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JAMES LAWSON WAS THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT’S DRILL SERGEANT  
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Chris Maisano
August 28, 2026
Jacobin
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_ The civil rights movement’s nonviolence was a moral commitment
and a strategic calculation of how the movement could best exert
power. No practitioner of that nonviolence was more effective and
disciplined than Rev. James Lawson. _

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Nonviolent: A Memoir of Resistance, Agitation, and Love by Reverend
James Lawson Jr and Emily Yellin (Random House, 2026)

Reverend James Lawson Jr did not attend the 1963 March on Washington
for Jobs and Freedom. Most of the movement’s boldfaced names —
the “Big Six” civil rights leaders, labor leaders and religious
figures, celebrities and entertainers — were there, in front of a
quarter million people up on the Lincoln Memorial’s marble steps.
But Lawson was not. He was hundreds of miles away from the nation’s
capital, organizing and training people at a regional gathering of
Methodist student leaders in Upstate New York.

Lawson and his colleagues paused the proceedings so that anyone who
wanted to board a bus to Washington early that morning could do so.
“I had planned to go,” recalls Lawson in his landmark memoir,
Nonviolent, “but we didn’t have enough room for every student who
wanted to attend. I decided to give up my seat on the bus so that a
student could go instead.”

Lawson deserves to be remembered as one of the black freedom
movement’s greatest leaders. Those who knew and worked with him, as
well as anyone who has delved beneath the surface of the movement’s
history, understand just how important a figure he was. No less of an
authority than Martin Luther King Jr himself considered Lawson
[[link removed]] “the
leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world.”

A Methodist minister whose Christian faith was thoroughly suffused
with Gandhian principles, he trained a veritable army of activists in
the philosophy, strategy, and tactics of nonviolent direct action. He
had a hand in every major Southern civil rights campaign from 1958,
when he moved to Nashville to begin his movement work, through the
1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike that claimed King’s life.
He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s and was a central figure in
the city’s labor and progressive movements until his death in 2024,
at the age of ninety-five.

For Lawson, the problem with violence was not that it was too
revolutionary, but that it was not revolutionary enough to change a
society whose fundamental organizing principle is violence.

If Lawson is not as well-known as many of the people he trained — a
group that includes the late John Lewis, among many others — the
story of his absence from the March on Washington goes a long way
toward explaining why.

“My role,” Lawson writes of the 1963 Birmingham campaign, “was
to be the one who stayed on the outside to do the work of recruiting
people, persuading more people to participate.”

This was his role not just in Birmingham but across the movement. He
took raw recruits, fired by their determination to destroy systems of
oppression, and forged them into disciplined militants ready to face
down their oppressors, whatever the cost — up to and including
death.

For Lawson, the problem with violence was not that it was too
revolutionary, but that it was not revolutionary enough to change a
society whose fundamental organizing principle is violence. James
Lawson was the drill sergeant of nonviolence.

It is impossible to come away from Nonviolent without respect and
admiration for a man who did more to advance the cause of human
freedom than most. It should, one hopes, help Lawson receive the wider
recognition he so richly deserves. Reading it is a morally and
politically rewarding exercise, one that is enhanced by the compelling
plainness of Lawson’s words.

It is also a challenge. In his foreword to the book, the scholar Eddie
S. Glaude Jr admits that the call to nonviolence “remains a hard
question for this country boy shaped by the raging ghosts of
Mississippi.” Nonviolent underscores the immense difficulty, even
the ultimate impossibility, of inspiring a universal commitment to
nonviolence. Nevertheless, even if violence is, in some form or
fashion, an inevitable aspect of the project of changing the world,
Lawson’s memoir testifies to the enduring power of nonviolence as a
regulative idea.

“There Must Be a Better Way”

Nonviolent, which is skillfully assembled out of Lawson’s previous
written and spoken work and interviews with his collaborator, Emily
Yellin, chronicles his life in movements for social transformation.
Because that work was indelibly grounded in his Christian faith, in
many ways this is, as Glaude describes it, a spiritual autobiography.

