Nonviolence - A Brief History: The Warsaw Lectures

2 The American Civil Rights Struggle

27 Chapter 2 The American Civil Rights Struggle Many of my listeners have already heard the story of the American civil rights struggle. Still, it may be helpful to review the earlier backgrounds of the experience of black Americans. Soon after the colonization of the American coast by English settlers, the importation of black workers from Africa began for commercial reasons. The movement which led to the independence of the thirteen colonies from England through the revolutionary war of 1775–1783 did not include any thought on the part of the rebels about the human dignity of slaves. Yet there had been by that time specific protest against the institution of slavery from Quakers and Mennonites in the colony of Pennsylvania. The special history of the colony founded by William Penn on the basis of his nonviolent conviction and settled initially by numerous German Pietist communities, including the Mennonites and the Brethren, would be a worthwhile history study in the history of nonviolent social concern. Yet the strength of the slaveholding culture was in the southern colonies, and each colony had its separate legal status under the English Crown, so that the witness of Quakers and Mennonites against the institution of slavery had no effect upon those states where it was becoming a dominant economic pattern. The first widespread wave of protest against slavery began soon after national independence in the cities of the northern seaboard. Its moral base was clearly religious, although it could argue as well that slavery was not a good economic system, and 28 Nonviolence could appeal to recent secular enlightenment philosophy to support its criticism. Most of the leaders of the early abolition movement were pacifist, as exemplified by William Lloyd Garrison.1 Their arguments were based simply on the appeal to the New Testament rejection of violence and the general gospel vision of liberation, in ways very parallel to what Tolstoy would be discovering just a few decades later. Their arguments were paralleled by British counterparts, also moved by evangelical piety, who successfully got the British government to outlaw the international commerce in slaves. Meanwhile, by contrast, the slave society was increasingly entrenched in the American South, with the moralistic criticism from outside serving only to deepen the defensiveness of the landowners and governments of the Southern states. Around 1850, the unity between the nonresistant movement and the abolition movement broke apart. The cause of outlawing slavery was increasingly transformed into a matter of regional, political, and economic conflict, which for want of any higher vision of statesmanship took the path toward war. This became the most costly military conflict of American history, ending with the formal emancipation of slaves. The military solution was, however, no solution. The imperatives of restoring domestic government in the defeated Southern states soon led to a new coalition between the federal government and white elites in the South, under the label of “reconstruction.” The legal status of slavery was not restored, but very rapidly a set of laws were established protecting racial segregation in every aspect of social life. It was made almost impossible for black Americans to vote, very difficult for them to obtain education, and illegal for them to receive equal services in public places. There were some ameliorative measures of nongovernmental character, such as schools and colleges for black young people, created in the South with the assistance of Christians from the North. There were some areas such as music, and later sports, 1 William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879) was an American abolitionist, best known for his role in founding the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator and the American Anti-Slavery Society. 2 — The American Civil Rights Struggle 29 where the special skills or cultural power of blacks won exceptional recognition sooner, but these embellishments were not fundamental change. A few found greater economic opportunity by moving from the southern countryside to the northern cities: but that promise was deceptive, as they soon found themselves the victims of other less legal but equally powerful forms of discrimination. Volunteer agencies based in the North, like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), struggled patiently through the use of the courts to enlarge bit by bit the realm of freedom for blacks, but progress was very slow. One of the small victories in the use of the courts was a landmark decision by the federal Supreme Court in 1954, ruling that racially segregated...