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The question of how to mobilize collective democratic power in the service of justice - not simply persuasion or sympathy or force - is among King's most important provocations for our contemporary moment but also one we most often overlook /1
“Our nettlesome task tis to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power so that government cannot elude our demands.” Lines like this are often read as a radical turn in his final years but the question of power was at the forefront of his thinking from the start
On the heels of the Montgomery bus boycott, King positioned himself in the legacy of Frederick Douglass to argue that “Privileged groups rarely give up their privileges without strong resistance." ‘Nonviolence and Racial Justice’ (1957). Power concedes nothing without demand but
King was not yet sure of how understand the power the movement was beginning to tap into. /4 https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/nonviolence-and-racial-justice
Gandhi offered King both a powerful narrative for articulating the force of protest but also threw up a series of obstacles he did not know how to work through at first. /5
The most important of these was Gandhi’s insistence that the persuasive force of nonviolence to convert the enemy into a friend – satyagraha – was categorically distinct from the force of coercion – duragraha. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/palm-sunday-sermon-mohandas-k-gandhi-delivered-dexter-avenue-baptist-church
In Stride, King frames coercion as a tactic of White Citizens’ Councils and the KKK. The boycott, by contrast, was a fundamentally nonviolent. “Our method will be that of persuasion, not coercion. We will only say to people, ‘Let your conscience be your guide” /7
King’s early sermons testify to a genuine faith that disciplined suffering alone would ultimately convert the white conscience. At the same time, passages like this in Stride testify an uneasiness with a strictly moral account of direct action /8 https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/stride-toward-freedom-montgomery-story
Speaking directly to the movement, however, King sounded another note. He had no illusion that boycotts are coercive and that the movement depended on mobilizing the coercive apparatus of the state. As he told the first mass meeting of the MIA in 5/55... /9
Standing beside love is always justice, and we only using the tools of justice. Not only are we using the tools of persuasion, but we’ve come to see that we’ve got to use the tools of coercion.” /10 https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/mia-mass-meeting-holt-street-baptist-church
King struggled to reconcile the emerging theory of nonviolence with its actual practice over the 1950s. In this sense, he followed a tradition of Black religious thinkers reaching back to the 1930s learning from India’s anticolonial struggle for fighting white supremacy in the US
– and wrestled with the ways the Gandhian repertoire would need to be remade for an American context. I discuss Gandhi in the Black social gospel tradition and the influence of Howard Thurman on King's developing understanding of nonviolence here /12 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/tough-love-the-political-theology-of-civil-disobedience/929871467661FA5DE28E720FC39861C5
As Garrow and other historians argue, the Birmingham campaign marks a turning point when it comes to coercion. The battle plan Wyatt Tee Walker’s drew up for the SCLC – Project C (for confrontation) – was a multi-stage campaign meant to escalate conflict and disorder in order /13
to force white elites to the negotiating table. It extended from picketing to boycotts to sit ins to jail ins, and ultimately, the plan to flood the city with outside allies to shut it down completely. /14 https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/walker-wyatt-tee
King gives you a hint of the reality of the protest in ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’ where he defends ‘creative tension’ and the productive force of disorder but here too he moderates his case because he is speaking to multiple audiences /15 https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/letter-birmingham-jail
The essay by itself figures the tension introduced by nonviolent direct action as a conscientious one while the protest itself was coercive and disruptive. Putting the essay into context shows us something else though: /16
King was coming to see that coercion and persuasion were not opposed but rather could be made mutual enforcing if conducted with discipline /17x https://twitter.com/erinrpineda/status/1349131213026586627?s=20
This realization – implicit but inchoate from his earliest writings – comes into full bloom after 1965. The twin pressures of white reaction and Black power forced King to articulate a bolder, more militant case for nonviolence. /18
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/706982
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/706982
Appeals to shame and conversion begin to drop out of King’s sermons and editorials over these years. In their place he stresses the need to coercively force ‘the power structure’ (he was big into C Wright Mills) to get results. /19
King’s report embraced United Automobile Workers (UAW) president Walter Reuther’s definition of power as “the ability to make the largest corporation in the world, General Motors, say yes when they want to say no.” /20
https://www.crmvet.org/docs/6608_sclc_mlk-rpt.pdf
https://www.crmvet.org/docs/6608_sclc_mlk-rpt.pdf
Accordingly, the mass strike became a more fitting model for direct action than the Gandhian hunger strike. https://jacobinmag.com/2019/01/martin-luther-king-civil-disobedience-injunction-birmingham
This wasn’t repudiating nonviolence but radicalizing it. Power matters but the legitimacy of wielding power-over adversaries turned on a commitment to equal dignity and the possibility of democratic power sharing with these same adversaries in a radically reconstructed future /22
This is the core of 'the radical king' and his celebrated arguments against imperialism and racial capitalism although the ways nonviolence animates them often drops out /23
Violence was always an obstacle to this not only because it was morally wrong but because of ways it undercut this kind of reconstructive prefiguration. Political actions is a way of reconfiguring social relations. This is what it means to say ends reflect means. /24
Which gets you here: “What is needed is the realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that..."
stands against love.” The question is not morality or power. It is morality and power. King's name for this balancing act was 'mass civil disobedience' https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/where-do-we-go-here
King was aware that this was an almost impossible project. His final years are marked by a deep skepticism that this kind of democratic reconstruction was possible in the United States. That said, he pushed forward to the Poor People's Campaign with the commitment that
this wasn't only the best strategy available for a genuine democratic reconstruction but the only one. /28
“This really means making the movement powerful enough, dramatic enough, morally appealing enough, so that people ... begin to put pressure on congressmen to the point the they can no longer elude our demands... Our idea is to dramatize the whole economic problem of the poor” /29
'Showdown for Nonviolence' https://spelelearn.spelman.edu/file.php/1/ims_import_1/showdown.pdf /30
How to cleave apart violence and power remains a major puzzle for scholars and movements. I’m teaching a seminar on this question this semester that runs through the history of the puzzle from Lenin + Tolstoy to today. If I figure out the answer, I’ll let you know /31
