Black Politics and the Intellectual Roots of Kingian Nonviolence

• In Event: The Psychology of Radicalized Political Engagement

Abstract

Kingian nonviolence (named after Martin Luther King, Jr.) describes a sequential and scientific approach to social and political change that uses moral suasion and civil disobedience to address systemic inequalities. Kingian nonviolence is also strategic in that it organizes indigenous networks, leaders and organizations to withdraw their dependence on and support of political institutions and elites as way to leverage their support for equitable policies. The tradition of nonviolent resistance in the civil rights movement—and Kingian nonviolence—have been understood as having a lineal attachment to Gandhi and western intellectuals of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Mahatma Gandhi, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Henry David Thoreau are generally considered the intellectual parents of nonviolent resistance, as well as key figures that influenced Kingian nonviolence in the 1950s and 1960s. Some political observers argue that the civil rights movement actually “Americanized” Gandhian nonviolence—that is, civil rights activists imported Gandhi’s approach into the Jim Crow South. Yet, as a central thesis in this paper, I argue that Kingian nonviolence was shaped as much by a black intellectual and activist tradition as it was by Gandhi and other western intellectuals. Indeed, nonviolent resistance was embedded in black indigenous networks such as the church, civic groups, and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) that played prominent roles in the civil rights movement. For example, black abolitionists such as David Ruggles and Sojourner Truth articulated a pseudo-religious, liberation narrative, which would be considered nonviolent resistance by contemporary standards. Several presidents of HBCUs also embraced nonviolence two decades before Martin Luther King, Jr. rose to prominence. Even the rise of black militancy in the mid-to-late 1960s forced King to sharpen his arguments for a nonviolent approach to addressing white supremacy and poverty. Indeed, the dialectical struggle between nonviolent resistance and armed struggle forced advocates of the former approach, e.g. Martin Luther King, Jr., to become more vigilant in tailoring nonviolence to address the changing political landscape of the late 1960s. By examining Kingian nonviolence, this paper offers new insight into how King understood nonviolence, not just as an emotive struggle to establish the “Beloved Community,” but as part of a complicated, black political tradition dating back to the 19th century.

Author

• Sekou Franklin, Middle Tennessee State University