MLK and violence

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/01/dont-criticize-black-lives-matter-for-provoking-violence-the-civil-rights-movement-did-too/

The clergymen urged black Americans to reject King’s leadership and adopt peaceful means to achieve racial equality. King’s “nonviolent” movement, they said, was anything but.

King’s response, written while he was detained in Alabama, was the famous “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” He wrote that, in fighting racial injustice, the goal of his demonstrations was “so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.” In other words, violence was not something that simply happened to activists; they invited it. Violence was critical to the success of the 1960s civil rights movement, as it has been to every step of racial progress in U.S. history.

the civil rights movement wasn’t seen as nonviolent in its day — and for good reason. The most jarring evidence of this came just a month after King’s Birmingham jail letter. In May 1963, movement organizers assembled black children , some still in pigtails, to march through the streets of Birmingham and confront Bull Connor’s violent police force. It was a controversial tactic within the movement, but organizers must have known that images of jailed, beaten and cowering children would affect hearts, force a response from officials and move the movement toward its goals.

“They couldn’t have been ignorant of the terrible response,” says King biographer and New York University historian David Levering Lewis. “King and his inner circle appreciated the probable certainty of violence on the part of the establishment to trigger responses that they wanted, in terms of legislation and policies.” The children called it “D-Day.”

Connor didn’t disappoint. He attacked the marchers with German shepherds and baton-wielding policemen. Connor’s army funneled hundreds of children and teenagers into overcrowded jail cells. Still, the kids returned to the streets the next day. And the day after that. Malcolm X, whom history treats as the movement’s violent alter ego, criticized King for the event, saying that “real men don’t put their children on the firing line.” King, on the other hand, called it “one of the wisest moves we made.”

The Children’s Crusade changed the way the movement was covered by the press. Where the crushing effects of segregated schools hadn’t won hearts, where brutal, state-sanctioned beatings of hymn-singing black men and women hadn’t gained sympathy, the nation couldn’t ignore the images of children recoiling from the raised batons of sneering police officers. Only the most distressing type of violence worked.

This was King’s strategy. “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed,” he said — an aggressive and confrontational stance that Americans rejected at the time and have forgotten today.