Washington DC, 21 October 1967.
Real or threatened violence has regularly been confronted or trumped by those who rely on the hidden power of non-violence.
In this famous photograph – in a scene that has been endlessly repeated in different contexts – seventeen-year-old Jan Rose Kasmir stands with a flower before soldiers with bayonets at an anti-war protest in Washington in 1967. On that day, admittedly, non-violence was not a great success. Demonstrators were beaten, arrested and tear-gassed, even as they attempted to levitate the Pentagon. (Participants were instructed to perform ‘a magic rite to exorcise the spirits of murder, violence and creephood’.)
But photographer Marc Riboud said he had the feeling that ‘the soldiers were more afraid of [Jan Rose Kasmir] than she was of the bayonets’. Decades later, Kasmir’s own memories expressed a similar thought. ‘All of a sudden, I realized “them” was that soldier in front of me – a human being I could just as easily have been going out on a date with.’
Those who know they may be told to commit acts of violence against others are often unsettled when confronted by the non-violence of those they should beat or shoot. Like a real-life version of stone-paper-scissors, apparently vulnerable protests can prove surprisingly powerful.
‘Given a just cause, capacity for endless suffering, and avoidance of violence, victory is certain.’
MOHANDAS GANDHI
The story of how Mohandas Gandhi, barefoot lawyer, confronted and humbled the British Empire is well known. Less remembered is the story of his close friend, Muslim leader Abdul Ghaffar Khan, also known as Badshah Khan or ‘Frontier Gandhi’.
In 1929, Khan created an army of non-violence in the North-West Frontier Province, now part of Pakistan. The army became known as the ‘Servants of God’. For Khan, the key weapon was ‘patience and righteousness’. Those, he said, were ‘a weapon that the police and the army will not be able to stand against’. His Servants of God became known as the Red Shirts, after the colour of their informal, dyed uniforms.
It is sometimes suggested that the British took a ‘tolerant’ approach to non-violent protest in India. The reality was different, as events in the Qissa Khwani Bazaar in Peshawar on 23 April 1930 made clear. Two weeks after Gandhi’s defiance of the salt tax and famous march to the sea, Khan was arrested. Large crowds gathered in Peshawar, provincial capital of the North-West Frontier, demanding the release of Khan and others. Troops ordered the crowds to disperse. In the words of a report commissioned at the time by the All India Congress Committee, ‘The people did not disperse and were prepared to receive the bullets and lay down their lives.’ More than two hundred were killed that day. Some Indian soldiers disobeyed their British commander’s orders, saying, ‘You may blow us from your guns, if you like. We will not shoot our unarmed brethren.’ Seventeen men were court-martialled and jailed for their disobedience.
The Congress Committee report noted, ‘News of the Peshawar incidents was withheld by the Government and only garbled versions were given to the public. Part of the truth leaked out, however … The courage, the patriotism, the non-violent spirit of the war-like Peshawaris became famous and earned for the whole province a unique place in the history of the struggle.’
As Khan himself wrote, in words that remain relevant in different contexts today, ‘The British feared a non-violent Pathan more than a violent one. All the horrors the British perpetrated on the Pathans had only one purpose: to provoke them to violence.’
Khan’s Red Shirts were not provoked. British rule ended. Khan died in 1988, aged ninety-eight. Two hundred thousand people attended his funeral.
Badshah Khan (fourth from left) stands next to his friend Gandhi, flanked by some of his non-violent Red Shirt army.
ARMED AGAINST VIOLENCE
In the American South in the 1950s, racism was not simply tolerated, it was violently enforced.
Some believed the obvious way to end violence was with more violence. For others, non-violence held the key. In 1959, twenty-two-year-old Diane Nash, a student at Fisk University, began attending non-violence workshops in Nashville, Tennessee. The sessions were organized by James Lawson, who had spent time in India and absorbed the lessons of Gandhi. The meetings took place in a Methodist chapel every Tuesday at 6.30 p.m. These workshops, and their participants, helped change America.
One participant later described the weekly scene, as they role-played with fellow activists acting as ‘angry bystanders, calling us niggers, cursing in our faces, pushing and shoving us to the floor’. They learned never to respond to the violence with violence. Lawson insisted it was not enough simply to endure a beating or resist the urge to strike back. ‘That urge can’t be there,’ he would say.
In February 1960, Nash and others launched their first challenge when they sat down at segregated lunch counters in downtown Nashville. They were beaten. They were arrested. Others stepped forward to take their places. The pattern was repeated, over and over. Eighty-one protesters were arrested in a single day.
Lawson (described as a ‘flannel-mouth agitator’) was expelled from university. But, after a series of actions over three months that culminated in a historic exchange between Diane Nash and the city mayor, lunch-counter segregation ended. On 10 May 1960, downtown stores in Nashville served black customers at lunch counters for the first time.
It seemed – it was – a remarkable victory. But the essentials remained unchanged. The following year, Nash, as co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, played a key role in the Freedom Rides, challenging segregation on inter-state bus routes across the American South. Freedom Riders, black and white, faced attacks, jail and threats to their lives. Outside the town of Anniston, Alabama, the Ku Klux Klan firebombed a bus with Freedom Riders inside. Despite the attacks, the Freedom Riders, too, triumphed – which gave new impetus for further victories in the years to come.
Half a century later, Nash reflected on the risks she and others had taken. ‘I sometimes wonder if we in the civil rights movement had left it to elected officials to desegregate restaurants and lunch counters, to desegregate buses … I wonder how long we would have had to wait. And I think, truly, that we might still be waiting.’
