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

prudent, if necessarily e+eactionary, relationship of self-defense to power .
Whether power represented a function of moral or physical strength during the
civil rights era is still somewhat unclear. The answer to this question depended on whom
one asked .~ 9 Dr. King would most likely have argued the former; Huey Newton, citing
Mao Tse-Tung's famous quotation about political power growing from the barrel of a
gun, probably would have argued the latter. King refused to be driven to a Machiavellian
cynicism with regard to power . He envisioned it, at its best, as "the right use of strength ."
He equated nonviolence with power, and took faith in the notion that it could save not
only black people but whites too. ° "Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve
purpose;' he wrote in 1967 . "It is the strength required to bring about social, political or
economic changes ." 2 '
Undoubtedly, like most things in life, the answer to whether power is
metaphysical or corporeal lay somewhere between the two extremes ; that is, power most
likely shares attributes of both physical and moral strength . As Frederick Douglas told
an audience in New York in 1857 :
This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both
moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a
~,ahts Movement in the DeeQ South (New York: Viking Penguin, 1977), 266 .
~ 9Hannah Arcndt has carefully distinguished between "power," "strength," "force,"
"authority," and "violence," in her treatise On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
World, 1969) . She has also challenged the notion "that violence is nothing more than the
most flagrant manifestation of power." See Arcndt, On Violence , 35-56.
=°Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here?, 59.
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