My response to "anarchists" and their insulting Dr. King's methods

[ET Awful]

I put this in GD because it does fit and pertains to activism.

These guys actually insulted Martin Luther King for "legitimizing the state" when he said, basically, to violate unjust laws, but prepared to accept the consequences.

My response:

Here's a little clue, if it works, it's worth paying attention to. Kings methodology works.

This all started because someone disagrees with the statement that you SHOULD violate the law, and if you do so, you should be willing to accept the consequences. How that statement "legitimizes the state" is beyond me. The FACT is that by accepting the consequences, you bring MORE attention to your goals. If King hadn't gone to jail, hadn't been beaten, hadn't been harrassed, hadn't accepted the consequences of breaking unjust laws, nobody would have known who he was. He would have been nothing.

Instead, he accepted the penalty, but publicized it, called attention to it, etc. Not only that, he went out and broke the same law again and again, accepting the consequences each time and drawing attention to it each time. If you want to draw attention to it, you don't cut and run when the going gets tough then whine about it. You accept the consequences, then make sure that the consequences are in the face of the public at every opportunity. Otherwise, all the public at large sees is a bunch of people who are causing trouble.

If someone is arrested, posts bail, and disappears other than a few court appearances, the story is dead from the moment bail is posted.

If someone is arrested, posts bail, and instead of posting on a website, personally approaches every media outlet for 1,000 miles to tell their story, the story gets noticed.

King had it right. He knew how to organize, he knew how to bring extremely diverse groups together for a common cause, he knew how to make sure that the cause was noticed.

What Kind did worked, and King based much of what he did on what Gandhi did. Both of them were highly successful in their methodology and ultimately accomplished the vast majority of their goals.

Ineffectual whining about "legitimizing the state" doesn't accomplish anything except making you look less and less appetizing to anyone outside your own little circle of like-minded individuals. To accomplish anything, you must bring the majority around to your way of thinking.

"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win." - Gandhi

“Gandhiji would always offer full details of his plans and movements to the police, thereby saving them a great deal of trouble. One police inspector who availed himself of Gandhi’s courtesy in this matter is said to have been severely reprimanded by his chief. ‘Don’t you know,’ he told the inspector, ‘that everyone who comes into close contact with that man goes over to his side?’”

—Reginald Reynolds, in A Quest for Gandhi, Doubleday, 1952

[etherealtruth]

1. Ghandi, King (and others)...heroes of humanity

[alcibiades_mystery]

2. King was only part of a complex ecology during the time

It is wrong, in my opinion, to separate out King's methods from the other methods that were going on at the time: how could you attribute the change to one or the other? The Watts riots may have been just as instrumental as anything SNCC or SCLC did in shaping the struggle. You simply can't say X rther than Y in that complex ecology.

Here's another version, BTW:

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/malcolmxballot.htm

1964 threatens to be the most explosive year America has ever witnessed. The most explosive year. Why? It's also a political year. It's the year when all of the white politicians will be back in the so-called Negro community jiving you and me for some votes. The year when all of the white political crooks will be right back in your and my community with their false promises, building up our hopes for a letdown, with their trickery and their treachery, with their false promises which they don't intend to keep. As they nourish these dissatisfactions, it can only lead to one thing, an explosion; and now we have the type of black man on the scene in America today -- I'm sorry, Brother Lomax -- who just doesn't intend to turn the other cheek any longer.

----snip---

Perhaps the more interesting question is why King (and Ghandi's) strategies have been selected out from actually quite complex networks of actors and events, selected out, that is, for identifying "success" and as a model for proceeding. That's the ideological work: to put blinders on to the complexity of the situation, and only recognize to the one course of action. It's a historically blind and pragmatically suspect operation.

[ET Awful]

3. Perhaps, but to label King as "legitimizing the state" and ignore

his successes is to detract from what he accomplished.

The reason King and Gandhi have been separated out is because they were publicly visible, they weren't sitting there just in their own circles inciting their own little groups to action. They were speaking in public to diverse people in many environments and bringing them all together for common cause.

The Watts Riots did not do that, they frightened away and alienated factions that were not directly involved and were ineffectual for any other purpose. The Watts Riots were the activist equivalent of "we had to destroy the village in order to save it."

When you can bring thousands upon thousands of people from different environments, cultures, and communities togethers, as both King and Gandhi did, then, and only then, do you have a movement capable of creating lasting change.

[alcibiades_mystery]

4. Whether King legitimated the state

in the 1950's and 60's is a much different question than whether the King mythology (which you are pushing here) legitimates the state today. That has to be separated out before any discussion proceeds. King was radical then. Whether his methodology is still radical, or is radical in all situations, is another question. King's method was one rhetorical tactic among an ensemble of rhetorical tactics.

"It's time for us to stop singin' and start swingin'." - Malcolm X

[ET Awful]

5. Once again, King brought diverse and disagreeing groups together

that is not something that Malcolm X accomplished. Malcolm spent the majority of his time preaching to the choir, King to the unconverted.

I'm not discounting what Malcolm X was able to do, but to put him on the same level as King is to overemphasize his effectiveness.

[alcibiades_mystery]

10. And I will return to my previous point

That you cannot demonstrate (or at least have not demonstrated) the individual effectiveness of King's program, either historically or theoretically. I simply don't buy it. The civil rights movement was a vast, complex network, deploying a wide variety of tactics and rhetorics. It is very difficult in such cases to read specific effects as the result of specific causes: they could just as likely be emergences resulting from a confluence of causes, none of which is more important than the entire ensemble (i.e., violence and separtism providing the incentive to latch on to King's more amenable rhetoric). With such complex social phenomena, pointing at one cause as "effective" while ignoring the productive power of the others is an invested and dubious operation. I suspect you are overdetermining one aspect of that movement. That one aspect, of course, has been constantly harped on by dominant culture as the "best" "most effective" and "most desirable," making your own overdetermination ideologically suspect in the extreme.

