INTRODUCTION

When Martin Luther King Jr. and a dozen of his top advisors arrived at the Dorchester retreat center near Savannah, Georgia, in early January 1963, the mood of the group was somber. The organizers had just suffered one of their greatest defeats, and they could not afford to fail again. They were about to risk their lives by launching a major series of protests against segregation in one of the most foreboding cities in the American South: Birmingham, Alabama. They resolved that this time they would have a plan to win.¹

Over the previous year, King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had been involved in a civil rights campaign in Albany, Georgia—a small city in the southwestern part of the state. There, months of demonstrations resulted in the arrest of more than two thousand participants. Yet, in the end, the national press focused on the reserve and good judgment shown by segregationist city officials. The New York Times noted “the deft handling by the police of racial protests” in Albany, while another publication remarked that “not a single racial barrier fell.”²

At Dorchester, King gathered his inner circle to regroup, reflect, and strategize. Among those in attendance were Ralph Abernathy, King’s best friend and spiritual counsel, and Wyatt Tee Walker, the SCLC’s thirty-three-year-old executive director. Dorothy Cotton and Andrew Young were also present. Although they were still considered junior staffers in the organization, their influence was rising. Cotton, already a powerful force in the organization’s training programs, was one of few women to break into the organization’s male-dominated command. For his part, Young served for King as a moderate voice—a counterweight to the leader’s more radical advisors. These radicals included James Bevel, a veteran of the militant Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who had gained a reputation as an expert in mobilizing students for sit-ins and other high-stakes acts of resistance.³

Together, the group reviewed their failure in Albany and mapped their next move. To this end, they began laying the foundation for an audacious scheme that would be implemented over the following months. Today, their strategy is sometimes referred to as the “Birmingham model.” But early on, when preparations were known to only a few, the plan was referred to as “Project X,” and later “Project C.”

The C in Project C stood for confrontation.

In 1963, Birmingham possessed a well-earned reputation as a bastion of reactionary racism. The homes and offices of local civil rights leaders were so regularly bombed that one prominent black neighborhood was known as “Dynamite Hill.” Just a few years before, African American singer Nat King Cole had been attacked during a public performance at the city’s Municipal Auditorium, with several members of the white-supremacist North Alabama Citizens’ Council rushing the stage and knocking him from his piano bench before security could pull Cole from the melee. The musician pledged that he would never perform in the South again. More recently, after a court order decreed that, as of January 15, 1962, the city’s sixty-seven parks and eight public swimming pools would have to be open to persons of all races, public safety commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor announced that he would simply close the facilities rather than allow black residents to use them.⁴

Aware of the hazardous terrain they were about to enter, King addressed his advisors during one solemn moment of their retreat: “I think everybody here should consider very carefully and decide if he wants to be with this campaign,” he said. “I have to tell you that in my judgment, some of the people sitting here today will not come back alive from this campaign. And I want you to think about it.”⁵

Despite the dangers, the organizers believed their campaign could produce a major media event that would tap the conscience of the country. Their intent, as King would later write from the confines of Birmingham’s city jail, was to “create a situation so crisis-packed” that the too-often-ignored boil of segregation would be opened and all of its “pus-flowing ugliness” exposed “to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion.”⁶

The idea of creating a public crisis was not merely a rhetorical goal for those in the retreat. Nor was the pursuit of nonviolent conflict simply a matter of having the proper moral conviction or spiritual resolve. Project C, as it was conceived at Dorchester and then developed through subsequent months of nuts-and-bolts planning, included detailed calculations. In order to force store owners and city officials to desegregate Birmingham’s downtown business district, the campaign would create an ambitious combination of several tactics that had been employed before: the economic pressure leveled against merchants during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the dramatic lunch-counter sit-ins that had exploded in cities such as Nashville in 1960, the pack-the-jails arrest strategy of Albany. This time, organizers would bring together these tactics to form a multistaged assault that sociologist and civil rights historian Aldon Morris would later dub “a carefully planned exercise in mass disruption.”⁷

