IN THE STRANGE world of Internet bookmakers, it is possible to bet on almost anything—and that includes the question of who will next win the Nobel Peace Prize. Given the arcane and secretive politics surrounding the prize, predicting a winner is always chancy. However, over the past several years, one of the odds-makers’ favorite picks has not been a head of state, a major nongovernmental organization, nor a charismatic resistance leader but rather a soft-spoken Boston academic in his eighties. His name is Gene Sharp.
In 1953, when Gene Sharp was a twenty-five-year-old war resister, one of his proudest possessions was a letter from Albert Einstein. At the time, Sharp, the son of an itinerant Protestant minister in Ohio, had recently finished a master’s degree in sociology at Ohio State University. He moved to New York City with a plan to write a book about Mohandas Gandhi. However, he soon found himself in a federal detention center, arrested for refusing to cooperate with the Korean War draft.
Before going to trial, Sharp struck up a correspondence with Einstein, who had gained renown as a peace activist in his later years. Einstein wrote to the young pacifist: “I earnestly admire you for your moral strength and can only hope, although I really do not know, that I would have acted as you did had I found myself in your situation.” Sharp ultimately served nine months and ten days in prison in Danbury, Connecticut, for draft resistance, a stint he regarded at the time as an important political stand.1
Decades later, he had a very different view of his solitary act of defiance. “I don’t think it did a damned thing to get rid of the war system,” Sharp told one interviewer. In 2010, he stated that his stand had been utterly ineffectual, except “in keeping my sense of personal integrity together.”2
Over the years, Sharp had not given up on the idea of nonviolent action. But he had gone through a sort of conversion—one that would shape his career and ultimately reverberate through social movements in dozens of countries. His understanding of nonviolence had become anything but ineffectual.
Today, Sharp is known as a theorist and author of seminal works on the dynamics of nonviolent conflict. In addition to the “Machiavelli of nonviolence,” he has been called the “dictator slayer” and the Clausewitz of unarmed revolution. His circumstances are humble: he runs his research outfit, known as the Albert Einstein Institution, out of the ground floor of his row house in East Boston, and the organization has just one other staffer. For the most part, Sharp has labored for decades in quiet obscurity—well respected within a small field of study but virtually unknown outside of it.
At the same time, Sharp’s work has had an unusually broad impact. His pamphlet From Dictatorship to Democracy, a ninety-three-page distillation of his core teachings and a handbook for overthrowing autocrats, has been translated into more than thirty languages. The slim volume has a habit of turning up in hot spots of global resistance. Originally written in 1993 to help dissidents in Burma use nonviolent action against the ruling military junta, the book became a valued possession of Serbian students seeking to overthrow the regime of Slobodan Milosevic. It circulated among activists during uprisings in Georgia and the Ukraine in 2003 and 2004. And it was downloaded in Arabic amid mass protests in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011.
The Iranian government has denounced the book and its author by name. In the summer of 2005, two independent bookshops in Russia were burned down after stocking the newly available Russian translation of Sharp’s pamphlet on their shelves. (“I still keep a half-burned copy on a shelf in my office,” one opposition leader told the Wall Street Journal.)3 Particularly after the Arab Spring, Sharp’s renown has grown. He was the subject of a feature documentary, entitled How to Start a Revolution, released just as the Occupy movement was taking shape in 2011.
The conversion that Sharp underwent not long after his stint as a draft resister—the epiphany that would guide his later research and teaching—revolved around a simple idea: that nonviolence should not be simply a moral code for a small group of true believers to live by. Rather, Sharp came to argue that nonviolent conflict should be understood as a political approach that can be employed strategically, something that social movements can choose because it provides an effective avenue for leveraging change. Out of this principle has emerged the modern study of “civil resistance,” devoted to understanding how unarmed social movements are able to stage uprisings of dramatic consequence.
The conversion experienced by Sharp was a consequential one. Yet it is not altogether uncommon within the history of nonviolent social movements. Over the past century, many great innovators have arrived at the same conclusion: nonviolence must be wedded to strategic mass action if it is to have true force in the world. Martin Luther King Jr., born within a year of Sharp in the late 1920s, was one of those innovators. In King’s case, it would take years of political evolution to fully appreciate the use of nonviolent conflict as a means of political struggle and to commit to schemes such as Project C. But, in the end, it was his mastery of this technique—not merely his personal courage or spiritual conviction—that would secure his place in American history.
Gene Sharp spent the first years of his political life immersed in a mainstream current of the pacifist tradition, and he has spent much of the rest of his career declaring independence from it. Upon his release from prison in 1954, Sharp worked briefly as an assistant to prominent radical pacifist A. J. Muste. He then contributed to the weekly publication Peace News in England before moving to Oslo and researching how teachers during World War II successfully used nonviolent tactics to resist the imposition of fascist schooling in Norway. His investigations into nonviolence would ultimately lead to a doctorate at Oxford and to a nine-hundred-page treatise called The Politics of Nonviolent Action, published in 1973. Widely regarded as a classic, the work remains in print and is available in a three-volume edition.
By the time he had published this work, Sharp had begun to distance himself from the peace groups with which he used to associate. Pacifism—moral opposition to war and violence—has existed for hundreds if not thousands of years and can trace its roots to the core texts of major world religions. These roots continued to show in Sharp’s time as a young researcher. Proponents of nonviolence regularly emphasized its moral and spiritual dimensions.4
In the 1950s and 1960s, Sharp found himself veering in a different direction. Reading through old newspaper coverage of Gandhi’s 1930 resistance campaign in India, he made a troubling discovery, one that he considered omitting from his writing. He found evidence that most participants in that satyagraha, as Gandhi called the campaign of defiance, did not embrace nonviolence out of a sense of moral commitment. Instead, they chose to employ nonviolent struggle because they believed it worked. The discovery was troubling for Sharp because it contradicted the cherished convictions of many people he knew—adherents to what is now known as “principled nonviolence”—who believed that the practice requires deep ethical resolve. As Sharp explained in a 2003 interview, he puzzled over what to do:
I wondered: Should I put that down? Better just leave it out!