[ET Awful]

11. Tell me how often Malcolm X got 50,000 or more people together

of all races and had them all agree on anything?

Malcolm X's movement excluded everyone except blacks up until the very end, and when he finally woke up to the fact that it could not work that way, he was killed before he could engage in too much cooperative dialogue.

All he did was organize an exclusive group of people into a mass that, more than anything else, wanted a separation from white America.

Malcolm was very effective at organizing his base, but failed at bringing about real change because of his exclusionary rhetoric. By being exclusionary in nature, he earned the ire of those who could to the most to help further the civil rights movement. While Malcolm was calling all white people devils, and telling anyone that would listen that all white people were evil, King was preaching unity and solidarity.

What is required for any movement to work on any realistic level is for the masses to work in conjunction with each other, without numbers, you have no strength, and without strength, you cannot win.

[alcibiades_mystery]

13. Ha

Tell me when King got 50,000 or more people together and had them agree on anything?

And don't say the March on Washington. Please don't be that ignorant.

[ET Awful]

14. You insult King, and you call ME ignorant?

So you believe that the march on Washington didn't have people agreeing on anything? Hmm, they ALL wanted the Civil Rights bill to pass, which it did, they all listened in rapt attention while King spoke. They all erupted into applause afterwards.

Or perhaps you aren't aware of the March on Montgomery lead by King which involved over 50,000 people?

[alcibiades_mystery]

15. I have never in any of these posts insulted Dr. King

Nor have I called you ignorant. To think that the March on Washington was Dr. King's creation would be ignorant, as would be thinking that he had unanimous approval for his speech that day.

I take nothing away from Dr. King. The strategy of his various organizations was brilliant and persistant, and Dr. King is one of the foremost rhetors of the 20th century. Together with the total ensemble that we call the civil rights movement, Dr. King effected great change in the country, and made America and the world a better place, and enabled a better life for millions. There should be no mistake about that.

The mistake, rather, is to obscure the complex history of both the movement and the period by attributing all those changes to Dr. King or to his tactics. That's historically inacciurate and theoretically unsound.

As far as the ignorance is concerned, there have been many good arguments made that the March on Washington began as a grass roots effort that was then seized upon by King and several other civil rights leaders. In his "Message to the Grassroots" (Novemeber 1963, Detroit), Malcolm argues that these leaders effectively hijacked the grassroots movement at the behest of the establishment. While this may be an extreme sentiment, there is a good deal of truth to it, and certainly the way the March has been represented as some invention of Dr. King in popular US culture over the last 25 years or so is a fairy tale of first order. Malcolm was quite right to say that it started on the street corners of Brooklyn, Detroit, Atlanta and in the fields and corner stores of Mississippi and Alabama - and not in the meeting rooms of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Which is NOT to say, of course, that the SCLC wasn't instrumental in getting buses together, etc. Let's be clear-eyed and not too sentimental about our history, especially the history of one of the most important social movements (notr INDIVIDUAL movements) of all time.

[ET Awful]

16. "Malcolm effectively argues?"

He also "effectively argued" that all white men are devils. That doesn't make it so.

[G_j]

6. who used the term "legitimizing the state" again?

do you have a link?

[ET Awful]

7. It was the "anarchists" who are taking turns complaining about

how the rally in Boston on Sunday was organized and carried out. The comments follow this article http://boston.indymedia.org/feature/display/34037/index.php

[Mairead]

12. Martin succeeded because Malcolm was the alternative.

To the extent that Martin's tactics worked against entrenched racism, it's because the racists knew that he represented the 'easy way'. The polite, face-saving way. Malcolm's would have been the 'hard way' and nobody wanted to find out what that was.

[aaronnyc]

8. The violence accomplished virtually nothing

alcibiades_mystery writes:
"It is wrong, in my opinion, to separate out King's methods from the other methods that were going on at the time: how could you attribute the change to one or the other? The Watts riots may have been just as instrumental as anything SNCC or SCLC did in shaping the struggle. You simply can't say X rther than Y in that complex ecology."

I wholeheartedly disagree. In the end whites controlled the country, and if they wanted to continue enforce the Jim Crows laws, they could. Blacks therefore had no choice to but to appeal to the sympathy of whites.

King was correctly perceived as non-threatening by the white majority; additionally his appeals to the ideals of Christianity, and American Cold War ideals made northern whites more sympathetic to the cause of southern blacks. In the end, the civil rights laws were passed because northern white voters overwhelming supported them.

On the other hand, in the 40 years since Watts, no significant piece of civil rights legislation has been passed. Watts ushered in the "white backlash" midterm elections of 1966, it allowed Republicans to successfully tie crime into the issue of race. The reason "liberal" is a bad word in politics is because of racial connotations which are in many ways related to a perceived liberal permissiveness toward black crime. Prior to Watts, being labeled a "liberal" was not a bad thing. Gov't programs which help the lower-class are shunned because of a twisted logic (which stems from the late 1960's in which black radicals began to seem threatening to whites).

Look, I am not at all defending the racist backlash which has occurred. I am just being a realist about the situation. Blacks are less than 10% of the population; without the support of the white majority they can't really change the country. Groups like the Black Panthers spoke about a revolution - but instead, all they got is Nixon, Reagan, and Bush.

[Telly Savalas]

9. I heard Bush was considering pulling out of Iraq...

when he heard that some kid threw a brick through a Starbucks window.