On the evening of 26 February 2012, George Zimmerman was on a neighbourhood-watch patrol in a gated community in Sanford, Florida, when he saw a black teenager. He didn’t like what he saw. He told the emergency dispatcher, ‘These assholes, they always get away.’
Trayvon Martin, unarmed and aged seventeen, had just bought a bag of Skittles at the 7-Eleven store. Trayvon told a friend he was worried about the strange man following him. Moments later, Zimmerman shot Trayvon dead.
The police concluded there was nothing further to investigate, Zimmerman having displayed head injuries and claimed that he had acted in self-defence. The media showed no interest. It was another black man’s death, and it looked set to be ignored. This time, though, things would end differently. Trayvon’s parents launched a petition calling for justice. Gradually, then with dizzying speed, the Change.org petition gained momentum. At one point the petition was gaining a thousand signatures a minute, ultimately reaching more than two million. President Obama said, ‘If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.’ Zimmerman was charged with murder.
In July 2013, Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges. Yet again, that seemed to be the end of the matter. Again, it wasn’t. On the evening of Zimmerman’s acquittal, Alicia Garza was in a bar in Oakland, California. She composed a Facebook post (as she put it later, ‘essentially a love note to black people’): ‘I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.’ Her friend Patrisse Cullors shared Garza’s post, summing it up in a single hashtag: #blacklivesmatter.
And so it began. Garza, Cullors and a third friend, Opal Tometi, set up social media accounts that shared stories of why #blacklivesmatter. The slogan gained traction. Then, a year later, came Ferguson. Michael Brown, an unarmed eighteen-year-old, was shot dead by police in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. Protests were violently dispersed. Black Lives Matter, the slogan that had begun with a Facebook post from Oakland a year earlier, went viral. Michael Brown was one of too many. Seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald was shot and killed by police in Chicago. Twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was killed by police while playing with a toy gun in Cleveland, Ohio. Twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray died when his spine was severed in a police van in Baltimore, Maryland. And so on, many times over. The Washington Post calculated that unarmed young black men are seven times more likely than white men to die from police gunfire.
The Black Lives Matter campaign, and others like it, galvanized millions across the United States. Ferguson City Council agreed to the overhaul of police and courts that it had previously resisted. It was, Michael Brown’s father told the mayor, ‘beautiful, a good feeling’. In Chicago and Cleveland, voters threw out prosecutors who had failed to take action on police killings. Police officers have been charged and police chiefs have been fired. As the black American poet Langston Hughes had written ninety years earlier, ‘I, too, am America.’
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 9 July 2016. Ieshia Evans, a nurse from Pennsylvania, faces down armoured officers at a Black Lives Matter protest. After her arrest, Evans said, ‘[Baton Rouge] opened my eyes ... I have been sleeping and now I’m awake.’
Under President Ferdinand Marcos, the Philippines was not an obvious place to imagine that non-violent opposition might succeed. Marcos’s US-backed government tortured and killed its critics. Opposition leader Benigno Aquino was assassinated at the airport when he returned from exile to Manila in 1983. Marcos and his wife Imelda became known as ‘the Macbeths of Manila’. Even some who supported non-violence suggested that armed rebellion might be needed because nothing else – surely – could work. Events proved otherwise.
After snap elections in February 1986, computer operators went public with their knowledge of electoral fraud. In the days that followed, millions took to the streets to demand that the election victory of Aquino’s widow, Corazon Aquino, be honoured.
Nuns risked their lives as they knelt in front of tanks. Their courage became a key element of the non-violent juggernaut for change. As his core support crumbled, Marcos still sounded bullish. He declared, ‘I have all the power in my hands to eliminate this rebellion at any time we think enough is enough. I am not bluffing … Let the blood fall on you.’
But it soon looked as if the president had been bluffing, after all. Eighteen days after the election, on 25 February 1986, Marcos stood beside his wife on a palace balcony as a tearful Imelda sang a final love song to a small crowd of remaining supporters. It was Imelda’s favourite song, ‘Because of You’. Then the couple fled to Hawaii.
Corazon Aquino became president. She described how ‘a people knelt in the path of oncoming tanks and subdued with embraces of friendship the battle-hardened troops sent out to disperse them’. Aquino concluded, ‘All the world wondered as they witnessed a people lift themselves from humiliation to the greatest pride.’
Manila, Philippines, February 1986. Sister Porferia Ocariza and Sister Teresita Burias kneel at the head of a crowd that stopped tanks. Sister Teresita said afterwards, ‘It was very much a miracle.’
In late 2013 and early 2014, huge crowds gathered in the centre of the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. The protests began over a change of policy by President Viktor Yanukovych, apparently as a result of pressure from Moscow. Yanukovych refused to sign a previously negotiated agreement that was set to bring closer ties between Ukraine and the European Union. The pro-European protests quickly broadened into a challenge to Yanukovych’s rule. The riot police seemed ready to use unlimited violence against protesters in the central square, the Maidan. Before the protests were over, more than eighty people would be killed.
Even as the violence began, however, Ukrainians remained creative and unbowed. Women held up mirrors, forcing policemen with riot shields to confront their own image. The policemen, in turn, tried to avoid the direct gaze of the women who looked like their sisters, mothers or even grandmothers. ‘It was tense at first; I was a little scared,’ said Kateryna Maksym. ‘But, like with mirrors, you have to show positive energy to have it reflected.’
On 21 February 2014, a day after dozens were killed in the most violent clashes of the ‘Euro-Maidan’ protests, many police defected to the protesters’ side. It seems they had looked in the mirror and did not like what they saw.
Late that evening, Yanukovych fled. Crowds wandered in a daze around the president’s opulent mansion, which included everything from an underground boxing ring to a private petting zoo. For Yanukovych, police defections had proved the final straw.
