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The tactic of non-violent resistance was not a novel idea at the time of the modern Civil Rights Movement. American colonists employed it during the Revolution when they boycotted British imports and offered resistance to taxation without representation. A modus operandi of social change that employs strategies such as strikes, sit-ins, boycotts, and civil disobedience, non-violent resistance is a theory that was developed by Henry David Thoreau in his 1849 essay, Civil Disobedience, in which he argued that it was morally justifiable to peacefully resist unjust laws. Leaders such as Asa Phillip Randolph, James Farmer, Bayard Rustin, George Houser, and Abraham Muste advocated non-violent resistance in the black American struggle for freedom in the1940s.

During the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-1950s through the 1960s, leaders such as the Reverends Martin Luther King Jr. and James M. Lawson also adopted this strategy in the crusade to combat racial discrimination. Perhaps the most noted adherents of non-violent resistance were Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. In 1906 at a protest meeting held in Johannesburg, South Africa, Gandhi adopted his methodology of satyagraha (devotion to truth), or non-violent protest, when he called upon his fellow Indians to defy a newly enacted law that compelled registration of the colony’s Indian population by suffering the punishment rather than resisting by violent means. The adopted plan led to a seven-year struggle in which thousands of Indians were jailed, flogged, or shot for striking, refusing to register, burning their registration cards, or engaging in other forms of non-violent resistance. Notwithstanding his actions in South Africa, the story of non-violent resistance in colonial India is indistinguishable from the chronicle of Gandhi and the Non-Cooperation Movement. In addition to bringing Indian independence, he also assisted in improving the status of the Untouchables in Indian religion and society during the 1930s.

A civil rights activist in Brooklyn demonstrates the non-violent method of protest in 1964 (Library of Congress).

King captured America’s attention with his philosophy of non-violent resistance. He believed that the only way to create a just society was to eradicate evil within that society. Putting this belief into action during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, King proved that non-violent resistance was an effective technique in fighting the unjust restrictions perpetrated upon American blacks. King understood that the oppressor did not render freedom willingly; freedom must be demanded by the oppressed in a non-violent fashion to overcome injustice with justice.

During the movement years, there were two different types of non-violent resistance practiced by leaders and participants: philosophical nonviolence and tactical nonviolence. Those who practiced philosophical nonviolence, like King, Lawson, John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette, and Diane Nash, were deeply grounded in the Gandhian credo and believed in taking action to counter injustice and converting the antagonist through redemptive suffering. For them, philosophical nonviolence was a lifestyle. Tactical nonviolence was a political strategy used in demonstrations to achieve specific goals. Adherents of tactical nonviolence believed that nonviolence was the best way to accomplish the goals of movement through political means. By 1963 many civil rights activist in the Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and even the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were tactically non-violent rather than philosophically non-violent. Ultimately, in the late 1960s, those of the Black Power Movement overpowered the tactic of non-violent resistance.

Linda T. Wynn

King captured America’s attention with his philosophy of non-violent resistance.