But I put it down. And later it dawned on me that, rather than that being a threat, it was a great opportunity, because it meant that large numbers of people who would never believe in ethical or religious nonviolence could use nonviolent struggle for pragmatic reasons.5
Sharp’s decision to record his discovery altered the trajectory of his research. Ultimately, he would become a leading proponent of the position sometimes known as “strategic nonviolence.” While he continued to personally believe in nonviolence as a “philosophy of life,” he grew increasingly unconcerned about whether others did. He began arguing to his pacifist colleagues that people turn to war and violence not because they are wicked or hateful. They resort to violence because they do not see any other option for resolving intractable conflicts. It made little sense, he reasoned, to try to win these people over with “moral injunctions against violence and exhortations in favor of love.” It was far more fruitful to show how a strategy of nonviolent conflict could be an effective alternative to armed struggle—perhaps even a superior alternative.6
In books such as Gandhi as a Political Strategist, a collection of essays written between 1959 and 1970, Sharp sought to establish the independence leader not as an otherworldly mahatma, but as a shrewd and calculating tactician. He similarly battled the common beliefs that strategic nonviolence somehow involves avoiding conflict and that it can only be used in democracies. Instead, he set out to show that, far from being passive, nonviolent action could be “a technique of struggle involving the use of psychological, social, economic, and political power” and that it can be used even against viciously repressive regimes.7
Just like armed struggle, Sharp argued, nonviolent conflict involves the “waging of ‘battles,’ requires wise strategy and tactics, and demands of its ‘soldiers’ courage, discipline, and sacrifice.” Perhaps for this reason, he has claimed, those with military backgrounds have sometimes been quicker than peace activists to catch on to his ideas. In later years, one of his closest collaborators has been a retired US Army colonel, Robert Helvey, who became fascinated with the inner workings of nonviolent uprisings after seeing Sharp lecture at Harvard.8
Sharp’s analysis of nonviolent struggle could be notably unflinching. He recognized that if the target of a campaign is a tyrannical regime, repression can be severe. “There must be no illusions,” he wrote. “In some cases nonviolent people have not only been beaten and cruelly treated but killed . . . in deliberate massacres.” Nor did Sharp promise success: “The simple choice of nonviolent action as the technique of struggle,” he explained, “does not and cannot guarantee victory, especially on a short-term basis.”9
That said, Sharp documented how unarmed uprisings could produce remarkable and sometimes counterintuitive results. Whereas violent rebellions play to the strengths of dictatorships—which are deft at suppressing armed attacks and using security challenges to justify the creation of a police state—nonviolent action often catches these regimes off guard. Through what Sharp calls “political jiu-jitsu,” social movements can turn repression into a weakness for those in power. Violent crackdowns against unarmed protests end up exposing the brutality of a ruling force, undermining its legitimacy, and, in many cases, creating wider public unwillingness to cooperate with its mandates. Niccolò Machiavelli recognized this dynamic as early as the 1500s. Of the leader who seeks to impose his rule on a mass of hostile people, he wrote: “the greater his cruelty, the weaker does his regime become.”10
For Sharp, nonviolent efforts could not be limited to acts of noble sacrifice. They needed to have real political impact if they were to be worthwhile. And this insistence on effectiveness was another way in which he broke with previous traditions of pacifism and principled nonviolence.
Earlier strains of peace activism regularly involved small groups of individuals “bearing witness” or “speaking truth to power.” Typical tactics included conscientious objection, war tax resistance, and refusal to participate in air raid drills. Although participants in these actions acknowledged that they might appear isolated or quixotic, they prided themselves on setting a positive example for others. Since the Vietnam era, some in this lineage have undertaken more extreme acts of moral witness. Advocates in the Ploughshares Movement and members of the Catholic Worker Movement—founded by Christian pacifists Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin—have attempted to enact the biblical injunction to “beat swords into plowshares.” In their opposition to war and nuclear arms, these religious activists have burned draft files, poured blood on the decks of battleships, and crossed onto military facilities with the intent of crippling nuclear missiles by hammering on their nosecones.
Such protests have been imbued with a spirit of moral righteousness, and they have been averse to political calculation. Although participants sometimes faced long jail sentences, they put little emphasis on conceiving of how their bold acts of defiance might advance a concrete strategy for change. A saying popular in Catholic Worker circles summed up the approach: “Jesus never told us to be successful,” movement participants would say, “only to be faithful.”11
If the twenty-five-year-old Gene Sharp, who was willing to spend time in jail as an act of personal conscience against war, might have been sympathetic to such thinking, the Sharp who published The Politics of Nonviolent Action two decades later wanted nothing to do with it. In such writing, Sharp repeatedly challenged the notion that good intentions were sufficient to create change. As he wrote in one of his later books, “Feeling good, not engaging in violence, or being willing to die, when you have not achieved the goals of your struggle, does not change the fact that you have failed.”12
What was remarkable, from Sharp’s point of view, was the number of times nonviolent struggle had in fact prevailed, sometimes against hardened opposition. Advocates of principled nonviolence often talked of the goal of “conversion,” or winning over the heart of the enemy. Sharp contended that, although such changes of conscience may be desirable, they were not necessary. To win, activists did not need to express love for their adversaries or make hated opponents see the errors of their ways. In fact, insistence on converting the enemy could be counterproductive, Sharp believed. He argued that “the demand for ‘love’ for people who have done cruel things may turn people who are justifiably bitter and unable to love their opponents towards violence.”13
Once again, Sharp’s perspective would be far more practical. If a dictator can be made to resign through popular protest, the question of how this undemocratic ruler feels about losing his grip on power need not be a main concern of the social movements that compel his ouster. Sharp approvingly quoted civil rights leader James Farmer: “Where we cannot influence the heart of the evil-doer, we can force an end to the evil practice.”14
Sharp’s disagreements with pacifist groups did not end well. The arguments they produced, he reports, were “long and frustrating.” When he was unable to make headway, Sharp resolved to chart his own path. As he gained influence as a theorist, he came to eschew the term “nonviolence” altogether, believing that it was too ambiguous and too loaded with connotations of passivity and religious belief. Instead of using the word as a noun, Sharp began employing it only as an adjective, referring to “nonviolent action” or “nonviolent conflict.” This would prove an influential move. Recently, some academic researchers studying strategic nonviolence, influenced by Sharp, have made a further break in terminology. They now discuss campaigns of unarmed popular action simply as “civil resistance,” a formulation that is notably free of pacifist associations.15
Unlike Gene Sharp, Martin Luther King Jr. was not shaped early on in the pacifist tradition. King’s introduction to nonviolence—both principled and strategic—would be a gradual one.
