Rewind with Todd Boyle: Kingian nonviolence
19 min read
Presenter: Rewind with Todd Boyle to the year 2013, and the Western Washington Fellowship of Reconciliation Seabeck Conference. The speaker is Kazu Haga, (then) Bay Area coordinator for Positive Peace Warrior Network, offering training in Kingian nonviolence.
Kazu Haga: Kingian nonviolence is a philosophy that, I like to think of it as, it was given birth on the morning of April 4, 1968. Early that morning, early that morning, Dr. King was in his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee and he was having a conversation with Dr. Bernard Lafayette, who was at the time the national coordinator of the Poor People’s Campaign.
[00:00:37] And they were talking about the Poor People’s Campaign and Dr. Lafayette had to go to Washington D.C. to attend to a press conference, so as he was leaving his hotel room, Dr. King called out to him and said, ‘You know Bernard, the next movement that we need to have is to institutionalize and internationalize nonviolence.’
[00:00:55] Dr. Lafayette said he kind of didn’t know what King meant by that, but he figured that they would just finish that conversation later on. He had to catch a plane, so he said, ‘Oh, all right, Dr. King, we’ll talk about this more later,’ and he took off. And unfortunately, they were never able to finish that conversation because just about five hours after that conversation, Dr. King was shot.
[00:01:15] So Dr. Lafayette then took that as Dr. King’s final marching orders to figure out a way to institutionalize and internationalize nonviolence education. And over the years, he worked with another guy by the name of David Jensen to create this philosophy, this training curriculum, called Kingian nonviolence, as a way to institutionalize and internationalize the philosophies of Dr. Martin Luther King and the organizing strategies used in the civil rights movement.
[00:01:43] Kingian nonviolence is something that grew largely out of the Nashville student lunch counter sit-ins, where Dr. Bernard Lafayette was one of the student leaders there. Diane Nash, John Lewis, many leaders of the civil rights movement grew out of the Nashville movement. And sometimes people ask, How come so many important leaders grew out of that one small movement in Nashville? And it’s largely because of their commitment to training.
[00:02:07] Rev. Jim Lawson was leading nonviolence trainings in Nashville for those leaders, and they trained for an entire year before they engaged in their first protest. And that’s what made them so successful and that’s what allowed them to become leaders and other movements throughout the civil rights movement after that.
[00:02:24] And so within Kingian nonviolence, the idea of training, that social change is not going to come easily. And if we’re really going to create peace, then we need to be committed to the idea of training to the same level that soldiers are committed to training their troops, right?
[00:02:42] If people are training their soldiers for six-month boot camps to go to war, then we need to at least be committed to the same level of creating peace. That nonviolence is not easy and we need to be trained in social change. It’s just not going to come easily.
[00:02:58] There’s been several things that have happened throughout my life that completely changed my life. The first happened in November of 2008, when I took my first two -day workshop in Kingian nonviolence.
[00:03:11] About three months after that workshop, this philosophy was just so alive in my head, when on New Year’s morning of 2009, a young man by the name of Oscar Grant was shot and killed by the transit police in Oakland, California.
Many of you probably have heard his name before. There’s actually a movie called Fruitvale Station about the last 24 hours of his life that’s about to be released. But Oscar Grant was a young man, African American man, 22 years old, father of a two-year-old girl named Tatiana, who was out partying on New Year’s Eve with some of his friends in San Francisco.
[00:03:43] About two o’clock in the morning, New Year’s morning, he was taking the train, the BART, back to his home of Hayward, coming through Oakland. And on the train, he got into an altercation with another group of young men, him and his friends. And so the BART police, the transit police were called, and the train was stopped at the next station, which was Fruitvale, Fruitvale Station, about a mile from where I live.
[00:04:04] And at one moment, the police had taken Oscar and all his friends out onto the platform, and they were questioning him. And there was a moment where Oscar was being held down, laid down on the ground, the stomach on the ground, with one police officer holding him down using his knees while another police officer stood up, unholstered his gun, and shot him in the back.
[00:04:26] And this happened right on the train platform on New Year’s Eve, on New Year’s morning. So there were hundreds of witnesses, and many of them cut the whole incident on their cell phones, and the videos got uploaded to YouTube, and the whole thing just went viral.
