While I have mixed feelings about nonviolence as a movement, it's been a solid part of every successful modern revolution (and a few pre-modern ones, which I will ignore today). Dr. King had teachers, and a long list of men and women who fought (Or, more accurately, sat. And marched. Not fought. Stupid nonviolence.) alongside him. I'm mostly linking to Wikipedia below; it's as good a place as any to go read snips of these heroic lives.
A few of my personal favorites:
-Ida B. Wells, who sued (and won, which was overturned) a railroad for making her give up her seat some 70 years before Rosa Parks refused to move on the bus. She went on to publish and agitate on the topic of lynching, and successfully encouraged black folk to leave the southern apartheid states. She tore it up with more than a few women in the temperance movement over white feminists refusal to deal head on with racial issues.
-A. Phillp Randolph, an atheist socialist who unionized the Pullman car workers and agitated to end military segregation. I don't think you can understand American civil rights history without understanding the Pullman car workers.
-Bayard Rustin, a openly gay black Quaker (born just up the road from my hometown!) who coaxed and counseled the then-armed Dr. King to the message of nonviolent resistance and started the Freedom Rides. Please note that homosexuality was illegal in most of his lifetime, yet he was uncloseted. A hero in every way.
-Fanny Lou Hamer, a righteously loud Christian organizer who was certain she had god on her side. When we sing We Shall Overcome, we do her honor. Of course, Billy Graham was equally sure that god was on his side, but whatever. Fanny Lou's personal history and charisma, along with her belief that civil rights needed to be a multiracial movement, makes me love her.
-Shirley Chisolm, who survived three assassination attempts when she ran for president in 1972. She's as much as a feminist hero as a civil rights hero, which earns her at least triple importance. She worked hard for kids, women and the urban poor...and Nixon, of course, vetoed her most important bill.
-Melvin Tolson, a poet and professor who's probably best known for his work with the Wiley Forensic Society (subject of The Great Debaters movie with Whitaker and Washington and produced by Oprah). I think it's more interesting that he was the poet laureate of Liberia and wrote a book-length epic poem called Libretto for the Republic of Liberia. (I hoped to link to the text online, for those of you interested in reading a book-length poem in your few minutes of blog perusal time, but couldn't find it. But it's available for purchase here and there, if you are so inclined.)
-This last one is more an exercise in frustation for me. A few months back, I stumbled across an interesting fellow; a white guy (Jewish? Quaker? I don't recall.) who's been teaching nonviolent resistance in this country for decades. He was, at least as of about eight months ago, still alive, and a professor emeritus somewhere. In case it's not obvious already, I didn't write his name down, or at least write it down in a place I can now find. The school he's affiliated with isn't a coastal state, but that just means "somewhere in the Louisiana Purchase" which is more unhelpful vagueness. I found him interesting because I'd never heard of him before, and he's about a zillion years old and still active, and it struck me that he's pretty damn important in any civil rights narrative and dammit, we should all know who he is. I am both annoyed and ashamed that Mr. Who The Hell Knows will continue to live in relative oblivion, thanks to my lazy/disorganized discovery.
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