The Radical Power of Nonviolent Activism

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

(I post this essay, previously published in the Bucks County Herald in 2013, in gratefulness to the prosecution and to the jurors for the accountability served in today’s verdict of the Derek Chauvain trial, but with the awareness that this verdict, while a necessary step, is only a step in the collective hard work ahead of all of us ensuring the arc of the moral universe will, indeed, keep bending toward justice).

The 2013 film, Lee Daniels’ The Butler, stirred the conscience and raised the consciousness of many viewers through the detailed, emotional proximity the film gives us to the lives of young activists of the American Civil Rights movement.

Some of the most riveting moments of the film are the scenes centered around accounts of the intense nonviolent resistance training that Fisk University students and others voluntarily endured prior to the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins.

When activist James Lawson was explaining the fundamental nonviolence strategy of refraining from retaliation, even in the face of life-threatening physical abuse, a student voiced his concern that the situation could get out of hand, and that one of them might even be killed.

Lawson (played by actor Jesse Williams) responded, “Yes. You might die. If anyone has a problem with that, the door is right over there,” he said.

Lawson then followed with a question to the crowd: “Anyone?”

No one moved toward the door.

To then prepare for the verbal and physical abuse they could potentially receive in response to the lunch counter sit-in protests, students sat in rows while fellow students shouted racist insults and physically harmed them.

According to published accounts, the response the integrated group of Nashville student activists received from a white mob became far worse than what they endured during training. The activists were subjected to verbal violence and humiliation, with several being beaten and kicked to the point of unconsciousness and concussions.

The Nashville sit-ins began on February 13, 1960. Legislation to desegregate public facilities was not passed in Nashville until three months later on May 10, 1960. The sit-ins were among the earliest non-violent direct action campaigns in the 1960s to end racial segregation in the South. They were the first campaigns to desegregate lunch counters, making Nashville the first Southern city to do so.

Young people of the civil rights movement willingly and nonviolently stood in harm’s way in the hope that, should any harm actually be perpetrated against them, including death, the specter of that violence might awaken a universal moral truth in those opposing basic civil rights.

And that awakening is possible.

According to University of Berkeley professor Dacher Keltner, we are actually “wired for good;” indeed, compassion and altruism are more innate than most people realize. Studies at Berkeley’s Institute for Development as well as other labs across the country are proving how social-emotional learning can help children as well as adults identify more with our altruistic side than with our selfish, self-serving side.

As author Vicki Zakrzewski says, “It may seem like a cliché, but science is proving Gandhi right: ‘We must be the change we wish to see in the world.’ This deeper scientific understanding of who we are as human beings shows us that at our core, we have tremendous capacity for goodness. But it’s up to our schools, our families, our workplaces, our communities, and each individual to act upon that capacity.”

An implicit and even explicit question, then, is posed to us in The Butler : “Which side of our country’s history will you be on”?

And the next questions I hear the film ask us are: 

“Which side of your own personal history will you be on?”

and Mary Oliver’s question for all of us —

“What will you do with your one wild and precious life”?

~~~~~~~~~

I am including with today’s essay the obituary of activist Anne Moody, in gratefulness for Ms. Moody’s inspiration and message to all of us. She is pictured here in the photo below. May God rest Anne Moody’s soul.

Anne Moody, sat stoically at violent Woolworth’s sit-in, dies at 74

By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS

FEB. 10, 2015

12:47 PM

Anne Moody, whose memoir “Coming of Age in Mississippi” gave a wrenching account of growing up poor in the segregated South and facing violence as a civil rights activist, has died. She was 74.

Moody died Thursday at her home in the small town Gloster, Miss. She had dementia the last several years and stopped eating two days before she died in her sleep, according to her sister, Adline Moody.

On May 28, 1963, Anne Moody was among the students from historically black Tougaloo College who staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Jackson, Miss. A white mob attacked the integrated group of peaceful students, dousing them with ketchup, mustard and sugar and beating one of the men.

A photograph from the sit-in shows Moody sitting stoically at the five-and-dime counter with food on her head. Moody’s eyes are downcast as a man pours more food on one of her fellow students, Joan Trumpauer.

Moody wrote in her 1968 memoir that “all hell broke loose” after she and two other black students, Memphis Norman and Pearlena Lewis, prayed at the lunch counter.

“A man rushed forward, threw Memphis from his seat, and slapped my face,” Moody wrote. “Then another man who worked in the store threw me against an adjoining counter.”

The Jackson sit-in occurred more than three years after a more famous one in Greensboro, N.C. The one in Jackson happened just after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision that legalized sit-ins. But, Jackson police provided little protection to the protesters as about 300 whites screamed at and jostled them.

The Rev. Ed King, a white Methodist minister who was the Tougaloo chaplain in 1963, went to Woolworth’s as an observer. During a 2009 AP interview, King recalled he reported to Medgar Evers, the Mississippi NAACP leader, what was happening.

“I had to call him and tell him that of the first sit-inners, a mob has formed, Memphis Norman was unconscious on the floor, he had been kicked … had blood in his nose, I think even ears. And he did have a concussion from it,” King said. “And the first two women had been dragged by the hair.”

The sit-in lasted several hours before the store closed. The mob was dispersed and the Tougaloo contingent returned to campus in north Jackson. The protest was part of a months-long boycott that the NAACP led against white-owned businesses in downtown Jackson, seeking the hiring of black police officers and bank clerks, the elimination of segregated water fountains and lunch counters; the use of courtesy titles for black adults, who routinely were called by their first names rather than “Mr.” or “Mrs.”; the hiring of black clerks at Capitol Street stores; and the change to a first-come, first-served approach for waiting on customers at downtown stores rather than making black customers wait until whites had been helped.

Two weeks after the sit-in, Evers was assassinated outside his family’s Jackson home.

Anne Moody was born Sept. 15, 1940, near Centreville, Miss. After graduating from college in 1964 she left Mississippi and for a time lived in New York, where she wrote her memoir.

Even after Anne Moody returned to Mississippi in the mid-1990s, she never felt at ease in her home state, her sister said.

Adline Moody said that she admired the courage of her sister, who was two years her senior.

“We came from a very poor family, and when she joined the movement, she did it because it was something that needed to be done. She wasn’t out there just to be there,” Adline Moody said. “I’m very proud of her for what she did. She made it better for me.”

According to the Associated Press, Anne Moody is survived by her son, Sascha Straus, from her marriage to Austin Straus, which ended in divorce; sisters Adline Moody, Virginia Gibson, Frances Jefferson and Vallery Jefferson; and brothers Ralph Jefferson, James Jefferson and Kenneth Jefferson.

Wagster Pettus writes for the Associated Press.

news.obits@latimes.com