Black Lives Matter protests have produced one spectacle after another. Peaceful demonstrations in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri , were followed by riots in which police and activists clashed. Many Americans, weaned on tales of how 20th-century civil rights leaders used nonviolent …show more content…
Protesters who marched in the streets of America’s most racist cities and towns were attacked by police dogs, their clothing tattered by high-pressure fire hoses, and their lives were taken by police officers’ bullets. Alarmed by what they saw, eight liberal, white clergymen wrote a public statement in 1963, calling King’s movement foolish and counterproductive. They sympathized with his cause but said his actions were too aggressive, too disruptive and drove people to violent uprising. 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 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. …show more content…
King, likewise, faced admonishment for provoking riots and isolating those sympathetic to his cause with his “excessive” demonstrations. Progressive white Americans, who distinguished themselves from the “bigots and hatemongers” in the South, turned against King when he came into their de facto segregated neighborhoods to protest racist housing practices — in much the same way Bernie Sanders supporters slammed the “extreme” tactics of activists who took the presidential candidate’s stage in August to demand that he address systemic racism.
Black Lives Matter has more in common with the civil rights movement than we’d like to acknowledge. It fights the same injustices and encounters the same resistance. The truth is, if you oppose Black Lives Matter’s tactics, you would have abhorred