The Provocation of Violence

...The fulfillment of this goal hinged on violence, and the leaders knew it...

...Even the group that subscribes to nonviolence is divided...

...In essence they were imploring: "You must let nonviolence work, or you must be violent...

...He says, "It's easy to talk about non-violence, but in a lot of cases you've got to be tested, and reinspire yourself...

...2. Racists resist by unleashing violence against them...

...One life...

...discussing the rationale behind the Selma protest, Dr...

...Finally, we should recognize that not all participants in the movement are philosophically committed to nonviolence...

...But there is more to the attraction of violence than its power to arouse the public at large...

...It would have brought the students South anyway...

...I am certain many of us working for civil rights are unconscious of the way we exploit violence...

...Thus, the moral superiority of nonviolence is most graphically displayed in a violent setting.* Nonviolence reaches the height of its legitimacy when it is counterposed with the illegitimacy of naked violence...

...I asked...

...and to expose white college students to the rigors of Southern poverty and repression...

...Leaders of the movement anticipated that bringing hundreds of outsiders to Mississippi would trigger violence, but this time the violence would be against students from white, affluent, influential families, and the federal government would be forced to protect them...

...I still hear the words of the parade captain I spoke to in the march that turned around...

...Violence is dramatic, and Americans like the dramatic...

...This single act gave the program more publicity than any other kind of action could have...

...When you turn the other cheek and nobody bothers to slap it, it's hard to believe you are a threat to anyone...

...And we see the nonviolent movement wrestling with its conscience and struggling to cope with the attitudes represented by the Deacons...

...There is division in the ranks, and this is another pressure toward violence...

...One venture came within a hair of trigger ing mob violence...

...6 Adler, Renata...

...And they are trying to bolster the nerve of the active Negro as well...

...In the South violence against civil rights workers often occurs spontaneously, without any attempt to invite it...

...The situation was so tense and the youngsters were so eager to take on the police that King's aides had to respond to the dissatisfaction...

...They made several frantic attempts to show that nonviolence works...

...Italics added) 3 King, Martin Luther, Jr...

...Yet, the record suggests that in many situations the provocation of violence has become more than a calculated risk of the movement...

...3 Can nonviolence pay such "eloquent" dividends...

...They also knew something else—that the government was reluctant to provide protection...

...And the federal government can be forced to intervene in situations of violence while it turns its back on less inflammatory brutality...

...What is the next step...

...In the words of Dr...

...Long years of experience indicate to us that Negroes can achieve this goal when four things occur: 1. Nonviolent demonstrators go into the streets to exercise their constitutional rights...

...This group and the nonbelievers are constantly pressuring the committed to prove that nonviolence works...

...Some participants in the movement may be drawn into battle for more personal reasons: to prove to themselves and others that they are pacifists out of principle rather than fear or to prove they are truly committed to nonviolence...

...They may hastily involve the movement in a dramatic protest because they know drama has a quick pay-off...

...It is then, in effect, relying on violence to achieve some end...

...And what price are you willing to pay to keep marching...

...To quote Dr...

...I am not suggesting that the violence of white segregationists always pays dividends for the movement...

...Martin Luther King clearly suggests that the movement in Selma, like the movement in Mississippi, was relying on violence to achieve some goal.* The goal of the demonstrations in Selma, as elsewhere, is to dramatize the existence of injustice and to bring about the presence of justice...

...Thus, we who are involved may be captives of a social dynamic, without necessarily being aware of the forces acting upon us...

...No lives," he replied...

...Consider what happened in the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project...

...It is commonly assumed by those of us involved in it that the provocation of violence is alien to its strategy and that violence is simply a calculated risk in trying to achieve its goals...

...Behind the Selma March," Saturday Review, April 3, 1965, p. 17...

...Through demonstrations, Negroes learn that unity and militance have more force than bullets...

...The violence of white segregationists may be necessary to sustain the nonviolent movement, but it may not be sufficient...

...As we followed the leaders back to Selma, he vociferously declared: "We should have kept marching right through the troopers...

...In • Federal agents did not define their role as protective, but as "investigative...

...It was the bombings in Birmingham that forced President Kennedy to submit the historic Civil Rights Bill...

...Or they may try other means of winning laurels for nonviolence even if they have to throw caution and some principles to the winds...

