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

ights movement, including : redemptive suffering ;~ (a Hindu concept meaning,
roughly, "truth-strength" or "love-power")4 ; peaceful resistance ; the influence of
Gandhian philosophy as adopted by Martin Luther King ; and civil disobedience through
nonviolent protest, as exemplified by the 1955-56 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama,
and the sit-in movement in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960 . They also have written
widely on the growing militarism among activists after 1965, the rising tide of black
nationalism of the period, the introduction of Black Power, and the injection of violent
rhetoric into the latter stages of the movement . Most scholars tend to frame any
discussion of the civil rights movement in terms of a dichotomy between "violence" and
"nonviolence" : descriptive categories for antithetical modes of protest, with nonviolence
being normative. The prevailing and generally accepted consensus maintains that
nonviolence shaped and directed the movement up until roughly 1965, when the
movement-thrown off course by frustration, impatience, disillusionment, and
combativeness=`turned" violent . Hinging on Stokely Carmichael's famous "Black
Power" speech during the 1966 march in Grcenwood, Mississippi as a marker of
discontinuity, a clear dichotomy seems to exist between the pre-1965, nonviolent
movement and the post-1965, violent movements
4For more on the concept of~, see Gandhi's autobiography : Mohandas K .
Gandhi, The Story of Mv,-E.xxriments with Truth 2d. ed . (Ahmedabad : Navajivan, 1940) .
s'I'he term "violent" here refers to the behavior of activists, not counter-protestors .
Clearly, violence was a well-worn implement in the toolbox of segregationists long
before 1965 . A typical example of the dichotomy in question may be found in August
Meier, Elliot Rudwick, and John eracey's definitive Black Protest in the Sixties 2d ed.