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

ights for black Americans . In other wot+da, he was not the first black American to t+ecogniu
the merits of nonviolence in addressing black needs . The philosophy of nonviolence
especially influenced the organizing principles of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).
CORE grew out of a series of actions by earlier movements and organizations, particularly
the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a pacifist group founded by Quakers and
Episcopalians during World War I . in February 1942, James Farmer, race relations secretary
of FOR, suggested the creation of a group composed of pacifists and nonpacifists alike to
utilize nonviolent direct action against racial discrimination . That same year, against
segregated facilities in Chicago, Farmer and others used the sit-in techniques devised by labor
organizers during the Great Depression . CORE established chapters in other major cities ; by
1960, it was the oldest and most established of the direct action groups active in the United
States . 3~
King's faith in nonviolence ran counter to the pervasive, if sometimes unspoken,
sentimentamong black Americans that freedom should come "by any means necessary."
There existed a persistent and undeniable strain in Afro-American thought and history that
championed the effectiveness of self-defense . For example, before the Civil War, Henry
Highland Garnet, a black Presbyterian minister and one of the country's most militant
spokesmen for equal rights and antislavery, survived by defending himself. He made
3'For more on the founding of CORE, see Inge Powell Bell, CORE and the Strateav of
Nonviolence (New York: Random House, 1968) ; Lynd, Nonviolence in America ; and August
Meier and Elliott Rudwick, CORE: A Studv in the Civil Rights Movement. 1942-1968 (New
York : Oxford University Press, 1973) .
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