[00:04:43] And I ended up on the steering committee of, we called it the Coalition Against Police Executions, which was the community coalition that was behind organizing a lot of the rallies and the community’s response to it, and throughout that movement, I realized that even in movements for peace, and even in movements for justice, there’s many different ways in which we can engage in that work.
[00:05:07] And the Oscar Grant movement, I mean, at that time, it had so much potential. You can ask anyone who lived in Oakland during the first few months of 2009, and just the raw emotion that was present in the entire city. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. You go on BART, go to the laundromat, go to a cafe, everyone’s talking about Oscar Grant. We could have called meetings with the mayor, with the chief of police, with the BART president, and they would have had to meet with us.
[00:05:36] So it was a movement, it was a moment in history that had incredible potential. But in my opinion, we let it go to waste. And in my opinion, in my perspective, it was because even though that movement had so much potential, it was a movement that was largely grounded in anger, and grounded in hatred towards the police.
We hated Johannes Mehserle, who was the police officer that shot Oscar Grant. We hated the police.
[00:06:05] And on the one hand, we have every right to be angry, right? I mean, we need to be angry about these situations. And at the same time, I remember during one of the rallies, you know, the rallies were always peaceful. It was always when the rallies ended and it got dark that there was violence.
[00:06:24] For those that don’t know, there was, you know, if you want to call it rioting or uprising or whatever, there was violence in the streets of Oakland for a while. People were burning police cars, breaking windows. And I remember one time after one of the rallies, some young Black man from East Oakland started breaking windows at a Wells Fargo bank.
[00:06:41] And so me and a few other people ran up as they turned, there was another bus station that was in one of those glass bus stations, and they tried to break the window so we got in between them to try to stop them from breaking the window. And I just remember seeing the anger in the eyes of these young people and just how frustrated they were and how fed up they were with the system and with the violence that they had to witness every single day of their lives.
[00:07:07] And that night, I was at a friend’s house and we were talking about how we were going to respond to the violence, especially with the media, right? We were running press statements and we had a press conference the following morning. And ultimately, we decided to distance ourselves from the violence, said, ‘You know, we organized a peaceful protest, let’s focus on that. We had nothing to do with the violence.’
[00:07:27] And I felt a little uneasy about that. And later on, is that it was because, again, the young people were right to be angry. Were they right to break windows? No, I disagree with those tactical decisions. But they have every right to be angry.
[00:07:46] And I realize that as a community, we need to create spaces for a lot of these young people, safe spaces for them to be able to release their anger. Because if they don’t have safe spaces to release that anger, it’s going to get released in the streets. Whether it’s during a protest or during gun violence that happens every single day in East Oakland, it’s going to get released somewhere.
[00:08:08] So we need to honor that anger, recognize that they’re angry for a good reason, and find ways to help channel that anger. Anger can spark movements. Anger has sparked many movements, but it cannot sustain movements. If anger becomes the driving force behind a movement, it’s just we eat ourselves up from inside out.
[00:08:31] And that’s exactly what happened with the Oscar Grant movement, right? We started arguing with ourselves and we started accusing each other of working with the police or of not being there for the movement or for the right reasons, and we just destroyed ourselves from inside out.
[00:08:44] I mean, we destroyed just as many movements as that we always like to point the finger and say, “Oh, it’s the FBI. It’s COINTELPRO.” And those are legitimate too. We know that. But we also destroy just as many of our own movements because we can’t learn how to relate with each other within our movements.
[00:09:01] This is one of the reasons why it’s sometimes frustrating for me.
[00:09:05] King was also very critical of a lot of pacifists and a lot of pacifist organizations, because Dr. King believed that oftentimes, pacifism, people misunderstand the true meaning of pacifism, that it’s just about sitting at home and singing ‘Kumbaya’ and hoping that the war overseas ends without looking at what’s happening in our own backyards, and without having the righteous indignation about what’s happening overseas, as well as at home.
