King: A Biography

4. Satyagraha, Home-grown

4 Satyagraha, Home-grown "It's no use," he said, turning to me with half an apologetic grin. "You can't hit a bugger when he stands up to you like that!" He gave the Sikh a mock salute and walked off. JOAN v. BONDURANT "IT IS BECOMING CLEAR," Martin prophesied at the end of the Montgomery struggle, "that the Negro is in for a season of suffering." As the legal victories of American blacks accumulated , he anticipated a steeply rising curve of Southern obstructionism on the order of that at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, and at the University of Alabama and, tragically, of the naked violence of the Emmett Till variety. Martin could not have realized then how completely his prognosis would be realized. If the white recoil to black legal gains was to be withstood, it was essential that black leaders devise an appropriate tactic of struggle. Montgomery was the forcing house of such a tactic. The proof that passive resistance could be made to work on a massive scale was no longer lacking. "Nonviolence can touch men where the law cannot reach them," Martin believed. "It is," he added, "the method which seeks to implement the just law by appealing to the consciences of the great decent majority who through blindness , fear, pride, or irrationality have allowed their consciences to sleep." In the years to come, nonviolence would 85 86 King win tens of thousands of adherents, most of them convinced of its tactical superiority. For Martin and his associates and a far smaller number of nonviolent practitioners, more than tactics was involved. Nonviolent passive resistance was a Weltansicht, not merely a viable technique but the sole authentic approach to the problem of social injustice. The distinction between operational and ideological nonviolence was not always clear and not always important at first. Viewed clinically, the origins of the philosophy of nonviolence are traceable to the numerically determined and irreversible social fact that the American black cannot utilize violence on a collective scale for more than brief and infrequent periods, without jeopardizing his existence as a member of American society, no matter how marginal that existence may be alleged to be. Such a determinist judgment in no way minimizes the catalytic and creative role of Martin Luther King, nor does it suggest that his unique interpretation of passive resistance was primarily a function of objectively assessed social limitations. Martin's deep Christian concern with the brotherhood of man and his abiding faith (until late in his career, at least) in the fundamental decency of his fellow man directed his philosophical speculations far more than cold realism could have. In his unending struggle for dignity, the American black has had recourse to four contradistinctive ideologies. (1) The ideology embodied in the plans of the slaves Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner holds that small, elitist bands of armed militants can rally black masses to assault white power by means of guerrilla warfare. It is assumed that the terrible efficacy of these tactics and fear of racial bloodletting will compel responsible white authority to enforce drastic social change. (2.) Delany-Garveyism rejects the design of racial integration outright as an unworthy chimera and calls for the formation of an authentic black culture. Pure Garveyism commanded wholesale migration of the race to Africa, but there have Satyagraha, Home-grown been later thematic variations that contemplated the creation of something like black kibbutzim in America. (3) Dr. Booker T. Washington's ideology, that of the "Great Accommodationist ," proclaimed that the races could be as unitary as the hand in economic matters and as cleanly separate as the fingers in the domain of social intercourse. \Vhat the black needs, according to this view, is the opportunity to develop separately to such a point that, by dint of industrious labor and intelligent investment in his own enterprises , his successes will create viable social and economic activity. Washington supposed that black success would ultimately win the indulgence of the white community. (4) Finally , Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. DuBois, extremists in their own right but eschewing the programs of Vesey-Turner and Delany-Garvey, argued that, while the tenets of white society must be accepted, the individual black must actively remonstrate against his degraded status and refuse to accept the spurious doctrine of separate development. He must develop his intellectual powers fully in order to argue his case before his...