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To King, nonviolent resistance implied that the resister must love his enemy: "When we allow the spark of revenge in our souls to flame up in hate toward our enemies, Jesus teaches, 'Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you."
In the spring, the S.C.L.C. spearheaded a massive campaign in Birmingham for desegregation and fair employment. Marches occurred almost daily. The marchers maintained their nonviolent tactics in the face of many arrests and much intimidation.
"The more weapons of violence, the more misery to mankind," Lao-tzu taught. "The triumph of violence ends in a festival of mourning." "I am fighting for nothing less than world peace," Gandhi has declared. "If the Indian movement is carried to success on a nonviolent SATYAGRAHA basis, it will give a new meaning to patriotism and, if I may say so in all humility, to life itself."
Thoreau, who had defended John Brown's attack on Harpers Ferry, had made the statement that guns, for once, had been used for a righteous cause and were being held in righteous hands. In integrating his theory in regard to self-defense with the teachings of Thoreau, Williams was obviously attacking the philosophy of nonviolent resistance taught by Martin Luther King who also drew on Thoreau.
His experiences with direct action techniques in Montgomery helped him to confirm and to further elaborate his thinking. His philosophy had been influenced by the writings of Henry Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi with the result that he developed an ideology of nonviolent resistance. Like Gandhi, King wanted to make clear that nonviolence was not the same as nonresistance.
Not an earth of fear, chaos, famine, pestilence, the DANSE MACABRE, but one broad land of peace, of prosperity, and of widening knowledge. The nonviolent voice of Gandhi appeals to man's highest conscience. Let nations ally themselves no longer with death, but with life; not with destruction, but with construction; not with the Annihilator, but with the Creator.
King made it clear that nonviolent resistance was concerned with morality and justice and not merely with obtaining specific goals. When laws, themselves, were unjust, nonviolent resistance could engage in civil disobedience as a means of challenging those laws. Civil disobedience was not to be understood merely as law-breaking.
There were scores of leaders representing dozens of differing positions. In the first half of the twentieth century, the spectrum was limited almost exclusively to the advocacy of nonviolent techniques. Four of these leaders will be discussed below. Their ideas present a broad overview of the concepts to be found within the Afro-American community.
Even during the peak of the Civil Rights Movement, in the background there was a constant, irritating opposition. While the movement grew, the Black Muslims also grew. Not only did they challenge the tactics of nonviolent resistance, they disagreed totally with its goals. While Elijah Muhammed constantly opposed aggression, he did preach the need for self-defense.
Let us now be in search of something new; let us try the force of love and God which is truth." When we have got that, we shall want nothing else. Gandhi has already won through nonviolent means a greater number of political concessions for his land than have ever been won by any leader of any country except through bullets.
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