Conversion stories have defined Christian devotional literature since
St Paul was blinded by the light on the road to Damascus. Lawson
didn’t have to convert to Christianity, like Paul, nor give up the
pleasures of the flesh, like St Augustine. His father and grandfather
were both Methodist ministers, and he appears to have been a
constitutionally virtuous person from childhood. There is no evidence
of a sex, drugs, and rock and roll period in James Lawson’s life.
But there is a conversion story here, and it revolves around his
precocious renunciation of violence as a means of confronting
injustice.

The book begins with a stark declaration: “I smacked a white boy in
his face when I was four years old.” Lawson was playing with this
boy, who had been his friend, in the empty lots of Depression-era
Massillon, Ohio. Then the boy started hurling racist taunts at him,
suddenly and without provocation. “So I balled up my fist, reached
back as far as I could, swung around with determination, and hit him
in his jaw. Hard. Or as hard as a four-year-old could.” This was the
first bout of a fighting career that lasted until he was nine years
old.

Lawson’s Canadian-born father carried a pistol while ministering in
the South and thought violent self-defense against racism was
justified. His mother, an immigrant from Jamaica, did not.

One day, after proudly telling his mother how he slapped a boy who
called him the n-word, she made a fateful intervention. “Jimmy,”
she told him as she washed the dishes, “There must be a better
way.” At this moment, according to Lawson, he had a “numinous
experience,” a transcendental encounter with the divine that set him
on his life course.

That’s when I began to hear another voice. I heard my mother’s
voice at the same time. But the other voice rose up. I didn’t know
where it was coming from. It resounded from a vast depth beyond her
and beyond me, and yet was in my body. It seemed to go all through me.
I realized later that it was my voice, but it was also a voice beyond
myself. It said, “You will never fight in this way again. You will
never do that again.” It didn’t say, “You might do it again.”
It said, emphatically, “You will never do it again.” That
experience stayed with me for every day of my life.

Secular readers may find it difficult to take this at face value. But
considering the thoroughly spiritual character of Lawson’s
upbringing, there’s little reason to doubt he really experienced it.

By high school, Lawson had concluded that biblical injunctions against
violence “contained the seeds of a resistance movement. They were
not acquiescent or passive.” His spiritual and intellectual
development led him to Baldwin–Wallace College, a Methodist campus
outside Cleveland, where he encountered the ideas of Christian
pacifist radicals like A. J. Muste
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and Bayard Rustin
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and, most important, Mohandas K. Gandhi.

Together with black and white comrades, Lawson challenged racial
discrimination on campus and in town, and in 1949, he decided to send
his draft card back to the Selective Service System in a bold act of
civil disobedience. After two years of bureaucratic inaction, FBI
agents came to his family home in Massillon and arrested him for
failing to report for military service.

Lawson was sentenced to three years in federal prison but served
thirteen months. The time behind bars solidified his commitment to
Gandhi’s teachings and stoked a “driving fire of Christian
adventure and daring” in him. The Methodist Church negotiated his
early release, and to Lawson’s “great delight,” the terms of his
parole compelled him to leave the country for missionary work abroad.
Though he suffered in the penitentiary, Lawson came out more defiant
and more committed to nonviolent revolution than he was before he went
in.

“It wasn’t until after my time in prison,” Lawson writes,
“that I truly believed in the deepest parts of my heart that all
humans were created equal and endowed with inalienable rights, and
that loving my neighbor was the way to live.”

[James Lawson in 2005.]

James Lawson in 2005. (Joon Powell
[[link removed]])

Lawson missed the March on Washington, and he missed the Montgomery
bus boycott too. When the Montgomery movement kicked off, Lawson was
teaching English and coaching sports at a school in Nagpur, India,
while deepening his immersion in Gandhian philosophy, strategy, and
tactics. One morning in December 1955, he picked up the morning paper
to see news of the boycott splashed across the page. “I was so
elated to read the news,” Lawson writes, “that I started clapping
my hands, and jumping and shouting.”

