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Groups like Black Panthers and associates of Malcom X were arming up and rearing up to back up their wishes with violence. King certainly gets the credit for oratory influence, but I think a lot of the obsession on overrepresenting it is white washed non-violence 'protest and vote harder' nonsense that the history books like to push hardest when giving role models to the youth in schools. So people like King became elevated but omit the part that there was a very real looming rod waiting and the carrot King offered was only half of the equation.

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I think the underappreciated part isn't "violence vs non-violence", but the role that malcolm x and black pathners actually played.

They weren't primarily organizing armed revolt.. it was more about the idea that they were articulating moral clarity. They were, in the most credible way, refusing to accept endless delay.

This allowed them to shift the baseline of what was politically tolerable.

In that sense, the movements worked collectively because of a kind of good-cop/bad-cop dynamic. MLK JR offered a path to reform that felt (to some) constructive and legitimate _because_ there was a visible alternative that many people udnerstood as worse.

I think violence is already far to prominent today, but I think successful movements do need both moral persuasion (if morality is still a thing that persuades) and _also_ a credible way of making inaction feel unsafe.

> good-cop/bad-cop

The first essay in "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" deals with this dichotomy and how it's been used many times. Great read.

I think we also shouldn't sell the nonviolence short. It wasn't merely nonviolence. It was subjecting yourself openly to state violence and not resisting. It was letting the brutality of the state be made manifest as it washed over you. As the cops abused and beat people who were not responding even remotely in kind.

That was part of Malcolm's moral clarity, though in the alternative. He suggested it was immoral to subject yourself or people you loved to such an exercise, tantamount to one of self immolation.

Malcolm X essentially advocated a system of sovereignty not unlike the American founders, who of course were violent, not nonviolent.

In that way MLK JR really was America's Christ. He was willing to be nailed to the cross if it meant bending the arc towards justice.

You argument is intuitive but it is also very wrong.

In the face of violence, human groups tend to become tighter and more authoritarian with less room for dissenting voices. If you believe that the State was really afraid of revolutionary violence you are terribly misguided, repressing violence with violence is one of the State most ancient task, what all States are most prepared for and good at. Only in rare cases where there is a legitimacy crisis and/or a repressive apparatus unwillingness to do its job, only then regime change may happen.

> Groups like Black Panthers...

This is a little ahistoric, to the point where I'd appreciate if you provided scholarly sources about your overall argument.

This is years before the founders of the Black Panther Party went to college:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party

interesting to ponder is whether violence alone would have had a similar positive outcome?

I think I can hold in my head two things: prefer changing minds; realize that major changes are often made real by violence.

However, I would hesitate to encourage violence. I hope you also.

The civil rights movement was not a single‑track nonviolent morality thing, and the way it’s taught does often flatten it into something safe, palatable and politically convenient

Thank you, everyone always likes to harp on about non-violent resistance, but that really only works when there is a further threat behind not accepting the non-violent demands.

That seems to have become the received wisdom on the subject in certain circles but I do wonder how strong the evidence of this dynamic actually is.

> it is white washed non-violence 'protest and vote harder' nonsense that the history books like to push

My family is largely [EDIT: South Asian] Indian. It’s really not nonsense.

> there was a very real looming rod waiting

The rod was thinly-veiled racial violence and domestic terrorism. It would have been a route towards exterminationist rhetoric and potentially action on both sides. Not civil rights.

Keep in mind, while King was in jail America was in its own telling losing the Cold War. We were behind in space. We drew a stalemate in Korea and were getting routed in Vietnam. A year earlier the Cuban missile crisis had been narrowly averted through diplomacy. King vs. Malcolm is a textbook illustration of the downsides of escalating to violence as a political tool. (And the upsides of refraining from it even if your adversary embraces it.)

If the Indians would have gone the King route alone rather than being on reservations they'd have been annihilated and you wouldn't even have been born. The token offering of the reservation was what they got in exchange for not fighting a losing battle to the last man, but the exchange wouldn't have happened had that not been on the table.