King assigned Wyatt Walker, a cunning strategist and demanding administrator, to lead the preparations. Mapping the battlefield, Walker timed precisely how long it would take participants to walk from the movement’s 16th Street Baptist Church headquarters to the various stores and public facilities selected as the campaign’s primary, secondary, and tertiary targets. Likewise, SCLC organizers anticipated the probable legal moves of their opponents, weighing the costs of violating any court injunctions that might be handed down. They calculated the costs of city bail fees and made plans for how long arrested activists should stay in custody before being bailed out—their stay and release timed to best keep the jail cells filled. Walker and others projected the value of the business that would be lost to Birmingham store owners at different levels of boycott effectiveness, and they debated what losses would be convincing enough to make the business leaders remove the “Whites Only” signs from the fitting rooms and drinking fountains in their stores.⁸

The civil rights activists imagined that, with mass protest in Birmingham, they could crack the segregationists’ stoutest fortress—and thus open the floodgates for change nationally. If successful, King argued, the campaign “might well set the forces in motion to change the entire course of the drive for freedom and justice.”⁹

Before the fact, most people would have considered SCLC’s blueprint for confrontation in Birmingham to be outlandish. In January 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. had just turned thirty-four. It had been seven years since the success of the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott thrust him onto the national stage. In the time since, both conservative opponents and competing civil rights organizations had raised questions about the efficacy of his leadership. Some foundations that had funded the SCLC were dissatisfied, and the public did not have a clear sense of the organization’s direction.

Among those close to King, an awareness of their leader’s precarious standing was pervasive. Some undertook measures to compensate. Whereas SCLC staff members typically interacted with one another on a first-name basis, Walker insisted that they call their president “Dr. King” at all times. “This was important because he was so young—and looked younger,” writes Andrew Young. “If we didn’t show him an exaggerated respect, the concern was that others would not show it to him either.”¹⁰

Beyond the questions about King’s leadership, the very idea that a mass public “crisis” could be engineered—that a major uprising could emerge not as an unstructured product of an era’s zeitgeist but as a planned effort—was a suspect notion. Social movements in general were not held in high regard, and scholars of the time doubted nonviolent resistance in particular. They considered Gandhi’s example in India to have little application in a country like the United States, and they did not expect the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott to be replicated. In May 1963, Wyatt Walker explained in a speech in San Francisco:

It was interesting to note that sociologists and some prophets of doom said of Montgomery, “Well, this is just one of those sociological freaks, a phenomenon that will never happen again. Nonviolence can’t have its effect in America because we’re too Westernized. Our chromium-plated push button society won’t take it.” Or, “This discipline comes out of an Eastern culture where people are meditative and reflective and we’re too busy ripping and running, trying to make a living.”¹¹

In the wake of the Albany debacle, members of the national media were “pronouncing that the direct-action phase of the civil rights movement was over,” Andrew Young notes.¹²

And yet, when the Birmingham campaign was finally launched on April 3, 1963, the careful calculations of Project C were proven sound. Within just six weeks, the tensions simmering in Birmingham had exploded into an event that made headlines across the country. As historian Michael Kazin argues, the scenes of police dogs snapping at unarmed demonstrators and water cannons being opened on student marchers “convinced a plurality of whites, for the first time, to support the cause of black freedom.”¹³

Popular versions of the Birmingham story, which tend to focus only on the campaign’s climax, often skip over the preparations that began at Dorchester. But the implications of such planning are very important. The landmark civil rights uprising that took so much of the country by surprise was no sociological freak. Nor was it happenstance that a clash with segregationists put the normally hidden injustices of racism on stark public display, prompting a stunned Northern media to spread outrage nationally. To the contrary, these were the consequence of a premeditated strategy of conflict.

And it was not the last time that a strategy of this kind would be put to use.

“Spontaneous.” “Unplanned.” “Uncontrolled.” “Emotional.”

Whether it is a rush of resistance to dictatorship throughout the Middle East, the explosion of protests against corporate power in cities such as Seattle, a province-wide student revolt in Quebec, a million people spilling into the streets of Los Angeles to demand immigrant rights, a call for new elections in a former Soviet republic, an encampment on Wall Street that gives rise to hundreds of tent cities across the United States and beyond, or an insistent cry that #BlackLivesMatter, the perception is the same: when mass movements burst onto our television screens, the media portrays them as being as sudden and unmanageable as a viral epidemic or a prairie thunderstorm.

