Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s advocacy of nonviolence and natural law

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on Non-Violence and Natural Law

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is internationally recognized for his iconic leadership of the Civil Rights Movement, which resulted in a furthering of social justice and fairness for people of color. Moreover, the work of King and his movement resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. One of the key strategies that King embraced -- in addition to his soaring oratory, his charisma and his skills as a creative writer -- was the use of nonviolence. This paper reviews and critically evaluates his use of -- and advocacy of -- nonviolence in social change movements, and his use of natural law.

King's Education (Academics / Social Injustice)

In A.L. Herman's book, Community, Violence, & Peace, he presents sections on Gandhi, Buddha, Leopold and King. On page 120 Herman explains that King had passed the entrance exam to get into Atlanta's prestigious Morehouse College "at the age of fifteen without graduating from high school." In order to pay his way through college, King worked on a tobacco farm in Connecticut, where he "expressly enjoyed the personal and social freedom" that a black man could experience in New England (he could sit anywhere in restaurants and movie theaters) (Herman, 120).

However, on his way back to Atlanta from New England, the train he was taking entered Virginia and, as he did earlier on the trip, he thought he could walk into the dining car and find a seat to his liking. But when the waiter "led him to a rear table and pulled a curtain down to shield the white passengers from his presence," he knew he was back in the segregated South (Herman, 120). He stared at the curtain, incredulous that others "would find him so offensive," Herman wrote. "I felt as though the curtain had dropped on my selfhood," King remarked later to a friend (Herman, 120). There is no verification that this was a seminal moment for King, and certainly there were many, many moments and incidents in his young years when it became obvious to him that the evil institution of segregation needed to be challenged.

Herman made it clear -- and this is an important fact to remember when considering King's remarkable legacy -- that when King later graduated from Morehouse College and was lined up to attend Crozer Seminary, he wasn't thinking big picture that he would become a pivotal mover and shaker in the civil rights effort. He just intended "…to become a well-educated Christian minister" (Herman, 120).

Author Lerone Bennett Jr. has written a biography of King, and he adds to the narrative as to how King first came to be interested in Gandhi. Bennett claims that during King's senior year at Crozer Theological Seminary he read with great interest Reverend Walter Rauschenbusch's book Christianity and the Social Crisis. In that text the minister applied the "social principles of Jesus to the problems of the modern world" (Bennett, 1968, pp. 36-37). King later said that Rauschenbush's work "…left an indelible imprint on my thinking." The pivotal theme of the Rauschenbush book was that the church "should take a direct, active role in the struggle for social justice," and this was very poignant for King, and according to Bennett became "a pivotal element" in King's personal belief and philosophy (37).

Another event actually took place prior to King hearing a lecture (explained in the next section of this paper) about Gandhi; it was a lecture by a "Christian rebel" named A.J. Muste who championed a "nonviolent approach" to social change. King though was not "overly impressed" with Muste at that time in his educational career (in 1950) because the idea of "turn the other cheek" for King was only valid in conflicts between two people, and not valid when racial groups and nations were in conflict.

The Literature -- King Fashions a Campaign Based on Gandhi's Movement

"I feel that this way of nonviolence is vital because it is the only way to reestablish the broken community. It… seeks to implement the just law by appealing to the conscience of the great decent majority who through blindness, fear, pride, or irrationality have allowed their consciences to sleep…" King's speech on "The Broken Community" presented before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., July, 1962 (Herman, 139).

While King wholeheartedly advocated the use of nonviolent resistance to oppression, he also -- on numerous occasions -- employed his talent for descriptive language that occasionally eschewed hot-button terms like "segregation," "Jim Crow," and "racism." While attending a church conference in Nashville in December, 1962, King avoided using the term "desegregation" and instead invoked the concept of "integration" for the South. As Herman writes on page 140, King had a vision -- through the implementation of nonviolence -- of an "integrated community… an organically unified body." King offered the idea that "Integration is creative, and is therefore more profound and far-reaching than desegregation… integration is genuine intergroup, interpersonal… the ultimate goal of our national community" (Herman, 140).