Few are aware that, as a young preacher, King once sought official license to carry a concealed handgun. In his 2011 book Gunfight, UCLA law professor Adam Winkler notes that, after King’s house was bombed in 1956, the clergyman applied in Alabama for a concealed carry permit. Local police, loath to grant such permits to African Americans, deemed him “unsuitable” and denied his application. Consequently, King would end up leaving the firearms at home.16
The lesson from this incident is not, as some members of the National Rifle Association (NRA) have tried to suggest, that the Nobel Peace Prize winner should be remembered as a gun-toting opponent of firearms regulation. Rather, the fact that King would request license to wear a gun in 1956, just as he was being catapulted onto the national stage, illustrates the profundity of the transformation that he underwent over the course of his public career.17
Although this transformation involved an adoption of principled nonviolence and personal pacifism, that is not the whole of the story. More importantly, for those who are interested in how nonviolent campaigns can have political consequence, King’s evolution also involved a hesitant but ultimately forceful embrace of direct action: broad-scale, confrontational, and unarmed. Just as Sharp’s conversion would profoundly impact how nonviolence is studied, King’s developing appreciation for the strategic dimensions of nonviolent conflict would have lasting consequence for how it is put into practice.
The campaign that first established King’s national reputation, the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, was not planned in advance as a Gandhian campaign of nonviolent resistance. At the time, King did not have a clear sense of the strategic principles behind such a campaign. Rather, the bus boycott came together quickly following the arrest of Rosa Parks in late 1955, taking inspiration from a similar action in Baton Rouge in 1953.
Still a relative newcomer to Montgomery, King was elected by his fellow ministers and community leaders as the president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, formed at the start of the boycott to oversee the campaign. He was chosen in part because he was not identified with any of the established factions among the city’s prominent blacks. King was surprised by his selection and reluctant to assume his new role and its burdens. Indeed, the risks were considerable: soon he was receiving phone calls on which unidentified voices warned, “Listen, nigger, we’ve taken all we want from you. Before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.” After such threats resulted in the bombing of King’s home in February 1956, armed watchmen guarded against further assassination attempts.18
At this point, King’s embrace of the theory and practice of nonviolent action was still tentative. In his talks before mass meetings, King preached the Christian injunction to “love thy enemy.” Having read Thoreau in college, he described the bus boycott as an “act of massive noncooperation” and regularly called for “passive resistance.” But King did not use the term “nonviolence,” and he admitted that he knew little about Gandhi or the Indian independence leader’s campaigns. As biographer Taylor Branch notes, out-of-state visitors who were knowledgeable about the principles of unarmed direct action—such as Rev. Glenn Smiley of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and Bayard Rustin of the War Resisters League—reported that King and other Montgomery activists were “at once gifted and unsophisticated in nonviolence.”19
In a famous incident described by historian David Garrow, Rustin was visiting King’s parsonage with reporter Bill Worthy when the journalist almost sat on a pistol. “Watch out, Bill, there’s a gun on that chair,” the startled Rustin warned. Rustin and King stayed up late that night arguing about whether armed self-defense in the home could end up damaging the movement. Rustin believed it could; King was uncertain.20
Although today’s NRA members might prefer to forget, it was not long before King came around to the position of Rustin and Smiley, who argued for the removal of the firearms. Smiley would make visits to Montgomery throughout the civil rights leader’s remaining four years there, and King’s politics would be shaped by many more late-night conversations.21
In 1959, at the invitation of the Gandhi National Memorial Fund, King made a pilgrimage to India to study the principles of satyagraha. He was moved by the experience. Ultimately, he never embraced the complete pacifism of A. J. Muste, Sharp’s former employer; in the Black Power years, King made a distinction between people using guns to defend themselves in the home, on the one hand, and the question of “whether it was tactically wise to use a gun while participating in an organized protest,” on the other. But, for himself, King claimed nonviolence as a “way of life,” and he maintained his resolve under conditions that would make many others falter. Although Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) staffers, fearing that their leader could be assassinated, often implored police and federal authorities to ensure public safety at civil rights gatherings, King regularly refused to travel with an armed guard, and he showed a sometimes-disturbing acceptance of the idea of that he might someday be killed.22
In September 1962, when King was addressing a convention, a two-hundred-pound white man, the twenty-four-year-old American Nazi Party member Roy James, jumped onto the stage and struck the clergyman in the face. King responded with a level of courage that made a lifelong impression on many of those in the audience. One of them, storied educator and activist Septima Clark, described how King dropped his hands “like a newborn baby” and spoke calmly to his attacker. King made no effort to protect himself even as he was knocked backward by further blows. Later, after his aides had pulled the assailant away, King talked to James behind the stage and insisted that he would not press charges.23
Believers in pacifism often contend that such principled nonviolence represents the high point in a person’s moral evolution. They argue that those who merely use unarmed protest tactically—not because they accept it as an ethical imperative—practice a lesser form of nonviolence. Gandhi advanced this position when he claimed that those who forgo violence for strategic reasons employ the “nonviolence of the weak.” King echoed the argument when he wrote that “nonviolence in the truest sense is not a strategy that one uses simply because it is expedient in the moment” but rather is something “men live by because of the sheer morality of its claim.”24
Despite such admonitions, the opposite case can be made: in holding up King as an icon of individual pacifism, we fail to see his true genius. Like Sharp, the civil rights leader made his greatest impact when he championed campaigns of widespread disruption and collective sacrifice.
