Nonviolence and Activism

Nonviolent activism comprises the practice of applying power to achieve social and political goals through the use of nonviolent methods. It is a powerful and effective way to cause social change because it seeks to transform society using means that are consistent with the ends of a just society. Nonviolence is more than the mere absence of violence. It is a positive, constructive orientation to all living things. The roots of this creed are found in the Indian concept called ahimsa, which means nonviolence or noninjury.

Mohandas Gandhi was a major political and spiritual leader in India. He was the pioneer of satyagraha—resistance through mass civil disobedience strongly founded upon ahimsa (total nonviolence). Gandhi most famously implemented nonviolence and activism when he led Indians in the disobedience of the oppressive salt tax in the 1930 Dandi Salt March. Although nonviolence gained popularity in the political arena, Gandhi did not limit it to this arena. Early in the development of his philosophy and the techniques that came from it, he saw fit to live by the law of nonviolence in all his activities. These included his family relations, diet, and work interactions. He did not believe that one could use nonviolence only in the political arena and not in all of one's life. Gandhi's life [Page 1045]and teachings inspired people working for justice throughout the globe, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the American civil rights movement. King learned about Gandhi and, thus, nonviolence and activism from a wealthy white southern woman named Juliette Hampton Morgan.

Morgan was a seventh-generation southerner and a third-generation Alabamian with high status in the community. She suffered from severe anxiety attacks and for that reason rode the Montgomery, Alabama, city buses instead of driving her own vehicle. On those buses, she saw the white bus drivers terribly mistreat the black passengers. In 1939, 16 years before the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott, Morgan began writing letters of protest to the Montgomery Advertiser. In these letters, she said that segregation was un-Christian and wrong and that the citizens of Montgomery should do something about it.

One morning as she rode the bus, Morgan watched a black woman pay her fare and then leave the front door of the bus to reenter through the back door, as was the custom. As soon as the black woman stepped off, the white bus driver pulled away, leaving the woman behind even though she'd already paid her fare. Incensed, Morgan jumped up and pulled the emergency cord. She demanded that the bus driver open the door and let the black woman come on board. No one on the bus, black or white, could believe what they were seeing. In the days that followed, Morgan pulled the emergency cord every time she witnessed such injustices.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus. On December 12, 1955, Morgan was published in the Montgomery Advertiser and wrote how the quiet dignity and discipline of the local boycott reminded her of Gandhi and what he had accomplished in India. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., recalled Juliette Morgan's influence on him and the civil rights movement in his book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. King acknowledged that Morgan had been the first to draw an analogy between the boycott and Gandhi's practice of nonviolent civil disobedience.

...