Lessons from the King Center
(Photo credit: The King Center)
In July 2020, as the Black Lives Matter movement organized worldwide in the wake of the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, I participated in a training program provided by the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, Georgia.
The three-week, six-class training workshop was called The Fierce Urgency of Now. Unfortunately, due to borders being closed due to COVID-19 and a summer job as an investigative reporter and editorial assistant, I wasn’t able to fly to Atlanta to see The King Center in-person. On the bright side, people from across the globe who wouldn’t had have the financial ability to travel to the U.S. were able to participate in the training—me included!
The news that I’d been selected for a full scholarship at The King Center that summer was both humbling and transformative. Our first week of classes culminated in the devastating news that civil rights leader, congressman, and personal hero, John Lewis, had passed away at the age of 80, months after being diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer.
The King Center was founded in 1968 by King’s partner, Coretta Scott King. According to their website, “nearly a million people each year make a pilgrimage to the National Historic Site to learn, be inspired, and pay their respects to Dr. King’s legacy.”
Our first class was instructed by MLK’s daughter, Dr. Bernice A. King, and educator Dr. Vonetta L. West.
“We grew up in a house without guns,” King told us. “He said he would never take a life, even if it meant his life was the first to be taken.”
West spoke of “facing a lack of dignity with dignity, a lack of discipline with discipline, and using light to drive out darkness.”
Our first lesson was coming to understand the concept of “nonviolence,” purposefully spelt without a hyphen, as it's not simply the opposite of “violence.” They explained that nonviolence is an act of non-cooperation, or strategic opposition to evil.
The key to practicing nonviolence is to not become what you’re opposing, as so many people battling hate become hateful themselves. It’s also important to remember that nonviolence isn’t rooted in fear, but in love, something West describes as the foundation of nonviolence.
“[It’s about] ensuring I can turn the other cheek—not passively and weak—but turning the other cheek to get to work,” West explained.
“Nonviolence seeks peace but not at the expense of justice,” she said, adding that “true peace is not merely the absence of tension but the presence of justice.”
We learned that Dr. King studied personalism and theology, recognizing that human life was sacred and that the dignity and worth of the individual must be preserved. King concluded that nonviolence was not only the most moral way to address injustice, but also the most practical way.
(Photo credit: the King Center)
We only had one required reading: Letter from Birmingham Jail, a June 1963 open letter, written by Dr. King while he was incarcerated for violating an injunction against “parading, demonstrating, boycotting, trespassing, and picketing” against the Birmingham campaign. The letter, a response to “A Call for Unity”—an open letter by eight white clergymen in Alabama who condemned the nonviolent campaign led by King, branding him an “outsider”—was written during King’s eight-day incarceration.
In his now-famous letter, King described the four basic steps to succeeding in a nonviolent campaign: “collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive, negotiation, self-purification, and direct action.”
“Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored,” King wrote.
We learned about the many misconceptions associated with nonviolence; the conflation between nonviolence and civility; the perception that nonviolence is weak; that nonviolent action won’t get media attention; and that nonviolence ignores injustice.
Often, we’re inclined to start making meaningful change with direct action, but that’s actually the final step of nonviolence. Just like lawyers need to understand case law in order to succeed in litigation, West explained that moving right to direct action can lead to people not truly grasping what the goal or demands of the campaign are, causing the mission to veer off-course.
“For Dr. King, direct action was used to create strategic tension,” West said, noting it operated as a pressure tool.
King also encouraged others to “not condemn riots without condemning the conditions that led to rioting.”
Much of our lessons centered on King’s philosophy of the Beloved Community, “a global vision, in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth.” For King, the Beloved Community represented a realistic and attainable goal that could be accomplished through the widespread practice of nonviolence.
“In the Beloved Community, poverty, hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it,” the mission statement reads. “Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood.”
The Beloved Community believes in peaceful conflict-resolution and reconciliation rather than military war, trusting that “peace with justice will prevail over war and military conflict.”