DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk K-9 Consensus Peaceful vs. Violent... where is your line?

behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something

On Saturday, as protests mounted across the country following the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed explained the large police presence at downtown protests to reporters: “Dr. King would never take a freeway.”

Reed’s claim was historically absurd. Martin Luther King Jr. took many a highway—most famously, perhaps, in the Selma-to-Montgomery march.

Reed is not the only one trafficking in dangerous and distorted ideas of the civil rights movement. Across the political spectrum over the past two years, as Black Lives Matter burst into national consciousness, many commentators—from former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee (who said that King would be appalled by BLM) to Oprah Winfrey (who told young activists “to take note of the strategic, peaceful intention if you want real change” ) and the Rev. Barbara Reynolds (“We were nonviolent activists who won hearts by conveying respectability and changed laws by delivering a message of love and unity”)—have invoked the history of the civil rights movement to chastise Black Lives Matter. They and many others have cast today’s protesters as dangerous and reckless and not living up to the peaceful, respectable, unified legacy of the civil rights movement.

These framings misrepresent the movements that BLM activists are building across the country and the history of the civil rights movement. Such historical revisionism is both dangerous and comfortable—dangerous because it grossly distorts how the civil rights movement actually proceeded, and comfortable because it allows many Americans to keep today’s movement at arm’s length. This repeated comparison has become one of the ways that many justify hand-wringing on the sidelines—as if they would act, given a righteous movement like King's, but today’s activists are simply too excessive, too disruptive and too unrespectable.

Calling out these myths is more than setting the historical record straight. The “propaganda of history,” as W.E.B. Du Bois reminded us a century ago, becomes a way of “giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment”—for soothing and justifying inaction in the face of persistent racial inequality.

Myth 1: The civil rights movement wasn’t disruptive.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a disruptive consumer boycott that sought to use the power of black consumers to hurt the bus company and force the city to address black demands. The Birmingham, Ala., campaign that King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference waged in 1963 was a campaign of mass civil disobedience designed to overflow the jails and cripple downtown businesses and city function. Key to the work of many civil rights organizations, from SCLC to the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was mass civil disobedience because they understood that injustice would not be changed without disrupting civic and commercial life.

Myth 2: The movement's righteousness was apparent.

The civil rights movement made most Americans uncomfortable. From presidents to ordinary citizens, many regarded it as “extremism.” People regularly called MLK and Rosa Parks communists and traitors, not just in the South but also in the “liberal” North, for their critiques of police brutality and their support of housing and school desegregation. Although our public imagination focuses on Southern-redneck racism, both Parks and King came to see the white “moderate” as key to the problem. As King wrote from a Birmingham jail in 1963, “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens' Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice […] who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action.’”

Myth 3: “Respectable” activists like Rosa Parks were publicly appreciated.

Parks spent many decades grappling with how hard it was to be a “troublemaker,” and with the stigmatization and punishment of black people who dissented endured. She noted how those who challenged the racial order as she did were labeled “radicals, soreheads, agitators, troublemakers.” Politically active for two decades before her bus stand (and four decades afterward), Parks despaired for years before the boycott that no mass movement was emerging.

“Such a good job of brainwashing was done on the Negro,” Parks observed, “that a militant Negro was almost a freak of nature to them, many times ridiculed by others of his own group.” She struggled with feeling isolated and crazy, writing how she felt “completely alone and desolate, as if I was descending in a black and bottomless chasm.”

Myth 4: Most well-meaning Americans supported the civil rights movement.

The majority of the American public did not support the civil rights movement while it was happening. In May 1961, in a Gallup survey, only 22 percent of Americans approved of what the Freedom Riders were doing, and 57 percent of Americans said that the sit-ins at lunch counters, freedom buses and other demonstrations by Negroes were hurting the Negro’s chances of being integrated in the South.

Lest we see this as Southerners skewing the national sample, in 1964, a year before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, in a poll conducted by the New York Times, a majority of white people in New York City said the civil rights movement had gone too far: “While denying any deepseated prejudice, a large number of those questioned used the same terms to express their feelings. They spoke of Negroes’ receiving ‘everything on a silver platter’ and of ‘reverse discrimination’ against whites.” Nearly half said that picketing and demonstrations hurt black people’s cause. In 1966, a year after Selma and the passage of the Voting Rights Act, 85 percent of white people and 30 percent of black people nationally believed that demonstrations by black people on civil rights hurt the advancement of civil rights.

Myth 5: The federal government was a key supporter.

The history of the March on Washington is revealing of the federal government’s approach to the movement. Now celebrated as one of the most American events of the 20th century, the march was feared at the time. In a poll a few days before the march, 63 percent of Americans surveyed had an unfavorable opinion, and numerous congressmen denounced the march as decidedly “un-American.”

The FBI surveilled the march’s organization for many months preceding the event. The march was policed like a military battle; in Operation Steep Hill, the Pentagon put 19,000 troops on standby. Five thousand local and suburban police, National Guard troops and Army rangers were given riot-control training and were on duty that day. The Kennedy administration had rigged the microphone so that it could be turned off if that was deemed necessary. In the wake of the march’s success and King’s galvanizing influence, the FBI, with the Kennedy administration’s approval, expanded its surveillance of King.

