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

aggravate ; that is, his politics of confrontation sought to generate a crisis . They were
intended to prod a hesitant government to rc-structure its legal system, and to coevce an
indifferent society to look inward and reconsider its values and ideals . King's methods were
not designed to mollify or conciliate .
But many Americans, in processing the revolutionary changes along the South's racial
front, tended to confuse nonviolent direct action with "passive resistance," a term which
devalued King's novel and powerful approach to social protest . The term "passive
resistance" connotes non-cooperation with, or inert resistance to, a government or occupying
power; King advocated a much more proactive and confrontational stance . This
misrepresentation helped to translate the issue at the heart of the movement into one of
"violence" versus "nonviolence ." Activists had to choose between acquiescence (a non-
option), violence, or nonviolence: stymied by the media's oversimplifying influence, most
could not break out of the either/or rationale defining the place of violence in the movement .
If one disregarded the centrality of self-defense in protecting black interests throughout Afro-
American history, then black people seemingly had a single choice : they could go berserk,
lashing out at white people and the symbols of white supremacy in a blind rage, or they could
"passively" protest their grievances in a sober, non-threatening way. Thinking of the
movement in such dualist terms could not explain how self-defense (or any sort of violence)
had little to do with militance ; it also underscored the difficulties King encountered in
justifying his brand of nonviolent resistance.
As King envisioned it, nonviolence was simply an expression of Christian love : a re-
articulation of the Golden Rule . When he began his crusade in 1955, self-defense, as an
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