When a neighbor checked to see what the commotion was about, Lawson
“showed him the paper and told him how important this was, because I
had been hoping and dreaming that such a movement could be possible in
America and would start one day soon.” It had, and Lawson quickly
came to regard its leader, a young Baptist minister named Martin
Luther King Jr, as his Moses.

After a whirlwind trip through an African continent stirring to revolt
against colonialism, Lawson returned to the United States in September
1956. He wanted to pursue a PhD in divinity before joining the
Southern movement, so he began graduate studies at Oberlin College in
Ohio. But when he met King at Oberlin, Martin implored him: “Come
now. Don’t wait. Come as quickly as you can. We need you now.”
Lawson’s best-laid plans couldn’t withstand the power of this
appeal. “I looked him in the eye and quietly said, ‘I will come as
fast as I can.’”

The Making of Nonviolent Revolutionaries

Lawson had two big things going for him. He was an ordained minister,
which meant he would complement a movement rooted in the church and
led by clergy. Just as important, he was already recognized as an
authority on Gandhian nonviolence and could impart his knowledge to a
movement that was still finding its way forward. A. J. Muste offered
to hire him as the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s Southern
secretary, and he moved to Nashville to begin his work in early 1958.

In Waging a Good War
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journalist and military historian Thomas E. Ricks contends,
justifiably, that “Gandhi’s impact on King and the Movement, both
directly through his writings and indirectly through American
followers . . . probably has been underestimated, even now.”
Perhaps this is because of a lingering misunderstanding of what
Gandhian nonviolence really entails.

As Lawson explains, the Gandhian term for nonviolence, _ahimsa_, was
originally translated into English as “passive resistance,” a
formulation that Gandhi himself rejected as misleading. Ahimsa finds
practical expression through _satyagraha_, which means “love
force” or “soul force,” and takes the active form of civil
resistance to unjust laws — boycotts, strikes, marches,
demonstrations that disrupt the course of everyday life. The historian
David L. Chappell describes Martin Luther King Jr as a “strategist
of force
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who aimed “to coerce [powerful white people] to give up privileges
against their will,” not to appeal to the better angels of their
nature. Nonviolence entails protracted mass struggle, and as Lawson
emphasized in his book Revolutionary Nonviolence
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“protracted struggle is a moral struggle that is like warfare, moral
warfare.”

Like soldiers going to war, nonviolent militants aren’t simply flung
into the fray. They receive training and preparation; they go to boot
camp. “Nonviolent soul force preparation” in the Southern civil
rights movement, Lawson contends, “was even more rigorous than
training for violent military action. In fact, Gandhi’s soul force
would not have succeeded without extensive practice, deep commitment,
and strategic planning.”

Like soldiers going to war, nonviolent militants aren’t simply flung
into the fray. They receive training and preparation; they go to boot
camp.

This may sound like an exaggeration, but the comparison is an apt one.
Very little about the movement was spontaneous or unprepared. When it
was, this was typically a sign that something was going wrong.

The fight to desegregate Downtown Nashville was Lawson’s first major
campaign, and it’s the textbook example of a Gandhian campaign à la
Lawson. It begins with fact-finding, and in Nashville this entailed
“investigat[ing] and mak[ing] a sort of laundry list of the plights
and tortures Black people faced” in the city. For nearly half a year
beginning in January 1959, Lawson writes, “we simply sought out
descriptions of all the separate manifestations of racism and
segregation that were hurting Black people and the community.” They
identified many problems during this process, but one theme began to
stand out: the indignities black residents faced while working and
shopping in the city’s downtown business district.

Only the most menial jobs were available to black workers; “Whites
Only” signs designated zones of exclusion at every turn; black
shoppers — most of whom were women — had nowhere to rest their
feet or have a cup of coffee while on their rounds. Lawson recounts
the blunt testimony of one woman: “You preachers and our husbands do
not know the pain of having to shop downtown for our family. We do
your shopping for you, so we’re the ones who bear the brunt of the
racism, of the segregation in Nashville.”

