As we commemorate the 1963 civil rights march on Washington, it's worth remembering how close it came to not happening at all. When A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin started shopping the idea, the Urban League declined to support it, the NAACP refused to commit one way or another, and Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were too busy with other challenges to get engaged. President John Kennedy argued that the march would hurt the chances of passing legislation.
It was only the events in Birmingham, Ala., in early May — the police beatings, the snapping dogs, the fire hoses turned on people – that galvanized the movement. Without Bull Connor's brutal overreaction, there might not have been a history-making march.
It's also worth remembering that while today we take marches and protests for granted, the tactics of the civil rights movement had deep philosophical and religious roots. The leaders rejected the idea that significant progress could be made through consciousness-raising and education campaigns, through consensus and gradual reform. They wanted a set of tactics that were at once more aggressive and at the same time deeply rooted in biblical teaching. That meant the tactics had to start with love, not hate; nonviolence, not violence; renunciation, not self-indulgence.
"Ours would be one of nonresistance," Randolph told the Senate Armed Services Committee all the way back in 1948. "We would be willing to absorb the violence, absorb the terrorism, to face the music and to take whatever comes."
At the same time this tactic was not passive. It was not just turning the other cheek. Nonviolent coercion was an ironic form of aggression. Nonviolence furnished the movement with a series of tactics that allowed it to remain on permanent offense.
It allowed leaders to stage relentless protests, sit-ins and marches.
Nonviolence allowed the leaders to expose the villainy of their foes aggressively, to make their enemies' sins work against them as they were exposed in ever more vicious forms.
The stereotype of the day held that a large gathering of determined black marchers would inevitably turn violent and unruly. But the whole point of this philosophy is that you defeat your opponents with superior self-discipline. These days, protesters from the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street like to be fully demonstrative, expressing their rage or whatever. But the early-1960s civil rights tactics demanded relentless self-control, the ability to remain calm and deliberate in extreme circumstances.
The idea was not only to change society but to work an inner transformation. They clung to this in a way that is humbling for the rest of us.
The idea was to reduce ugliness in the world by reducing ugliness in yourself. King argued that "unearned suffering is redemptive." It would uplift people involved in this kind of action. It would impose self-restraint. At their best, the leaders understood that even people in the middle of just causes can be corrupted. They can become self-righteous, knowing their cause is right. They can become smug as they move forward, cruel as they organize into groups, simplistic as they rely on propaganda to mobilize the masses. The strategy of renunciation and the absorbing of suffering was meant to guard against all that.
The method relied upon a very sophisticated set of paradoxes. It relied on leaders who had done a lot of deep theological and theoretical work before they took up the cause of public action.
And it worked. And sometimes still does. A study by Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth in the journal International Security found that between 1900 and 2006, movements that used nonviolent means succeeded 53 percent of the time, while violent resistance campaigns succeeded only 26 percent of the time.
So that's what we are commemorating: the "I Have a Dream" speech, of course, but also an exercise in applied theology.
David Brooks writes for The New York Times.