Strategy

by Lawrence Freedman

  The man who saw most clearly how nonviolence could be made to work for blacks was Bayard Rustin. Born in 1912, Rustin was raised in a Quaker family in Pennsylvania. He was gifted intellectually, athletically, and musically. Refined and cultured, he affected an upper-class British accent, but was also a consistent activist, moving between campaigns against war and for racial justice, ready to accept jail for either cause. Enthused by the febrile radical, intellectual atmosphere of late 1930s New York, he joined the Young Communist League until he realized that it had no special commitment to racial justice. In 1941 he became involved with Philip Randolph, a leading black campaigner close to the labor movement. Randolph had picked up on how the early mobilization for war increased the economic importance of black workers. He proposed a march of ten thousand people on Washington demanding desegregation of the armed forces and an end to racial discrimination in the war industries.18

  The march was canceled when President Roosevelt signed the Fair Employment Act which banned discrimination in the war industry, though not the armed forces. Rustin thought Randolph should have held out for more concessions, and went off to work for Muste. In practice, Randolph—the wise elder statesman of the civil rights movement—became Rustin’s most consistent and loyal patron. When two decades later Rustin eventually got his own organization to run, it would be the Philip Randolph Foundation. Randolph’s support and admiration for Rustin’s political and administrative skills were particularly important because Muste disapproved of Rustin’s homosexuality, both morally and politically. At the time it was a crime, judged as a perverse sexual choice. A 1953 Californian conviction for immorality, combined with his past communism, obliged Rustin to keep a low profile. This prevented him being recognized as one of the key leaders of the civil rights movement. He was described as “an intellectual engineer behind the scenes—probably the most adroit tactical aide to almost all the frontline black leaders and organizations.”19

  In retrospect it is difficult to understand how the Jim Crow laws had survived so long. In the media age, and with a global struggle underway to win over allegiances to the United States at a time of growing anti-colonial sentiment, there was something jarring about a situation so at odds with the country’s proclaimed values. But the entrenched power structures of the old confederacy were not so easy to dislodge, and while northern politicians deplored segregation, there were few political prizes to be gained doing anything about it. The landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision (Brown v. Board of Education) which declared segregated public schools unconstitutional was at one level a morale-booster to blacks, but at another it hardened southern white opinion against integration, undermining moderates. As new challenges arose, the segregationists were in a determined mood.

  The main black organization—the NAACP—was based in the North, lacked a mass organization, and was barred from operating in some southern states on grounds of subversion. Nonetheless, in November 1955, it was the secretary of the local branch of the NAACP, Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested. This was a moment for which local activists had prepared: soon Montgomery’s buses were being boycotted. This was “no bolt from the blue,”20 and the effects were as anticipated. A crisis was created for the bus company, which depended on blacks for up to three-quarters of its customers. There were already precedents. In some cases, notably Baton Rouge, action had led to concessions, although not full integration. The compromises still involved blacks sitting at the back of buses. In Montgomery, the white establishment refused to budge. As the blacks found ways of getting their people to work without the buses, their demands escalated into a challenge to the principle of segregation. The boycott ended in late 1956 when the Supreme Court declared bus segregation laws to be unconstitutional.

  For those looking for lessons for direct action, three appeared salient. First, the economic effects were as important as the political. In that respect, the actions were coercive. Second, the political effects grew as the boycott endured and the national and international media became progressively more intrigued by the struggle. Third, on balance, the harsher the local response the more the campaign benefited. A subsequent bus boycott in Tallahassee, Florida, faced a more sophisticated local police chief, determined not to make martyrs, and authorities showing a degree of flexibility. This helped take the steam out of the protest and cause divisions in the campaign, although the Supreme Court case that confirmed the illegality of bus segregation in Alabama had the same effect in Florida.

  The leaders of the Montgomery campaign, who became the key figures in a burgeoning civil rights movement, applied these lessons over the next decade. The young Baptist pastor, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who reluctantly agreed to preside over the campaign’s organization, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), became its most familiar and eloquent face. Though a female group had provided the impetus for the boycott, the church provided leadership and organization. The churches were the only local institutions independent of white society, financed and run by blacks. Their congregations had been swelling with the migration from rural to urban areas. They offered the movement both respectability and a religious theatricality.