In 2011—a year that featured the Arab Spring, mass antiausterity demonstrations throughout Europe, and the emergence of the Occupy movement—Time magazine described those uprisings as “leaderless, amorphous, and spontaneous.” The Washington Post wrote of the wave of Middle Eastern protest as something that “spread like a virus” and “hits each country in a different and uncontrollable way.” And, according to the New York Times, the surge of citizen resistance was “beyond the scope of any intelligence services to predict.”¹⁴

Such characterizations, as it turns out, are not unusual. In 1999, when students and labor unions in Serbia challenged the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, the press commented on work stoppages “accompanied by spontaneous acts of civil disobedience across the country.” The Moscow Times wrote that the 2004 Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, a reaction to corruption and electoral fraud, “was, at its core, a spontaneous, emotional outburst by the Ukrainian people.” In 2006, when immigrant-led marches brought hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets of American cities, the Washington Post described it as “a spontaneous groundswell of activism.”¹⁵

Regarding the civil rights movement, Aldon Morris has pointed to the commonly held view that protesters were “reacting blindly to uncontrollable forces” and that the lunch-counter sit-ins “were a spontaneous collegiate phenomenon.” Indeed, the historical record is full of such depictions.¹⁶

But what if periods of mass, spontaneous uprising are neither as spontaneous nor as unbridled as they might at first appear? What if the fits of social change that burst into our headlines like flash storms can actually be forecast? What if one can read the clouds and understand their signs?

Or what if, in fact, it is possible to influence the weather?

For Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC organizers, the confrontation in Birmingham proved to be a tremendous boon—a validation of their belief that widespread, purposeful, nonviolent disruption could change the course of national politics. Victory in that city sent ripples throughout the country: in the two and a half months after they announced a settlement with Birmingham storeowners to begin desegregation, more than 750 civil rights protests took place in 186 American cities, leading to almost fifteen thousand arrests.¹⁷ And less than a year and a half after the SCLC’s campaign had commenced, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.

But this reversal of fortune leaves unanswered a crucial question: Why did Birmingham succeed while the attempted effort to end Jim Crow discrimination in Albany had so badly, so tragically, and so recently failed?

The problem in the thwarted Albany drive was not a lack of creative tactics. Like the Birmingham campaign, the movement took an innovative approach to combining sit-ins, boycotts, marches, mass arrests, and legal action. Albany was, in fact, notable for being the first time the civil rights movement deployed the full range of weapons in its arsenal of civil resistance. King would dub Albany “the most creative utilization” of nonviolent protest to date.¹⁸

And yet, despite this level of tactical sophistication, few could deny that the effort fell short. Even King—who publicly tried to put a positive spin on the Albany movement—acknowledged that, after more than a year of protest, “the people were left very depressed and in despair.” A regional director for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was more blunt: “Albany was successful,” the staffer quipped, “only if the objective was to go to jail.”¹⁹

Many factors played a part in the failure. In Albany, the SCLC had been drawn into a conflict it did not create. Local activists had already begun a diffuse, broad-based attack on the segregationist power structure without adequately analyzing their opponents’ weaknesses. As the NAACP’s backbiting comments suggest, there was rampant rivalry among civil rights organizations, with groups, including SNCC, allowing their disagreements with King and his staff to go public. Savvy city authorities, led by the personable and restrained police chief Laurie Pritchett, were able to make just enough arrests to quell dissent without overflowing their jails or overwhelming their police forces.

All of these factors contributed to a catastrophe. But together they pointed to a more fundamental problem: in Albany there was no clear plan for how to use the steady escalation of nonviolent conflict to make the pressure on racist structures unbearable. Missing was an overarching framework through which acts of personal sacrifice could be channeled into a concerted effort to increase tension and break the back of segregation at its weakest point. With Birmingham, that had changed.

“There is no tactical theory so neat that a revolutionary struggle for a share of power can be won merely by pressing a row of buttons,” King wrote in a perceptive reflection after Albany. “Human beings with all their faults and strengths constitute the mechanism of a social movement. They must make mistakes and learn from them, make more mistakes and learn anew.”²⁰

No magic formula exists for ousting Jim Crow or overthrowing a dictator. The dynamics of nonviolent conflict are subtle and complex. And, certainly, there is an element of unpredictability in any given mass mobilization. Yet Project C is part of a tradition that has sought to study, map, and apply the principles of an underappreciated art that is becoming one of the most influential forces in the world today—the art of unarmed uprising.