Myth 6: The movement focused on the South.

Forced to leave Montgomery for Detroit in 1957, Rosa Parks found Detroit the “Northern promised land that wasn’t” and continued her activism fighting the racism of the Jim Crow North till her death in 2005. She repeatedly lamented how black movements challenging school and housing segregation, urban renewal, economic injustice and police brutality were opposed in the 1950s and 1960s, and this “resistance to change long beforehand” laid the groundwork for the uprisings of the mid-1960s.

Following the 1965 Watts uprising, King took to the pages of the Saturday Review to criticize the “surprise” evinced by California officials, given long-standing movements in their own backyards. “In my travels in the North,” King said, he had grown “increasingly … disillusioned with the power structures there … [who] showered praise on the heroism of Southern Negroes. Yet when the issues were joined concerning local conditions only the language was polite; the rejection was firm and unequivocal.”

So let’s be clear: Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks and their many comrades were persevering, courageous and disruptive, and they made America uncomfortable—just like many people engaging in BLM movements across the country today. But we have stripped them of this history. By turning civil rights heroes like King and Parks into Thanksgiving Day parade balloons—happy, larger than life and stripped of their substance—we make them “unavailable for where we are now,” as the late Vincent Harding put it, “so we can keep ourselves comfortably distant from the realities [they were] trying to grapple with.”

King certainly did take a freeway. What are we doing?

I think the word violence is obvious and has a definition for the word that explains it well.



If your actions do not include things that fall under this definition you are not being violent. But the bigger question here is criminal. Crimes are also being committed that while not violent, are certainly criminal acts and as such those people should be caught and convicted.

I think property destruction, theft, physical violence and blocking roadways should be off limits. I realize that protestors have to make an impact and it can be done without resorting to violence or harm.

J/C

Some context


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IMO, there's a fair amount of grey area even in my understanding of violent vs forceful bu peaceful.

Really, it all comes down to the hurt you're causing by your protest. Looting a store obviously hurts the owner, a local businessperson. Pulling down a statue will probably hurt someone's feelings, but I'm ok with that. I acknowledge that protests, by their nature, are not intended to have everyone come away feeling comfortable. In another way, if you're protesting and nobody has had their feelings hurt, you're probably doing it wrong.

I think the word violence is obvious and has a definition for the word that explains it well.



If your actions do not include things that fall under this definition you are not being violent. But the bigger question here is criminal. Crimes are also being committed that while not violent, are certainly criminal acts and as such those people should be caught and convicted.

Do you guys see a difference between several people locking arms across all lines of the roadway and people surrounding a car en masse, pounding on the car, jumping on the hood, trying the door handles, and screaming and yelling at the occupants?

Yes. One should bring a simple Kidnapping charge and the other False Imprisonment.

Actions like these are the best example of how ridiculously stupid these people are.

"Hey Fred, how do you suppose we can get a bunch of people to endear themselves to our cause?"

"I don't know Charlie, maybe we can figure out a creative way to make them hate us and want to spit in our faces?"

I don't know who the leaders of these groups are, they seem to be mostly nameless and faceless anymore... but they would be well served to find some people with a huge bump in intelligence quotient.

#sodumbitbringsmetotears

I completely understand what you are saying here. On its face I can't say I'd disagree with the sentiment. But let me ask you this: do you see any value in maintaining a consistent standard? Yes tearing down a statue at worst might hurt someone's feelings, but in the initial days of the rioting there were several people who rationalized the damage to the businesses saying "its ok, they have insurance".

And also if I may, how much of you being ok with a statue coming down has something to do with how you personally may or may not feel about what it represents?

Do you guys see a difference between several people locking arms across all lines of the roadway and people surrounding a car en masse, pounding on the car, jumping on the hood, trying the door handles, and screaming and yelling at the occupants?

I don't believe you can take actions for things claimed to be "imminent". The judicial system dictates that law enforcement arrest criminal behavior. If no crime has been committed there is no cause for actions other than curfews that I know of as not infringing on the rights of the innocent. I believe that would fall under needing reasonable suspicion of a crime being committed.

We also disagree on the definition of violence. Yelling at someone is not violence. Graffiti is not violence. We may find the message contained in that graffiti disgusting or enraging but no violence occurred.

If what you said is to be considered accurate, that would mean that any march or protest conducted by the KKK of its very nature is violent considering the things they say. Yet they too have the same right to free speech and are protected just like any other group.

And I guess that's the bigger point here. Laws dictate what a crime is. They define penalties for criminal behavior. Maybe I'm mistaken but I do not think the law puts hateful graffiti as a violent act.

Where we need to be careful is to not neglect to separate those breaking the laws form those who are not. We should stand against the criminal element and also stand with those who are not committing crimes.

I think we have a huge disagreement on what the circumstances are as it pertains to what constitutes imminent.

When looking at the vast majority of protests around this nation and when looking at the minority of protests and protestors that are violent, using an imminent threat as an excuse to gas hundreds of innocent people in the process seems to ring hallow. The actual numbers would tend to suggest just the opposite. The only thing thus far that has proven itself to be imminent at this point is that it has been used to harm a lot of people that have not been violent.