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'Gandhi Would Be Grieved By India's Treatment Of Civil Disobedience Today'

In this interview, Mary Elizabeth King, an expert on nonviolent resistance, discussed how Mohandas Gandhi's civil disobedience influenced the American civil rights movement, and what he might think of India today.
Mahatma Gandhi and Mrs Sarojini Naidu, poetess and politician, on their way to break the state laws at Dandi, India, on 24 April, 1930.
PA Images via Getty Images
Mahatma Gandhi and Mrs Sarojini Naidu, poetess and politician, on their way to break the state laws at Dandi, India, on 24 April, 1930.

NEW DELHI — The United States and India, the world’s oldest and largest democracies, have been punishing their citizens for using civil disobedience to challenge injustices. In the U.S, the killing of Black Americans brought people out into the streets. In India, it was a law that discriminated against Muslims by making religion the basis of granting Indians citizenship, and the threat of a national citizen register that left Indians irrespective of their religion worrying about proving their citizenship in the future. Those who led the movement against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) have been jailed and charged with terrorism.

Days before a U.S. presidential election that candidates describe as a battle for “America’s soul,” Mary Elizabeth King, a professor of peace and conflict studies at the University of Peace, an affiliate of the United Nations, and author of five books on civil disobedience, spoke to HuffPost India about the American civil rights movement in the sixties, how it drew from Mohandas Gandhi’s civil disobedience, and what he might think of India today.

King, who is white, and grew up in a deeply racist Fredericksburg, Virginia, was schooled in social justice by her father, a Methodist clergyman, and mother, a nurse, who later became a nursing professor. After graduating from Ohio Wesleyan College, King was 22 when she went to work for the civil rights movement in Atlanta and Mississippi in the early 60s. She joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), helping organise direct action, and working with the media.

It is almost as if time hasn’t passed. Young people were important in the civil rights movement and they are vitally important now, here and in India, because they see injustice and they are outraged by it and ready to respond to it. They are not going to go quietly home and just try to be comfortable,” she said.

“Young people were important in the civil rights movement and they are vitally important now, here and in India...”

What is civil disobedience?

Gandhi regarded civil disobedience as an extremely potent way to destroy unjust laws. This is a quote - ‘Complete civil disobedience is a rebellion without the element of violence in it.’ Gandhi regarded civil disobedience as dangerous to the autocratic state but harmless for a genuine democracy. A democracy must be willing to submit to the will of public opinion. And so there is no threat to democracies from civil disobedience. These are people who are patiently and publicly and staunchly taking a stand if something is unjust and willing to pay the penalties for taking that stand. They do not seek to evade the penalties so there is no threat to a democracy in Gandhi’s view. There is no threat to democracies from civil disobedience because it is always non-violent and it is always hinting at a sense of justice beyond the current crisis.

What would Gandhi think of India today?

Were Gandhi to gaze with us upon India today, he would be grieved to know that more than 50 individuals, many of them young bystanders and mostly Muslims, had died in the recent Delhi Riots as a byproduct of the Citizenship Amendment Act, the regressive law that has been widely criticized for making religion the basis for granting citizenship in India. Secondly, Gandhi would be distressed by the depth of animosities and fearfulness that have been gratuitously stimulated by the Modi government in its pursuit of its backward-looking diminishment of the civilisation that is India. Instead of policies encouraging justice for all, Modi’s government appears tragically to stoke the
fires of intercommunal hostilities.
Worse, from my personal viewpoint, those who were victimized in the Delhi Riots manifest a new generation of students who are willing to make personal sacrifices in order to voice honorable, rational, and admirable responses to the Citizenship Amendment Act. Forward-looking young people with a vision for a strong democracy are a huge asset for the future of any parliamentary government.

Dr. Martin Luther King leads an estimated 10,00 or more civil rights marchers out on the last leg of their Selma-to-Montgomery march.
Bettmann via Getty Images
Dr. Martin Luther King leads an estimated 10,00 or more civil rights marchers out on the last leg of their Selma-to-Montgomery march.

What did the Civil Rights Movements learn from Gandhi?

There was a steady stream of black Americans traveling to India in the twenties, thirties, forties and fifties to learn how the Indians are using civil disobedience and other non-violent methods. The reason for this is they saw themselves stuck in a caste system. In Fredericksburg, Virginia, where I grew up, and where I’m living, if I went downtown and I was walking with my grandfather, anyone coming toward us who was a Black person would have to step off the pavement and step into the street to let us pass because we were white. That’s exactly like the conditions of unseeability and unapproachability that I encountered when I went to Kerala to write my book on the Vaikom Satyagraha; unseeability and unapproachability.

The Reverend James Lawson taught at Hislop college in Nagpur for three years, and on the weekends, he was with people who had worked alongside Gandhi. He came back to the United States in 1957 and he met Martin Luther King who said, “Come South immediately. We don’t have anyone like you.” This is the way that learning from Gandhi got imported into the mid-Atlantic states and the Black community by leaders who were traveling to India. In 1959, Reverend Lawson started running university student workshops in churches in Nashville. In Nashville, I soon would meet the student leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). This was the most audacious, creative, fearless, enterprising, bold, group of people who couldn’t be held back. I would say the single most important word is audacity. The audacity of youth. That is what we all had.

