Sunday, February 8, 2009
Freedom Summer reading
Throughout the entire reading, after reading the prologue. I just kept asking myself how do the civil rights activist have such strong willpower not to retaliate violently against the people who have attacked them and treated them so badly. They must really believe that what they are doing is truly right and put everything they have and more to stop the problem. This reminds me of Gandhi and his non-violent rebellion against the british.
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Yes, exactly. The inspiration for non-violence as a form of civil disobedience came directly from Gandhi and the Indian independence movement, and before Martin Luther King, Jr. made it a centerpiece of civil rights movement protests, another organization called Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) also made use of the tactic in earlier protests against segregated interstate travel in the 1940s. The linchpin connecting these ideas is activist Bayard Rustin, who you will be reading about later in the semester. Not only did Rustin influence King and SCLC, he also worked with A. Philip Randolph starting in the 1940s and 1950s to bring more black workers into the labor movement.
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