Non-violent direct action

William Chafe is inviting us to engage in a crucial civics discussion about what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously defined as the tension and the crisis of non-violent direct action.

After we had read Chafe's piece, my wife and I looked up and reviewed Dr. Martin Luther King's “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” His emotional description of his children's experience growing up reminded my wife that when she was five years old she would often ask her mother, “Why can't Effie” — her best friend and nanny — “sit with me on the bus?” Her mother's oft repeated response: “It's not right, but that's how things are.”

Like Chafe, Dr. King explains that civil society must eventually take direct action to ever effectively change “how things are.” As King defines it, “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.” And, as Chafe points out, Frederick Douglass, too, understood the necessity for a dramatic nonviolent crisis. Thus, many voices have long been encouraging Americans to exercise nonviolent direct action — marching, debating, speaking, publishing and demonstrating — and to trust in the beneficial tension it creates. Robert Forker, Houston