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However, a paradox ensues when revolutionaries use violence to free themselves from oppression, as a mean to an end. By replacing violence with violence, you are only contuining a destructive cycle that can in no way liberate everybody. It oppresses the oppressor and depresses the depressed. Martin Luther King jr. sought to remedy this unhealthy cycle by prescribing a new approach to rebellion. Not only did he inspire millions to resist their human condition, he did so without resorting to violence. Through his pragmatic and ethical approach to civil rights reform, Martin Luther became a revolutionary revolutionist. King believed that the problem with violence as a means of pursuing freedom is that revolutionaries must often employ means that threaten to subvert it therefore is illegitimate, and as Hanna Arendt states in On Revolution, “Violence has no intrinsic value, and on the human scale of relative values, will always lie beneath the human needs and interests that is serves.” Albert Camus states “Violence can only be an extreme limit which combats another form of violence, as, for example, in the case of insurrection” Both Arendt and Camus agree with King that Violence, although justifiable in extreme cases, can never be legitimate. King sought to legitimize the Civil Rights Movement by exhorting and adhering to a philosophy of non-violence grounded in morals and human ethics. When we hear the word “rebellion”, the first thought we have is that of violence, so it is of no coincidence that the pre-King black struggle for equal rights is predominantly remembered for its violence. Blacks were rent from their native Africa and forced to exist as slaves. The treatment of these people not only decimated their freedom but demeaned their humanity. Slave owners whipped and beat the slaves if the tried to escape and black slave girls were raped by their masters. Some refused to accept such oppression and began to rebel. Nat Turner, who is heralded as a martyr, rebelled against the white slave owners of the south by walking from plantation to plantation massacring the owners and their family’s. Even today, his martyrdom is vividly recounted in elementary educations black history courses. However, what is not often remembered is the fierce backlash that ensued due to the violent nature of his rebellion. Violence and discrimination continued to plague Black Americans even after the Civil war. They were lynched, their homes were burned, and they were terrorized by white supremacists who refused to accept the outcome of the war. Blacks did not sit by idly and watch, there are many reports of black militant groups organizing and forming to fight for civil rights. The problem was these groups incorporated violence in their movement, which as a result had violent reproductions. By the 1950’s, Blacks had seemingly come a long way from their years of slavery. They could vote, hold a job, and even go to public school. Many whites believed that they had undisputedly given Black Americans a normal life, a life of equality. Yet, in the words of George Bernard Shaw, “Where equality is undisputed, so also is subordination.” This clash of beliefs was raging furiously in the deep south where Jim Crow laws proclaiming Blacks as “Separate yet Equal” prevented them from attending the better schools, drinking from the same water fountains, using the same restrooms, eating at the local diner, or sitting on the front of a city bus. Although blacks now had some rights, they were in no way treated as equals, separated yes, but not equal. The schools young black children were forced to attend were inadequate. It was not uncommon to find an entire class of children sharing the only book made available to the school by the state. While young white children were bussed to and from school, the Blacks were forced to walk sometimes two or more miles to school. Many Black families had such a low income that it was impractical for children to work past the fourth grade when they could be making money to support their family. After all, their education would not do them any good if they could not find a decent job when they graduate. The condition of the Black American was such that rebellion was imminent and the sociopolitical strain that existed created a tension that made violence the most appealing release. In the context of the civil rights movement, this violence came at a time when Blacks needed to define their purpose. Arendt states, “The problem with the beginning” concerning revolution “is that such a beginning must be intimately connected with violence” and that “Whatever brotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out of fratricide.” There was a time when violence was a necessary means of empowerment for the Blacks. Yet violence can only be justified in extreme circumstances; for example, when a life or lives are in immediate dander. A point is reached however, where violence is no longer necessary and therefore no longer justified. This was the point where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proposed his revolutionary system of no-violent protests against a society that no longer was violently oppressive, but nevertheless was unfair. Blacks had been set “free” after the Civil War, but since freedom is unconditional, they were not truly free. To put it simply, blacks were allowed to leave the plantations however were still forced to live their lives under many discriminatory conditions. King believed that although the Black man was far from reaching civil freedom, he could transcend his current condition and become intellectually emancipated. Freedom is a cognitive state, not a physical state. When a black person agreed to conditions set forth by the whites he was, in effect, still living as a slave. Mahatma Gandhi spoke to the distinction between physical freedom and mental freedom when he wrote: “The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters (shackles) fall. He frees himself and shows the way to others. Freedom and slavery are mental states. Therefore the first is to say to yourself, ‘I shall no longer accept the role of a slave. I shall not obey orders as such but shall disobey when they are in conflict with my conscience.’ The so-called master may lash you and try to force you to serve him. You will say, ‘No, I will not serve you for your money or under threat.’ This may mean suffering. Your readiness to suffer will light the torch of freedom which can never be put out.” In effect, the Blacks who refused to take action and rebel against their condition were enslaving themselves in the fog of complacency. The only way one can rectify an intolerable condition is through a conciencous choice to take action. According to Camus’ “absurd philosophy” man is thrown into an alien, irrational world in which he must create his own identity through a series of choices for which there are no guides or criteria. King saw that humans, both black and white, as members of society, should make it their duty to choose for themselves what to believe in, through the use of nonviolent action, should make every effort to attain the life they have chosen. The worst thing a man can do is live a life dictated to him from another with no thought from himself concerning his actions. If a mans reaches this point of rationality and does not choose for himself what he wants, yet continues to rely on others and allow them to decide for him how he is to live, he is not free. It is the banality of those people who allow themselves to be molded by society’s unjust laws into a depersonalized cog that is incapable of human thought, emotion, or free will that disturbed King. What can liberate a man from mental slavery is his ability to determine some significance in his life. Man needs some sort of clarity and rationality in the face of the unreasonable silence of the universe. It is in this quest for clarity that a slave becomes free. King was willing to bring people into this clarity because he believed much of the wrong people commit is due to their being victims of their own intellectual and spiritual blindness. The Supreme Court Justices who rendered the Dread Scott decision of 1857, affirming that the Negro had no rights that a white man had to respect, were, in Kings judgment, decent and sincere men who were also the victims of spiritual and intellectual blindness. In this regard, King endorsed Socrates idea that moral evil is due to ignorance of the good act and it’s effect on the soul. King believed the best way to bring all people into this clarity was through non-violent civil disobedience. Hannah Arendt endorses Kings use of non-violence as a means for change when she wrote: Non-violence has a different logic. It recognizes that sin is an every day occurrence in which the very nature of action’s constant establishment of new relationships within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing, in order to make it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing men from what they have done unknowingly. Only through this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free agents, only by their constant willingness to change their minds and start again can they be trusted with so great a power as that to begin something new. This compelling statement of Arendt’s shows the inherent relation between non-violence and the renewal of America for which King lived and died. A violent change would not have been a serious change at all. To punish and destroy the oppressor is merely to initiate a new cycle of violence and oppression. This paradoxical situation was one that Camus, Arendt, and King all saw and recognized as illegitimate. King knew that the only real liberation is that which liberates both the oppressed and the oppressor at the same time. In his visionary I have a dream speech, King spoke about a liberated America when he wrote: I have dream that on day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ”We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal.” I hava dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slave slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brother hood. I have a dream that that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today. The only way King saw this to be possible was to create a tension, an uncomfortable tension that would force the segragationalists into a self examination; for he believed that when tension is created, all the truths that lie dormant inside each one of us can become exposed, and when they are exposed, we will be able to follow our moral path. King, who was greatly influenced by the writings of both Gandhi and Henry David Thoreau, saw non-cooperation as a means of creating this tension. Gandhi preached non-cooperation and civil disobedience as the primary means to freedom. At the onset of the Civil rights movement King incorporated this idea of non-cooperation as the best tool for reform. Thoreau asserts that in a government that imprisons any man unjustly, the proper place for a just man is also prison. King, echoing Thoreau, persuaded his followers to be true to their conscience and not to cooperate with an evil system that refuse to recognize their rights as individuals, even if it meant spending the night in jail. King’s respect for Thoreau was demonstrated when he claimed, “It goes without saying that the teachings of Thoreau are alive today, indeed, they are more alive today than ever before.” He maintained that his unique protests, the freedom rides, the sit-ins, and the Albany movement was, “An outgrowth of Thoreau’s insistence that evil must be resisted and no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice.” King justified his use of civil disobedience in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”. He stated “An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in terms of natural law and eternal law. A just law is a legal code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with moral law. Just as it is one duty to obey just laws, it is also ones duty to disobey unjust laws.” As practical criterion of distinction, King perceived any law that up lifts human personality as just, and, contrarily, one that degrades human personality as unjust. Segregation statutes were unjust because “segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.” Such statues could be disobeyed, King felt, because they were morally wrong. In Kings attempts to bring about radical change through non-violent protests, he was met by those who had previously been using violence as their central mode for bringing about change. From childhood we are brought up to be violent, competitive, beastly to one another. It is something that humans have developed by nature, through our environment. Evident everywhere, from movies to sports to the nightly news violence saturates our culture. In fact, in a random Wall Street Journal my sister put in my mailbox,10 of the top 14 news clips were of events involving violence. Therefore it