There's a lot of consternation on here abt the uprising in Minneapolis & how the only means protestors can be effective is through non-violence.I hurt for the destruction like everyone else. But the fact of history is non-violent protest has not been successful for blk Americans.
The Civil Rights Movement was *not* non-violent. It was sparked by violence -- beginning with the brutal beatings of black servicemen coming home from war. And while black protestors were trained to be non-violent, they courted *white* violence as a strategy.
King, Diana Nash, John Lewis, knew most white Americans did not care abt black people non-violently protesting in the streets. These were the same people that had tolerated lynchings, racial apartheid, fascism against black Americans for decades. Why would marching change that?
When King did marches & sheriffs did not respond with violence, the white media did not even bother to cover the protests. The mvmt understood tht the thing Americans understand is violence. Our country was literally born of violent insurrection& act of vandalism in Boston Harbor
So, the strategy became how to bait white people *into* violence in order force other white people to act. They picked the locations of their protests and marches based on the ability to draw violence. And when dogs got sicced on children, white media "discovered" a story.
Peaceful protest did not bring about the great civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Black people being firebombed, water-hosed, lynched, bitten by dogs, beaten to a pulp by police trying to march across a bridge is what brought the changes. Violence.
It's not incidental that this civil rights legislation is passed during the Vietnam war. The images of the Great Democracy violently suppressing its own citizens became an international embarrassment, and it was that, not some newfound racial egalitarian, that forced change.
So, when we talk abt what will or will not work for black communities to get justice when citizens are killed by police and no charges ever come, when they live in desperately impoverished communities w failing schools & no work, communities many of you don't see *until* a riot..
Let's at least be *honest.* Slavery in this country ended because of the deadliest war in our history. Black Americans got full legal citizenship only after a decades-long *violently* repressed rights movement. I am sure destruction won't work here, but neither has anything else.
