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

nonviolence, and Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955-the genesis of nonviolence in the
black struggle for equality-provides a logical place to starts
With much personal hardship, to the paradoxical delight of local blacks, the
boycott dragged on . After the first few mass matings, his friends and peers, mostly
Dexter members, decided it was too dangerous to let King drive around town by himself
anymore . Recognizing the threat of white retribution, they offered to escort him to and
from meetings . They organized into a corps of drivers and bodyguards, using what
weapons they had ; for example, the Reverend Richmond Smiley toted his tiny .2S-caliber
Beretta.6
As the activists worked out a strategy for the boycott, outside forces complicated
matters . On the evening of January 30, 1956, dynamite rocked King's home. An angry
crowd gathered at the scene. One black man challenged a policeman who attempted to
push him aside : "I ain't gonna move nowhere . That's the trouble now; you white folks is
always pushin' us around . Now you got your .38 and I got mine ; so let's battle it out."~
King intervened, speaking to the crowd :
I want you to go home and put down your weapons . We cannot solve this problem
through retaliatory violence . . . We must love our white brothers, no matter what
they do to us . We must make them know that we love them . Jesus still cries out
across the centuries, "Love your enemies ." This is what we must live by. We must
meet hate with love .°
SAdam Fairclough has pointed out the difficulties in disaggrcgating King's
philosophical tenets . Sec Fairclough, "Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Quest for
Nonviolent Social Change," Phylon 47 (Spring 1986) : 3 .
6Branch, Parting the Waters, 161-62.
~Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound, 89.
e~, 89-91 . See also Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Toward Freedom (San
Francisco : Eiarper and Row, 1958 ; reprint, 1986), 137-138 .
6