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For this week’s Piece of History: Today is the 72nd anniversary of Mohandas Gandhi’s assassination. Let us commemorate his extraordinary achievements by tracing exactly how his legacy came to influence so many social movements in the United States of the 20th century. One of the earliest places in the United States where Gandhi’s ideas took root was East Harlem. Several of the members of this particular community went on to become leaders in the civil rights and peace movements of the 1950s, 60s, and beyond. Founded in 1940, the Harlem Ashram was an attempt to unify Gandhi’s teachings of satyagraha (“action based on truth”) and ahimsa (“action without violence”) with the Christian pacifist tradition. The founders, Ralph Temlin and Jay Holmes Smith, were two white men who had formerly served as Methodist missionaries in India. There, they had each been deeply inspired by the Gandhian movement -- so much so that they were both expelled from India by the British government for refusing to cease their pro-independence work. Back in the United States, they continued work in nonviolent direct action, eventually forming the Ashram in Harlem specifically in order to organize with local black leaders. Together, they all worked to build a multiracial community to exploring ways of using nonviolent action against racial injustice. As the members of the Ashram organized community groups like the Non-violence Direct Action Committee, some African-Americans began to develop an understanding of how to apply the lessons of the Indian experiment in nonviolence to the struggle against Jim Crow. One influential member of the Non-violence Direct Action Committee was Krishnalal Jethalal Shridharani, a veteran of Gandhi’s 1930 Salt March and interpreter of Gandhi’s teachings for over ten years. Shridharani’s work culminated in his book War Without Violence, reaching a wide audience in the United States and becoming invaluable to spreading Gandhi’s message. Early nonviolence trainings in the United States were developed using War Without Violence. More than giving just a detailed explanation of Gandhi’s philosophy, Shridharani also gave sharp criticism to the messianic interpretation of Gandhi so common in American pacifist circles at the time. For many Americans of the time, Shridharani was instrumental in demystifying Mahatma Gandhi from a modern-day Hindu Jesus to a strategic revolutionary leader of a mass movement. As history shows, the Harlem Ashram became an incubator of American Gandhism and the civil rights movement. Here, future leaders cut their teeth doing work like helping black newcomers from the South find housing, investigating police violence during strikes, desegregating the local YMCA, and creating a credit union run by and for African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and other minorities who made up most of the East Harlem neighborhood. Ruth Reynolds, a strong supporter of the Puerto Rican independence movement, stayed at the Ashram. So did Pauli Murray, who would become prominent at the nexus of civil rights and the women’s movement. Bayard Rustin, whose outsized influence in the peace and civil rights movements has only recently come to the fore, lived nearby and visited frequently while working for the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). James Farmer, who later became a founding member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) along with Rustin, and then a leader of the 1961 Freedom Rides, received his first trainings in nonviolent direct action at the Harlem Ashram. Farmer, however, was one of several who would ultimately leave the Ashram due to disagreements with the ascetic nature of the commune. Although the Harlem Ashram closed in 1948, one could vigorously argue that the Ashram was incredibly successful in so far as it trained and inspired some of the first Americans (many of them African-Americans) in Gandhian nonviolent direct action. Some of those same Americans then went on to refit the practice into the American context and spread it across the country. It is worth noting that though Gandhi’s teachings have been applied in multiple social movements over the years, none have been more successful or well-known as the American civil rights movement -- in part, perhaps, due to some of the civil rights leaders’ early critical engagement with, training in, and practice of Gandhian nonviolent direct action at the Harlem Ashram. The Voluntown Peace Trust shares significant history with the Harlem Ashram. Ralph Temlin served as a resource person at the 1960 nonviolence training in New London, which Barbara Deming wrote about (see our post from 11/7/19). Ruth Reynolds was close to the Community for Non-Violent Action (CNVA), from which VPT got its start. Marj Swann was trained in 1942 in the same nonviolent methods that James Farmer and others learned and continued to develop at the Harlem Ashram. Gandhi called his autobiography, My Experiment in Truth. The people of the Harlem Ashram continued this experiment by bringing Gandhian methods to the American context -- and while we honor their work, it is far from over, and so we must continue to experiment with the power of nonviolent action. As we move on to Black History Month, we will continue to highlight lesser-known but vitally important African-Americans who helped change the course of history. For more information on the Harlem Ashram, watch the first part of the “Roots of Nonviolent Direct Action Training” video from the War Resisters League: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jprdqKEBGvU&t=790s Additional reading on the Harlem Ashram can be found at the following source links: https://www.christiancentury.org/…/harlems-experiment-inter… http://corenyc.org/nycore.htm http://www.elegantbrain.com/…/v…/king/phil_gandhi_black.html http://www.peacehost.net/HarlemAshram/dekar.htm http://www.thebritishtoastrack.com/gandhi-and-america/ (click here to view the original post on Facebook)