...They refused to be provoked into violence even when a group of Negro youths broke ranks and charged their line, and Baker readily approved all forms of nonviolent protest such as speeches and prayers...

...But the leaders could say to their critics that they had succeeded in getting past the police non -violently...

...4. The Administration, under mass pressure, initiates measures of immediate intervention and remedial legislation .2 When nonviolent protest does provoke violent retaliation, civil rights leaders know how to capitalize on the situation and turn it to our advantage...

...Let Justice Roll Down," The Nation, March 15, 1965, p. 271...

...Violence is not simply a calculated risk...

...The brutalizing of whites arouses much more attention and anger than the brutalizing of Negroes...

...4 Ibid., p. 270...

...They are trying to arouse the apathetic Negro by showing him that other Negroes would rather stand up in battle than be bent by the yoke of submission...

...And King's aides followed his example, leading us to the barricades but no further...

...so it is hard to know where provocation as risk leaves off and provocation as tactic begins...

...I King, Martin Luther, Jr...

...King: Those who have lived under the corrosive humiliation of daily intimidation are imbued by demonstrations with a sense of courage and dignity that strengthens their personalities...

...I be * King, of course, turned the second march around but not until we went to the brink and in his words "made our point, revealing the continued presence of violence, and showing clearly who are the oppressed and who the oppressors...

...Since the latter have no philosophical attachment to nonviolence, they are more vulnerable to the appeal of violence as a strategy than the committed are...

...When they asked for federal protection, the government was uncooperative...

...Some are committed to it as an end in itself...

...Because the Summer Project had so many goals, one can always argue that the goal of getting federal troops had no special effect on the actions of the movement...

...He said that the Bakers really thwart the movement but that the Bull Connors and Jim Clarks play into its hands and give it momentum...

...Violence which rallies national sentiment behind the movement can tear a local community apart and freeze positions, so that it becomes more difficult to win localized demands...

...King, the murder of the three civil rights workers was "a grisly and eloquent demonstration to the whole nation of the moral degeneracy upon which segregation rests...

...Ten lives...

...We were forced either to be violent ourselves or to bear the burden of seemingly ineffective nonviolence...

...Mass media will give extensive coverage to violence and threats of violence while they ignore more subtle injustices against the Negro and more subtle attempts to remedy injustice...

...Thus, Charles Mauldin, a teen-age leader, wants a chance to be tested...

...I am not suggesting participants in the movement are attracted to violence for its own sake...

...The prophecy was largely correct...

...Its purposes were to register Negroes to vote...

...If so, there must be an escalation of violence to get the same effect...

...Civil rights leaders have other audiences in mind when they march into battle...

...to teach them in Freedom Schools...

...This may be an unforeseen consequence of using the dramatic protest to arouse public opinion...

...it is part of an over-all plan...

...The civil rights movement is pledged to nonviolence...

...but with respect to achieving another, it can be a latent tactic...

...Tear gas in Selma outraged the nation, but only three weeks later smoke bombs in Camden went practically unnoticed...

...Sometimes this pressure forces the committed to exploit violence as a means of gaining symbolic victories for nonviolence...

...2 Ibid., p. 16...

...But I am suggesting we are consciously and unconsciously drawn toward violence because violence pays dividends for the movement...

...I remember what Reverend Andrew Young, one of King's top aides, said in Browns Chapel as he reflected on the fact that Safety Director Baker was a nonviolent police chief...

...The police then blocked us from marching to the county courthouse...

...On at least two occasions they sent small groups to the courthouse by evasive routes to stage a demonstration...

...And the instrumental value of violence is a built-in impetus for actions that will provide it...

...Does the American public have a rising degree of tolerance for violence...

...As they are forced to take more and more chances, violence as risk becomes violence as certainty...

...The impact on the public at large depends in part on the character of the victim...

...A hundred...

...The success of nonviolent struggle may require that this prophecy be fulfilled...

...l lieve this reaction was caused in large part by the failure of the nonviolent technique to provoke violence...

...Letter From Selma," The New Yorker, April 10, 1965, p. 138...

...e The movement actually increases the attraction of violence by reserving the greatest acclaim for those who have braved it...

