The most successful nonviolent campaign, in my opinion

Out of the six episodes and nonviolent campaigns viewed in the documentary, I would have to say that the most successful nonviolent campaign would have to be the sit-ins performed by African-American students in Nashville, TN. In the readings completed for class, one of the steps stressed by Gandhi was preparation. This is something that the students did beautifully. They spent months in nonviolent workshops where they practiced being harassed, they learned how to resist the urge to fight back. The preparation taken by Lawson and the students he taught exceeded what was probably necessary. This preparation, however, prepared the students to be arrested, harassed, and taught the students that though they may be harassed and thrown into jail, that they are fighting for something that is more important than all that. The students dressed well, they behaved themselves, and the violence that met those students during those sit-ins opened the eyes of not only a city, but a nation. The persistence of the students, the peaceful form of protest, and the overall behavior of the campaign greatly benefited the students and the city of Nashville. The students protested in what I would consider one of the best examples of nonviolent action. They took the methods they learned from Lawson and from Gandhi and adapted them so that the methods fit their needs.

On the "A force more powerful" website, I think the author of the page puts why this campaign was successful in better words than I possibly could.

"The American civil rights campaigners of the 1960s contributed one other thing to the power of nonviolent resistance in the final third of the twentieth century. Because they were conscious that nonviolent sanctions had been successful earlier in history, and because they were convinced that the use of these sanctions had intrinsic advantages in resisting oppression, their success conferred on nonviolent action a new aura of effectiveness that it had never before possessed. Not only did the mass media popularize the story of what was done in the American South – they universalized the impression that nonviolent force could be more powerful."

"In the United States, that force transformed the social fabric and political direction of the nation. In Nashville and in other southern communities, the sit-ins separated white leaders who had no deep interest in preserving segregation from those who did; the most ambivalent elements of the old order were detached from the most intransigent. The Freedom Rides played out on a larger stage – the riders destabilized the balance of interests that kept the American system of apartheid in place, by provoking the national government to act against its institutions and practices. The quickest way for civil rights activists to make headway in the Deep South was to nationalize the struggle by igniting crises that would draw federal intervention. 'The key to everything,' Martin Luther King declared in the early 1960s, 'is federal commitment.'"

"The civil rights movement followed a simple logic: It mobilized black people behind nonviolent sanctions that compelled the nation to change. Martin Luther King's declaration on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 that he had a dream of racial equality capped the largest nonviolent demonstration of the postwar period in America, the March on Washington. In the wake of President Kennedy's assassination later that year, a white southerner, Lyndon Johnson, moved into the White House and drove the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into the annals of human liberation – as Dr. King and his legions drove their spirit outward to the world."

The sit-ins in Nashville didn't just desegregate Nashville, they were the catalyst to a slew of other nonviolent civil rights movements. It was their ability to prepare extensively and peacefully, even in the face of danger and violence, protest and earn their rights that makes this campaign, in my opinion, the most successful.


photo courtesy of: nyu.edu