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

accepted part of the American character, represented the normative reaction for an individual
faced with antagonistic behavior. He offered Afro-Americans a means of supplanting this
tradition with a far more conciliatory response. For a short time, nonviolence became-in
large part due to the selflessness of those Montgomerians involved in the bus boycott-the
normative method of civil rights protest. A report from Martin Luther King to Bayard Rustin
summed up the state of affairs in Montgomery in 1956 :
The people are just as enthusiastic now as they were in the beginning of the protest.
They are determined never to return to jim crow buses . The mass meetings arc still
jammed and packed and above all the buses are still empty. Every now and then we
will hear some complaint, but the vast majority of the people arc dedicated to
sacrificing and sticking out to the finish . I think also there is a growing commitment
to the philosophy of nonviolence on the part of the Negro community . Even those
who were willing to get their guns in the beginning are gradually coming to see the
futility of such an approach .
The question of protecting himself from harm King relegated to the realm of faith . From the
beginning, he had resolved that what he was doing was extremely dangerous and, in giving
his care to God, he had devoted himself to a greater cause . The issue was not his life, "but
whether Negroes would achieve first-class treatment on the city's buses ." His safety was a
distraction from more important issues; dwelling on it was "too great a burden to bear." King
concluded that violence, "even in self-defense," ultimately created more problems than it
solved . The beloved community, "where men can live together without fear," was within
reach, but only through "a refusal to hate or kill" in order to "put an end to the chain of
violence"; the beloved community would require "a qualitiative change in our souls" and "a
'Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter to Bayard Rustin, September 20, 1956, Box 67, VIII-34
(Correspondence "W"), Martin Luther King Collection, Department of Special Collections,
Boston University.
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