Today is Martin Luther King Day. On my run this morning, I listened to a discussion between NYTimes writer and podcaster Ezra Klein and Brandon Terry, a professor at Harvard and co-editor of a book of essays on King--To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. From Dr. Terry’s first explanations, I was jarred by his ways of considering King’s use and purposes of nonviolence, and heard reflected back to me the romanticized, anodyne vision most often taught, and also taught by me. By the time I was returning from my run, I was also making some connections to the last book I read, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland and the dangers of violence, not to immediate means to political ends, but to both lasting ends and enduring individual dignity.
Dr.
Terry begins his interview by saying we don’t actually read Martin Luther King,
who has written five books in addition to his countless speeches: America celebrates
King as hero but also marginalizes his ideas. We teach King as a unifier, as a
leader wanting us to rise up to America’s ideals, and to progress, therefore,
to who we were already becoming: this is essentially a conservative view that
challenges little and proposes nothing new to the American vision and applauds King
as an organizer and inspirer rather than a demanding critical intellect.
Terry and Klein’s discussion
of King and nonviolence has my head spinning. Dr. Terry distinguishes
between nonviolence as strategy and nonviolence as principle, and suggests that
both King and Gandhi’s philosophies of nonviolence are both misunderstood. King spoke of direct action, not of passive resistance,
and he thought of it in aggressive terms. Dr. Terry suggests that King believed
doing nothing was the worst choice, and that violent action was better for
community and soul than passivity, but that peaceful direct action—refusing to
participate and standing in the way of unjust and inequitable practices—was best
of all for the dignity of activists and for the long term goals of community
and movement. Either Klein or Terry mentioned that we tend to see King’s
nonviolent principles as a political strategy—create the kind of drama, or
tension, as King called it in the jail letter, that draws televised attention,
and then allow viewers to observe the savagery of the state on the peaceful such
that a frowning national pity swells. This is what I had been teaching as well.
But Dr. Terry says that the nonviolence is much more deeply considered: committing
violence degrades personal dignity, and, when it succeeds, recreates division
and perpetuates continued resentment. Nonviolence is more than strategy or
principle.
As
a teacher preparing to send half a class to South Africa and half to Northern
Ireland in a month from today, and thinking about apartheid in one
place and partition in the other—and the actions needed for change amidst generationally
deep community divisions in both places—King’s thoughtfulness about the means
of activism is clarifying.
In
South Africa, Nelson Mandela after transitioning from prisoner to president pointedly
allowed many whites to continue in their governmental roles; President Mandela committed
not to Africa for Africans but to a Rainbow Nation. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, meanwhile, grounded a process of Truth and Reconciliation in a concept of ubuntu—a person
is a person through other people—justice itself relied on recognizing the
humanity of neighbors, those victimized and those harboring guilt. Both the Rainbow Nation and the TRC had their failures and limits. But both considered dignity for the lasting
changes sought.
Meanwhile,
in Northern Ireland, the provos of the Irish Republican Army used fear and
chaos as the means available to end British occupation. In Patrick Radden Keefe’s
Say Nothing, two IRA foot-soldiers reveal in tapes secreted away in Boston College their sense of betrayal when their former
friend and direct commander in the IRA Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin both denies his
involvement and, for these two, worse, helps engineer the Good Friday Agreement of
1998: they “had set bombs and robbed banks and seen friends die and nearly died
[themselves], in the expectation that these violent exertions would finally
achieve the national liberation for which generations of [their families] had
fought” (253). The book captures these two growing increasingly bitter and
alone and twisted by drugs or drink, broken of body and dignity.
Listening
to Dr. Terry describe King’s considered thoughtfulness about nonviolence, I was
struck by how it applied to what I just read: violence was an obvious poison
to the paramilitaries described in Say Nothing, a poison they readily accepted because they viewed
themselves as tools of a movement to a better future. But in Northern
Ireland’s careful and recent peace, bitterness, tension, and distrust remains.
Humanity,
and not “winning,” is the prize.
