I'm in awe of how we ran historical revisionism on the civil rights movement so bad that people truly believe it was quiet self-sacrifcial non-disruptive christ-like activism that forced progress and not — like — the incredible economic pressure of boycotts and outbreaks of illegal civil disobedience
Yapping to the choir but eughhh it burns me up girl effective protests have to be loud and inconvenient for change to happen because silent cries die in the dark that's the entire pointtt
Also, a lot of the so called harmless examples used for peaceful protests were specifically supposed to be disruptive as all hell. Like, take sit-ins, for example. What you were probably told is that black people just refused to leave white only establishments to make a point.
But how they actually worked was manipulating racist policies to cause as much of a delay as possible. They'd sit down at the bar to order (that's how those restaurants worked, you had to sit down to order and there weren't many tables) and when the waiter said they couldn't serve them, they'd respond that they would wait until they could be served. And then all their friends who they organized this with would do the same, and they would sit there at every seat until they're holding up the whole line. Then nobody could order and the restaurant was forced to either close, serve them, or try and fail to work around them. It wasn't just to make a point, it was to cost them money and time.
Even what was framed as "quiet peaceful protest" was actually very disruptive both socially and economically.
Does this look quiet, peaceful, nondisruptive?
And the struggle didn't stop after formal integration, once the Civil Rights act had passed. Because even when they are legally required to serve you, they can make you really fucking uncomfortable and threaten you and the cops probably will take their side.
For one example, there was a cafe that would serve Black people, but would then publicly break the dishes so that no white customer would ever have to eat off a dish a Black person had eaten off of. This was done publicly, right as the Black diner was done eating. The waitress takes the plate and smashes it. This is a signal both to the white diners "see, we hate them just as much as you do, you're safe here" and also a threat of violence to the Black diners. "If you're not careful we'll smash you just like we did this plate."
But at the same time, if Black people go there and eat every day ... how long before the cafe can't afford to do that? How long before they have broken so many dishes that it's eating into their profits? How long before the white diners start getting used to eating alongside Black people and simply don't care as much any longer, or start getting annoyed at the noise and fuss and mess?
Black people eating in white establishments was loud, inconvenient, and disruptive. Because that's the nature of challenging the status quo.
All of this, plus a couple of additional thoughts:
1. Folks in these movements trained. They were disruptive and they were strategic about it and they trained so that they could stay calm in terrifying situations and create the targeted disruptions they wanted to create and not get goaded into deviating from that. Absolutely badass.
2. Not at all a criticism of OP because I think their description of people thinking it was "quiet self-sacrificial non-disruptive christ-like activism" is dead on, but I think that description itself speaks to the same kind of revisionism re: the Christ of the Gospels and how disruptive he was and why, and it's important to remember that, especially in this era of renewed christofascism. Rev. Dr. King was a prophet and you will never convince me otherwise.
As I told my students a few weeks ago:
Nonviolence is not a goal, it is a strategy. A deliberate strategy at a calculated time in response to violence of the oppressor, which can be effective if it shames the perpetrators. See: why Selma or Montgomery was chosen by the SCLC (they had the most racist unhinged sheriffs who would deploy maximum force, which got shown on nationwide broadcasts and finally moved the public).
Nonviolence doesn’t mean you don’t carry weapons if necessary, as many organizers in Selma did. Nonviolence doesn’t mean that you accept that people will throw bombs into your family’s home, as they did to MLK.
And yes, the absurd simplification and bastardization of this strategy is deliberate. It went from being a tool for fighting for liberation to being a justification for more violence and oppression used against future generations of protestors who didn’t meet the standard of perfectly obedient nonviolent non disruptive protestors. Which of course there is no such thing.
And it’s all a lie. Know that people in the movement, at the time, were called criminals, because they knowingly and deliberately broke laws with the idea that they’d get arrested. Know that most of the country hated King at the time of his death. Know that no movement demanding change from the system will ever be loved by those in power.
once again I feel I must mention Erica Chenoweth & Maria J. Stephan's "Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict".
For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns ofnonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as theirviolent counterparts
