25. Non-violence

E.D. Mondainé, president of the Portland, Ore., branch of the NAACP, wrote in the New York Times this week: “What is happening in Portland is the fuse of a great, racist backlash that the Trump administration is baiting us to light.”

Mondainé is worried that the white protestors—even the “wall of moms”—are focusing attention on whites, taking public attention away from Black Lives Matter, and providing it to Trumps’ law and order agenda.

The coverage of Congressman John Lewis’s death and lifework strikes an entirely different note. I tear up when I see the old film of Lewis taking hits to the head at the bridge in Selma, or when he’s  tearfully accepting a National Book Award for a graphic autobiography as he explains that the librarian in his Alabama town did not allow Black children to have books.

Some from that time carry the image of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. I carry the image of Joan Baez, then 22 years old, leading that same huge, non-violent 1963 crowd in “We Shall Overcome.” Baez captured my young heart with her voice and non-violent stands for Civil Rights and against the Vietnam War.

In 1968, weeks before King was killed, as Washington D.C. was readying for the Poor People’s Campaign, I went to a workshop on non-violence put on by the Quakers. “No jewelry: earrings and ears can be ripped, fingers broken; hunker in a fetal position with head covered if they come to pick you up or beat on you.”

I don’t know when I’ve ever felt stronger.

And I hunger now for a new John Lewis, a Joan Baez, Jessie Jackson, Ralph Abernathy, an MLK to remind us to cut the angry outbursts of violence and keep our “eyes on the prize”—the health, welfare, and fair treatment of all people, based on the “content of their character,” and not the “color of their skin.”

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