Nonviolent Protest
In A Democracy Informed Voices Matter
Predictions of Morehouse University students’ protesting President Biden’s Commencement address failed to grasp the opportunity before the esteemed Historically Black College and University (HBCU). The focus was more on fight than what the HBCU could bring to international and domestic crises. Sure a few students and faculty turned their backs on the president. A few placards supporting Palestinians could be seen. And one faculty member gave a head slightly bowed “Black Power” salute. For the most part, though, protests proved to be anemic at best!
More, it seemed like “It’s not our problem!” was the theme of the day. A posture that illuminates brightly opportunities missed in the university’s momentary occupancy of the world stage. Showcasing the leadership legacy of HBCU’s in social justice movements was at a minimum, an obligation. After all, both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his father are Morehouse men. How more steeped in social justice can an institution be?
And if taking the high road was the greater calling, I would assert that taking the high road is one of the key pillars of nonviolent protest.
HBCU’s Social Justice Leadership Legacy (Significantly Abbreviated)
Nonviolent protest does not happen by chance. It’s learned! Congressman Lewis and many other other students, sat with Reverend James Lawson, Pastor, Clark Memorial United Methodist Church, Nashville, on many an occasion learning the spiritual underpinnings and tactical strategy of nonviolent protest. A philosophy, and skills, he had studied in India, reflecting the teachings of Gandhi. The discipline and self esteem required to allow oneself to be spat upon; to be cursed and defamed; to be beaten; to stare in the face of armed police and hostile tempers; to be carried away, all, without retaliation, is an epic request.
Many years ago, I sat with Franklin McCain, one of the four men, then students, thrust into the national spotlight for refusing to give up their seats at a “whites only” Woolworth’s counter in Greensboro, NC. He seemed weary. Perhaps, my “what was it like questions,” were not the way he wanted to spend an evening at home. Still, he was patient, gracious and reflective. Not long into our conversation, it became evident that it takes more than preparation to become a civil rights activist and icon, especially as a college freshman. Courage leaves an indelible mark, I remember thinking in hindsight. These days it might be called PTSD.
John Lewis went on to join the Freedom Riders. Their inaugural ride, from Rock Hill, NC to Anniston, AL, consisted of college students and other youth, clergy and other activists. They were men and women, Black and White. They were people who understood the enormous life threatening risks they were taking. And true enough from 1961 through to Freedom Summer (1964) attempts to integrate the segregated South were met with violence, murder, rape and bombings.
The murders of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney, on June 21, 1964, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, for registering African-Americans to vote resulted. Sadly, the monument honoring their sacrifice and commemorative park, promised, at New York City’s Freedom Place, have yet to be realized.
The two Jackson State students killed and the twelve students injured have been memorialized on the school’s campus (Jackson State is the same school attended by James Meredith who had integrated the University of Mississippi). Just eleven days after National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State University, Ohio, protesting the Vietnam War, city and state police opened fire upon Jackson State students protesting persistent racist harassment by the White community.
A Teachable Moment, Missed?
African Americans, the progeny of the African diaspora, have used nonviolent protest to survive generational marginalization; to confront home grown terrorism and tyrannical racist systems, and to rebuke colonial dogma that established and furthers color based rule and colonization’s hierarchies around the world today. Perhaps many around the world took to the streets in support of the “Black Lives Matter” protests of 2020 because African Americans are champions of, and role models for, nonviolent protest.
African Americans know first hand what many also know, and many are still learning, that liberation comes at a cost. A cost that too often also comes with exacting, swift and barbarous retribution. It’s a paradigm that continues to challenge those who seek recompense for stolen lands, resources and legacies.
For African Americans, lessening cost of liberation, and its impact, demanded that nonviolent protest moving public sentiment was not enough. Achieving goals of equity, inclusion and resource sharing unaffected by race, class, orientation, and ethnicity meant expanding the nonviolent protest model. Public policy changes needed to be at the ready. Resource acquisition, partnerships with diverse stakeholders, and political and legal action had to occur simultaneously.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Al Fin: Let’s Be Clear
I’m not saying Morehouse students should’ve built encampments, occupied buildings, or engaged in demonstrative confrontational protest. I am saying, the world needs talent capable of addressing the complexity of issues humanity faces. A need that perhaps exceeds that which was required when the world: valued for hundreds of years legal enslavement and colonization; when the Holocaust and global wars raged; when unfettered capitalism and imperialism made promises, never delivered.
Significantly, as many know, the 1960’s and early 1970’s were turbulent times in the U.S. Students on college campuses were at the forefront of many protests and confrontations. So much so that what I call the “Reagan doctrine on campus unrest” divided the nation in ways that persist to this day. Specifically,
“In one 1966 campaign speech, Reagan declared that many leftist campus movements had transcended legitimate protest, with the actions of ‘beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates’ having become more to do ‘with rioting, with anarchy’ than ‘academic freedom.’ He blamed university administrators and faculty, who ‘press their particular value judgments’ on students, for ‘a leadership gap and a morality and decency gap’ on campus, and suggested a code of conduct be imposed on faculty to ‘force them to serve as examples of good behavior and decency.’” (Ronald Reagan on the unrest on college campuses, 1967,https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources)
As I’ve noted before, the inhuman treatment of Palestinians is just the tip of the spear. Never before have there been such a convergence of decisions pressing humanity with such urgency. Wealth and income disparities loom large without retardation. Climate change and the lifespan of the planet worries many to ill mental health. Forced mass migrations, genocide and food insecurity, territorial conflicts, and more are happening to them or those they know.
The absence of HBCU’s in these protests must not portend neglect of participation in, and leadership for, discourse seeking to resolve these critical, and potentially catastrophic, concerns. Nor should it be left to the imagination that absence in student led protests reflect an abdication of global leadership skills development. The tasks are enormous. And the humanity’s interrelatedness grows evident daily. Especially as U.S. elections loom.