He said that true pacifism isn’t about nonresistance to evil, but it’s about active nonviolent resistance to evil. Very different things. It’s not enough to sit at home and sing ‘Kumbaya,’ it’s not just enough to hope that different people can learn to get along, but we need to be angry. Our message to kids isn’t, ‘Don’t be angry,’ because we need to be angry about the fact that kids are getting shot up. We need to be angry about how much investments we’re making into war. We need to be angry about poverty.
[00:10:03] The question is what we do with that anger. The theme of this conference is ‘Harnessing Outrage And Compassion.’ So what does it mean to harness anger in a healthy and productive way?
[00:10:14] The third principle of Kingian nonviolence says: ‘Attack forces of evil, not persons doing evil.’ Which I’m sure as a concept is not new to most people in this room, but in the Oscar Grant movement we attacked the individual. We thought if Johannes Mehserle would get locked up, that somehow police shootings would stop.
[00:10:34] And I always say: ‘If it weren’t Johannes Mehserle, it would have been another police officer.’ All right? ‘If it weren’t Oscar Grant, it would’ve been some other young Black youth.’
These issues are not specific to any one individual, but we need to learn to build movements that acknowledges and honors our anger and that righteous indignation and targets it at the root causes, at the conditions of why people are so violent, why communities struggle with injustice. That anger is not a bad thing as long as we can channel it in the proper places. And we need to be angry at injustice.
[00:11:10] Now, I was mentioning that we hated Johannes Mehserle. And I was talking about how when you hold on to that anger, it just eats you up from inside. And there’s an old saying that says, ‘Hating someone is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.’
[00:11:29] Like, when you sit there, when you’re just hating somebody, and when you’re just harboring that anger, the person you’re angry at is probably having a wonderful day on their own. It does nothing to affect them, but it kills you inside, which speaks to the fifth principle of Kingian nonviolence, which is: ‘Avoid internal violence of the spirit, as well as external physical violence.’
[00:11:50] That internal violence of that spirit, that emotional violence, like we think of all the homicides as being violent, and they are, but all of those homicides starts in here, right? (pointing to heart)
[00:11:59] In fact, there’s twice as many suicides every year in this country as there are homicides. So we have to acknowledge that violence isn’t just a physical act, but it’s oftentimes what we do to ourselves and what we do to each other without physical acts, right? All the bullying that happens in schools, all the ways that we treat each other and the way that we misunderstand each other, the way that we oppress minority communities.
[00:12:25] We’re not going in order, but we’re talking about the six principles, if you haven’t noticed.
[00:12:30] In Kingian nonviolence, we have six core principles, the final one being that: ‘The universe is on the side of justice,’ and sometimes, you know, people during the trainings, they say, ‘Well, how can you tell me that the universe is just when there’s so much violence in the world?’
And I tell them that I’ve come to see, every time a young person gets shot in the streets of Oakland, I see that as evidence of this principle.
[00:12:51] Because look at all of the investments that we make into violence as a society. We continue to invest in war. We continue to invest in a broken prison system. We continue to invest in broken schools. And then somehow we act shocked when we see violence and injustice in our communities.
Maybe if we continue—if we invested more into peace, then the same justice of the universe will ensure that we’ll start to see some of those returns, right?
[00:13:23] So fighting for justice in some of the hardest-hit communities has to be part of the peace movement. Sometimes the peace movement, we think of as the anti-war movement, it’s all over there. But the wars overseas are manifestations of the injustices at home. Dr. King said about the Vietnam War that we’re sending young Black men to fight for rights in Southeast Asia that they don’t have in Southeast Georgia. Like, what sense does that make?
[00:13:55] The next moment in life that I just took a huge leap in terms of learning was after the Oscar Grant movement, it was the Occupy movement. And in the Occupy movement, I learned a considerable deal about principle number one, which is: ‘Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people.’
[00:14:11] And I learned a lot about that principle from the anarchists. And I had many, many heated debates and disagreement with many anarchist communities. I learned a lot from them about courage because they are not afraid to put their bodies on the line. They are not afraid to get arrested, they are not afraid to get tear gas, they are not afraid of confrontations with injustice.