In time, Martin Luther King Jr. would embrace strategic nonviolence in its most robust and radical form, and this stance produced the historic confrontations at Birmingham and Selma. But it is important to remember that these events came years after his baptism into political life in Montgomery and that they might easily not have happened at all.
Following the success of the Bus Boycott, King sought out ways to spread the Montgomery model throughout the South. He knew there were strategists who had immersed themselves in the theory and practice of broad-scale confrontation, but he acknowledged that this organizing tradition had yet to take root in the civil rights movement. In early 1957, King met James Lawson, a savvy student of unarmed resistance who had spent several years in India. As biographer Taylor Branch relates, King pleaded with the young graduate student to quit his studies: “We need you now,” King said. “We don’t have any Negro leadership in the South that understands nonviolence.”25
Despite his desire to employ tactics of nonviolent struggle, the idea of waging widely participatory campaigns of direct action fell far outside of King’s organizational frame of reference, and in many ways he remained a reluctant convert to mass action. Founded not long after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference was conceived as a coalition of ministers. It thought of itself, in the words of one historian, as the “political arm of the black church.” As Ella Baker biographer Barbara Ransby writes, typical church institutions were none too bold in their push for civil rights, and “the majority of black ministers in the 1950s still opted for a safer, less confrontational political path.” Even King and his more motivated cohort “defined their political goals squarely within the respectable American mainstream and were cautious about any leftist associations.”26
Frustrated that the SCLC’s program in the first years involved more “flowery speeches” than civil disobedience, the militant Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth of Birmingham warned that if the organization did not become more aggressive, its leaders would “be hard put in the not too distant future to justify our existence.”27
The next major breakthroughs in civil rights activism would come not from the SCLC’s hesitant ministers but from the student lunch-counter sit-ins that swept through the South starting in spring of 1960, and then from the 1961 Freedom Rides. In each case, when young activists implored King to join them, the elder clergyman—himself just in his early thirties—stalled and equivocated. King told the students that he was with them in spirit. They pointedly shot back, “Where’s your body?”28
According to John Lewis, then a leader in Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), King replied to such challenges with irritation, making reference to the site of Jesus’s crucifixion: “I think I should choose the time and place of my Golgotha,” he said.29
When King’s SCLC did get directly involved in a major campaign of strategic nonviolence, the organization was drawn into an effort that was already under way—the movement in Albany, Georgia, starting in late 1961. Even then, the SCLC did not fully commit until after King and Ralph Abernathy were swept up in an unplanned arrest.30
The failure of the protests in Albany, combined with the inspiration of the Freedom Rides and student sit-ins, convinced King that the time had come for a campaign that, in the words of Andrew Young, could be “anticipated, planned and coordinated from beginning to end” using the principles of nonviolent conflict.31
King had chosen his Golgotha: Birmingham, 1963.
King and Sharp, in their own ways, would each make critical contributions to a lineage that had been growing out of Gandhi and that was about to flourish in the second half of the twentieth century.
Nonviolent action did not start with the Indian independence movement. Sharp documented a variety of earlier precedents, going back to the use of noncooperation by the plebeians of Rome in 494 BC. And there were intellectual forerunners as well. Thoreau produced influential writings in the 1800s, as did Tolstoy—who even carried out a correspondence with the young Gandhi.32
Yet, these forebears notwithstanding, it was Gandhi’s experiments in South Africa and India that would most profoundly shape the usage of strategic nonviolence in the years that followed. Both King and Sharp saw themselves as standing in his shadow. King, a Christian minister, would describe the influence in religious terms: “Gandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale,” he wrote.33
Sharp made a similar observation, using more secular language: “Gandhi,” he argued, “was probably the first to consciously formulate over a period of years a major system of resistance based upon the assumption” that “hierarchical systems can be modified or destroyed by a withdrawal of submission, cooperation, and obedience.”34
For both King and Sharp, Gandhi’s efforts in India were not an end point. Instead, Gandhi’s campaigns were breakthrough examples of what nonviolent confrontation could accomplish. They suggested the enormous potential of a mode of political engagement that was only starting to influence world affairs. For his part, Gandhi sometimes spoke of nonviolence as a developing science. He saw himself as conducting investigations into its unique laws and properties, going so far as to title his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Viewed in this framework, King, like Gandhi, would become an experimenter pushing the frontiers of innovation. Sharp, on the other hand, would take on a different role: that of a taxonomist who documented the most exciting discoveries that were made.
One of the achievements that became a trademark for Sharp—and that showed his penchant for careful cataloguing—was his list of “198 methods of nonviolent action.” Originally presented in detail in the second volume of The Politics of Nonviolent Action, the list serves as a suggestion of possible tactics for movements. It encompasses widely varied approaches: vigils, fasting, land occupations, “protest disrobings,” display of flags and symbolic colors, mock funerals, humorous skits and pranks, deliberate bureaucratic inefficiency, and civil disobedience—in addition to dozens of distinct types of strikes and boycotts.
In a 2003 interview, Sharp explained the origins of his now-famous list. He explained that, around 1960, he began collecting examples of different forms of resistance. At first, he said:
I think I had 18 methods of nonviolent action. The largest list I had come across previously was 12. When I was in Norway, I drew up a list which I think went up to 65 and took it to a conference in Accra, Ghana. People there were absolutely fascinated by this list.35
By the time The Politics of Nonviolent Action was published, Sharp’s count had grown to 198 tactics.
The list is sometimes misunderstood by Sharp’s admirers and his enemies alike. Some readers assume that Sharp somehow invented the nonviolent tactics, when really he merely documented approaches that had already been put into practice by others. As he labored away in the archives, Sharp became buried in examples, and his writing style showed a love of classification that bordered on obsessive. But Sharp’s list had great strengths. It encouraged dissidents to be creative in their planning and not to simply repeat previously tried approaches. Sharp likened the 198 methods to the various weapons in the arsenal of a conventional army: each has different range and effects, and each is adapted to distinct circumstances. They can be used separately or together. And their wise selection can help determine the outcome of a battle.
At a time when little attention was granted to nonviolent tactics, Sharp’s expansive inventory hinted at a new world of possibility—both for action and for future research. And this was only one part of his project.
