November 18 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace
Encounter the wisdom of civil rights pioneer Diane Nash
http://blogs.courier-journal.com/faith/2012/11/13/diane-nash-recounts-fighting-with-love-and-courage-in-civil-rights-movement/
Diane Nash recounts fighting with love and courage in civil rights movement
Diane Nash's stunning career protesting segregated businesses, buses and other aspects of daily life
in the Jim Crow South — put her in the forefront of the civil rights
movement. From organizing student sit-ins in Nashville to reviving the
Freedom Rides and registering voters in Selma, Ala., she was fearless,
and she was everywhere.
Nash was a keynote speaker at this past weekend’s Call to Action
conference in Louisville — a national gathering of Catholics challenging
church teachings and practices in such areas as women’s ordination and
homosexuality.
Nash, a Catholic, did not herself discuss these issues in detail but
recommended the group use “agapic energy” in their struggles. If you’ve
never heard of that, Nash said, “I’m not surprised, because I made it
up.”
It’s her way of translating Mahatma Gandhi’s concept of
satyagraha,
a concept that involves the force or insistence of love and truth. “I
was always dissatisfied with the word non-violence because it did not
communicate the meaning” of the spirit behind civil disobedience, she
said.
She said she learned of that concept through the teachings of another
civil rights pioneer, James Lawson, who studied Gandhi’s tactics in
India and was teaching them in Nashville while Nash was a student there.
Activists needed a term, she said, that conveyed “more than simply
the absence of violence.” She drew from the Greek biblical term agape,
for unconditional love:
It’s “waging war using energy produced by love instead of
the energy of violence. Have you ever gotten angry and cleaned your
home in half the time you normally do?”
Nash said she turned her indignation about segregated water
fountains, bathrooms and other facilities in the South into positive
activism.
“If you recognize that people are not the enemy, you can love and
respect the person at the same time you attack the attitude or action of
that person,” she said.
The real enemies, she said, are not people but systems of injustice
and oppression. She cited the example of a Nashville restaurant owner
who at first resisted the sit-ins but eventually convinced fellow
restaurateurs they could integrate and remain profitable.
“Wouldn’t it have been a shame if we had killed or injured him, thinking that he was the enemy?” she said.
With violence, she said, “You often kill individuals and leave the oppressive system, which is the real problem, untouched.”
She added:
“Oppression always requires the cooperation of the oppressed. … It’s two sides of a sick coin.
“…When I obeyed segregation signs, it felt like I was agreeing that I
was too inferior to to through the front door or into a particular
restaurant.
I found the whole practice of segregation so humiliating.”
Once black bus riders in Montgomery, Ala., decided not to move to the
back anymore, she said, “Guess what? There were no longer segregated
buses in Montgomery. … It took not change on the parts of the whites.”
Nevertheless, it required a willingness to be jailed, killed or beaten.
The stories of Nash’s intrepid activism are astounding. The book,
“Parting the Waters,” by Taylor Branch, describes how she spoke in court
on behalf of those arrested in Nashville sit-ins: “We feel that if we
pay these fines, we would be contributing to and supporting the
injustice and immoral practices that have been performed in the arrest
and conviction of the defendants.”
Later, when the Rock Hill Nine were jailed for a sit-in at a South
Carolina lunch counter, Nash and three others drove over there, sat in
the same spots, and made it 13. Still later, with Freedom Riders under
physical attack, Nash insisted in reinforcing them, saying that if “they
stop us with violence, the movement is dead. We’re coming.”
Looking back in her Louisville talk, Nash reflected:
“The only person you can change is yourself. … Our
attitude was, ‘Shoot us if that’s what you’re going to do. But you
cannot segregate us.”
“… That applies in your personal life also. When you don’t realize
your power in a situation, you waste a lot of time trying to change
other people.
“We do not expect violent warfare to be easy and should not expect non-violent warfare to be easy.”
Nash didn’t hesitate to take on the legacy of two iconic African-Americans — Martin Luther King and Barack Obama.
The civil rights movement, Nash said, was not King’s.
“It doesn’t take anything away from Martin. I think he
was a great man and his contribution was tremendous, but people did
everything necessary for that movement. Martin was not the leader, he
was the spokesperson.”
Younger people, such as in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee, which she helped found, “were often upset with him for not
going fast enough,” she said.
“So it was not Martin Luther King’s movement. It was a
people’s movement. It’s important to understand that, because when young
people today see things in society that need to be changed, if they
think it was Martin’s movement, they might say, ‘I wish we had a great
leader like Martin Luther King today so that we could change things.’
But if they understood that it was a people’s movement, then they would
say, ‘What can I do?’”
As for Obama, whom she discussed before a Democrat-friendly crowd:
“We just elected a president for the next four years.
We’re very happy about that. But the fact is that we citizens are the
only ones who can save this country.”
