Non-Violence Essay

I wrote this essay for my aforementioned non-violence class. It's not the best essay (it's the first I've written for a grade in several years), but I think it makes some interesting points.

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The Albany Campaign

On December 15th, 1961, Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Albany, Georgia at the behest of Dr. W.G. Anderson, leader of the Albany Movement. King had planned to only stay a short while in Albany, but was arrested the next day along with about 700 others. This began a series of non-violent protests and subsequent arrests. On August 10th, 1962, Martin Luther King Jr. called off all demonstrations and left Albany for the last time. The non-violent campaign discussed in the following paragraphs, however, is not that of Martin Luther King Jr., but that of Chief of Police Laurie Pritchett, who studied Gandhian and Kingsian non-violent tactics and tried to subvert them. This essay will discuss why Pritchett’s tactics were a resounding success as well as why they occupy a unique position within the history of non-violence.

“I did research - I found his method was non-violence, that his method was to fill the jails -same as uh, Gandhi in India.” So says Laurie Pritchett in a 1985 interview; ten years earlier, in another interview, Pritchett explained his actions thusly, “Well, as you remember, we had information that Dr. King was coming...And you know his philosophy was non-violence. So we were going on the same philosophy as that. My men would train on non-violence…The men were instructed that if they were spit upon, cussed, abused in any way of that nature, that they …would act in a non-violent approach in that.” Before we begin, it should be said that there were some violent incidents perpetrated by Albany police officers during this period. However, if this is to be used as an argument to invalidate Pritchett’s attempts at non-violence, then the same argument must be used against King. And Gandhi. And Jesus Christ, for that matter. No one of these was, or claimed to be, a perfect controller of human beings. There were violent incidents from both sides in Albany, and there are violent incidents in every non-violent campaign. Another argument leveled against Pritchett is that he was not truly non-violent because he did not practice non-violence as a way of life. I would respond that there is no “true” non-violence. I personally find Pritchett’s actions all the more interesting in that they were used purely as a political strategy, stripped of the usual moral, religious, or ethical accouterments. This is how most young people today perceive non-violence. With that out of the way, I will discuss Pritchett’s specific tactics.

To begin with, the police officers under Pritchett’s jurisdiction actually received formal non-violent training. No matter what they were not to use overt violence, no matter if they were spit on, verbally abused, targeted by thrown bottles, or what have you. In fact, Chief Pritchett adopted the methods used by SNCC to train his officers. Pritchett also prepared himself to subvert the usual tactic of filling the jails. Prior to King’s arrival, Pritchett sat down with a map and made a list of every jail within a sixty mile radius. He then negotiated their use, and though he arrested over two thousand demonstrators his jail was almost always empty. To ensure the safety of these demonstrators, Pritchett sent over his own officers trained in non-violence to keep in line those who had not been trained. With the police acting non-violently, King was denied the media and national attention that Gandhian non-violence requires and that King’s later campaigns in Birmingham and Selma provided in abundance. With the jails never full, Pritchett never reached a point where he was forced to acquiesce to King’s demands due to a negated capacity to arrest anyone. Pritchett also arranged once for King’s bail money to be paid, then required King to leave, thus taking away another staple of modern non-violence: that of the prisoner of conscience. Stymied at every turn, with no significant help coming from the media or from the White House, King agreed to call off the demonstrations upon his third release from jail after an extremely short sentence.

King’s defeat in Albany has been described in terms ranging from “an embarrassing failure” to “a superficial assessment” to an outright victory…for those activists who had been in Albany before King and who remained in Albany after he left. Nonetheless, King considered Albany a failure and it weighed heavily upon his mind as he continued on to Birmingham in his struggle for civil rights. Albany resulted in a major shift in strategy from King, who resolved that, “The mistake I made there was to protest against segregation generally rather than against a single and distinct facet of it.” He decided subsequently to focus on specific, symbolic victories. Unspoken, but apparent, is that he decided subsequently to focus on towns and cities that would guarantee the violence, and thus the media frenzy, that modern, political non-violence requires to be effective.

More even than Pritchett’s victory, or its subsequent effect on the strategy and future victories of the Civil Rights Movement, I find Pritchett’s actions in Albany to be worth discussing for two reasons. First, Pritchett’s Albany campaign is one of, perhaps the only examples of non-violence being used to fight non-violence. Second, this unique status reveals a fundamental flaw in Gandhian/Kingsian non-violence. Flaw is not quite what I mean, but it is the area that non-violence in the 21st century must refashion in order to be effective. The “flaw” is this: modern, political non-violence relies inherently upon violence. In describing Satyagraha Gandhi usually does so in terms of winning the heart of one’s opponent through one’s own suffering, of taking a blow but never giving one, etc. “To lay down one’s life for what one considers to be right is the very core of Satyagraha.” But what if one’s opponent is not inflicting suffering, not giving blows, not trying to kill?

In that case, it seems, the method flounders. King reeled in confusion when faced with a non-violent opponent, and then dove headlong into Birmingham, the most violently racist city in the country. Today there are hundreds of people and organizations in our country protesting non-violently, inspired by Gandhi and King, who are largely accomplishing nothing because the American government rarely reacts to them. Non-violence as a religious or moral way of life, of course, is not affected by these considerations. But non-violence as a political weapon, which is the defining characteristic of modern non-violence, must face this problem head-on if it is to remain potent in the 21st century.

Sources and Citations
1. “Interview with Laurie Pritchett”, Eyes on the Prize, 11-07-1985.
2. “Interview with Laurie Pritchett”, Southern Oral History Program Collection, 04-23-1976.
3. “Martin Luther King Jr.’s Style of Leadership” by Dr. Peter J. Ling.
4. Quote from Howard Zinn, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albany_Movement
5. King, Martin Luther. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. New York: Warner Books, 1998
6. Gandhi, Mohandas K. Gandhi on Non-Violence. New York: New Directions, 1965.