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

Additionally, Bayard Rustin reported to some members of the War Resisters League, a
coalition of conscientious objectors and pacifists, that there existed in Montgomery
"considerable confusion on the question as to whether violence is justified in retaliation to
violence directed against the Negro community."~° Both Smiley and Rustin saw King's grasp
on nonviolent doctrine as tenuous and sought to educate him. "For being so new at this,"
Smiley wrote in another letter, "King runs out of ideas quickly and does the old things again
& again . He wants help." zi
Appropriately, the young minister turned to Mohandas K. Gandhi for inspiration . In
his struggle against British imper;alism in India, Gandhi had insisted that a struggle against
oppression must appeal to activist and non-activist alike, not only to a discontented minority
but also to the majority of the community . He felt that a social movement relying on the
tactics of nonviolence could not succeed without convincing a full majority of the people that
its cause is just .22
3 : 20 .
20.
believe . The whole movement is armed in a sense, and this is what I must convince
him to see as the greatest evil . . . If he can 1~IJy be won to a faith in nonviolence
them is no end to what he can do.~9
~9Glenn Smiley, letter to Swomley and Hassler, February 29, 1956; The KirkPapers
Z°Rustin, "Report on Montgomery, Alabama," March 21, 1956 ; The Kin~Paoers 3:
2~Smiley, letter to Swomley, March 2, 1956 ; TfK K;r~ Pap, 3 : 18 .
uSee Bayard Rustin, Strategies for Fradom (New York : Columbia University Press,
1976), 24.
13