This book is the story of that art. It is about the type of strategizing that went into creating Project C and about why the architects of nonviolent upheaval in Birmingham thought their plan for escalation could work. It is about the decades-long tradition of experimentation that led up to Project C and about how the lessons from that tradition have continued to be refined in the years since, contributing to landmark social justice victories. Finally, it is about why the tradition of nonviolent action may yet reshape political life in the coming century.

This book is concerned with a specific phenomenon: momentum-driven mass mobilization. It contends that those who have most carefully studied these mobilizations—examining how to construct and sustain scenarios of widespread protest—come out of a tradition of strategic nonviolence. It argues that political observers watching the democratic upheavals of the twenty-first century should incorporate this tradition’s insights into their understanding of how social transformation happens. Those wishing to bring such upheavals into existence, meanwhile, do well to marry these insights with their existing approaches to leveraging change.

Nonviolence is often written off as obsolete, an idea that has been mostly forgotten and is largely irrelevant in global affairs. Yet, every time it is cast aside, strategic nonviolent action seems to reassert itself as a historic force. Without taking up weapons, and with little money and few traditional resources, people forming nonviolent movements succeed in upending the terms of public debate and shifting the direction of their countries’ politics. Nonviolence in this form is not passive. It is a strategy for confrontation.

Decade after decade, unarmed mobilizations have created defining moments. In the United States, these include the sit-down strikes in Michigan auto plants in the 1930s, the antiwar and campus free-speech movements of the 1960s, the welfare and women’s rights protests of the 1970s, the nuclear freeze campaigns and AIDS activism of the 1980s, direct action to protect old-growth forests and oppose corporate globalization in the 1990s, and demonstrations against the Iraq War in the early years of the new century. Internationally, strategic nonviolent conflict has been critical in helping to overthrow undemocratic rulers in a litany of countries, from Chile and Poland, to the Philippines and Serbia, to Benin and Tunisia.

When such outbreaks occur, they sometimes feel like whirlwinds of activity—rare and exceptional intrusions upon the norms of daily politics. They seem to be once-in-a-lifetime events. But, curiously, once you start looking for them, these once-in-a-lifetime uprisings start to appear constantly, in diverse forms and unexpected places. The year 2011, which saw the Arab Spring and the rise of the Occupy movement, was a time of peak activity. But the pace has only somewhat relented. Since then, eruptions of mass resistance have burst forth in Mexico, Turkey, Brazil, and Hong Kong, to cite just a few of the most prominent international cases. Within the United States, major demonstrations around climate change have taken place, and bold protests against racism and police brutality coalesced under the banner of #BlackLivesMatter.

The principles of momentum-based organizing sometimes seep into electoral politics. This was the case with the drive that coalesced in 2008 around a young senator, Barack Obama—an effort that borrowed grassroots mobilizing techniques from social movements and ended up astonishing those familiar with the typical practices of presidential races. On a smaller scale, momentum-driven campaigns have been used to make living wages for service workers a defining issue on college campuses and to fill state capitols with demonstrators demanding resignations from disgraced public officials. In instances where countless reports, exposés, and congressional speeches have failed, nonviolent conflict has succeeded in taking disregarded injustices and bringing them to the fore of popular consciousness.

That most pundits have little to say about social movement eruptions, no matter how often they seize the spotlight, reflects a bias in their thinking about how social change happens. The same analysts who invariably describe waves of unarmed revolt as spontaneous and uncontrolled spend endless hours speculating on which candidates might enter into elections that are still years away. They closely track developments in Congress, in the courts, and in the White House. They carefully study the arts of electioneering, lobbying, and legislative deal making—processes that dominate public understanding of US politics and that are shaped by elite values and practices. In doing so, they appeal to realism. This is how the system works, they tell us. This is how the sausage gets made.

But is this really how change happens? Many of the critical advances of the last century and a half—the end of slavery, women’s suffrage, the restriction of child labor and implementation of workplace safety standards, and the outlawing of many forms of discrimination—owe less to the legislative endgame that formalized acceptance of these causes and much more to the social movements that put them on the map. Likewise, on the international scene, an increasing number of unelected leaders have ceded power not as a result of traditional diplomacy or military maneuvering. Instead, they were ousted through the demands of unarmed mass mobilizations.

