Stephanie Van Hook made an eloquent case for personal transformation in the context of nonviolent struggle. The essence of her argument was that acting nonviolently is not enough to sustain a people-powered revolution, and that a person must have nonviolent intentions and the willingness and ability to engage in an internal discipline of personal nonviolence if the struggle is to be truly won. On this point, I don’t have any serious disagreement. While I am not sure I would make the same case that nonviolent success requires this level of individual transformation prior to the waging of the struggle, Van Hook’s argument is similar enough to the case I would make — that nonviolent success requires genuine appreciation of one’s own (and thus our collective) power. I am someone who does not align solely with one camp of nonviolence or nonviolent action, and am someone who believes that both principle and strategy are magnified when they are married. I think our differences here are mostly rhetorical rather than conceptual.

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Bonus Army encampment in July 1932. By Theodor Horydczak, via the Library of Congress.

In the Northern Hemisphere, and well before the onset of global warming, May has always been a great month for protests — especially ones that involve spending a lot of time outdoors. As the month comes to a close, let’s take a moment to remember five born-in-May occupations that rocked.

These five have interesting features in common, relating to the conditions that catalyzed them, the instigators and the authorities’ overly harsh responses (often resulting in an outpouring of public sympathy). Each of these occupations faced deteriorating economic prospects, increasing disparities in wealth distribution, a lack of legal recourse or government accountability, along with an abject insensitivity or intentional denial of the needs of the society’s poorest members. The organizers of these events were completely committed to mounting a protest alongside the concurrent development of an alternative community to provide for basic needs.

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As we evaluate the successes and errors of past organizations in order to shape more effective movements today, it is vital to be careful and precise about what lessons remain relevant. Certain organizations, such as the Black Panthers, have amassed so much interest and subsequent mythology that it is often particularly difficult to sort through the hype. White nonviolent activists, furthermore, have an added burden; if we are to be valued participants in building successful mass movements for social change we must be extremely careful to provide as much principled solidarity as we do criticism.

George Lakey’s recent essay, “The Black Panthers’ ‘Militarist Error,’” spotlights an important fact, delivered by a person with many years of anti-racist experience: Many leading former Panthers recognize a strategic error in their glorification of the gun. Even amongst those Occupy Cleveland supporters who were recently accused of plotting to blow up an Ohio bridge, the message is clear: If a movement is going to be built for the long haul, “those kinds of tactics just don’t cut it.”

There are other vital insights, however, which must be brought to light if peace advocates are to further engage in drawing lessons from the Panther legacy.

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An article published by CounterPunch yesterday, “Inconvenient Truths about Tar Sands Action,” argues that the grassroots campaign targeting the Keystone XL pipeline was nothing more than “a manipulated charade, funded and run with loads of money from pro-Obama Democrats through non-transparent organizations like the Tides Foundation.” It follows, then, according to the article, that the real goal of Tar Sands Action “was to manufacture Obama a ‘green victory’ during his first term in the run up to the 2012 election.”

In short, for those thousands of you who participated in the White House sit-ins or encirclement and became “True Believers in the mission,” you were duped. What you took part in “was not social change, nor was it grassroots empowerment.” You became nothing more than a name on an email list. You were “converted into clicktivists who will hopefully contribute money to the Obama ‘I’m In’ 2012 Presidential campaign, ecological landscape be damned.”

I’d ask you how it feels, but I should know. I’m one of you. The article mentions Waging Nonviolence along with the socialist group Solidarity and author Naomi Klein as being among the “principled radicals” who “drank the kool-aid.” So how do I feel? Well, for someone who has supposedly been drugged, I feel remarkably sober and unconvinced.

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Huey Newton and Bobby Steale, via Wikimedia.

The Black Panther Party was an African-American radical organization founded in Oakland, California, in 1966. Originally it was called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, and even though it emerged in the North, it was responding to the same anger and frustration as the Deacons for Defense felt when watching black people get punished for standing up for themselves in the South.

The Panthers’ immediate goal was to protect black neighborhoods from police brutality. The group evolved from black nationalism to a broader revolutionary socialism. It rapidly expanded to many cities, still mainly in the North, and became influential. It differed from the Deacons for Defense in that it didn’t think of itself as a security force for the civil rights movement. Instead, it offered an outright alternative to the civil rights movement, with goals that included “land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.” Its best-known programs were its armed citizens’ patrols to monitor the police, and Free Breakfast for School Children. Other programs included free medical clinics, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, and an experimental school to develop new methods for educating African-American children.

Not nearly enough notice has been taken of the Panthers’ effort, as a revolutionary organization, to include alternative institutions in their program. Many in the Occupy movement have made the same move. Both are in alignment with a framework that emphasizes “prefigurative work,” which builds skills and creates new ways for organizing life in a future society.

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Illustration of self-defense, from James E. Homans' 1908 New American Encyclopedia of Social and Commercial Information.

We have a moral right to defend ourselves against violation; there’s no doubt in my mind about that. Persons and groups have boundaries for a reason, and integrity generally requires that we defend them. Gandhi said that this is an obligation that trumped his call to experiment with nonviolent action; if you can’t think of a way to defend yourself nonviolently, he said, use violence. I believe Gandhi would have sympathized with the Deacons for Defense, for instance, an armed civil rights group in Southern U.S.

Of course Gandhi also believed that, with sufficient creativity, there is always a way to devise a nonviolent defense. He also recognized that either violent or nonviolent defense might fail in an immediate sense; there is such a thing as overwhelming force.

I think it’s no accident that the question of self-defense has been coming up in some circles in the Occupy movement at this time. Having the discussion reflects how many people are realizing that moving the 1 percent out of the driver’s seat is a revolutionary mission. The person who doesn’t feel fear at the prospect of revolution is out of touch with their feelings. It’s only natural at such a moment to wonder if there is some way to act boldly — and at the same time stay safe.

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As I flew in from Illinois, the thunderstorms over Birmingham cleared long enough to let us land in good order. I had come to Alabama to attend a retreat featuring Narayan Desai, one of the last living disciples of Mohandas Gandhi, who made the trip there from India at the invitation of longtime activists and authors Shelley and Jim Douglass. Born in 1924 in Gandhi’s ashram, Desai has consistently undertaken Gandhian work for eight decades, and has recently published a 2,300-page biography of Gandhi. It was not only deeply moving to spend three days last week in the presence of this life-long Gandhian, but to do so in Birmingham, the site of one of the civil rights movement’s most iconic struggles.

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Forty-seven years ago this week, Martin Luther King Jr. set out with 3,200 civil rights activists from Selma to Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, to call on the state and the nation to dismantle the structural obstacles to suffrage for African Americans. Two weeks before, on Sunday, March 7, 1965, hundreds of marchers had been brutally attacked on the Edmund Pettus Bridge by Alabama state troopers and local police officers on horses wielding clubs and whips amid a storm of tear gas.

“Bloody Sunday” horrified the nation and motivated a reluctant Lyndon Johnson to provide federalized National Guard protection for a renewed march, after the movement succeeded in getting a court order to allow the demonstrators to proceed. As federal judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. ruled, “The law is clear that the right to petition one’s government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups … and these rights may be exercised by marching, even along public highways.” Over the next four days, the marchers walked 50 miles, sleeping at night in fields alongside Jefferson Davis Highway. Over 25,000 people arrived at Alabama’s Capitol building on March 25. Less than five months later, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law.

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