I attended the Durbin Library Building Committee monthly planning session last week. An energetic group is working to raise funds to build a new facility.  As I often do when I’m at our branch facilities, I cast my eyes at the book collection, and pulled out a volume, “Freedom Walkers,” by Russell Freedman.  I thumbed through the pages, scanning the photos and some of the paragraphs. I checked out the book.

“Freedom Walkers” is about the Montgomery bus boycott.  Many states had various laws that segregated people on the basis of their race, which in effect relegated minority races to inferior services and opportunities. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, an Afrrcan-American, was arrested for defying a bus driver’s order to give up her seat to a white person and move further back on the bus. This action sparked the African-American community into boycotting buses in the city. After over a year of walking and carpooling to their jobs, enduring harassment from city and police officials, and suffering threats by segregationists, the boycott succeeded. Buses were fully integrated. 

One of the young leaders that rose to prominence during that long boycott was a young, well-educated Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr. It was King who set the remarkable strategy that eventually crumbled the walls of institutionalized segregation. King had studied the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and was inspired by his use of nonviolent resistance which overturned British rule over India. Gandhi had united the Indian people to refuse to cooperate with unjust colonial rule.  King would later write, “I had come to see early that the Christian doctrine of love operating through the Gandhian method of nonviolence was one of the most potent weapons available to the Negro in his struggle for freedom.”

King’s strategy of noncooperation rests upon the willingness of the movement to not use evil means to change an evil system. Otherwise the changed system itself is poisoned.  Therefore respect for the intrinsic human dignity of opponents is critical. To develop and nurture these attitudes into a disciplined movement requires extensive teaching sessions and motivational rallies. 

King was opposed in his time. His house was firebombed, he was repeatedly arrested and jailed and ultimately, he was assassinated. The FBI, under its director, J. Edgar Hoover, launched a massive vendetta against King, who did not wilt under such pressure, nor did he back off from his strong message nor did he refrain from civility to friends and foes.

That King’s approach brought success in ending American apartheid is evident in his award of the Nobel Peace Prize and a national holiday established in his honor. Moreover, King set the tone for new forms of political engagement in American society and elsewhere in the world as grassroots movements take hold of nonviolent resistance as a strategy to deal with injustice.

Motivated, informed, engaged citizens can mobilize for good causes. Pocahontas Libraries is proud to offer reading materials, meeting room space, internet connected computers, video resources, and an atmosphere of openness and welcome to the public. These services are available because it is important that our fellow neighbors civilly engage as citizens in our local communities and outward into the broader society.