Monday, January 19, 2015

Martin Luther King on Nonviolent Change

For this day, I wanted to see if I could find something that explained something that happened years ago that I had missed.

I am engaging in a little historical fact checking in my own head, a little self-reeducation of things that I had forgotten.

I had heard that Dr. Martin Luther King had been a strong believer in the process of nonviolent change.  Through the dust and fog of the intervening years, and through the current disturbances through the world, it was a strong contrast to how things have happened in this century.

"Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love." -Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Stockholm, Sweden, December 11, 1964)

This is one of the videos that I have found that speaks to the subject.  It is Dr Martin Luther King being interviewed at some point in the 1950s after the desegregation of the Little Rock, Arkansas schools where he gives his own views on the subject as well as his own theories on how to effect change in society.

If you ignore the interviewer, who was not terribly effective, you hear MLK's own words on this subject.

"Noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good"  MLK


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