As a veteran of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, I have misgivings about Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Black History Month. They celebrate a throttled or incomplete triumph, “achieved” through fantastic means. The triumph was of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, and its means, a strategy of nonviolent resistance.
As a 19- and 20-year-old, I spent some 30 weeks as a voter registration worker in Alabama, a place where even the Democratic Party’s slogan was “White Supremacy, For the Right.” Like veterans of many other conflicts, I can’t forget what I saw—nor thoroughly explain my mixed feelings to those who weren’t there.
Whether or not Dr. King was sincerely a disciple of the nonviolent philosophy of Mohandas Gandhi is, I believe, a subject worthy of scholarly dispute. What is patent is that the two leaders faced different circumstances. Natives by far outnumbered the British in India, and had East Indian independence been subject to a referendum—or had Gandhi lead an ordinary rebellion–his followers would have ultimately prevailed, as anti-colonial fighters elsewhere did.
But African-Americans were a minority, less than 12 percent of the American population. Out-numbered and out-gunned, neither elections nor uprisings could have brought the changes they sought. Non-violence was a forbearance in India, but the Civil Rights Movement had no choice. For its militants, nonviolence was a necessity—and I think, a bitter one.
The Movement was a continuation of the Civil War in which unprotected demonstrators were beset by both regular troops and guerrillas, the police and the Ku Klux Klan, both of them, heartless and armed. The result was that when the Movement’s soldiers made any headway, we did so in the face of terror, knowing that any martyrs in the conflict had to be ours.
Though I have read that a few Movement stalwarts truly loved our enemies and savored self-sacrifice, I never encountered any of that kind.
The people with whom I worked, including Movement lieutenants and colonels, were ordinary working folk and students on temporary duty as targets and shields. We didn’t look forward to being evicted, arrested, fired, expelled, beaten or kidnapped, and when these things happened to us or our comrades, we sometimes cried and sometimes writhed in rage. Incapable of striking back, in our fear and incredulity, we were traumatized, in mind if not always in body, for the remainder of our lives. In the town where I worked, Klansmen sprayed battery acid into the eyes of an 18-month-old girl. I don’t recall that her mother found any consolation in that; “sacrifice” is not usually redemptive.
Nobody knew the term then, but I think psychologists today would conclude that our sojourn left a lot of us with what is now recognized as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a malady common among combat veterans. For 20 years afterwards, my first arrest revisited me in nightmares—a symptom of PTSD—and if even now I’m a little bit wary of fellow whites—especially when they praise the Movement’s nonviolence!–I think I know why. What is unclear to me, however, is whether my nightmares and suspicions are indicators of a psychological malady or the footprints of a peculiarly American political wisdom—or both.
For the Movement’s grunts, nonviolence was a less-than-uplifting strategy. It gave us a “victory” without a ‘vanquished.’ Though we are proud of the stand we took, and though we may think that the nation needs a new Movement, most of us wouldn’t wish a great part of our experience on anybody.
