WE SHALL OVERCOME WHAT?
Mayer, Milton
We Shall Overcome What? by MILTON MAYER TVTonviolence is an emanation—noth-ing more—of one person's concern for the welfare of another with whom he is in conflict. It is not a means of winning...
...and so the civil rights movement is divided...
...Barry Goldwater said that racism, which he said he deplored, was a matter for the human heart and not for the law, (though he didn't mind a little state law here and there, and especially there...
...The votary is not the man to lead a nonholy army in a pure cause...
...A very hard case...
...He himself doesn't want it...
...To injure him—even to want to injure him—is to make him a worse man and to worsen themselves into the bargain...
...The mere promulgation of human law is adequate to the preservation of public order under generally noncontroversial circumstances;, a fact which conceals, but only lightly, the further fact that the law is enforceable by violence...
...But until they saw William Penn at Shackamaxon, they had never seen a white man without a gun...
...They find themselves denouncing the FBI because it "just stands there," which is what they themselves do when they practice nonviolence...
...This human starvation is on the rise—faster far than is the animal starvation of man (which, incidentally, is also on the rise...
...The Negroes remained unfree...
...In the absence of concern for the welfare of the Nazis, the Jews' nonviolent nonresistance says nothing more than the Danes' nonviolent (or the Russians' violent) resistance...
...But there are not more than a few thousand votaries of this true nonviolence in our society, and almost none at all in any other Western society except England's...
...It is possible, indeed probable, that the malefactors were unrepentant...
...They remained unfree for a hundred years...
...He has either got to win or get out of the movement...
...Those who want more law and more law enforcement—of any law— must be aware that the ultimate recourse of law is violence...
...But to make a man worse is an evil, and they can not believe that the right thing can produce evil...
...His articles have appeared in many American publications and have won him the George Polk Memorial Award and the Benjamin Franklin Citation for Journalism...
...and a minis-cule proportion of the whites...
...A hard case...
...This mighty G-Whiz-Man is getting his lumps these days...
...Whether or not they know it, they are religious pacifists...
...If this angelic folly succeeded in Seventeenth Century Pennsylvania, as it did, in conflict with "the merciless Indian savages" (to quote Jefferson as of a century later), it will probably succeed in Twentieth Century Mississippi...
...It is an emanation of one person's concern for the welfare of another with whom he is in conflict...
...He is narrow-minded and shallow and is (or was) immensely cunning, and he has been considerably and consistently less than a friend of liberty all his life...
...The few who constitute the other wing of the movement are, whether or not they know it, religious pacifists...
...They believe, whether or not they formulate their belief, that there is that of God in every man, and that that of God in him may be aroused by their consuming concern for his welfare (which is the way the Holy Doctor Aquinas defines love...
...And the civil rightists have no different, or less violent, reaction to the probation of the confessed bombers in McComb than the non-civil-rightist Hoover, who condemns the judge's "blindness and indifference to outrageous acts...
...They find themselves calling for an economic boycott of Mississippi...
...They want to inflict punishment on him and make an example of him...
...Now, I don't say he meant it, and I don't say he djdn't...
...We don't know that the judicial action had any connection with the change, but do we care...
...But what was the effect of the action beyond its embitterment of Mr...
...they embrace retaliation and deterrence (at home as abroad) as "the only language those b------s understand...
...Thus he and the other leaders of the movement—men like himself—find themselves wanting the equal justice under law to which the best of all violent societies is dedicated...
...I hold no brief for the buffalo, and still less for the bull...
...Assume the worst of intentions on the part of the judge and the malefactors...
...Holy men, he and his kind, who, in their heart of hearts, want not to carry the day but to carry the Cross and to make a friend or die trying...
...The civil rightists who want a more powerful and ardent Federal police force are confronted by a non-civil-rightist, J. Edgar Hoover, who keeps warning them against the tendency of such a force to create a police state in which all civil rights are lost...