[00:14:35] Oftentimes, again, that anger, their righteous indignation, is targeted in the wrong places, in my opinion. But they’re not afraid to go out there. And it’s a criticism that a lot of nonviolent activists oftentimes face, is that we spend too much time talking about compassion, and we don’t know how to harness our righteous indignation, and have the courage to go out and hit the streets. And I think that’s something that nonviolent movements can never lose.
[00:14:59] But it’s also, ‘Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people,’ right? I learned that a great deal too, because even in nonviolent caucuses in Occupy, there was a lot of violence within the caucus in terms of how we treated each other and how we looked at people within the caucus and outside of the caucuses.
[00:15:16] Nonviolence isn’t just a guide for our external direct actions, but it also has to be a moral guide for our internal interactions within each other, within our own movements. Nonviolence isn’t something you clock out of, right? It’s like, ‘All right, I’m going to a protest. I’m going to be nonviolent for the next three hours. And then I’m going to punch out, and I’m back to myself.’
Nonviolence has to be a way of life.
[00:15:37] And I also thought a lot about the 99% framing and how brilliant it was in that it brought so many issues and so many communities together. And at the same time, I don’t think it’s a framing that King would have ultimately supported. King used to say that the issue of segregation wasn’t an issue between Black people and white people, but it was an issue between justice and injustice.
[00:15:59] And I was saying during the Occupy movement that this issue isn’t an issue between the 99% and the 1%, but it’s an issue between 100% of humanity and injustice. It’s about what’s right and what’s wrong. There are plenty of people in the 1% that supported the Occupy movement. There are plenty of people in the 99% that didn’t support the Occupy movement, right?
[00:16:20] It’s never as simple as saying these people are right and these people are wrong. But it’s about being able to build movements that articulates the root of injustice and being able to target that as the enemy.
[00:16:33] And I think it’s really important that even if you disagree with that other person, like in our workshop, we say that the other person’s perspective in a conflict, even if you disagree with that perspective, and even if you think that perspective is wrong, even if that perspective is wrong, it’s still a part of the story. And if you can’t learn to see things from that other person’s perspective, you’re not seeing the full story.
And if you don’t see the full story, then you’re not going to figure out the best response to that conflict. And so I think it’s really important for us to, even if that other person is wrong, to really try to see where they’re coming from and start the conversation there.
[00:17:11] And also really identifying what you have in common first, before engaging in discussions about where your differences are. I think in Occupy, we always started the discussion with debates versus trying to figure out what we have in common first. So we have that as an underlying foundation for that conversation. So when we get into those difficult conversations, we have some baseline level of trust that we’re working from.
[00:17:36] And part of that is about being able to walk through conflict confidently and not being afraid of conflict. Nonviolence is not about avoiding conflict. Dr. Lafayette says that Dr. King used to set up conflicts between his staff sometimes and just let them go at it and he would just sit back and watch because he could learn a great deal from conflict.
[00:17:58] So I think one of our lessons that we always talk about in our trainings is that when there’s conflict you have to figure out some way to engage in that discussion, as difficult as it may be, because the longer you hold on to it without it being spoken, the more it’s going to start to hurt.
[00:18:16] Dr. King used to always describe the role of direct action as trying to dramatize an issue because oftentimes the injustices that were in Black communities weren’t being spoken about, weren’t being addressed, even in the progressive white community. So they used direct action as a way to bring those issues into the forefront and force society to deal with it.
[00:18:35] And so I think that’s one of the biggest misunderstandings of nonviolence is it’s about being passive and peaceful. And sometimes in that, we lose sight of the fact that it’s really about learning how we can confront the conflict in our lives.
[00:18:51] And meditation, I’ve found that there’s a lot of parallels between meditation and nonviolence.
[00:18:57] Shugyo is a word that there’s not a great translation for in English. Shugyo is kind of a combination between practice and training, but it’s like a spiritual practice. There’s a deeply spiritual component to me. When people talk about they have a meditation practice or martial arts practice, they’re talking about shugyo. And it’s something that you do, you train yourself to get to a larger goal in life.
[00:19:25] And so that idea of training, that deep training of shugyo, became really important to me with my time in Nipponzan. And it’s also something that is really important within the philosophy of Kingian nonviolence.