  King turned out to be a natural leader, a gifted orator who could reach out to an audience beyond his local congregation. He had an understanding of organization and tactics and a readiness to learn. He was aware of Gandhi and Thoreau, but he had not thought through nonviolence as a strategy.21 As a theological student he had wrestled with the issues of morality and politics, was aware of Niebuhr’s Christian realism, and remained unconvinced by those who spoke of the power of love to change hearts. He wrote in a college essay that “pacifists fail to recognize the sinfulness in man” and the need for a degree of “coercion to keep one man from injuring his fellows.” Later he said he believed at this time that the “only way we could solve our problem of segregation was an armed revolt.”22

  As the Montgomery boycott began, neither he nor the other members of the MIA had much of an idea of strategy. They were nonviolent but that was not a deliberate choice. Violence was the segregationists’ weapon. If it came to a fight, blacks would lose. As the pressure against them was stepped up during the first weeks of the boycott, they felt obliged to consider forms of self-defense, including their own weapons, especially after King’s house was bombed at the end of January 1956. The shift in tactics and philosophy came as King acquired a number of advisers seeped in Gandhism. The first to reach him was Rustin. Not only had Rustin extraordinary practical experience, including the credibility derived from time in India and in jail, but also confidence in his own beliefs, acumen, and powers of persuasion. Because of his controversial past, Rustin had to withdraw from Montgomery almost as soon as he arrived. But he did not stop advising King, with whom he stayed close thereafter. Most accounts put him to the fore as an influence on the campaign.23 His replacement was another FOR/CORE activist, Glenn Smiley. He brought King’s attention to the works of Richard Gregg. In late 1956, King listed Gregg’s The Power of Non-Violence with Thoreau and Gandhi as particular influences.24 In addition to Rustin and Smiley, and later Gregg himself, another Gandhian influence was Harris Wofford, who later worked for President Kennedy and had also spent time in India studying nonviolence. Stanley Levison, a wealthy lawyer and former communist, introduced to King by Rustin, eventually became one of King’s closest confidants.

  The immediate effect of their arrival was to make nonviolence a guiding principle rather than a prudent tactic. Rustin argued that nonviolence had to be unconditional, so there could be no guns, even if only for self-defense, let alone armed bodyguards. He also demonstrated how this could be turned to tactical advantage, by persuading MIA leaders indicted by a grand jury for violating a state anti-boycott statute to dress smartly, smile broadly, and turn themselves in, thus depriving the arrests of gravity and intimidation. By the end of the Montgomery campaign, King was personally committed to a Gandhian philosophy. Wi
thin two years, he was making his own pilgrimage to India to meet with followers of the great teacher. “There is more power in socially organized masses on the march,” he declared, “than there is in guns in the hands of a few desperate men. Our enemies would prefer to deal with a small armed group rather than with a huge, unarmed but resolute mass of people.” He drew confidence from history which taught that “like a turbulent ocean beating great cliffs into fragments of rock, the determined movement of people incessantly demanding their rights always disintegrates the old order.”25 Unavoidably, King’s nonviolence had to draw as much from the Sermon on the Mount as from Gandhi. Its spirituality and dignity fitted a pastor. How well it was appreciated by black opinion is another matter. They could understand that there was little to be gained by initiating violence, but suggestions that high-minded actions in the name of racial justice might touch a segregationist’s heart could seem far-fetched. Moreover, the personal risks involved in inviting time in jail, especially for those who needed jobs and had to care for families, could be considerable.

  For King, the strategy made perfect sense. For many of his supporters it was conditional, but then the same had been true for Gandhi. King’s own theorizing was largely derivative. Indeed, as his biographers discovered when reviewing his doctoral thesis, King had an unfortunate tendency to plagiarism. At its most benign, this meant that he was relaxed when others willingly offered him drafts to which he could put his own name. Rustin drafted King’s first political article and then published it in his own journal, Liberation.26 The article described a “new Negro” who had “replaced self-pity with self-respect and self-depreciation with dignity.” The bus boycott had undermined many of the stereotypes Negroes had about themselves and others had about them, that they lacked nerve and staying power. The boycott had “broken the spell.” Six lessons were listed from the struggle: the community could stick together and their leaders did not have to sell out; they need not be intimidated by threats and violence; the church was becoming militant; there was a new self-belief; the importance of economics was understood, as white businessmen were anxious about the loss of business; a “new and powerful weapon” had been discovered in nonviolence, strengthening the movement by facing violence without returning it. King used more or less the same lessons when he spoke in December 1956 after the favorable Supreme Court ruling.27

  He never really put the effort into developing a coherent philosophy. Without the direct engagement of Rustin and Levison, his first book, Stride Toward Freedom, would not have been published. Garrow described the chapter on nonviolence as an embarrassment. Here too King’s contributions indicated a tendency to borrow liberally from others. The key chapter on “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” was “in part a poorly organized and at times erroneous hodgepodge of contributions from a number of King’s editorial advisers.”28 Despite the shortcomings of the book, King was on his way to becoming an iconic figure and Rustin understood better than most his value to the civil rights movement.

  Any comparison with Gandhi was suggestive but potentially misleading. King was only in his mid-20s and had neither prepared for nor sought a political role. He was at times a muddled thinker and, it later transpired, somewhat reckless in his private life. And yet for all his flaws and inexperience, there was no denying his courage, commitment, and grasp of southern black culture. His eloquence was special, almost poetic, drawing on the familiar cadences and rhythms of black preachers but also the classical tropes of American democracy and Western philosophy. The evident risks he was running, in the face of regular death threats, real violence, and occasional spells in prison, demonstrated that he was a man who suffered for his cause. He soon became a media star and so came to personify the black movement as its most visible face and most compelling voice. He had the quality described by Weber as “charisma.”