...On the one hand, nonviolence, in King's situation as in Gandhi's, appears to be a weapon or means of winning (and of winning in a pure cause...
...Nonviolence without that concern is a form of violence, and as such it is accepted by men and nations nowadays like any other strategy, however monstrous...
...no compulsion to love the killer...
...When it yields to the immense temptation to ask for Federal guns—or for the threat of them—it surrenders its magic hold upon the heart of man...
...Least of all do I know that enough of us have loved enough...
...and most, perhaps all, of its leaders are divided, each within himself...
...He has them coming to him—we all have—and he is further overdue than most of us...
...Hoover and the civil rightists...
...includes some of his finest work in The Progressive over the past quarter-century...
...assume, further, that there was no connection between the release and the subsequent change in McComb...
...The judge in McComb turned the convicted malefactors loose — they could have been sentenced to death— and told them to go and sin no more...
...Their motive is victory, and their cause is pure...
...I suspect that a sizable proportion, but by no means a majority, of the Southern Negroes in the movement have become its votaries...
...I may stand nonviolently while my enemy lies on the track and the train approaches, or while he dies of thirst and I have a jug of water by me...
...Martin Luther King is surely such a man...
...The merciless Indian savages had as their only rule of warfare—this is Jefferson again—"an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions...
...The degree of violence is determined by the requirement to make the Mississippians understand "the only language they understand...
...Think how the centurion and they that were with him saw the earth quake and the things that were done, and feared greatly and understood at last the language they had seen in the ninth hour at Calvary...
...But the prospect, dubious or salubrious, is not their reason for loving him: They love him because they love that of God and can do no other...
...In both cases you could have heard a fingerprint drop...
...It is not a weapon of war...
...Why not...
...He is right: If there is one man in America who will not be improved by more power, it is Hoover...
...We know that within two or three weeks a really classic change for the better occurred in McComb...
...Man is starved for love, and as starved to give it as he is to get it...
...They want to do him in...
...Does anyone care...
...They want to make him suffer under the doctrine —from which Christ tried in vain to dissuade the Christians—of an eye for an eye...
...Nor do I know that more lives will not be laid down as the guns and friends with guns increase...
...They know that their prospect is dubious...
...The split in the civil rights movement goes right straight down to the bottom of Martin Luther King's plea for brotherhood...
...This division over the nature of nonviolence splits the civil rights movement—but very far from right down the middle...
...So, when they sing, "We shall overcome," they are singing of their determination to overcome their own disposition to injure...
...It is not the first such age—far from it—but it is the first to prate of human dignity while it enchants itself with ancient barbarity...
...J. Edgar Hoover is a bull...
...Hor-ribile dictu...
...We are nearly all of us unconcernedly nonviolent nearly all of our lives, and our unconcerned nonviolence permits (and therefore predisposes to) the violence that everywhere carries the day...
...They must be aware, too, that the law of true nonviolence is the law of love, which is beyond men's power to enact or enforce...
...Nor do I know that his angry rejoinder to the Warren Commission—which criticized the FBI in the Oswald case— elicited applause from the liberals and radicals who defend the immunity of political deviates from preventive surveillance...
...on the other, it appears to King, as it did to Gandhi, in its true light as the emanation of concern for the welfare of the enemy, win, lose, or draw...
...It finds a few of the participants (very few, I suspect) with a consuming concern for the welfare of the killers of unarmed innocents, and the rest with a consuming commitment to nonviolent action as a strategy (and a marvelous strategy it seems to be) of defeating, or even destroying, the enemy...
...The liberal-radical line seems to be, If Hoover says it, it's wrong, and if Hoover does it, it's bad...
...Let us then try what love will do," said Penn, "for if men but see that we love them they will not want to injure us...
...Behind the Attorney General on the doorstep of the University of Mississippi is the National Guard, and behind the National Guard is the Army, the Navy, and the Marines...
