Compassionate Nonviolent Resistance

Political expressions of nonviolence originated in the United States as early as the 1650s with the establishment of the Quaker church by Margaret Fell and George Fox (Nagler, 1982:73). The Quaker church opposed the use of personal violence as well as participation in wars between states.

The Quaker principle of nonviolence was put to a test in the political arena in 1681. In that year, William Penn was deeded the area now known as Pennsylvania by the British crown. William Penn had ascribed to the Quaker church and incorporated many of the nonviolent principles into the administration of the colony. In what was labeled the "Holy Experiment," Penn pared down the number of capital crimes to only murder and treason, far fewer than among any other colony, and held that when Indians came to trial, half the jurors should be Indian (Cooney and Michalowski, 1977:21).

In the 1840s, the concept of nonviolence evolved into a theory of political resistance by Henry David Thorea

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lent campaign cost Gandhi several years in jail, but in the end Britain granted independence to India in 1947. Martin Luther King. Jr. Gandhi's successful nonviolent campaigns inspired similar efforts throughout the world, among them the civil rights movement in the United States. Particularly impressed by Gandhi's theory of nonviolence was a Baptist minister in Montgomery, Alabama--Martin Luther King, Jr. King had studied the philosophy of Gandhi as a student in seminary school. "Christ showed us the way," he wrote, "and Mahatma Gandhi showed us it could work" (Cooney and Michalowski, 1977:166). King's nonviolent activities primarily targeted racial discrimination in the United States. One of his first major protests concerned Rosa Parks. The black seamstress had refused yield her seat on a bus in Montgomery when several white passengers boarded. Local law required blacks to give up their seats to whites in a crowded bus. Parks was arrested. The following day 40 black community and religious leaders met in the basement of King's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to plan a nonviolent protest against the racist seating policy. They organized a city-wide boycott of the bus system that continued for nearly a year. In Nove
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