Use of Violence in Social Protests

One of the most famous uses of violence in social and political protest in this country in recent decades involved the split between the two camps of black activists in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. As Albert and Albert write in The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade, the civil rights movement was first led and dominated by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King's leadership was founded on non-violent boycotts and demonstrations. Passive resistance won a number of victories for the civil rights movement and drew the attention of politicians, the media, and the public. In the early years of the 1960s, the success of the non-violent arm of the civil rights movement prevented the rise of a more violent arm, but it seemed that those earlier successes were not being sustained as the 1960s moved along. This was true, at least, in the minds of younger black leaders who wanted to step up the pressure on the establishment to meet their needs. They devised the notion of "Black Power" and they sought to usurp the leadership of the civil rights movement from King and his non-violent approach. Malcolm X was one such leader. He did not openly advocate violence, but he did advocate "self-defense" for blacks as they fought the white establishment and the police who represented that establishment. He hurled the first hint of what was to come. When King was

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des the people and groups in the movement, as we read in Adamson and Borgos: "Black power" crystallized the latent tensions within the movement. The NAACP immediately condemned the slogan. CORE supported it, while King, anxious to maintain links with the younger activists, would neither endorse nor repudiate it. SNCC espoused it most fervently. . . . For some, pro and con, it was synonymous with armed revolution; for others it was as innocuous as black-owned business enterprises. Even within the electoral arena, where Black Power had its most sustained application, its import was ambiguous. People are confused by violent protest and by the suggestion of violent protest. A movement cannot succeed without popular support, which translates into political support. The public and politicians, seeing police battering non-violent protesters, tend to support the movement. When they see riots and violent protests, or even leaders such as Brown and Carmichael advocating violence, those people draw back from such support. The same result occurred in the violent protests in Chicago in 1968 during the Democratic National Convention. The public saw violence from both protesters and police, and the effect was the election of the Republican c
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Approximate Word count = 2595
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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