...And then nonviolence came to a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, four years ago, with its innocent, harmless helplessness...
...It is not a strategy or a technique or a device or a gimmick...
...Holy men, and unholy I. But an unholy man—.who better?—can see how hard the case is...
...It is on the rise because the community, the home, and the person are being pounded to pieces by the marvels of fragmentation that the machinists have produced...
...and the Negroes' chains, after a hundred years of violence won Emancipation, at last began to fall away...
...And if it won't, what on earth or in heaven will...
...His most recent book, "What Can a Man Do...
...I could be mortally wrong, and I could be heroic, if first I was holy, and lay my life on the line, and if need be down, instead of tending to my business, which is steam-heated yak...
...What the whites of Mississippi may need these days is to see more white strangers with the consuming concern for them that Penn had for the Indians, and more Negro familiars without friends with guns in Washington...
...Heroes are few enough, and to be a votary of the love whose mere emanation is nonviolence is to be not merely heroic but holy...
...Some of the civil rightists want him to have—or exercise—more power...
...They do not ask him to do differently— which wants only overwhelming violence against him—but to want to do differently...
...They are helpless to injure the killer...
...and they want to do the right thing...
...And love-starved man will be fed by the food that produces nonviolence, or he will not be fed at all...
...But King is a leader, and a leader of a nonholy (not unholy) army...
...What all of them have in common is the whole-souled acceptance of violence (including war) as the nature of the human case...
...But they profess no faith in conversion and MILTON MAYER, writer and lecturer, has just spent a semester as visiting professor of English at the University of Massachusetts...
...One of them complained that the FBI waited "the full twenty-four hours" before entering the Philadelphia case, implying that the hold-off period required by the Lindbergh law should have been violated in this instance because it may have been violated in others...
...I think that Martin Luther King is divided, and I do not derogate him: I know that Gandhi was divided, on occasion to the point of being immobilized...
...And to want to win is to turn inexorably, it seems, to the orthodox forms of power in which violence is always latent and the spirit of violence always overt...
...This is the age of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the age of Dean Acheson and the doctrine of the two moralities, private and public...
...and a very small proportion of the Northern Negroes...
...There is nothing in the warrior's lexicon to preclude an invitation to Martin Luther King to lecture the War College on Another Way of Winning...
...the votary of true nonviolence still does not know that he is uneasier at the release of the malefactors than he would have been at their death sentence...
...The Emancipation Proclamation and the law that followed it did not free the Negro—and the Proclamation and the law were achieved by four years of frightful violence and 600,000 lives...
...And if the going gets rough enough in the doorway, and all these instruments of violence can not control it, the Strategic Air Command will have to drop an H-bomb or two on the University (as it did in 1861-65...
...We have seen the best of our time," says old Gloucester...
...The civil rights movement is divided by nonviolence...
...When nonviolence calls for the help of violence—or the help of the power to do violence—it at once strips itself of its own peculiar power...
...But I do not know that his public dispatch of flowers to Walter Jenkins elicited praise from the liberals and radicals who insist that homosexuality is a sickness rather than a sin...
...The b—s came to understand another language that day...
...Whatever will win is sanctioned, and the generals would be the first to lay down their guns if they were persuaded that they could conquer surer without them...
...But I do not know that more lives would not have been laid down if there had been more guns and more friends with guns...
...I have never seen a harder...
...There is no historical doubt that it was this religious pacifism that gave the movement its impetus and its mystique...
...I know that the Mississippians seem —I say seem—to have been harder to persuade than the merciless Indian savages of Pennsylvania...
...The strategy wing of the movement includes by definition all of the orthodox liberals and radicals—often of the most heroic mold—and those who want to win simply because the cause is theirs...
...It is not a means of winning anything...
...But what if he should be right...
...I know that the Everses and the Schwerners and the Goodmans and the Chaneys have had to lay down their lives in holy persuasion...
Vol. 29 • February 1965 • No. 2
