By Barry L. Gan
Dr. Gan is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Nonviolence at St. Bonaventure University, St. Bonaventure, NY. He is editor of The Acorn: The Journal of the Gandhi-King Society. The following is an expanded, slightly revised version of a letter to the editor sent to MHQ in response to my article, “Why the Civil Rights Movement Was an Insurgency.”
Professor Mark Grimsley’s article “Why the Civil Rights Movement Was an Insurgency” introduces many readers to facts about the civil rights movement that lie outside popular conceptions, and in doing so he provides a useful service as an historian. But he also pushes the definitions of a few words to their outer limits and beyond, thereby helping to establish a dangerous orientation toward legitimate efforts at political change anywhere.
Most Americans remain unaware of some of the most interesting aspects of the civil rights movement that Grimsley brings to the fore. Although well known to scholars in the field, the American public is largely unaware of King’s failure in Albany, Georgia at the hands of an astute and cagey sheriff. They are largely unaware of King’s extra-marital episodes and efforts by the F.B.I. to blackmail King with audio tapes they made of these episodes. And perhaps most importantly, they are unaware of how nonviolent strategy worked.
However, to suggest that the civil rights movement was an insurgency seriously strains the meaning of the term. Grimsley construes insurgency as an effort “to overthrow the status quo.” This definition would classify voters as insurgents if they vote for anyone but incumbents!
Even if Grimsley wants to maintain that King had been out to overthrow the segregation laws of the South, King did so by appealing to federal law and authority. Civil rights activists did not aim to bring down any government. Rather, they sought the right to vote, sought enforcement of federal law and were by and large unwilling to defy federal court orders. This can hardly be called an insurgency.
True, as Grimsley notes, some blacks were separatists, and some were revolutionaries. And one might argue, as Grimsley suggests, that the riots in U.S. cities created a useful foil for those pursuing change nonviolently.
However, if King thought so, why did he do his best to stop the riots? And it was King, not rioters, who met with the Presidents. The riots were not a part of the civil rights movement; they were not organized. And by the time “Black Power” became a popular rallying cry in 1966 among more organized people disenchanted with King, the major civil rights laws had already been passed. King had moved on, not to challenge government but policy, specifically, to challenge the government’s policies on poverty and war.
Even those Blacks mentioned by Grimsley, Blacks who exercised their Second Amendment rights to carry a gun, including the Black Panthers, did so more as a means of self-defense, bravado, or machismo, certainly not as a means of bringing down a government.
Grimsley also calls the Supreme Court lukewarm on civil rights. Against the backdrop of Plessy v. Ferguson, the separate-but-equal doctrine that enabled segregation to flourish, it is difficult to view the Warren Court as lukewarm. Segregationists frequently hanged Chief Justice Earl Warren in effigy!
Grimsley also characterizes nonviolent strategy as a force, citing Gandhi’s characterization of satyagraha as truth-force and Gene Sharp’s characterization of strategic nonviolence as political jiu-jitsu, a term Sharp borrows from Richard Gregg, who visited Gandhi in the 1920’s. He characterizes nonviolence simply as another means of breaking the opponents’ will. But this isn’t quite accurate.
Violent strategy employs this dynamic: “Do as I wish, or I will make you suffer.” Nonviolent strategy employs a different dynamic. It says, “Do as I wish, or make me suffer.” If nonviolent strategy succeeds, it succeeds by creating empathy among formerly apathetic or antagonistic people.
But the most dangerous aspect of Grimsley’s article is the notion—too broad a notion, really—that people who seek change are insurgents. It’s not a giant step from that claim to the notion that police and military force should be used to quell protests, disarm those with firearms, break up tea parties, and interfere with voting or any other guaranteed freedoms that people exercise in challenging the status quo.
8 Comments
Sorry, Mark, I think he is right.
Well, I also disagreed with Mark because I consider insurgency a strategy that makes heavy use of or relies on violence, but Professor Gan seems mostly concerned with the idea that the word “insurgency” has negative implications. Which it does in the West, but not in other cultures.
We seem to be willing to use “insurgent” to mean non-violent opposition or resistance in other contexts.
In politics for example, we often hear the phrase “an insurgent faction in the party”
That’s a euphemistic use of the word like “war on poverty” or “war on crime.” The purpose is less accuracy than a desired emotional weight. “War on terrorism” was complicated because it was a semi-euphemistic use.
Interesting debate. It is like “Was the Civil War a Total War.” I call these Stone Soup Debates. We don’t actually care about the answer, but the process of discussion yields useful results.
Before I re-read both articles, I think Prof. Grimsley’s thesis is perfect for one thing: it creates discussion. Most importantly, it makes people question the def. of insurgency.
Also, forces people to address whether there can be good insurgencies, and bad insurgencies.
Anyways, love the site, keep it up.
A follow up. While I’ve defined insurgency in past publications, I’ve recently been thinking about it and wanted to update and refine my ideas.
With any phenomenon, it’s important to distinguish DEFINING and COMMON characteristics or features. If something is missing ANY of the defining characteristics, it is not the thing. It can miss one or several common characteristics and still be the thing.
Let me approach this backwardds. Insurgency has a number of COMMON characteristics such as the use of terrorism, a desire to create popular support or a mass base, and a desire to seize power and replace the state. Most but not all insurgencies evince these characteristics.
But here is what I consider the definition of insurgency: A protracted, psychological-coercive strategy to alter an adverse military, political and economic power balance.
So insurgency is a STRATEGY, not an organization. An organization can use the strategy of insurgency one week and then a different strategy the next. When it does, it is no longer an insurgent movement.
It is protracted. This is a result of the adverse power balance. Insurgent movements cannot attain their goals quickly. If they could, they would.
It is psychological-coercive. This is the heart of the definition. Because the insurgent movement is weaker than the state in tangible resources, it attempts to shift the focus of the conflict to the intangible, i.e. psychological realm. But, the use of violence is important. Any strategy that does not use violence or in which violence is peripheral is not, to me at least, an insurgency.
Violent strategy employs this dynamic: “Do as I wish, or I will make you suffer.” Nonviolent strategy employs a different dynamic. It says, “Do as I wish, or make me suffer.”
If that is true then going on strike is an act of violence: the whole point is to make someone else suffer.
You could use language this way, but not everyone would.