Digging through history, Sharp found countless examples of the deployment of nonviolent methods. Yet he saw that, in most cases, activists in diverse countries and time periods were essentially reinventing the wheel. No systematic study existed that might illustrate core principles of launching unarmed uprisings. “Extensive use of nonviolent action has occurred despite the absence of attention to the development of the technique itself,” he wrote. When movements undertook nonviolent campaigns, it was usually in haphazard fashion—“partly spontaneous, partly intuitive, partly vaguely patterned off of some known case.”36
How much more effective could civil resistance be if it were seriously studied? Sharp reasoned that a thorough exploration of how unarmed mass action worked—how uprisings could be sparked and their power harnessed—could have significant, real-world consequences. And so he made this his mission. He conceived of his research as “a very careful examination of the nature, capacities and requirements of nonviolent struggle.”37
Sharp insisted that nonviolent resistance—with proper knowledge and planning—could produce the kind of major upheavals that are often attributed to the diffuse spirit of the times. Certainly, in any given campaign, many political and economic factors are beyond the control of activists. But that does not mean that people seeking change should sit around and wait until circumstances seem ideal. Sometimes, the combination of careful preparation and tactical daring could upend conventional wisdom about the possibilities for change. “Some nonviolent struggles have succeeded in very poor circumstances because the struggle group compensated for specific unfavorable conditions by developing their strengths and their skills in how to act under such conditions,” Sharp would argue.38
Pursuing these ideas, Sharp followed a somewhat lonely path. Having broken with traditional peace groups, he made a turn toward scholarship. Yet Sharp never fit particularly well within the professorial mold, and he showed little interest in the sometimes-tedious processes of peer review. Consequently, his ideas were slow to take hold in academia. Had he started his career today, rather than in the 1970s, he could have much more easily found an academic community—thanks to the field of study his writing has done so much to help spawn. Stephen Zunes, a professor at the University of San Francisco and expert in the field, comments that, prior to Sharp, lectures on nonviolent movements took place almost exclusively in religion and ethics courses. Slowly, consideration of such campaigns moved into sociology. And today, the study of nonviolent conflict and civil resistance is a respectable subfield within political science and strategic studies, engaging scholars who would have no interest in a “peace studies” curriculum.39
If these developments have taken place too slowly to benefit Sharp’s professorial career, he can take some consolation in the traction his studies have gained outside the academy. Sharp’s theories are useful enough that they not only have influenced intellectuals but also have been widely adapted for practical application. Trainers who have been inspired by the emerging field of civil resistance—and who have waged campaigns of nonviolent conflict in places such as Serbia, South Africa, Poland, and Zimbabwe—have worked to codify a new organizing tradition based on the lessons gleaned from past mobilizations. As a result, activists today can benefit from the experiences of their predecessors in a way that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago. Like the Egyptian protester who told the BBC in 2011 that he had been handed a photocopy of the 198 methods, printed without any reference to the list’s provenance, many dissidents who have never heard Sharp’s name have nonetheless ended up exposed to his thinking.40
In his 1973 magnum opus, Sharp made an audacious prediction—a writerly version of Babe Ruth pointing his bat at the ballpark fences. “We are only becoming aware of the past history of this type of conflict and of the vast armory of nonviolent weapons it utilizes,” Sharp wrote. Of his investigation he stated, “This is only the beginning,” and he expressed the hope that it would initiate a “new stage in the development of nonviolent alternatives.”41
Remarkably enough, this is exactly what has come to pass.
On the ground in Birmingham in 1963, King and other civil rights organizers discovered what it took to actually carry out the type of campaign that Sharp was theorizing. And it was hardly as simple as it might have looked on paper.
It can be easy, with the benefit of hindsight, to overlook how much was unknown to the movement activists in Birmingham as they commenced their high-risk confrontation. Although Project C reflected the SCLC’s careful planning and preparation, its creators soon found that following through on their designs would mean taking huge risks and facing tremendous uncertainties.42
In the decades since the success of the Birmingham campaign, some writers have suggested that a triumph there was virtually preordained. This tendency was already in full bloom in March 1964, when Jet magazine published a glowing profile of Wyatt Walker that lionized the young SCLC administrator as the “Man Behind Martin Luther King Jr.” The piece described Walker as “a natty dresser, a tall, handsome movie-idol type with a flashy smile . . . a smooth, convincing, and wondrous wheeler-dealer.” According to this story, Walker’s planning for Birmingham was so flawless that, when King commenced the campaign, all he “had to do was push the right button that Walker had already connected to the proper detonator.”43
In more recent times, a different type of determinism has crept into popular versions of the Birmingham story. According to these accounts, the SCLC chose Birmingham because organizers relished a clash with Bull Connor, knowing that the hot-headed commissioner could be relied on to react to protests with violence and would make a perfect villain in the press.
