Nonviolent Protest
From the late 1950s to about 1964, nonviolent protest and civil disobedience were the chief tactics of the civil rights movement. The basic idea was that individuals had a moral duty to disobey the law when it was clearly unjust. This was a strategy that had been applied many times historically in a variety of social settings, with its most notable success occurring in the 1940s in India, where Mahatma Gandhi led the movement for independence from Britain (Sibley, 1963). The technique was to actively oppose the law but in a peaceful fashion. The proponents of nonviolent protest, Martin Luther King Jr. in particular, emphasized that it was necessary to win over the opposition through friendship and understanding, not through defeat or humiliation. Those participating in sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, freedom marches, or freedom rides were therefore prepared to accept suffering without retaliating in kind (King, 1964). Hostile white retaliation against demonstrators and civil rights workers, much of it in the South carried out by civil authorities, included shootings, beatings, fire bombings, and even killings. A pivotal year was 1963, when several key events occurred. Police brutally suppressed black demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama; a Birmingham church was firebombed, killing four black children; and National Guardsmen were used to carry out the court-ordered desegregation of the University of Alabama. These events were given prominent media attention and galvanized public and governmental support for black civil rights. This supportive mood climaxed in the summer with a march on Washington of more than two hundred thousand people. One year later, the most comprehensive civil rights measure since the Civil War was enacted, prohibiting discrimination in voting, public facilities, schools, courts, and employment. And in 1965, the Voting Rights Act was passed, ending the systematic disenfranchisement of southern blacks.
