3. Strain, Christopher Barry. “Civil Rights and ... - Freedom Archives

direct action, but self-defense had proved successful in the stnrggle, too : a fact eclipsed by
the r+eductionist simplicity of the "violenVnonviolent" dichotomy.
When discussing the civil rights movement, journalists, scholars and activists all used
violence to dune nonviolence, and vice versa.3 This tradition stemmed from a natural
tendency to understand a difficult concept in terms of its opposite . Imported from Hinduism,
nonviolence was, literally, a foreign concept to most Americans; violence, on the other hand,
was something which most could understand . Accordingly, a dichotomy of sorts came into
play which offered a relatively simple way to describe the actions of protestors : nonviolent or
violent, which was to say, Gandhian or not . Activists were either willing to take up arms to
ensure black equality or they were not . In their assessments of the movement, the American
public would come to embrace the violenVnonviolent dichotomy .
If Americans would use violence to define nonviolence in the mid-late 1950's, then
they would conversely use nonviolence in the early-mid 1960's to define violence and its
place in the civil rights movement. Etymologically, "violence" meant the opposite of
nonviolence (at least in relation to organized protest). That is, if nonviolence meant
abstaining from violence as a matter of principle, then violence meant using force ; if
nonviolence required loving one's enemies, then violence was ~-nonviolence, presumably
For an example of this dichotomization, see J . H. Griffin, "On Either Side of Violence,"
Satu y Review 4S (October 27, 1962): 38 . For examples in black periodicals, see
"Violence versus Non-violence," [photo editorial] F~4py 20 (April 1965) : 168-69 ; C.
Oglesby, "Revolution : Violence or Nonviolence," 13 (July/August 1968) : 36-37 ;
see also A. J . Muste, "Rifle squads or the beloved community," 9 (May 1964): 7-
12 .
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