This narrative, however, misses some important complexities. The SCLC did indeed plan on a confrontation with city officials in Birmingham, but organizers had not chosen the site solely based on Connor or the temperament of any single individual. Rather, the SCLC had been impressed by the careful preparation of local activists, led by Shuttlesworth and his Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. When they met in Dorchester, King and his advisors had reason to believe that Bull Connor might be removed from power by the time Project C commenced, and indeed they were hoping this would be the case. Connor’s longtime position as Commissioner of Public Safety was being phased out, and he was running a closely contested mayoral race against a more moderate candidate, Albert Boutwell. The SCLC twice delayed its campaign so as not to interfere with the election. The local black community fervently wanted Connor to be unseated, and the civil rights organizers shared the wider community’s wish: “We too wanted to see Mr. Connor defeated,” King wrote in his famous letter from Birmingham’s city jail, “so we went through postponement after postponement to aid this community in need.”44
Such delay was not merely for the sake of local residents. As Ralph Abernathy would later explain: “Our careful restraint was not something we did for Birmingham alone. We were also concerned about our own hides.” As he describes their calculus, the activists knew that in the demonstrations to come, “we would be much safer facing a government headed by Albert Boutwell than one headed by Bull Connor, and we would certainly be happier with a new police chief.” When the election took place, Boutwell did prevail over Connor, although a lawsuit by the defeated commissioner allowed Connor to retain day-to-day control over the police force as the case wound its way through the courts.45
Strategy and preparation were important to the success of Birmingham, to be sure. Project C laid out a course of premeditated disruption and nonviolent escalation. But to stay that course, it took perseverance and creativity. Sociologist Aldon Morris explains, “SCLC strategists decided that the Birmingham movement should be a drama. That is, it would start out slow and low-keyed and then continue to build up, step by step, until it reached a crisis point, where the opposition would be forced to yield.” When planning alone was insufficient to create such drama, organizers had to work hard to ensure that the campaign did not stall in its tracks. Their clever, persistent, and skillful maneuvers to keep tension building at times when protest energy might otherwise have died out were another factor belying the idea that successful uprising was a “spontaneous” occurrence.46
Indeed, despite their best-laid plans, protest organizers had to make many decisions about their unfolding production under tense conditions, once the demonstrations were already under way. “In the end, Project C was no social science formula,” writes King biographer Taylor Branch. “It was a cold plunge.”47
When the Birmingham campaign officially launched on April 3, 1963, it quickly became clear that conditions for an uprising were hardly as ideal as was hoped. With the start of the campaign, local leaders announced an economic boycott of downtown stores. Mass meetings at prominent African American churches began taking place nightly. And daily lunch-counter sit-ins and marches resulted in the arrest of small groups of demonstrators—a dozen or two people during most of the initial days. However, these events did not amount to everything King and other organizers had dreamed.
The truth was that the SCLC’s recruitment of jail-goers required painstaking outreach and had produced only modest results. Those staffers who arrived in Birmingham months earlier encountered less unity than expected among local black ministers and more resistance from members of the city’s black middle class, some of whom belittled King as a mere “glossy personality.” Moreover, the delays in the campaign’s start were costly. As they waited on the mayoral race, the organizers agonized over losing precious weeks that would have allowed them to punish segregationist merchants during the lucrative Easter shopping season.48
It took several key developments over the course of the following weeks for the campaign to surmount these difficulties and realize its vision. These involved both savvy moves by top leaders and great courage on the part of local activists.
First, the SCLC worked hard to mend fences in the city’s divided black community, winning over previously reluctant leaders such as businessman A. G. Gaston and the Reverend J. L. Ware, president of the city’s Baptist Ministers Conference. This did not stop the city’s black weekly, The World, from continuing its attacks—the paper declared aggressive protests “both wasteful and worthless” on April 10—but the endorsements from the likes of Ware did swell the ranks of participants in evening mass meetings.49
Next, with volunteers for arrest still lagging, King resolved that he would go to jail himself on April 12: Good Friday. This was a difficult decision to make. Getting arrested for leading a march meant violating an injunction against further protests that a court had handed down less than two days before. Many of the SCLC’s organizers were fearful that the campaign was on the brink of failure and that the movement did not have enough money to cover bail and legal fees of the dozens of people who had already been taken into custody. Some advisors, including King’s father, a respected minister, opposed the arrest. They argued that the SCLC president should travel north to raise money for their flagging effort rather than risk a lengthy imprisonment himself. Yet, after careful discernment, King decided, “The path is clear to me. I’ve got to march.”50
King’s gambit was that, in serving as an example of personal sacrifice, he could both move others to step forward and reassert a sense of escalating drama in the Birmingham drive. He was right. As photos of the arrested minister spread internationally, the Kennedy administration was prompted to intervene. After city authorities arrested King, they placed him in solitary confinement and prevented him from receiving news from the outside. To the general public, this raised the specter that a prominent black citizen might be “disappeared” inside a jail in the Deep South. In hopes of preventing any such mishap, both Attorney General Robert Kennedy and his brother, President John F. Kennedy, made it known that they were monitoring the situation with concern. Both called Coretta Scott King to reassure her that the FBI had determined that Martin was safe. Wyatt Walker made sure that word of these calls became part of the national press coverage of the campaign.
Although King’s arrest provided a temporary boost, it took a third major breakthrough for Project C to escalate to its full magnitude. This came with the decision, in what became known as the “Children’s Crusade,” to allow high school students to join the demonstrations. Early on, James Bevel had recruited scores of teenagers eager to take a stand. Yet older leaders were wary. They were sensitive to criticism about deploying student protesters who were perceived as too young to be on the front lines of the civil rights struggle. Eventually, however, the enthusiasm of the youth and the need to carry forward the campaign’s momentum won out.
“We were inspired . . . to give our young a true sense of their own stake in freedom and justice,” King would later write. Just shy of one month into the campaign, organizers announced that all people would be allowed to participate, and students overwhelmingly responded to the call. On May 2, the first day of the Children’s Crusade, wave after wave of young people flooded Birmingham’s streets, singing and joining arms. Project C was no longer a matter of a dozen or two activists risking jail time: in just one day of action, more than five hundred people were arrested by the police.51
With space in Birmingham’s City Jail rapidly diminishing, Bull Connor turned to more aggressive reprisals, and this marked a last major development that transformed the campaign: the advent of highly publicized police violence.
Connor likely believed that a firm-handed crackdown on “Negro troublemakers” would make him into one of Alabama’s most popular politicians. His instincts about what would appeal to his base of supporters in the state may well have been correct. Yet the national perception of his actions would be very different. Although Project C’s organizers had not known in advance that Connor would still be leading the Birmingham police, nor that the official response to their determined protests would come in the exact form that it did, they were well aware of the power that images of repression could have. And they were ready to maximize the advantage gained by tactical mistakes on the part of authorities.