On this week’s Peace of History: We celebrated the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on Monday, but his message and example cannot be limited to a single federal holiday, nor to any one speech, nor to the sanitized stories we tell to children in our schools. The importance of his vision would still be vast if his work had been completed; as it stands now, with so much of his work left unfinished in a world on fire, the value of Dr. King’s message has reached a new kind of urgency. No single speech of Dr. King can encapsulate his message, but in the one he delivered on April 4, 1967, Dr. King revealed a deeper, wider analysis of racism as part of an interconnected system of oppression. Delivered to an audience of over 3000 at Riverside Church in New York City exactly one year before his assassination, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” is widely considered his most controversial speech: his most emphatic denunciation of American military involvement in Vietnam, and of war in general. It was in many ways a watershed moment: the culmination of years of philosophical development and lived experience that had been transforming the Reverend for years -- a process that turned him from a reformer to a revolutionary. It is no wonder, then, that Dr. King devotes much of the beginning of the speech to justify his delivery at all. He appeals not only to conscience and faith, but also to practicality. Repeatedly, the Reverend explains the hypocrisy of using violence for good, how a society that prioritizes war cannot also prioritize racial and economic justice, and how the combination of racism and capitalism feeds poverty, which in turn feeds military recruitment, which then feeds war: “[The young gang members of Chicago and Cleveland] asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government[...] And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such[...] So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.” This broader analysis shows how Dr. King’s understanding of justice had expanded beyond the silo of civil rights to include an end to militarism and war, as well as to include the leveling of economic, social, and political power. It was only after achieving some victories in the struggle to end Southern segregation that Dr. King realized that he was integrating his people into “a burning house.” Indeed, according to historian David Garrow, Dr. King would say to his staff that he “didn’t believe that capitalism as it was constructed could meet the needs of poor people, and that what we might need to look at was a kind of socialism, but a democratic form of socialism.” In “Beyond Vietnam,” the Reverend continued with his analysis of the relationship between capitalism, imperialism, and war, warning that “The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.” Dr. King attempted to connect the revolutionary American values of self-determination and independence to the revolutionary efforts of colonized peoples in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to throw off their colonial masters and establish their own nation-states -- while pointing out that the United States had now flipped to the side of colonizers, exploiters, and reactionaries: "Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered." Dr. King’s understanding of racism as a part of a greater, interconnected system of oppression was spurred on by a few factors. A lesser known attempt by Malcolm X to reach a mutual understanding just before his death in 1965 seemed to retune Dr. King’s ears to the unique problems in the North. So, too, did a new generation of young, dissatisfied African-Americans calling for “black power” and their explorations of how to achieve it. And then, of course, the urban riots of 1967 added a whole new urgency to the persistent crisis of economic injustice. By the later 1960s, that path Dr. King was walking may have become less clear even to himself, but only because his vision had recently expanded, and needed time to adjust focus. Still, he walked, holding fast to his belief in the Promised Land of justice, and firm in his conviction that the manner by which one moves is as important as the destination -- only through radical nonviolent struggle can we transform our world into one of true peace and justice. Let us catch up to this trailblazer, and then let us surpass him, continuing not only his work, but also the continuous broadening of his vision. Like Dr. King, at times it will be difficult to see the path. But let us share his conviction, and continue on, for: “These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every [person] of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest[...] We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.” Vincent Harding. Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient hero. Orbis Books, 1996. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclope…/beyond-vietnam https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/…/documen…/beyond-vietnam (click here to view the original post on Facebook)