I think the ”Indian” there referred to India the country and Gandhi’s nonviolent protest as background

Excellent point. Though I find it distasteful when someone uses an ambiguous word counting on you to be able to figure it out from context, then "ha ha you are wrong" downvotes follow when I make a good faith effort to respond to it. It's certainly a weaponization of the word if it is implied the counterparty is naïve when they guessed the wrong one.

The poster you're responding to might be from the Indian subcontinent and not Native/Indigenous American.

In US Native/Indigenous usually call themselves either by their tribe or "Indian." White people are the ones that generally use native/indigenous more even though natives call themselves Indian more.

Since the context was US civil rights you can see how I came to the conclusion, since it didn't make any sense someone could simply declare their heritage is from an extra-continental nationality and thus I was wrong.

In any case in the context of US civil rights, the Indians (native) are a far more reasonable conclusion than Indian (Asian) so at best it is a shared failure of communication.

> In any case in the context of US civil rights, the Indians (native) are a far more reasonable conclusion than Indian (Asian)

Why? There's a very direct link between India and the US civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1959_visit_by_Martin_Luther_Ki...

I understand your confusion and I didn't downvote you. But the answer to "Which Indian?" is at the very least a coin flip in this context.

Let’s not whitewash Ghandi and the Indian independence movement either, by implying there also were violent sticks in the background vs Ghandi’s carrot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_movement_for_Ind...

> there also were violent sticks in the background vs Ghandi’s carrot

There are always agitators. Britain, however, did not withdraw because of them.

As with King, if they’d taken the driver’s seat, British public opinion probably wouldn’t have turned towards India the way it did in our timeline.

Now consider that the principle anti-colonial pusher in the wake of WWII was America. The timelines are too far apart for serious commingling. But consider how much worse the world would be if India fought a bloody revolution, and then America saw domestic terrorism at home. Instead of two forces amplifying each other we’d see strong incentives for the majorities in each power to err on the side of caution and security.

The "principal anti-colonial pusher"? The first thing America did coming out of WW2 was support France, a nation just resoundingly beaten, in an utter colonial fumble on the other side of the planet.

> The "principal anti-colonial pusher"?

Yes. It was a major foreign policy issue for us.

> first thing America did coming out of WW2 was support France

Principal doesn't mean uncompromising. Just a main thrust. Britain was constrained in India, in part, by America.

A key part was that the PM of the UK at the time of independence had been supportive of the notion of Indian self rule for two decades. England had other priorities in the 1947 that administering India didn't help with too.

But yeah, Britain had put down a full scale rebellion of Indian troops with a 100:1 casualty ratio ninety years earlier, and had a full-blown self-styled "Indian National Army" surrender to them at the end of WWII shortly before independence was actually granted. They were tired of war at the time but certainly not afraid of badly-armed rebels. Noncooperation posed an entirely different challenge because it couldn't just be responded to with force of arms, and colonialist dogma taught that British leadership was supposed to make India a better run country, not virtually ungovernable. There were also more cameras around in 1947 than 1857

The flip side is that simple disobedience has far less effect in states less concerned with optics and values they claimed to live up to than the tail end of the British Empire or the US federal government at the height of the the Civil Rights era

> The flip side is that simple disobedience has far less effect in states less concerned with optics and values they claimed to live up to than the tail end of the British Empire or the US federal government at the height of the the Civil Rights era

Most importantly, the Civil-rights era US government was highly concerned with optics, because, you know, the world was being swept by Communist revolutions, and the last thing it wanted to do is to provide further fuel to their fire.

The current US government couldn't give two shits about its optics, because none of the people running it can even conceive of there being consequences to their brutality. The tail is wagging the dog.

> the world was being swept by Communist revolutions, and the last thing it wanted to do is to provide further fuel to their fire

I’d broaden the premise a bit: the world was awash with new countries in the wake of decolonization. It was a unique time in history when ideas held geopolitical sway in a way it hasn’t since.

If you want to ignore the violent revolutionaries in history because they make your narrative not work, then go ahead.

It doesn't change the fact that both the Civil Rights movement in the USA and the Indian Independence movement both had violent actors in the background telling the oppressors what comes next if they don't work with the populace.