[00:19:37] In fact, during the height of the Occupy movement when we were running workshops every single weekend in Oakland and we were actually having to turn people away, the East Bay Meditation Center became our biggest supporter and they hosted all of our workshops for free.
And so at some point I decided to go to one of their workshops and just fell in love with meditation and I think the idea of shugyo and that deep practice of doing something consistently and also the—
[00:20:06] You know, I look at some of the footage of the trainings that (Rev.) Jim Lawson was leading in Nashville when they were preparing for the lunch counter sit-ins and they’re just able to sit there as people are putting their cigarettes out on them and throwing pies and whatever in their face.
And you can’t tell me that wasn’t meditation. That was deep meditative practice and training. And so I think whether it’s about learning to control our own anger from our own personal conflicts and our own personal lives, or learning how not to react to violence when we’re engaged in movement work, I think meditation is a really important tool.
[00:20:42] Principle four of nonviolence is: ‘Accept suffering without retaliation for the sake of the cause to achieve the goal.’ Gandhi used to say that nonviolence is about making your oppressor see the injustice of their ways through your suffering.
[00:20:58] So in essence, you’re sacrificing your suffering to try to reach the moral conscience of the oppressor or of the general public. And in Occupy, I remember seeing, I remember the image of the students at UC Davis who were sitting there nonviolently as they were being pepper-sprayed by the—it was like a fire extinguisher-sized canister of pepper spray.
[00:21:13] And I remember how the nation responded to that image. And then I remember how the nation responded to images coming out of Occupy Oakland where I was active. Very different.
When we’re able to stay nonviolent in the face of police repression and state repression, it paints a very clear image of who’s right and who’s wrong. And that public narrative is one of the most important weapons in nonviolence.
And when we aren’t able to accept that suffering without retaliation, then we lose sight of the goal. And that narrative becomes very confusing for the public.
And Dr. Lafayette always says that no revolution is possible without the active support, if not the sympathy of the majority.
[00:22:03] Another thing I learned a great deal in Occupy was the importance of negotiation. Occupy Oakland had a policy to not talk to the city of Oakland, which I just, yeah, that wasn’t sitting well with me. I learned through King and nonviolence that the goal of direct action, again, is to give yourself leverage so you can negotiate and end up in reconciliation.
And with all of these encampments, movements, all these direct actions that was part of the Occupy movement, we were creating so much pressure, right? So much pressure against certain institutions, and then by not negotiating, we were letting all that pressure go to waste. We weren’t utilizing the pressure that we were creating.
[00:22:46] And so, direct action is never a goal. That’s a huge thing that I learned in Occupy.
[00:22:53] And that brings us to the concept of reconciliation and the importance of reconciliation and how do we build movements that end in reconciliation instead of further divisions and further escalated conflicts?
[00:23:09] How do we balance that outrage and that righteous indignation with the compassion that leads to the beloved community in a way that we still have the courage to demand justice, right? That righteous anger, that righteous indignation is what gives us the power to demand justice. And the compassion and the love is what gives us the power to lead to the beloved community.
[00:23:35] So how do we balance those two things? Anger and love, compassion and outrage can equally be incredibly powerful forces on their own. But if we can combine the two towards the goal of justice, that’s a powerful movement. It’s an incredibly powerful movement. Dr. King used to say that power without love is reckless and abusive, that love without power is sentimental and anemic, that power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. And justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.
[00:24:18] So that’s our charge, right? That’s our challenge, is to build a movement that has the power that comes with that righteous indignation, the courage that comes with the righteous indignation, with the compassion of agapic love.
Those are two difficult things to balance. It’s things that King was incredible in being able to kind of touch both extremes at once. But that’s our challenge. And I believe that if we can harness both that outrage, the moral outrage, and the love and the compassion, with a deep commitment to the idea of shugyo, with a deep commitment to training, and the courage to demand justice, that we can build a truly powerful movement of nonviolent peace warriors that leads to the beloved community.
[00:25:06] Presenter: Rewind with Todd Boyle goes back to 2013 and Kazu Haga sharing principles of Kingian nonviolence.
Rewind with Todd Boyle is a production of KEPW News. You can see the full video on Todd’s You Tube channel.
