US civil right movement
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NONVIOLENCE TRAINING DURING THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
By Joanne Sheehan
In 1945 the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) became the first organization to develop nonviolence trainings in preparation for involvement in the civil rights movement. Many of the founders were radical pacifists who developed their ideas during their imprisonment for refusing to fight in World War II.
According to trainer-historian Charles Walker, “[War resisters] George Houser and Bayard Rustin began a series of workshops that foreshadowed methods used in today’s training: role-playing, sociodrama, group decision-making, and action as the training milieu.” (Training for Nonviolent Action: Some History, Analysis, Reports of Surveys, Center for Nonviolent Conflict Resolution, Haverford College, PA, 1972.) For 10 years beginning in 1947, CORE ran month-long training workshops in Washington, DC. Participants learned theories and skills in nonviolence and organizing, with the goal of breaking segregation in the capital area. By the time the CORE workshops ceased, the pacifist resistance community Peacemakers was holding “Orientation Programs in Nonviolence” across the country, which they continued through the early 1970s.
Early in the civil rights movement, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference based its preparation for nonviolent action campaigns such as the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott on African- American religious traditions. At mass meetings held in local churches, Martin Luther King, Jr. and others lectured on nonviolence. Community spirit and the nonviolent discipline were strengthened through singing and prayer. As civil disobedience became a crucial part of the civil rights movement, training was developed that included role-plays and the signing of a pledge to remain nonviolent. Peace and civil rights activists, who shared common philosophical roots, trainers and techniques, worked together.
Barbara Deming, who would become the country’s preeminent theorist of feminism and nonviolence, was introduced to training and direct action in the summer of 1960. On the back cover of a borrowed copy of Liberation magazine, Deming read about a 16-day training program in nonviolent methods scheduled to take place in New London, CT, where the militant pacifist Committee for Nonviolent Action was preparing for a campaign against the production of Polaris submarines. Later that year, she described the experience in her book, Revolution and Equilibrium. “When I first learned about it through chance, I decided to attend for perhaps a day,” she wrote. Instead, she spent the whole 16 days with those who were “experimenting with nonviolence.”
Then, in 1962, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the New York Society of Friends organized the meeting they called the Nyack Consultation on Training for Nonviolent Action. Twenty-five peace and civil rights activists planned extensive training programs in the first such gathering on nonviolence training the nation had seen.
It would take such extensive trainings to prepare civil rights workers for the violence they would encounter in the South. Participants in the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964 began with a two-week training in Ohio. The book A Manual for Direct Action by Martin Oppenheimer and noted trainer George Lakey was written for that workshop. The Poor People’s Campaign of 1968 held training programs for marchers, marshals and support people, and a “training tent” at Resurrection City—the “city” of tents on the Washington Mall—featured training workshops.
Excerpted from Decades of Nonviolence Training: Practicing Nonviolence by Joanne Sheehan from the Nonviolent Activist, July-August 1998.