These above-mentioned precepts reflect the philosophical approach to King's lofty commitment to peaceful solutions. In that same presentation to church leaders in Nashville, King explained his idea for an "organically integrated community" which can only be achieved through "altruistic love" (Herman, 140).

"The universe is so structured that things do not quite work out rightly if men are not diligent in their concern for others," King reminded his audience. "The self cannot be self without other selves," he continued. "All life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny" (Herman, 140). In public speaking situations King was clearly, emphatically distancing himself from the shrill rhetoric of black leaders like Stokely Carmichael, best remembered for launching the phrase "Black Power," which "ignited a white backlash" and "alarmed an older generation of civil rights leaders," including King (Kaufman, 1998). Juxtaposed to King's sensitive embrace of phrases like "the beloved community," Carmichael's rhetoric was angry, militant, and to some degree inspired the Black Panther movement and their provocative image of black berets, raised fists, and men with guns.

"When you talk of black power, you talk of building a movement that will smash everything Western civilization has created," Carmichael said in a 1967 speech (Kaufman, p. 4). He lashed out at blacks and whites that seemed satisfied to let the status quo of segregation continue unchallenged. "We are preparing groups of urban guerrillas for our defense in the cities," he told the media. "It is going to be a fight to the death" (Kaufman, p. 4). In fact King denounced -- without naming Carmichael or the Black Panthers -- the idea of using violence and divisive oratory. "Only a refusal to hate or kill can put an end to the chain of violence in the world and lead us toward a community where men can live together without fear," he wrote in Ebony magazine in 1966 (Herman, 141).

Creating a "beloved community" requires a "qualitative change in our souls as well as a qualitative change in our lives," he penned in Ebony, which in hindsight is far more elegant and thoughtful than the hostile, inflammatory threats that the likes of Carmichael put forward through the media. That said, while the radical, inflammatory rhetoric and the provocative brandishing of weapons by Black Panthers in the inner cities -- circa 1960s -- cannot be justified on strictly legal grounds, in hindsight, given the terrible conditions and lack of political support in Washington, D.C., those actions can be understood and even rationalized as morally defensible in 2011.

It should be emphasized that nonviolence was not always the path that blacks in Mississippi chose; in Michael K. Honey's book (Going Down Jericho Road) the author reports that during civil rights demonstrations in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and elsewhere in the state, "Black Mississippians often were armed and most were not ideologically committed to nonviolence" (Honey, 2007, p. 84). King had no problem with black residents "protecting their homes and families" albeit he continued to speak out advocating nonviolence.

In the summer of 1964 ("Freedom Summer" in the civil rights movement) "A mob of whites [in Philadelphia, Mississippi] attacked the marchers, with King among them." King continued to preach against violence but the next day in Philadelphia he was confronted by the police and elsewhere in the community "blacks exchanged gunfire with several carloads of marauding whites" that had fired rounds into the headquarters of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (Honey, 85). What comes across in Honey's book is the coolness, the calm that King showed in his deportment, even in the face of violence and chaos. It seemed to some observers that whites "…largely ignored King's nonviolent demands except when they feared a credible threat of counter-violence by blacks" (Honey, 86).

Honey writes that a twenty-year-old young man named Coby Smith had come to Mississippi with his dad, a union activist, and got into the thick of the demonstrations and the activities that King participated in behind closed doors with fellow marchers. Smith said that notwithstanding King's passion for nonviolence, King "…never backed down from a fight." Smith also noticed that younger blacks tended to side with Carmichael's rhetoric of black power while older protestors went along with King. But King did some cooperative work with Carmichael, according to Honey. Meanwhile King "never argued that everyone had to be a pacifist," Honey explained (87-88) and moreover King conceded that individuals had the right to defend themselves. That said, King also insisted that the movement for racial justice could not afford the "…luxury of publicly taking up weapons or speaking the language of violence" (88). King was media savvy, and he knew if televised images of violence were shown around the country, who started it, and who was responsible for it, would be obscured. The movement thereby would "lose both its moral standing and its appeal to public opinion and government leaders," Honey continued (88).