Armed with the facts, the movement could move on to battle planning
and training. Instead of making segregation in general their target,
they chose a specific expression of it: racial discrimination in
department store restaurants and lunch counters. They recruited young
people to their ranks “because they can be shaped and formed,”
Lawson writes, “And I felt . . . that we were building a
nonviolent army. Young people would be the ones most available to go
through constructive training in nonviolent direct action.”

Local clergy had already been recruiting high school and college
students to the movement, and they would soon assemble a remarkable
cadre of young militants including Marion Barry, James Bevel, Bernard
Lafayette, John Lewis, and Diane Nash, each of whom became brilliant
leaders and strategists.

“Out of its initial small group of about forty or fifty students,”
Ricks writes in Waging a Good War, “grew a cadre of people who would
become a major force in the civil rights effort — first the
sit-ins, then the Freedom Rides, then in forming the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), then in the Birmingham
marches, and finally in Selma.” James Lawson trained them all.

Lawson’s training combined intensive education in the philosophy and
history of nonviolence with role-playing and other methods intended to
prepare recruits for what amounted to combat situations. Role-playing
exercises were often intense.

He would have trainees pair up in twos, for example, and have them act
out the kinds of scenarios they could expect to encounter in the
field. One partner would play the part of a black person minding their
own business, while the other played a racist white assailant. The
latter would hit and slap and hurl racist insults, while the former
had to respond in a strictly nonviolent fashion — no physical
retaliation, no insults returned in kind.

“The point of the role playing,” Lawson writes, “was to think
about how to respond to the violence. . . .  People would talk
about it and evaluate their experiences. They were to figure out,
‘If this happens to me on Church Street in Nashville, how will I
react? If that happens to me when I’m at a sit-in what does it mean?
How do I respond?’” The exercises gave them space to think through
an incident in the abstract before it became a reality, where they
might be blindsided and not know what to do.

The training didn’t always take, and depending on the audience,
Lawson’s deep religiosity could backfire on him. Lawson notoriously
failed to connect with many white Freedom Summer recruits in 1964, for
example.

“I think I did a poor job in conveying to those students,” he
recalls, “the importance of the commitment to nonviolence in our
movement. And because I was a minister, it stirred the students’
skepticism of religion, and even their ridicule.”

Some recruits dropped out. Others were weeded out if leaders thought
they couldn’t handle what was in store for them. But the recruits
who made it through months of rigorous training in Lawson’s
workshops were ready to face the prospect of great suffering, even
death, together.

After nearly a year of preparation, the Nashville movement launched a
sit-in movement to desegregate Downtown Nashville in February 1960. It
was not an easy campaign. Militants suffered shocking violence at the
hands of white police and civilians; white politicians and media
outlets vilified the movement as the work of communists and “outside
agitators”; Lawson was kicked out of Vanderbilt University, where he
had been pursuing a graduate degree in divinity. They faced criticism
from the black establishment, particularly the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People, which opposed the Southern
sit-in movement for its supposedly reckless tactics.

For Lawson, the campaign wasn’t only an attack on the white power
structure but a criticism of traditional black leadership as well.
“The sit-in movement and the whole nonviolent movement for social
change,” Lawson contends, “was a statement to the Black community
that we did not have to settle for this evil.”

[On February 27, 1960, several sit-in participants in Nashville,
including Paul Laprad (pictured), were attacked by onlookers.]

On February 27, 1960, several sit-in participants in Nashville,
including Paul Laprad (pictured), were attacked by onlookers. (The
Tennesseean)

Despite beatings, bombings, and brickbats, the Nashville movement won.
After three months of sit-ins, boycotts, and demonstrations, the
city’s downtown merchants agreed to start serving black customers
equally. No more “Whites Only” signs, no more having to buy shoes
and take them home just to try them on. Poverty, employment
discrimination, and a host of evils remained. But the Nashville
movement and parallel efforts across the South showed that nonviolent
direct action could overcome the imposing but vulnerable structures of
Jim Crow.