was natural for blacks to resist King’s belief that it was possible to achieve justice without resorting to violence. Instead, many employed the philosophy of a Black psychiatrist by the name of Frantz Fannon who in his book, The Wretched Earth, argued that it is psychologically healthy and tactically sound for individuals to resort to violence: At The level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the oppressed from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect. King condemned Fannons suggestion that violence is a viable means for freedom because violence is both immoral and impractical. It is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than to win his understanding. It seeks it injure rather than redeem. Violence aims to destroy community and renders solidarity impossible. Hatred and Violence intensify the fears of whites and lessen their shame in their prejudices against blacks. King was aware that moral reasons may not deter some blacks from violence, so to facilitate the Blacks’ understanding with regard to violence not being answer; King used the best form of communication possible, he used language. Unlike the manipulative euphemistic language employed by the Nazis throughout world war two, Kings language was direct and clear rather than coercive. King clearly identified four pragmatic explanations as to why violence is intrinsically ineffective. First, the limited history of black insurrection in this country reveals the futility of violent rebellion. The well-armed white majority could easily suppress a violent rebellion, and some of them would take great delight in exterminating thousands of black men, women and children. King stated: “The courageous efforts of our own our own insurrectionists brothers, such as Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, should be eternal reminders to us that violent revolution is doomed from the start.” Second, the futility of violence is evident in the consequences of the race riots of the 1960’s: “At best the riots have produced a little anti-poverty money being allotted by frightened governmental officials, and a few water sprinklers to cool the children of the ghettos. It is something like improving the food in prison while the prople remain securlly incarcerated behind bars. Nowhere have the riots won any concrete immprovments such as have the organized protest demonstrations.” Third, violence negates some of the very goals the rioters seek to achieve. They desire to participate in the very things that they attempt to destroy, namely, the economy, the housing market, and the educational system. To burn down a factory is not an effective way to secure a job at that factory. Destruction cannot be constructive. The destructive are left with the debris. Fourth, A violent approach would be doomed from the outset since it cannot appeal to the conscience of the opponents. The future of blacks depends to a great degree on their capacity to awaken the conscience of white America. King states:It is perfectly clear that a violent revolution on the part of American Black would find no sympathy and support from the white population and very little from the majority of the Blacks them selves. Confronted with violence, the white majority would only grow in fear and prejudice, and render any reconciliation impossible. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that.” King observed that few if any violent revolutions would have been successful if the non-resisting majority had not extended their sympathy and support to the violent majority. He used Castro’s revolution as an example stating that if the majority of the Cuban people had not supported Castro, he would never have overthrown the Baptista regime. Kings not only was he able to clearly and concisely articulate his argument, but was able to incite his followers to act, expressing that the time was now. King saw that the current psyche of the American black was degenerating rapidly, his people were sick and they needed healing. Blacks had waited 340 years for their constitutional rights and found it increacingly difficult to wait. In letter fom a Birmingham jail, King responded to those who asked him to “Wait!”. “When you are harried by day and haunted by nightby the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments, when you are constantly fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’. Then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.” King wanted to arouse a sense of dignity in the Black community, because King believed a mans freedom springs from his dignity this was the means he used to inspire his people to make the choice to exercise their freedom not externally, but internally. When a man is frustrated and angry, is when be normally turns to violence, but by lifting their spirits and appealing to love as opposed to hate, he was able to unite his followers in a brotherhood of non-violent revolution. This is what distinguished King from other revolutionary. He was able to take both an ethical and pragmatic stance against the oppressor. Although he was not able to see the movement to its finality, he planted the seed of love that today is remembered as arguably the greatest civil rights movement of our time. King sacrificed his own life for a greater good, he wanted to cure the sickness that plagued his society and although knowing he might die in the struggle, he would not have died in vain. “It may get me crucified. I may die. But I want it said even if I die in the struggle that, ‘He died to make men free.’” His words are reminiscent of Camus’ Rieux in The Plague when he says: “I have no more than the pride that’s needed to keep me going. I have no idea what’s awaiting me, or what will happen when all this ends. For the moment I know this. There are sick people and they need curing” King, like Rieux, was a healer; he sought to mend the wounds of society rather that create new ones. It is for this vision that I deem him the ideal rebel. Bibliography: WDWGFH- Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1967) WWCW- Why We Can’t We Wait (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1963) TC- The Trumpet of Conscience (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1967) GONV- Merton, Thomas Gandhi on Non-Violence (New York: New Directions, Publishers, 1965) Isaac, Jeffrey C. Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion (Michigan: Yale University Press, Publishers, 1992) Word Count: 3393
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