“I would say the single most important word is audacity. The audacity of youth. That is what we all had.”

What did the SNCC do?

Ella J Baker, a phenomenal social philosopher and social theorist, convened SNCC, along with Revered Lawson and Martin Luther King in 1960. They brought together all the leaders of the student sit-in campaigns across the South at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, which was a University for black students where Ms Baker had studied. Ms Baker and historian Howard Zinn were putting together seminars of white and Black students who had never met before in the South. This was the first time White and Black students were brought together to talk about human rights, civil rights, except that we instead called it academic freedom.

SNCC was the largest staff of any of the Civil Rights Movement. I was put to work in communications with a leader named Julian Bond, and later in life he chaired the National Association For The Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), which was one of the most effective organizations in the civil rights movement, using a great deal of litigation. We dealt with the news media.

SNCC was smart enough to realize that there had to be two people working full-time, doing nothing but dealing with the journalists and media so that the truth would go out. We wanted to reach the entire country so we had a communications shop, we had our own printing press, we had a weekly newspaper called The Student Voice.

What was the media like at the time?

The white southern media did not regard anything bad happening to someone who was African-American as being newsworthy. An attack, an atrocity against a Black person, or even a Black person being killed was not considered to be worthy of a white southern newspaper’s notice. If they ever did report on a Black person, it was probably because that person was hauled into the courtroom and charged for using civil disobedience or getting arrested in a demonstration. They would not even use the full name of that Black person. They would say the Brown man or the Smith woman. The amount of prejudice in the southern white news media was absolutely toxic.

It was important for us that we have friends of SNCC organizations in northern cities, Princeton, Boston, New York, Chicago, Detroit, Portland, Seattle, Las Angeles and so on. If you have groups that support you, that are not under the heel of the source of oppression, they can carry news stories. They can make wire-service reports spread.

I would call on the Friends of SNCC groups myself. If someone in the group was arrested, say from San Francisco, I would call the San Francisco group and say, so and so from such and such address, 23-years-old, has been arrested for working on voter registration in such and such town, and in jail in such and such county. Would you please call the wire services, Associated Press, or UPI, and ask them to send someone out to interview that person and make sure they are being properly treated by the county sheriff. There were ways that the use of the press helped to save lives. But this has turned upside down in India. I can see that. I think that India needs some of that technique now.

“There were ways that the use of the press helped to save lives. But this has turned upside down in India.”

What about TV news?

1963 is when television coverage began. In Birmingham, there was one person named James Bevel, who went back and forth between the student wing and Martin Luther King’s organisation, the Southern Christian Leadership Congress. James Bevel went into all of the Black schools in Birmingham, Alabama one by one, and he would say ‘What did Gandhi say? Gandhi said fill the jails. What are we going to do?’ And the children would respond and say, ‘We are going to fill the jails.’ The children began to get arrested by Bull Connor, the Birmingham Commissioner for Public Safety, who should have been called commissioner of public danger because he was a famously despotic, criminal person. He arrested the school children and threw them into school buses that transported them to jail. For the first time, there were television cameras capturing children, 9, 10, 11,12-years-old, some even younger, being arrested and put into school buses and transported to jail. That footage went all over the world, and reactions started coming into the Kennedy White House of international outrage, perplexity, asking how could the United States be arresting children and transporting them to jail in school buses?

Do you think the world is more polarized then and now?

I definitely feel there is more polarisation now. I consider social media one of the most destructive forces in my lifetime. We have a capacity now for spreading hostility, doubt, false news, acrimony, ideologies that are highly irresponsible in their claims. It is a time of widespread, intentional, promotion of conflict which has been aggravated by technologies that advocate lots of misrepresentations on a scale that has never been seen before. There are almost no checks. It is so tragic because the ability to live together with differences of culture, religion and race is something important for all modern advanced societies. The sharing of societal resources, of societal institutions, of a societal quest for justice, is hard but imperative.

“We have a capacity now for spreading hostility, doubt, false news, acrimony, ideologies that are highly irresponsible in their claims.”

Was SNCC ever accused of terrorism?

We had many many epithets thrown at us. The word terrorism was not used because it is only recently that the United States has admitted that it has a problem with domestic terrorism. That word was never used for the actual terrorism that has been used against Black communities ever since human cargo reached the shores of the United States. Slavery itself was sustained by torture and violence. Racism is still being sustained through violence. We can’t put it in the past tense. You can see it in the way that some police have decided to become executioners. White supremacy has not ended. The current administration is evidence of that. The root of the word “reckon” means “to rearrange.”The United States has never rearranged its racial relations. It has never reckoned with its racial history. All of that awaits.

What epithets?

They called us ‘outside agitators.’ The implication was that the local Black people don’t know what they are doing. It is very very insulting at its core. When someone is suffering, and understands they are being prevented from having rights that other citizens have, they don’t need a lot of instruction in that. They don’t need to be told what is unjust and unfair. White-owned southern newspapers castigated all people working in the southern freedom struggle to the extent that I used to think of most of them as using blood instead of ink.