Several weeks earlier, shortly after the start of the demonstrations, Bull Connor had already brought out one of his most infamous weapons: the snarling police dog. On April 7, a unit of canines growled at marching protesters. When a bystander taunted one of the animals, the dog lunged and pinned the man. Onlookers from the crowd jumped in to help pull the bystander free, and the dog’s attack made national press.52
That evening, as they reflected on what had transpired, some of the SCLC organizers were jubilant. In a now-famous encounter, SNCC’s James Forman came upon Wyatt Walker and Dorothy Cotton in the Gaston Motel, the movement’s command center. As Forman describes it, Walker and Cotton “were jumping up and down, elated. They said over and over again, ‘We’ve got a movement . . . They brought out the dogs. We’ve got a movement.’” Forman was unsettled by the sight, disturbed that other civil rights campaigners would be excited about police brutality.53
But Walker and Cotton were not trivializing the violence of the police dogs. They took the risks of the campaign very seriously. As King had contended, the point of creating a public crisis in Birmingham was not to introduce Connor or other authorities to violence. Rather, it was to expose the violence routinely inflicted upon the black community under Jim Crow segregation. “We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive,” King wrote. “We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with.”54 Walker and Cotton knew that the attacking police dogs would serve as a choice representation of the much more pervasive violence that flourished in the city. In his tactical foolishness, Bull Connor had become an ally in exposing the brutality of white supremacy. And he was just beginning.
Despite tipping his hand early on, Bull Connor did not deploy public violence in earnest until after Birmingham’s black youth flooded the streets. On May 3, the day after the first Children’s Crusade march, even larger crowds took to the streets. With their jails already filled, Connor’s forces decided against mass arrests and instead opened up on demonstrators with batons, dogs, and water hoses. The scenes that resulted were horrifying. Streams from high-pressure fire hoses ripped the clothing from the backs of protesters, who turned and cowered against the force of the blasts. During one confrontation, a jet of water pinned a writhing Fred Shuttlesworth against a wall, and the reverend was taken to the hospital on a stretcher. Doctors treated other demonstrators for dog bites. And at least one black woman, a bystander watching the marches, charged that she had been intentionally knocked to the ground by police, beaten, and kicked in the stomach.
President Kennedy told one group of visitors to the White House that the images of Bull Connor’s crackdown made him sick. But rather than dissuading protests, the police action galvanized Birmingham’s black community. Seeing that demonstrations were only growing larger, the city’s merchants scrambled to find a resolution.55
The internationally broadcast images of revolt and repression had brought federal pressure for a settlement. But the downtown storeowners were already convinced: black customers had overwhelmingly stopped patronizing their businesses, and this drop in foot traffic alone was significant enough to make the difference between profit and loss on their ledgers. What was more, the prospect of confrontation was keeping white housewives from the downtown shopping district as well. Over the objection of Connor and the city’s racist holdouts, the merchants announced an agreement with civil rights leaders on May 10 that promised the start of desegregation. Less than six weeks after Project C began, it was over, and the city was forever changed.
Given the widespread perception that nonviolence functions as a kind of spiritual force, it is not surprising that its most famous adherents are regularly elevated to the status of saints. King, in particular, is enshrined in this way. At annual celebrations, people mostly remember his soul-stirring sermons and public address. They are less likely to be aware of those traits that made King human—his personal failings (such as marital infidelity), his robust sense of humor, or his tactical cunning. Likewise, the calculations of enterprising lieutenants such as Walker fall out of the story. Such omissions reinforce the idea that outbreaks of resistance owe more to divine intervention than earthly design. And they conceal elements crucial for understanding how movements actually succeed.
Both King and Walker were ministers who drew on their religious faith as a source of courage and resolve. But they also worked consciously to manipulate press coverage of the movement. As David Garrow writes, at least one observer “was astounded by King’s emphasis on pragmatic rather than spiritual considerations” when he approved the deployment of youth protesters in the Children’s Crusade. “We’ve got to get something going,” King said. “The press is leaving, we’ve got to get going.” And this attitude toward the media was just one example of how the civil rights activists maintained a hard-headed approach to unarmed uprising—one that would later be studied and refined by others.56
The Birmingham model proved widely influential. In the wake of Project C, movement activity exploded. Historian Adam Fairclough writes, the “protests in Birmingham also sent shock waves through the South. The fact that white leaders had made concessions in a city notorious for its racial intransigence gave new hope to blacks in Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and other segregationist strongholds.”57 Donations to the civil rights movement flowed in, and thousands of those inspired by what had happened in Alabama launched sit-ins, boycotts, and marches of their own.
Even the unadventurous National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) diverged from its typical strategy of pursuing lawsuits and insider lobbying to promote more disruptive approaches. At its annual convention that summer, it made the highly unusual move of calling on its local branches to take up “picketing, mass action protests, [and] selective buying campaigns.” Politicians also took note of the surge. For two years prior to the campaign, Fairclough explains, “Robert Kennedy had attempted to deal with each racial crisis on an ad hoc basis. Birmingham finally convinced him that the crises would recur with such frequency and magnitude that the federal government, unless it adopted a more radical policy, would be overwhelmed.”58
King’s political genius was in putting the institutional weight of a major national civil rights organization behind an ambitious, escalating deployment of civil resistance tactics. It would have been far easier for an organization of the size and background of the SCLC to turn toward more mainstream lobbying and legal action—much as the NAACP had done. Instead, SCLC organizers and their local allies followed the example of the Freedom Riders and SNCC’s student activists in embracing nonviolent confrontation.
To go beyond adhering to pacifism as a personal philosophy, and instead to stake your career and your organization’s future on a belief in the power of nonviolence as a political force, requires tremendous determination. It took years of deliberation and delay for Martin Luther King Jr. to take such a step. But when he finally did, the result was decisive: King went from being someone who had been repeatedly swept up in the saga of civil rights—a reluctant protagonist in the battle against American apartheid—to being a shaper of history.
As civil resistance has emerged as an organizing tradition, it has sometimes been mistaken for a conspiracy.
In the past two decades, cases in which nonviolent resistance has been used to overthrow undemocratic regimes have proliferated. Among other struggles, scholars have paid special attention to the boycotts against apartheid South Africa; the people power movement in the Philippines; the ouster of Pinochet in Chile; the revolutions of 1989 in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany; the “color revolutions” in Serbia, Georgia, and the Ukraine; uprisings in Burma in 1988 and 2007, and Iran in and 2009; and the revolts that swept the Arab world in 2011. In some instances, key participants in these movements attended trainings in civil resistance or otherwise familiarized themselves with insights from the tradition. In other cases, activists devised their own versions of the approach without exposure to outsiders. Always, leaders drew on their own distinctive political histories and deep local knowledge to rally broad support in their societies.