For Lawson, Nashville was “the pivotal movement for the rest of the
sixties, because many of us became the staff people, the volunteers,
and the foot soldiers” in the Freedom Rides, the battles of
Birmingham and Selma, and other key campaigns. Lawson’s assessment
is no idle boast. John Lewis became SNCC’s chairman, led the first
march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in 1965, and went on to
serve in Congress for decades. James Bevel and Diane Nash, who became
a couple during the Nashville sit-ins, became two of the movement’s
most effective and audacious strategists, especially during the
Birmingham and Selma campaigns (their marriage, unfortunately, did not
survive the strain of protracted movement work).

Lawson kept training waves of new recruits to the movement’s ranks,
and he chaired the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike strategy
committee. He wasn’t always successful, and his mistakes in Memphis
pulled King deeper into the strike — and deeper into harm’s
way — than anyone intended. Nevertheless, Lawson’s work in
forging disciplined groups of nonviolent revolutionaries was
indispensable to the fight against racial segregation.

“Cohesion was the ineffable but essential ingredient the Nashville
contingent possessed,” Ricks concludes. “Developing it was perhaps
the greatest contribution James Lawson made to the civil rights
movement.”

Holding the Tension

Nonviolence, particularly in the philosophically totalizing form
Lawson embodied, was never universally embraced in the movement. Some
accepted it conditionally and pragmatically, so long as it seemed to
work when nothing else would. Others rejected it entirely and
justified the use of violence as a means of self-defense or collective
liberation.

King, for his part, did not come into the movement as a fully formed
apostle of nonviolence. When Bayard Rustin realized King had a small
arsenal in his house during the Montgomery bus boycott, he talked him
into getting rid of his guns. According to Chappell, Rustin convinced
King that leaders must be committed to nonviolence in principle,
“since ‘if, in the flow and the heat of battle, a leader’s house
is bombed, and he shoots back, that is an encouragement to his
followers to pick up guns.’” King’s house was, in fact, bombed
during the Montgomery campaign. He was not home at the time, but his
wife, Coretta Scott King, and one of his children were; they were very
fortunate to survive the blast. Some of King’s supporters wanted to
retaliate or post armed guards at his house, but he refused on the
grounds that this would distract from the question at hand, which was
not his personal safety but the freedom of black people in Montgomery.

While King committed himself to principled nonviolence under
Rustin’s tutelage, he admitted that not everyone could be expected
to adopt the same rigorous standards. In “The Social Organization of
Nonviolence
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a 1959 polemic with the outspoken advocate of armed self-defense,
Robert F. Williams, King conceded that “the principle of
self-defense, even involving weapons and bloodshed, has never been
condemned, even by Gandhi, who sanctioned it for those unable to
master pure nonviolence.” In “Nonviolence: The Only Road to
Freedom
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written in 1966 amid a rising tide of urban unrest, King wrote that
“it goes without saying that people will protect their homes. This
is a right guaranteed by the Constitution and respected even in the
worst areas of the South.”

[Martin Luther King Jr, photographed during a meeting at the White
House in 1966.]

Martin Luther King Jr, photographed during a meeting at the White
House in 1966. (Yoichi Okamoto / Executive Office of the President of
the United States)

In Nonviolent, Lawson recounts an illuminating episode from the 1966
March Against Fear, the Mississippi demonstration where Kwame Ture
(then known as Stokely Carmichael) launched the “Black Power”
slogan before a national audience. According to Lawson, some young
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) marchers wanted to
tussle with white racists who were harassing them on the march route.
“Their guiding principle,” Lawson recalls, “was that you
couldn’t let yourself be pushed around”:

Again, we had to say, “Look. We have children and women here. And
there are some very old people. Now, if you want to make an
appointment with these guys afterward, well and good. But you are in a
demonstration now, and you don’t have a gun and that policeman has a
bayonet and these children don’t have any such protection. So,
you’ll put everyone in jeopardy.” These guys were confusing
self-defense with the responsibility you have when you are part of a
public demonstration.