...Already we see the emergence of the Deacons, an armed league of Negroes pledged to using violence in self-defense...

...Nor is Selma an isolated case...

...The bared fangs of Bull Connor's police dogs—the burning bus of the Freedom Riders—the tearstained face of Medgar Evers' widow: these are the alarms that awaken the conscience of America...

...others view it simply as an expedient tactic...

...The project had only begun when three of the workers were murdered...

...Perhaps he was refusing to admit something even more important—that he is disillusioned with the nonviolent approach to winning battles...

...First and foremost, it is a powerful catalyst to arouse public opinion...

...And for many this burden was shame—shame because we were just standing there, not getting through, not pushing through, not being beaten, not being arrested, just standing there...

...The strategy of the movement in this country raises a very important question: Does a movement which is dedicated to nonviolence as the means of action and reaction inherently need violence to sustain it...

...If the 600 Negroes who were tear gassed and beaten in Selma had walked all the way to Montgomery without a violent incident, we would still be awaiting a voting bill...

...If the public and the government do not respond to that violence, and what it represents, with enough indignation and power to change the Negro's inhuman condition to a human one—then the Negro and his white allies will totally abandon nonviolence as a principle and strategy...

...I suggest an answer: when the movement adopts a goal which it believes can be fulfilled only through violence...

...For several years a seasoned cadre of Negro civil rights workers had been waging the voter registration drive under conditions of open brutality and terror...

...But the facts compel me to question this assumption and to suggest that the provocation of violence is often used as a latent tactic...

...No lives...

...I understand still another goal was expressed by leaders of the project long before it actually began— getting federal troops to Mississippi to protect the voter registration drive...

...With respect to achieving one goal, the provocation of violence can be merely a calculated risk...

...5 " A further attraction of violence for participants in a nonviolent movement inheres in the fact that violence is the antithesis of nonviolence...

...Still their presence served as a deterrent toviolence...

...It has the earmarks of a strategy...

...This contention is difficult to prove...

...The philosophy of nonviolent struggle seems in part to be predicated on the idea that there will be violence against the movement...

...Thus, demonstrators found it impossible to make the police initiate action that the movement could capitalize on...

...But I think participants also sensed a more subtle sign of failure: the lack of violence...

...Give us some sense of effectiveness...

...Safety Director Baker headed the police, and they were on their best behavior...

...Both kinds of failure were articulated by spokesmen for the movement when they announced on the evening of the all-night vigil: "We will tell the police: You must let us through, or you must beat us, tear gas us, or jail us...

...And since the whole ideology of the movement implies an abhorrence of violence, none of us wants to admit that violence is more than a calculated risk...

...According to King, "segregationists learn from demonstrations that Negroes who have been taught to fear can also be taught to be fearless...

...To sustain itself, will it now be forced to sanction the use of violence in self-defense...

...5 Ibid...

...The obvious sign of failure was that we were not getting through to the courthouse...

...Selma, Alabama, provides another illustration of what I have in mind...

...It did not bring federal troops, but it brought FBI agents and federal marshals in large numbers, and by their presence they reduced the likelihood of violence against the civil rights workers.* The chain of events in this and similar situations forces us to consider this question: when is the provocation of violence more than a calculated risk of the movement...

...Did he really mean "no lives...

...A sizable number scattered throughout the movement do not beIieve in nonviolence, either as a principle or a tactic...

...The evidence suggests that it does...

...Pressured by the reality of life, the movement has already embraced the tactic of capitalizing on violence and the tactic of provoking it...

...Or was he refusing to admit even to himself that the nonviolent movement often thrives on violence...

...We were gripped by a tremendous sense of frustration and futility...

...They find that the bruises of dubs, electric cattle prods and fists hurt less than the scars of submission.4 The enemy constitutes still another audience...

...When bigotry erupts into violence, this dramatizes the everyday plight of the Negro and shows the righteousness of the movement's cause...

...But when nonviolence begets nonviolent opposition, this can really frustrate the movement, as I learned firsthand at Selma in the days immediately following the march that turned around...

...Even on a national level, a given type of violence seems to pay diminishing returns...

...3. Americans of conscience in the name of decency demand federal intervention and legislation...

...This argument begs the question...

...I felt the pressure on the leaders in Selma when nonviolence appeared to be ineffective...