> If you want to ignore the violent revolutionaries in history

Straw man. Obviously violent revolutions work. But nonviolent ones work, too, and often without substantially needing the “violent actors in the background.” They’re both valid tools, but they work in different contexts and seldom productively together. (Disruptive protest works incredibly well with diplomacy. But not violence. That gives the oppressor justification to dial up their own violence.)

> telling the oppressors what comes next

What comes next if the violent elements in India or the Civil Rights movement gained the upper hand would have been borderline-exterminationist intervention. Same as happened in the countless violent failed “revolutions” that preceded them.

I am not allowed to go into more detail into how we differ in opinion on forums with a US nexus.

> King vs. Malcolm

Popular history idolizes Dr. King, but without the stick of Malcolm X, King would have been cast aside. Only with both did the movement succeed. An ahistorical false dichotomy. Nonviolence wasn't simply some magic bullet that was magically better than force, it was a political tool that seemed nicer compared to the alternative of force.

> [R]iots are socially destructive and self-defeating. I'm still convinced that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and justice. [...] But at the same time, it is as necessary for me to be as vigorous in condemning the conditions which cause persons to feel that they must engage in riotous activities [...]. I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. [...] [A] riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation's summers of riots are caused by our nation's winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.

- Dr. MLK.

> India in relation to nonviolence

The Indian case is arguably one of the best cases for violence against a colonizing force. Ghandi brought eyes of the common people towards India and created internal pressures, and additionally functioned as a unifying figure, but without indian revolutionaries nothing would have happened.

> without the stick of Malcolm X, King would have been cast aside

This is very much a supposition. A credible one. But not settled history.

> Nonviolence wasn't simply some magic bullet that was magically better than force, it was a political tool that seemed nicer compared to the alternative of force

Fair enough. And perhaps showing a group of people movitated enough to credibly threaten violence demonstrates their potency as a political bloc. But the value is in showing organisation. Not in the violence per se.

Levying violence as a political tool a dangerous game. If that rhetoric turned to action, the civil-rights movement would have been destroyed. By popular command.

> Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.

I'm on board with the general mindset of this, but in recent years and especially since 2020, I've become less and less convinced that it's actually true. We have seen people effectively rioting in opposition to social justice and progress. There are for instance people who sincerely believe that by being required to get a vaccine they are just as oppressed as a Black person in the 1960s, or even as oppressed as a slave.

They are incorrect. But they believe they are correct, and social justice and progress won't alleviate their misunderstanding nor their willingness to advocate on its behalf.

> Ghandi brought eyes of the common people towards India

Just fyi, it's "Gandhi". Civilization I is over 30 years old but its orthographic sins live on forever apparently.

> Just fyi, it's "Gandhi"

To underline: Gandhi went to law school in London. There is a single correct English spelling of his name.

Thanks for getting out the word on an incredibly historically accurate take on the Civil Rights movement. I think people often forget that _this_ is an incredible part of the movement. We got large-scale non-violent demonstrations and civil disobedience instead of a proliferation of armed protest and possibly something even worse. Many folks were tired of waiting around to be safe and treated justly. Just one too many a cop beating up your father or murdering your brother or lying under oath to send your neighbor away for years. The Black Panthers started armed patrols of their own neighborhoods to protect themselves from racist Oakland police officers. There were growing calls for other Black neighborhoods to use their 2nd amendment rights to arm and defend themselves from a tyrannical government. They were succeeding and spreading. As a direct response, Regan (while governor of CA) eventually signed the Mulford Act of '67 which made carrying firearms in public without a permit illegal. (_And they were stingy when it came to giving these permits to Black folks._)

Re Mulford, you make a brilliant point. Rights are often tolerated until marginalized groups begin to use them effectively. Mulford is to 2A what FACE Act is to 1A. And the FACE Act is about to be used against the peaceful protesters who went into that church in Minnesota the other day.

Self-defense and revolutionary violence are two different things. The former can bring you safety through deterrence, the latter only lead to a violence escalation that the State is almost always most prepared for and better at

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