King and Lawson, despite their principled commitments to nonviolence,
could make pragmatic distinctions between the collective discipline
they thought mass demonstrations required and what individuals could
do on their own time, as it were. What is permissible in private life
may not be good for a public movement; what may be forgiven of a
rank-and-filer may not be allowed for a leader. Context matters, for
both moral judgment and strategic calculation.

Some of the most vivid scenes in Lawson’s memoir concern internal
frictions over nonviolence, especially when he and Ture were at
loggerheads. Ture often appears as Lawson’s symbolic foil in the
book; an embodiment of trends that Lawson feared would render the
movement marginal and ineffective.

Nevertheless, despite his deep disagreements with figures like Ture,
Lawson writes that he “would not denounce Black Power, and neither
would Martin — because we understood what it was about.” In Where
Do We Go From Here
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King writes that the Black Power slogan “was born from the wounds of
pain and disappointment,” a predictable and understandable
“reaction to the failure of white power” to recognize the humanity
and equality of African Americans despite the passage of landmark
civil rights and voting rights legislation.

In “The Social Organization of Nonviolence,” King conceded “it
is unfortunately true that however the Negro acts, his struggle will
not be free of violence initiated by his enemies.” Lawson reached a
similar conclusion: “Nonviolence and violence have a similarity.
Those who practice either must be prepared to do some suffering.” A
realistic appraisal of the human condition compels us to admit that
some degree of violence, often instigated by those who seek to
preserve their power and privileges, will attend any movement for
social transformation.

Viewed from this perspective, the simple dichotomy of violence versus
nonviolence begins to break down, and the issue takes on new
dimensions. In his 2022 book, The Revolutionary City
[[link removed]], Mark Beissinger
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writes that the question is not “_whether_ revolutions are violent,
but rather _how much_ violence they involve and what explains that
variation.” We also need to ask what exactly we mean by violence in
the first place.

The coauthors of On Revolutions
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a 2022 state-of-the-research summary of the field, concede that
“categorizing revolutionary struggles as either violent or
nonviolent can be problematic since movements often have fluid and
flexible strategic approaches, shifting between armed and unarmed
phases.” Distinguishing between armed and unarmed movements
doesn’t, on its own, solve the dilemma either. Unarmed movements can
and do employ tactical repertoires that blur the lines between
violence and nonviolence.

“Some unarmed uprisings,” they write, “have moments when civil
resisters destroy property such as military vehicles or police
stations. Is this violent or nonviolent? While some consider such acts
to be violent, others argue that a tactic is violent only if it harms
or endangers life.” This is why some scholars of revolution employ
the concept of “unarmed violence” to distinguish rock throwing or
rioting from armed combat, and to try to isolate the impact of these
tactics on largely nonviolent movements.

The focus here is often on “violent flanks” and how they affect
the mechanisms of movement success or failure. The political scientist
Erica Chenoweth defines this as violence that “remains exceptional
within the broader repertoire of contention” and therefore does not
entail a full shift from unarmed to armed struggle. Chenoweth’s
review
[[link removed]]
of the literature finds that “organized armed resistance alongside
primarily unarmed resistance campaigns appears to yield few long-term
strategic benefits for mass movements.” The same cannot be said,
however, for unarmed violence, whose effects on movement outcomes
appear to be much more ambiguous and case-dependent.

It is possible that the key strategic choice movements face is not
whether to adopt the kind of strict nonviolent discipline Lawson
embodied, but whether to remain unarmed. “Some portion of the
positive effect of nonviolent tactics on democratization campaigns,”
Mohammad Ali Kadivar and Neil Ketchley conclude
[[link removed]],
“may in fact be attributable to episodes of unarmed collective
violence.”

The mechanisms by which property destruction and other acts (or
threats) of violence can boost nonviolent movements are not entirely
clear, but inferences can be drawn from the history of the black
freedom struggle. The historian Peniel Joseph
[[link removed]],
for example, has described Malcolm X and King as the movement’s
sword and shield, respectively. In this framework, the Black Power and
self-defense flank complements and strengthens the main nonviolent
thrust. Negotiate with Martin, or you’ll have to deal with Malcolm;
give us the ballot, or you’ll get the bullet.