On this week’s Peace of History: Today is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, and some of us will have next Monday off in his remembrance. Dr. King’s legacy is vast, almost mythic, but like most of us, Dr. King’s own analysis of nonviolence, racism, war, and nuclear disarmament developed with the encouragement of others.. The first thing that must be stated is that it was not Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but Coretta Scott King who was first and foremost active in the anti-war and anti-nuclear arms movements, long before she met Dr. King. While a student at Antioch College (class of ’51) Coretta met Marjorie Swann through their mutual work with the NAACP. Marj and Bob Swann and their children lived in Yellow Springs, Ohio in the late 1940s and early 1950s as Bob pursued his interest in alternative economics. Coretta had many interests in common with Marj, who was already involved in the Civil Rights (Marj was a charter member of Congress of Racial Equality in 1942) and Anti-War movements (a pacifist, she worked for the National Committee on Conscientious Objection during World War II and joined the Peacemakers in the late 1940s). They stayed in touch throughout their lives. After WWII, Coretta Scott -- along with other soon-to-be prominent women like Fannie Lou Hamer, Angela Davis, Shirley Chrisholm, Ertha Kitt, and more -- was a part of a new generation of African-American women joining groups like the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and Women Strike for Peace (WSP). Although Martin was familiar with the nonviolence movement when they first met, it was Coretta who helped him connect racism, colonialism, and war as all part of the same problem. Coretta also seemed to have inspired his commitment to nonviolence -- while he was still considering the concept as merely a strategic tool, she had already adopted nonviolence as a way of life. Last week’s post highlighted a pivotal meeting between the great organizer Bayard Rustin and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The conversations the two had that evening in 1957 seemed to have reaffirmed the values of Coretta, and further advanced Dr. King’s understanding of nonviolence. Indeed, Bayard Rustin and Coretta Scott King worked alongside each other in the anti-war movement. In June 1965, both served as featured speakers at one of the first protests against the war in Vietnam, urging the crowd of 18,000 to nonviolent action and leading a march through New York City. Throughout the 1960s and beyond, both were some of the most important anti-war organizers, vigorously arguing that the racism that fuels violence within the United States is the same racism that fuels violence the United States perpetrates outside of its borders. They connected the black liberation movement in the South to the anti-war movement in the North, and trail-blazed the path that Dr. King would follow in his last years. As early as the spring of 1965, to an audience at Howard University, Dr. King publicly denounced the war in Vietnam. Afterward, he told reporters, “War had always been a negative concept, but nuclear weapons made it totally unacceptable.” Next week, we will closely examine Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s most famous antiwar speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” which he delivered in 1967. Until then, we will leave you this week with a quote from that famous speech: 'I am convinced that [...] we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values[...] A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood[…] A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.' Vincent J. Intondi. African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement. Stanford University Press, 2015. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/beyond-vietnam https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/beyond-vietnam (click here to view the original post on Facebook)
In this week’s Piece of History: As we approach Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday, let us examine one particularly important advisor to the famous civil rights leader: Bayard Rustin, a man best known for his association with the younger minister, but whose long and prolific involvement in peace and justice movements started well before King’s political beginnings, and who continued the work long after King’s death. Raised by his grandmother, who was a devoted Quaker and member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Bayard Rustin was introduced to nonviolence as a child. Earlier in his career, Rustin joined and worked for various peace and racial justice groups, including the Youth Communist League before they shifted priorities in 1941, the Fellowship for Reconciliation (FOR) which sent Rustin to India to learn Gandhian principles in 1948, and War Resisters International and the War Resisters League (WRL), for which he served as Executive Secretary from 1953 to 1965. For a man so relatively unknown today, when one looks into the recent history of civil rights and peace movements, Bayard Rustin shows up at many of the most famous moments:
But those snapshots only offer a glimpse into the man’s extensive career, and offer little about the complex life behind these moments. The 2003 film Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin, the centennial celebration of his birthday in 2012, and the posthumous awarding of the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama in 2013 have all helped shed light on his remarkable life. Rustin was instrumental in not just the civil rights movement, but also in the labor rights movement, in the gay liberation movement, and in the anti-nuclear weapons movement (both domestically and internationally), among so many more diverse but interrelated activities. Much of Rustin’s involvement in the civil rights movement and other organized efforts, however, was purposely downplayed at the time and until recently for his open homosexuality. One lesser known story about Rustin and Dr. King is worth sharing here. In 1957, when Rustin went to Montgomery, Alabama for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, he happened to visit Dr. King in