As important as it has proven itself, the strategic application of nonviolent force is poorly understood. Nonviolence is usually regarded as a philosophy or moral code. Much less frequently is it studied as a method of political conflict, disruption, and escalation. This is a missed opportunity. If we are perpetually surprised by unarmed uprising, if we decline to incorporate it into our view of how societies progress, then we pass up the chance to understand a critical phenomenon—and to harness its power.

For King, Birmingham was a revelation. Although the Montgomery Bus Boycott had been his baptism into mass action, he would write that it was only in watching marchers defy Bull Connor’s menacing troops that he felt, “for the first time, the pride and power of nonviolence.” Project C provided him with an epiphany about doing politics differently—for acting outside the bounds of traditional elections and lobbying and also outside the methodologies of conventional community or church-based organizing. It altered King’s life as a public figure, and it changed the way he saw the possibilities for social transformation within his lifetime.²¹

Over the past century, many others have had similar revelations. Experiencing the disruptive power of a major mobilization, they have decided to stop being surprised by waves of mass protest—to stop regarding these uprisings as uncontrollable sociological curiosities—and to start paying closer attention to their dynamics. These activists and scholars have become interested in examining how nonviolence works, and not simply as a moral philosophy. Some of them have sought to use strategies of nonviolent confrontation to provoke and guide moments of widespread citizen action.

As King cautioned, there is no neat row of buttons that can be pushed to oust Jim Crow or overthrow a dictator; the dynamics of nonviolent conflict are subtle and complex. Yet it is possible, as organizers in Birmingham insisted, to create situations so crisis-packed that long-ignored injustices are forced into the public spotlight. It is possible, as Aldon Morris asserted, to create planned exercises in mass disruption.

The course of strategic nonviolence’s development runs through many biographies. In part, it is a story of personal epiphanies. It concerns how a young Mohandas Gandhi, inspired by Tolstoy, put aside the training he had received as a lawyer to embrace a different type of action, a form of collective resistance that he saw as more powerful than the filing of petitions. It involves a scholar, Gene Sharp, initially immersed in the pacifist tradition, who discovered that nonviolence need not merely be a personal credo followed by a small community of people who reject all war but rather is something that can be adopted much more widely as a pragmatic weapon of struggle. And it is about Judi Bari, a feminist and union veteran, who reshaped the struggle to save California’s redwoods—bringing a new set of tactics to a radical environmental movement whose culture had been defined by an ethic of cowboy machismo.

Whether mass mobilizations are spearheaded by high-profile leaders or are propelled by people who go unheralded and unnamed in the history books, they can have a transformative impact on those who experience them. When people discover momentum-driven organizing as a new mode of action, it can fundamentally change how they approach some of the most basic questions of politics: How do you start a campaign, and how do you frame a demand for change? How do you respond to repression by the state, and how do you interact with the media? How can groups exploit the energy of an event that unexpectedly triggers a wave of interest in their cause, and when must they buckle down and institutionalize past gains? When is the right time for movements to declare victory, and what are the lasting changes that can result from their efforts?

The body of knowledge about strategic nonviolence that exists today has been passed between generations and honed over decades of trial and error. At times, this process has been disjointed and unruly. Activists on different continents and in different decades have independently reinvented key principles for guiding mass action, drawing on diverse political traditions and sources of inspiration. Many have acted with limited planning, and too rarely have they documented their learning. The creation of Project C was one occasion when those experimenting in nonviolence took time to map out key aspects of their strategy. Other instances of codification and reflection have occurred independently in movements throughout the world. Although haphazard, each represents a step forward in the collective accumulation of knowledge about the art of unarmed uprising.

Yet even as this slow accretion of knowledge has progressed informally for more than a century, it has recently been supplemented by a much more deliberate type of training and study. In an intriguing turn, a group of scholars and activists has decided that the development of strategic nonviolent conflict is vital enough that it should not be left to circumstance. And they have mobilized to do something about it.

Their story starts with a figure known as the Machiavelli of nonviolence.