The American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s is the best known example of nonviolent action in the United States. Its most famous voice, Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 to 1968), joined Christian teaching to Gandhian method.

The Montgomery bus boycott

In Montgomery, Alabama, city buses were segregated: Black riders had to sit at the back and give up seats to white riders on demand. On 1 December 1955, Rosa Parks, a seamstress and experienced local NAACP activist, refused to give up her seat and was arrested. Local leaders, including the Women's Political Council led by Jo Ann Robinson, called a one-day bus boycott for 5 December. It worked so well that they formed the Montgomery Improvement Association to continue it, and chose a 26-year-old minister new to town, King, as its president.

The boycott lasted 381 days. Most of the bus system's Black riders walked, shared rides in an organized carpool system, or used Black-owned taxis. King's house was bombed in January 1956; he urged the angry crowd outside to go home peacefully. In November 1956 the Supreme Court upheld a ruling that bus segregation was unconstitutional, and the boycott ended in December 1956 when integrated buses began running. The legal case and the boycott worked together.

Learning the method

King had read about Gandhi, but experienced pacifist organizers such as Bayard Rustin and Glenn Smiley helped him develop nonviolence into a full strategy. King visited India in 1959.

Birmingham, 1963

Birmingham, Alabama, was among the most segregated cities in the country. In spring 1963 King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference joined local leader Fred Shuttlesworth in sit-ins, marches and a boycott of downtown stores. King was arrested on 12 April for defying a court order against marching. In May, thousands of young people, many of them schoolchildren, marched; police commissioner Bull Connor turned fire hoses and police dogs on them. Images of the attacks shocked the nation, and business leaders agreed to desegregate stores and hire Black workers. The campaign helped build support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Letter from Birmingham Jail

In jail King wrote a long reply to eight white clergymen who had called the demonstrations unwise and untimely. In paraphrase, his main arguments were:

• A nonviolent campaign has four basic steps: gathering facts to establish that injustice exists, negotiation, self-purification (preparing to endure suffering without retaliating), and direct action.
• Direct action aims to create enough tension that a community which has refused to negotiate is forced to face the issue.
• For those suffering injustice, being told to wait has usually meant being told never.
• There are just and unjust laws. Drawing on Augustine and Aquinas, he described an unjust law as one out of harmony with moral law, one that degrades human personality. Someone who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, in a loving spirit, and ready to accept the penalty.
• He was more disappointed by the white moderate who prefers order to justice than by open opponents.

Discipline and training

Nonviolence in the movement was trained, not assumed. In Nashville in 1959 and 1960, James Lawson ran workshops where students role-played being insulted, shoved and pulled from stools before their lunch counter sit-ins. In Birmingham, volunteers signed a commitment card with ten promises, including to avoid violence of fist, tongue or heart and to be courteous to friend and foe. People who could not keep the discipline were given other jobs.

Debates

Not everyone agreed. Malcolm X argued that Black Americans had a right to defend themselves, and some local groups carried arms to protect activists. Historians still debate how self-defense, legal action and nonviolent protest each contributed. King was assassinated in Memphis on 4 April 1968.

Worked example: the Nashville sit-ins and the four steps

King's letter describes four steps of a nonviolent campaign. The student sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1960 show them in action.

1. Gathering facts. Downtown stores gladly took Black customers' money at most counters but refused to serve them at lunch counters. In late 1959, students made test visits to document the policy.
2. Negotiation. Students and their supporters raised the issue with store managers, who refused to change, citing custom and fear of losing white customers.
3. Self-purification. In James Lawson's workshops, students practiced staying seated, silent and respectful while others shouted at them and pushed them. They agreed on rules: dress well, be polite, do not strike back, and have a new group ready to take the seats of anyone arrested.
4. Direct action. From February 1960, waves of students sat at the counters. Many were arrested. Black residents also stopped shopping downtown, hurting store sales.

In April 1960, after the home of a Black lawyer defending the students was bombed, thousands marched silently to city hall. The student leader Diane Nash asked Mayor Ben West directly whether he thought it was wrong to discriminate on the basis of race. He said that he did. In May, several downtown lunch counters began serving Black customers.

The steps worked together: careful preparation made the students' discipline credible, the economic boycott added pressure, and a moral question asked in public made it hard for the city's leaders to defend the old order.