his home along with a few others. King had heard of Rustin: although Rustin’s sexual orientation was known and regarded somewhat suspiciously by King and other leaders, the older organizer’s reputation as a skilled strategist seemed to outweigh his perceived flaws. At King’s home, as the reporter Bill Worthy was about to sit in a chair, Rustin had to warn him that he was about to sit on a gun. In fact, since racists bombed Dr. King’s home the year before, King held several firearms in his home for self-defense. Although King had a passing familiarity with Gandhi, at this time, he was relatively ignorant of the late Indian leader’s broader philosophy of self, society, and social change. That night, Rustin and King conversed at length about Gandhian principles and the strategic and moral strength of nonviolence. Rustin explained that the inconsistent application of Gandhian teachings, even in self-defense, could only spell hypocrisy and hurt the movement. By the next morning, Bayard Rustin had convinced Dr. King to remove all guns from his home, and to fully commit himself to the practice of nonviolence -- a decision that would shape the rest of the young minister’s life. Next week, we will celebrate the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. -- with a post on Wednesday instead of Thursday in order to fall on his birthday. With the troubling military actions our government has recently taken, it will be worth revisiting how King seamlessly connected the internal racial and economic violence of the United States with colonialism and war exerted internationally. https://wagingnonviolence.org/…/revisiting-rustin-on-his-c…/ https://www.theguardian.com/…/martin-luther-king-guns-pacif…  (click here to view the original post on Facebook) On this week’s Peace of History: Let us consider the ubiquitous circular peace symbol . It may be surprising to learn that the symbol is a very modern invention, and one directly tied to the cause of nuclear disarmament. As explored in our 12/5 post, the origins of the Voluntown Peace Trust are shared with two important sources of the symbol’s spread: prominently displayed on a flag on the Golden Rule peace ship as it famously protested nuclear arms by attempting to enter U.S. atmospheric nuclear test sites; and on the signs carried on the San Francisco to Moscow Walk for Peace, which helped spread the symbol internationally in Europe. Moreover, Bayard Rustin, who was a co-founder of the Committee for Non-Violent Action (CNVA), brought the symbol to the United States. The original peace symbol was designed by Gerald Holtom for the first Aldermaston March in the U.K. in April, 1958. Organized by groups affiliated with War Resisters’ International, the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the march started in London and ended at a weapons research facility in Aldermaston to protest the manufacturing of nuclear weapons. Gerald Holtom, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Art and an organizer for the march, explained that the symbol is a composite of the semaphore signals for the letters N and D: “Nuclear Disarmament.” Holtom also recounted his sense of despondency at the time he designed the symbol, and how it came to be reflected in the design, as “an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards.” Bayard Rustin attended the Aldermaston March as a representative of the War Resisters League. By 1958, Bayard, an African-American pacifist who was out about his homosexuality, had already been involved in the peace movement for nearly two decades. His activities included organizing actions, strategizing campaigns, and training others in nonviolent resistance. Bayard spoke at the beginning of the march: “There must be unilateral (disarmament) action by a single nation, come what may. There must be no strings attached. We must prepare to absorb the danger. We must use our bodies in direct action, non-cooperation, whatever is required to bring our government to its senses. In the United States, the black people of Montgomery said, ‘We will not cooperate with discrimination.’ And the action of those people achieved tremendous results. They are now riding the buses with dignity, because they were prepared to make a sacrifice of walking for their rights.” Over the next few years, Bayard Rustin became a major figure in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, the Gay Liberation Movement, and the international disarmament movement. In 1960, just two years after the world premiere of the circular nuclear disarmament symbol, the Committee for Non-Violent Action brought the symbol to New London, Connecticut for the Polaris Action campaign. It became the symbol of the CNVA, and became known as the “peace symbol” as its popularity spread and protesters used it in opposition to the war in Vietnam. Little known fact: after the symbol had reached wide circulation, Holtom actually expressed his preference to flip the original symbol upside-down, as a more joyous, celebratory design. This would also change the semaphore letter N to U: “Universal Disarmament.” Next Week: We will examine Bayard Rustin’s influences on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. To learn more about Gerald Holtom, listen to the first part of the episode “Ubiquitous Icons” from the excellent podcast 99% Invisible: https://99percentinvisible.org/…/ubiquitous-icons-peace-po…/ To learn more about the Golden Rule, visit their website here: http://www.vfpgoldenruleproject.org/ And don’t forget to check in with our friends the Kings Bay Plowshares, who soon expect to be sentenced to prison for their nuclear arms protests: https://kingsbayplowshares7.org/ https://www.facebook.com/Kingsbayplowshares/ |
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