But you are talking about a level of misinformation that is several decibels more awful than anything we experienced in the South. The Hindu absolutists have been practicing it for so many generations now. They are well practiced in the allegations they are making. They have not been allowed to dissipate or transform.

“They called us ‘outside agitators.’”

Civil Rights leaders holds hands as they march along the National Mall during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Washington DC, August 28, 1963.
PhotoQuest via Getty Images
Civil Rights leaders holds hands as they march along the National Mall during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Washington DC, August 28, 1963.

How did you civil disobey?

The use of nonviolent action benefits from youth because it often requires a fair amount of resilience, an ability to sustain discomfort for a period of time. Standing quietly with a sign takes a lot of energy. Did we do a lot of demonstrations in SNCC? We did up until a point. By 1963, we were beginning to move towards more political organizing, putting more emphasis on voter registration. We had begun to realise that the inability of the Black community to choose its own leaders or to participate in any of the political institutions was a great barrier to the implementation of justice.

So, we imported something else from India. Gandhi’s 1941 Constructive Programme. Gandhi’s concept was that if people are persecuted or under oppression, they can start working on the creation of a new order while still living in the middle of the old order by withdrawing from the opponent and working to create new institutions. During Mississippi Freedom Summer 1964, we borrowed very heavily from Gandhi’s Constructive Programme. We created the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as an alternative institution or a parallel institution because the all-White Democratic Party in Mississippi would not admit Blacks. We organized cooperatives and credit unions because banks would not lend money to Black people. We organized cooperative farming. An alternative political party is no longer needed, but some of the other things are still at work in Mississippi.

President Lyndon Johnson got the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964 which desegregated public accommodations. In. In 1965, the Voting Rights Act addressed the barriers against black people and political participation. Unfortunately, the Republicans are always against widening political participation in voting. They have been weakening the Voting Rights Act. If (Joe) Biden is elected, I feel you will see moves to get the Voting Rights Act restored because it was an unconscionable act to destroy an Act that was passed by Congress. You are always fighting regression. Nothing ever stays advanced. There is always somebody tearing away at the foundations of progressive social justice.

When is Civil Disobedience successful?

Effective nonviolent civil resistance requires a great deal of cleverness, intelligence, a knowledge of history, what has worked and what has not worked and understanding of the theory. It is really important to be systematic in doing analysis. You have to have statistics. You have to know what the needs are. You need to know what the costs of solutions are. You have to be quite scientific. The theory is not capricious, it takes a long time to develop. It is possible to work out what Gandhi called ‘transformation of conflict.’ If you are just going to try outwit people, you’re going to end up on the floor of history.

“Effective nonviolent civil resistance requires a great deal of cleverness, intelligence, a knowledge of history...”

Mahatma Gandhi leading his followers on the famous salt march to break the English Salt Laws
New York Daily News Archive via Getty Images
Mahatma Gandhi leading his followers on the famous salt march to break the English Salt Laws

Why are lawyers important?

You need to have lawyers because people are breaking the laws with civil disobedience in response to laws being despotic, unethical, inhumane, or outrageous. The law that you are talking about is tyrannical.. The racial laws that we had in the United States were despotic, outrageous and inhumane. But young people are very very clear about what is fair and what is not fair. They haven’t learned to compromise. They often have moral and ethical clarity. They can be very responsive to justice. They are willing to take risks. They are repeatedly ready to put themselves on the line of the opposition to unjust laws policies. This is something that young people all over the world share. It should be celebrated in India. With the amazing history of India, this capacity should be praised.

Was it praised in the US?

It was not praised in the independent white South. But there were a lot of other people who praised it fortunately.

What about the courts at the time?

The system was entirely stacked against anyone who was not white. There was no justice. I mentioned, Black people would not even be called by their proper names in the courthouse. They would not even say Mr Steven Smith. They would say the Smith man.

The United States has a rich civil society, meaning a realm that is not controlled by the state. We have had the Development of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) since 1910. In 1967, Thurgood Marshall was the first Black person to be appointed to the Supreme Court but he had many years in which he was making enormous strides by bringing lawsuits, seeking to find cases that would make it all the way to the Supreme Court. You had to have someone with unimpeachable integrity. The Southern Poverty Law Centre was coterminous with the Civil Rights Movement. They have done an extraordinary job of research but also litigation. Then, you have the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), founded in 1920, an extremely potent organization. It has been around for most of the 20th century. They have litigated, litigated, litigated, litigated. There is a lot going on from civil society. Legal organizations have used the law to take cases of extreme injustice into the courts as fast as they can get them there. It is a time-honored profession to be a civil liberties lawyer. These individuals are highly esteemed. They are not rich. But they are highly regarded and respected because they protect the civil rights and human rights of everyone, regardless of politics or ideology.

Our Supreme Court has not responded to the assault on civil liberties.

Among many enlightened people of both our major political parties in the United States, a fear exists that under Trump the Supreme Court has become increasingly politicised.

(Editor’s note: This interview is part of The Idea of India, HuffPost India’s monthly newsletter. You can subscribe to the newsletter here).

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.