The mass media played up the divide within the movement -- nonviolence vs. violence -- far beyond what that division actually was in reality, Honey writes on page 88. And while in Chicago, King actually convinced some tough street gang individuals that they could be militant, they could be disruptive and challenging and still not be violent, Honey explains. But the nonviolent training these young black men received didn't matter in the end; in July 1966 a "major riot broke out" and some 5,000 rock-throwing working class and middle class whites "reacted violently to his call for integration," Honey continues on page 88. In that riot, King was hit in the head with a rock.

Dr. Lawrence Edward Carter, Sr. writes in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy that King found in Gandhi's nonviolent resistance to oppression "…a consistency between the principles of personalism and the inherent respect for the person in the method of nonviolence as a strategy and a way of life" (Carter, 2006, p. 220). (When Carter uses the term "personalism" he is relating to the idealistic theory that asserts that the basic features of human personality -- like consciousness, self-determination, and self-identity -- make up the substance of all reality for that person.) King believed that "…what effects one directly affects all indirectly," according to Carter (221). The thought that, "I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be," is what King also came to understand within the Gandhian approach (Carter, 221).

The individual person -- in King's belief -- is the "individual expression of the Love-Intelligence that grounds the universe," and this potential to love through intelligence is "latent in every person," Carter continues (221). It was this latent power that King was appealing to when he broke "the unjust segregation laws"; he was "appealing to the conscience of the segregator" and demonstrating the "highest respect for the humanity of his oppressors by his willingness to accept the penalty for his actions" (Carter, 221). The minds of "many white and black Americans" became what William James referred to as "a theater of simultaneous possibilities" as they watched closely the nonviolent personalism of King, Carter concludes.

While Carter's explanations and observations about King and his personalism are perhaps a bit esoteric to the layperson, he has credibility when it comes to the life and times of Dr. King. In fact, in 1958, King "privately recruited" Carter as a 10th grader to attend Morehouse College; and twenty-one years later, Carter became "the first Dean of the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel" and today he is a tenured Professor of Religion and College Curator at Morehouse (Morehouse College, 2010).

King read widely in order to come to a full understanding of how nonviolence can help bring about social change, and one of the books he read was The Power of Nonviolence by Richard Gregg. According to author John J. Ansbro, Gregg lived in India from 1925 to 1929, and he was close to Gandhi for several months during that period of time. Gregg's interpretation of Gandhi's strategy is that when an assailant "encounters no violent resistance from his victim, he loses the moral support that such resistance would give him" (Ansbro, 1982, p. 147). But if the victim did use violence against the assailant, then the assailant could "enjoy the moral reassurance that his attack is morally acceptable," according to Ansbro's reading of Gregg's theory. The attack would become morally acceptable because in effect "the victim would be assigning the same value to violence as the assailant" (Ansbro, 147).

On the other hand, if the victim eschews a violent response, the assailant reportedly is "startled" and becomes less than certain about his own values; the assailant then realizes that the courage shown by his nonviolent opponent "is higher than physical bravery and is a stronger realization of human nature," according to Gregg's beliefs (Ansbro, 147). This sounds very good in theory, and clearly Gregg gleaned this concept from his time studying Gandhi, but one has to wonder if the perpetrator would really have the presence of mind to view his intended victim as having courage. In the best of all worlds, perhaps, this scenario would be in evidence. But it would seem that some of the violent attackers of today -- take the megalomaniac that cold-bloodedly murdered over 60 young people in Norway in July, 2011, for example -- wouldn't be the least bit impressed with a nonviolent response from an intended victim. Perhaps Gregg was alluding to a protest demonstration in which the assailant is a law enforcement officer wielding a Billy club, and rather than resisting or fighting back, the demonstrator uses nonviolent tactics and simply resists arrest. Still, on page 148 of Ansbro's book, the Gregg theory continues; in contrast to the perpetrator, Ansbro writes, the nonviolent resister "is in a position of poise and power."