In countries where these struggles have taken place, Gene Sharp has consistently attracted interested readers. This interest has also drawn detractors, such as the Iranian government. For an intellectual opponent of autocracy, being featured as an animated character in an Iranian propaganda film surely counts as a high honor. Sharp received this strange accolade in 2008, when Iran aired a video that showed a computer-generated version of him scheming with Senator John McCain and philanthropist George Soros. It accused Sharp of being a CIA agent “in charge of America’s infiltration into other countries.”59
Similar charges have emanated from some sketchy corners of the Left. In 2005, French writer Thierry Meyssan, author of a book entitled 9/11: The Big Lie, charged that Sharp “helped NATO and the CIA train the leaders of the soft coups of the last 15 years.”60 Unfortunately, Meyssan’s suspect publishing history did not stop Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez from swallowing the Frenchman’s accusations. In 2007, Chávez publicly denounced Sharp as being part of a US plot to oust his government.
Those who think that Sharp is a CIA tool willfully overlook the fact that principles of civil resistance have frequently been used against US-supported dictatorships and that Palestinian activists drew on them during the first intifada in the 1980s. But, more importantly, conspiratorial claims reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of how civil resistance works. It is true that techniques of unarmed uprising—just like guerilla warfare—can be used by groups with a wide range of ideological orientations. But there is an important difference. At their core, the principles of civil resistance are inherently democratic: nonviolent campaigns require mass public support and participation if they are to succeed.61
Civil resistance can just as easily be employed to defend a popular government as to challenge a repressive one. Thus, in response to Chávez’s complaints, Sharp wrote the Venezuelan president a letter recommending his book entitled The Anti-Coup, which explains how nonviolent action can be used to repel an armed putsch by a minority group that does not have the backing of the population.
It is an error to attribute any mass movement to a single person. During the Arab Spring, Middle Eastern analysts criticized portions of the Western media for being too eager to credit Gene Sharp as something like an American “Lawrence of Arabia,” responsible for the revolts breaking out. Sharp himself disowned such characterizations. When others tried to credit him, he instead highlighted the agency and creativity of indigenous protesters. Sharp consistently argues that movements must always devise their own strategies. “An outsider like me can’t tell you what to do,” he advised one group, “and if I did, you shouldn’t believe me. Trust yourselves.”62
As King’s experience shows, strategic nonviolence does not offer a secret formula for success, and its development is hardly the work of a single mastermind. Rather, the growth of civil resistance has been the result of practitioners experimenting in diverse and difficult conditions, adding their own refinements to an art that has been developing for more than a century. Sharp has made an important contribution to this process, but his is by no means the only one.
The SCLC’s campaigns—and those of the civil rights movement more broadly—have become touchstones for a modern tradition of direct action in the United States. Young people whose politics were shaped by campaigns in the South went on to play important roles in New Left student organizing and in the movement against the war in Vietnam. Their example would influence antinuclear activists and feminist groups in the 1970s; Central American solidarity, antiapartheid groups, and AIDS campaigners in the 1980s; and grassroots environmentalists in the 1990s. A strain of common experience would run through the historic protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle at the turn of the millennium, the massive demonstrations against the Iraq War under George W. Bush, and the eruption of Occupy Wall Street in the Obama era. Although these efforts had distinctive traits and drew in unique constituencies, they also shared many common characteristics, and it is no accident that they have displayed overlapping vocabularies and tactical repertoires.
As civil resistance has matured in other parts of the world, it has raised intriguing questions for this indigenous strain of direct action in the United States. Can domestic activists combine innovations from international movements with their own tradition in order to create something new and powerful? Can Sharp’s ideas, which have focused on unseating dictatorships, be applied in a democratic context? Can versions of civil resistance be used to confront the challenges of climate change, runaway economic inequality, racial injustice, and the corporate hijacking of government?
When Sharp began his career, popular opinion held that nonviolence could not succeed against authoritarian regimes. The technique could only work, the argument went, within democratic societies—against governments that, at least in principle, respected basic civil liberties. Mainstream pundits contended that Gandhi could prevail against the British Empire but would have been wiped out by a fascist foe, just as the civil rights movement relied on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to constrain Southern racists. Sharp took it upon himself to refute such widespread notions, and that commitment shaped his career.
The situation today, however, is very different. As the list of undemocratic governments ousted by “people power” grows ever more expansive, the conventional wisdom about strategic nonviolence may well have reversed: a common bias might hold that nonviolent conflict can be effective in challenging tyrannies, but it holds little value in places where dissent can be channeled through lobbying and electoral politics. In this context, the onus for US activists is now to show how the same types of tactics used to oust autocrats abroad can be brought to bear at home.
Despite the demonstrated power of mass mobilizations to alter the political landscape, few prominent organizations have been willing to pursue strategies of militant nonviolence. There is a reason for this. As veteran labor movement strategist Stephen Lerner has argued, major organizations have just enough at stake—relationships with mainstream politicians, financial obligations to members, collective bargaining contracts—to make them fear the lawsuits and political backlash that come with sustained civil disobedience. What Lerner says of unions applies equally to large environmental organizations, human rights groups, and other nonprofits: they “are just big enough—and just connected enough to the political and economic power structure—to be constrained from leading the kinds of activities that are needed” for bold campaigns of nonviolent conflict to be successful.63
As a consequence, explosive direct actions, from the Nashville sit-ins to the revolution in Egypt, are often led by underfunded upstarts. Such ad hoc groups can risk daring campaigns because they have nothing to lose, but they commonly lack the resources to escalate or to sustain multiple waves of protest over a period of years.
A gulf has emerged that separates established organizations dedicated to slowly winning social change over the long haul from explosive mass mobilizations that use disruptive power to shake the status quo. Often, the divide has resulted in tension, acrimony, and confusion. In recent years, civil resistance has presented a compelling possibility: that this gap, which has often seemed insurmountable, might yet be bridged, and that the fortunes of grassroots organizing might be transformed as a result.