Nonviolence

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Nonviolence is a principle that rejects violence as un-conscionable and may reject all forms of coercion. Belief in nonviolence is deeply rooted in American history, from the pacifism of the Quakers and Anabaptists to the nonresistance of the clergyman Adin Ballou, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and others. These Americans inspired the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who advocated social reform, and the Indian nationalist and spiritual leader Mohandas K. Gandhi, whose example reinvigorated American nonviolence in the twentieth century. An adherence to nonviolence took shape among those who read William James on the "moral equivalent of war," supported Jane Addams's efforts to resolve domestic class conflict and international warfare, and were provoked by Randolph Bourne's critique of American mobilization in World War I.

In 1915 three organizations professing nonviolence were formed: Protestant pacifists organized the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR); Jane Addams and other progressives founded the Women's Peace Party, which became the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF); and New York pacifists organized an Anti-Militarist Committee, which became the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Other such organizations followed. In 1917 Quakers organized the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). The War Resisters League (WRL) formed in 1923 to protect the rights of political conscientious objectors. John Haynes Holmes, a New York Unitarian preacher, and A. J. Muste, a Dutch Reformed minister-activist, were major leaders among these groups.

In 1933 two Roman Catholic peace activists, Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day, formed the Catholic Worker Movement. After World War II, Pax Christi became the leading international organization of Catholic peace activists, and the cloistered monk, Thomas Merton, gave them an important theological voice. The nonviolence of David Dellinger, Paul Goodman, James Peck, and Bayard Rustin, four non-Catholic activist-writers who came of age during the Depression, were tested by conscription in World War II. They exercised their greatest influence in the civil rights movement and the struggle against the Vietnam War.

Defending conscientious objectors, those who refused to serve in the armed forces for moral or religious reasons, was one of the nonviolence organizations' main objectives in the first half of the twentieth century. Later, their most important struggles were the Civil Rights movement and protest against the Vietnam War. Some trace the origins of the Civil Rights movement to FOR activities: its sponsorship of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), its Chicago sit-ins contesting segregated lunch counters in 1942, and its 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, testing the segregation of interstate transportation in the South. Yet these events received little notice. By contrast, the Montgomery (Alabama) Improvement Association's nonviolent bus boycott in 1955, with roots in Afro-Christianity, had a decisive impact on civil rights. After the local association had engaged in nonviolent boycott for many weeks, FOR and WRL activists came to Montgomery offering advice and important connections. As a result of the boycott's success, its leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, became preeminent vehicles for nonviolence in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1960 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was born out of the sit-in movement and, a year later, CORE launched its freedom rides. Rustin coordinated and King addressed the 1963 March on Washington, which drew far more participants than earlier similar demonstrations and became the example by which all subsequent marches were judged. By the mid-1960s, however, the struggle itself undermined the commitment of CORE and SNCC to nonviolence.

The Civil Rights movement crested, fragmented, and ebbed in a complex relationship to the war in Vietnam. America's armed forces had pioneered in desegregation and were a major vehicle of black social mobility. Rustin thought that the movement's alliance with Lyndon Johnson's administration was crucial to the future of black politics. Thus he broke with nonviolence to support Johnson's prosecution of the war. But King and other adherents of nonviolence, such as the well-known pediatrician and author Dr. Benjamin Spock, called for American withdrawal from the conflict. As the war continued, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, both Roman Catholic priests, tested different practices in nonviolence as a means of protest. King and others insisted that nonviolence might be obliged to violate unjust law, but that it would absorb the penalty for doing so. After committing dramatic acts of nonviolent protest, the Berrigan brothers went underground to avoid arrest. In the twentieth century Americans witnessed the power of nonviolence to effect social change but also the limited capacity of nonviolence to sustain itself through long periods of duress.

William James (1842–1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist. He earned a medical degree from Harvard University, where he later taught anatomy and philosophy before declaring himself a psychologist. In his essay "The Moral Equivalent to War," first given as a speech at Stanford University in 1906 and published in 1910, James proposes that until an activity equal to that of military service in its ability to discipline and unify citizens is implemented, military service and the consequent wars will remain a reality. James suggests that an obligatory national youth corps in which young men serve for two years in physically demanding jobs would both mature the participants and alleviate the need for men to spend a lifetime in such labor.

Dorothy Day (1897–1980) was an American Catholic writer and social reformer, who founded the Catholic Worker Movement (CWM) as well as the radical monthly newspaper Catholic Worker. The CWM, which Day described in her 1939 book House of Hospitality, created "houses of hospitality" in urban areas and farm communities for people who were hard hit by the Great Depression. Day herself chose to live in one of these houses in New York City. She was a pacifist and helped focus the attention of the Catholic Church on peace and justice issues, such as the unionization of farm workers.

Randolph Bourne (1910–1987) was an American civil rights activist who in the early 1940s participated in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the pacifist organization Fellowship of Reconciliation. During the 1950s Bourne was secretary of the War Resisters' League, and from 1955 to 1960 he worked with civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr. In honor of his colleague and friend A. Philip Randolph, a black labor leader, Bourne founded the A. Philip Randolph Institute, the goal of which continues to be promoting civil rights, labor, and educational reforms.

Bayard Rustin (1912–1987) was a civil rights organizer and political activist. He participated in a number of activist groups, among them the Young Communist League (YCL), Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), respectively. Labor leader A. Philip Randolph schooled Rustin in the nonviolent direct action tactics that had been so successful for Indian pacifist leader Mohandas K. Gandhi, and during the 1950s Rustin lectured nationwide on non-violent activism, teaching the tactics to Martin Luther King, Jr. Rustin was instrumental in organizing the 1963 March on Washington, from which the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act originated.

Addams, Jane; Civil Rights Movement; King, Martin Luther; Peace Movements.

Brock, Peter, and Young, Nigel. Pacifism in the Twentieth Century. Syracuse, NY: University of Toronto Press, 1999; distributed by Syracuse University Press.

Chatfield, Charles. The American Peace Movement: Ideals and Activism. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992.

Cooney, Robert, and Michalowski, Helen, eds. The Power of the People: Active Nonviolence in the United States. Philadelphia: New Society, 1987.

DeBenedetti, Charles. An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990.

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