  As he reflected on the Montgomery campaign, Rustin noted the strategic benefits of a bus boycott. It had a clear purpose, economic impact, and was susceptible to direct action. Unlike other targets, such as integrated education, there was no “administrative machinery and legal maneuvering” to get in the way. The action required a “daily rededication” to the struggle and so raised community solidarity and pride, making “humble folk noble” and turning “fear into courage.” Notably it had depended upon “the most stable social institution in Negro culture—the Church.”29 In early 1957, Rustin masterminded the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Each word was significant. Southern meant “not national.” “Christian” reflected the special role of the Church in the South (for whites as well as blacks) and incidentally undermined claims that the movement was communist. “Leadership Conference” eschewed a mass membership organization. The advantage of this formulation was to avoid a fight with the NAACP, a national organization, which considered itself best able to speak for blacks. The NAACP’s director, Roy Wilkins, was wary of King as a young upstart. King made little secret of his concern that based in the North, Wilkins was too preoccupied with mounting legal challenges to the Jim Crow laws and had done little to challenge them directly. Nonetheless, he did not want to foment disunity in the movement. The serious advantage of the SCLC was that it provided institutional support to King as the leader capable of giving meaning to the struggle and describing the strategy in terms that made sense to those who had to follow it. Wofford later recalled how “Rustin seemed ever-present with advice, and sometimes acted as if King were a precious puppet whose symbolic actions were to be planned by a Gandhian high command.”30

  Rustin understood that King was no puppet and had special leadership qualities. The real problem, as he acknowledged, was that the Church was a natural autocracy, without serious bureaucratic procedures. Ministers organized politically in the same way that they organized their congregations.31 This suited King but it soon led to complaints. One of King’s most severe critics was Ella Baker, an effective organizer who ran the SCLC. She became discouraged by the developing cult of personality, reflecting an urge to find a savior, which held back the emergence of a democratic mass movement.32 Without a mass base, there was no secure financial stream and much of King’s time was spent touring to raise funds. Fairclough argues that the “decision against creating a national mass-membership organization … turned out to be a serious and eventually crippling handicap.”33

  Even with a larger organization there would have been problems when it came to major campaigns of nonviolent direct action. There were a limited number of volunteers, perhaps no more than 5 percent of a given population. From those with jobs or responsibilities to their families it was unrealistic to expect major commitment. The real difference when it came to the surge of militancy that marked the early 1960s was that substantial numbers of students, black and white, developed a taste for direct action. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) formed with SCLC’s help in 1960 and began to make their mark by reviving the sort of action pioneered by James Farmer and his colleagues in 1942, starting with four students sitting-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro in 1961. At the time, this was presented as a spontaneous expression of anger that somehow sparked a movement, a representation that dried up “like a raisin in the sun” as it became apparent that the students had been activists in the youth wing of the NAACP, were drawing on experience of sit-ins over the previous two years, and had planned the activity carefully. The movement spread through a network of churches and campuses.34 In May the first “freedom rides” intended to desegregate bus terminals across the South left Washington, DC. The tactic fit in naturally with the direct action philosophy of King and Rustin, and they had little difficulty embracing it as a new stage in the campaign. By this time the white establishment was becoming more subtle in their tactics. Rustin may have been right that transport was a natural target, but following the Supreme Court ruling cities did not put up much resistance to desegregating buses. Voter registration, the other major push, was the best way to get real political power for blac
ks over the long term, but it was a slow process, especially when local officials felt able to interpret the law to keep out black voters.

  In December 1961, the first “community-wide protest campaigns” began in Albany, Georgia. Now rather than focusing on a particular target, such as a lunch counter or bus terminal, the aim was to develop a concerted attack on all local forms of segregation in order to create a crisis that would test the segregationists’ tolerance. This was not a great success, but lessons were learned and then “refined through a process of trial and error to the point where it was responsible for the most dramatic campaigns of the entire movement.”35 The new campaign was much more provocative, almost designed to incite violence, showing how far strategies of nonviolence had moved from when they had sought to inspire a reciprocal goodness in the hearts of segregationists. Now it was the contrast between official brutality and dignified demands for basic rights that provided the impact. As Rustin observed, “protest becomes an effective tactic to the degree that it elicits brutality and oppression from the power structure.”36 If so, the logic was to search for the more brutish police chiefs, a task that became more challenging as the more astute police forces were training their men to arrest without violence. In the spring of 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, such a chief was found in Eugene “Bull” Connors. He exceeded expectations in arresting children and in his resort to fire hoses and dogs. This ensured that the demonstrators were clearly the victims.37