What Gregg has laid out as to why nonviolence works and aggression fails seems remarkably naive. In today's violent world, some trainers show demonstrators how to defend themselves, how to fight back and how to make sure someone is taking video of the entire action for later use in possible litigation or prosecution. But in his passion to bring home what King has learned from Gandhi, Gregg lists ten reasons why the position of the person resisting violence is "superior" (Ansbro, 148). Several of them are logical; others are a stretch.

Because King read and responded to Gregg's theories, this paper will (as succinctly as possible) report Gregg's ten reasons: a) the nonviolent person has an advantage because the assailant doesn't know how to react; b) the nonviolent person "is in control of the process"; c) the nonviolent person enhances his energy by his commitment to nonviolence; d) because of his sense of direction he is "not in as receptive a state as his assailant"; e) his willingness to suffer indicates his "sincerity" which is "impressive and moving"; f) the nonviolent resistance of the victim "leads the assailant to shame"; g) the moral advantage goes to the nonviolent person as the public sympathizes with him; h) the assailant may see that his kind of power "is disadvantageous" and he may sense he's not as powerful as he thought; i) the nonviolent resister removes "fear and anger" from the assailant; and j) the assailant may well abandon is "pride, contempt, and anxiety" (Ansbro, 148-49).

The Literature -- King and Natural Law

In most scholarly databases, even in Google's basic search technology, when one searches for "Natural Law" and "Martin Luther King, Jr.," the most frequent document to come up is King's "Letter from the Birmingham Jail." The reason this letter is linked to natural law is quite basic: natural law theory holds that "there are moral laws…. written into the fabric of existence" and humans are not able to create what is "ultimately right or wrong, good or evil," according to the Dane Scott, Director of the Center for Ethics at the University of Montana. Right and wrong -- and good and evil -- are only to be discovered "as objective truths" because these are moral laws that supercede laws instituted by society. Clearly the white ministers in Birmingham, Alabama, were siding with the man-made laws and not embracing natural law as defined in this section.

Thomas Jefferson fully understood the concept of natural law when he wrote the preamble to the Declaration of Independence ("…We hold these truths to be self-evident… that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…"). Indeed, Jefferson knew that natural law theory holds that these truths are accorded "…for all people at all times in all places" (Scott, p. 2). And King understood natural law in the sense that civil disobedience is justified because there are "…two kinds of laws: there are just and unjust laws… [and] an unjust law is no law at all," King wrote (Bass, 2001).

"An unjust law is out of harmony with the moral law," King explained (Scott, p. 2). "Any law the uplifts the human personality is just. Any law that degrades the human personality is unjust," King asserted (Scott, p. 2).

In his letter, King argued that his people have "waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our constitutional and God-given rights"; he insisted that a "just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God" (King, 1963). "To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law" (King, 1963). A researcher critiquing the letter King wrote from the jail in Birmingham cannot help but respect the way he so brilliantly rebuked the supposed legitimacy of the white clergy in Birmingham. His words were stingingly honest and they struck at the truth like an arrow crisply penetrating the bulls-eye in a big target. He cajoled and he used his usual descriptive narrative to call the ministers out creatively.

To wit, he recalled driving through the region in the fall and seeing the "beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward." He remembered asking himself "over and over… what kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?" (King, 1963). Typically of King, he knew how to level criticism with style, and although in his letter he said he had hoped to meet with some of the clergy in Birmingham, reports from journalists following his release from jail indicate he made no attempt to contact any of them. One can hardly blame him.

Conclusion

This paper has chronicled the life and times of King with specific reference to his belief in nonviolence and his application of natural law. There are many volumes of respected literature that remain to be explored in the effort to detail King's part in the civil rights movement vis-a-vis the use of Gandhian strategies of nonviolence. But this paper takes a good first step in presenting this iconic leader's vision for a nation where as King famously said, people are judged not by the color of their skin but by the "content of their character."