There is some evidence to support the logic of this theory, like a
2022 study
[[link removed]]
that found “the presence of a radical flank can increase
identification with and support for a moderate faction in the same
social movement.” These findings, however, were based on survey
experiments, not an analysis of real movements; as Chenoweth notes, it
“may be difficult to extend these findings to political
environments” where actors and observers “do not actively try to
differentiate between radical and moderate tactics.”

This is especially true when movements, regardless of their strategies
and tactics, are based primarily on racial minorities or other
out-groups subject to unfavorable media treatment and systematic
social bias. King, who spoke consistently of the need for love and
reconciliation, was nevertheless one of the most widely hated people
in America at the time of his assassination.

[Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X meet before a press conference in
Washington, DC, on March 26, 1964.]

Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X meet before a press conference in
Washington, DC, on March 26, 1964. (US News & World Report / Library
of Congress)

It is extremely difficult to disentangle these threads in the context
of very messy, actually existing social movements. The effects of
unarmed violence on primarily nonviolent struggles appear to be, as
Chenoweth suggests in their review of scores of studies, essentially
simultaneous and contradictory.

Nineteen sixty-seven’s wave of urban riots, for example, spurred
President Lyndon B. Johnson to form the Kerner Commission
[[link removed]], whose
recommendations for action might as well have been written by King or
Rustin. If implemented in full, it would have amounted to the
establishment of a racially egalitarian social democracy in the United
States. Of course, that never happened.

The uprising of the black poor made the problems and the solutions as
clear as day. For a brief moment, it focused attention on the stark
fact that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one
white — separate and unequal,” as the commission warned in its
best-selling report. At the same time, it exacerbated already existing
divisions within the movement, which could not prevail upon an
administration that ran away from its own commission’s findings as
soon as they were published. It also fed into the tide of
law-and-order reaction that helped to put Richard Nixon in the White
House in 1968.

Nonviolence ultimately seeks to reconcile means and ends in the
struggle for social transformation. “Means and ends must cohere,”
King insisted in his last Christmas sermon
[[link removed]],
“because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately
destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.”

One may object that massive quantities of violence were needed to
destroy Southern chattel slavery or defeat the Nazi menace. True
enough. But the tendency of armed revolutionary movements to result in
authoritarian governments when they win power is a point in favor of
the nonviolent wager. Armed movements, by virtue of the violence and
secrecy they entail, impede mass participation and rely on
undemocratic organizations that do not prepare people for the exercise
of collective self-rule. Political violence has an interactive quality
that often takes on a life of its own. It’s not something that can
easily be turned on and off, and it can easily outstrip its original
justification.

Lawson was convinced that nonviolence “gives the right a far better
chance of emerging” from political struggle than violence of any
kind. Not a guarantee, but a chance. Given the sheer inertia weighing
against the “beloved community” King envisioned, Lawson’s faith
in the revolutionary power of nonviolence may well be naive. But as
Chappell so incisively puts it, “to believe that anybody’s plan
will ever be fulfilled after the shooting starts — that anyone will
be able to avoid tragic disappointment in the course of violent
revolution and war — is a more obvious and straightforward
naïveté.”

“Nonviolence understands clearly that the system is violent,”
Lawson writes, “especially when the structures of the system force
people to live with torturous oppression.” If the experience of
oppression cannot find an effective outlet through nonviolent action,
it will eventually explode. “That is why potential violence against
a violent system is not something you denounce. It’s also not
something you embrace.” Holding that tension is perhaps the most
practical thing one can take away from Nonviolent. It is also the
hardest one to master.

_Chris Maisano is a __Jacobin__ contributing editor and a member of
Democratic Socialists of America._

_Jacobin_ [[link removed]]_ is a leading voice of the American
left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and
culture. The print magazine is released quarterly and reaches 75,000
subscribers, in addition to a web audience of over 3,000,000 a
month.__ Subscribe_ [[link removed]]_ to Jacobin
magazine._

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