Guest Author: David Finke
“Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story” (1958/FOR)
I was thrilled to see the picture of this revived comic book, now translated into Arabic and Farsi. I believe I could still put my hands on my own copy of the original one, issued soon after the Montgomery Bus Boycott in the mid-1950s. As a teenager, I was energized to realize that the peace organization which my parents belonged to (and to whose meetings I’d often been taken along) was once again seeking new ways to promulgate the old lesson of the Power of Love as organized nonviolent social protest which does not dehumanize one’s political opponent. I think I ordered a batch of these for my classmates at Sunday School, at the time.
The next important thing to remember about this particular document is that some of the students who started the Sit-Ins — at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, NC — and thus officially launched “The Sixties” on Feb. 1, 1960, had seen this very book!
A modest investment by Fellowship of Reconciliation has paid immeasurable dividends, now, over half a century.
This is the same organization which — when they saw the young Dr. King suddenly being thrust into the public leadership of the Montgomery Movement (and with very little political experience) — sent one of their staff members, Glenn Smiley, to assist (and tutor) him, very much in the background. A google on his name turns up this telling piece, from the King archives.
Nonviolent action seldom “just happens.” Usually, creative (and courageous!) people have been laying the groundwork for a long time. Rosa Parks, for instance, wasn’t just another random tired black worker who happened not to give up her place on a bus for a white man. No, she had been the Youth Secretary for the local NAACP in Montgomery, and had participated in workshops at the Highlander Institute (now Highlander Research and Educational Center). She also had a tremendous mailing list, and stayed up all night running off leaflets on a mimeograph machine that she knew how to run. Hardly an accident.
The model for all this in my view was Gandhi’s careful preparation for mass protest… which I’ll not try to summarize here, but invite you to explore perhaps starting with his autobiography, “The Story of My Experiments With Truth”.
I first started getting a systematic overview of this when, in the late ’60s, I attended a conference on Nonviolent Training and Action held at Pendle Hill, organized by then-staffers George & Lillian Willoughby, now of beloved memory. One of the speakers who really caught my attention was a retired military General from Canada! As you may know, Canada has over the decades provided lots of peacekeeping troops to various U.N. missions. He spoke of the military virtues that can be put to service (and should not be ignored) by nonviolent social change movements. Discipline and a clear sense of purpose and mission were among them.
But primary was the role and value of TRAINING. Every soldier has this and knows this, and would be dangerous without it. For social change movements to be seriously effective, there have to be those who don’t just show up at the last minute, or treat it as a lark or yet another social event. Not that folks have to be grim — far from it! Songs and “light-and-livelies” are a good part of training programs for nonviolent action. And there have to be ways that activists (I’ll use Gandhi’s term “Satyagrahis”) build trust and commitement with each other — in fact, willing to die for each other.
The AIC's HAMSA initiative - designed to link civil rights groups throughout the Middle East -- undertook in 2008 a project to translate The Montgomery Story into Arabic (and later Farsi). With the endorsement of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Ziada distributed 2,000 copies of the comic throughout the Middle East.
Rather than spin out more of my own stories right now, let me just invite you to give your own reflections on some of these themes. And, to join me in celebrating the unfolding transformative power, seen in recent days in the MidEast, of people finding their voice, asserting their dignity, working together, being creative, being joyous and yet determined — and making the world more hopeful and humane by putting their bodies on the line, modeling what it is to Live Free.
Editors Note: Dalia Ziada is Egypt Director of the American Islamic Congress, a non-profit group founded in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 to confront intolerance against Muslims, and later to promote peace and civil rights throughout the Arabic world. Read more about the AIC’s HAMSA initiative and this story here, plus see photos of The Montgomery Boycott and read more coverage of this comic book’s contribution to the air of peaceful revolution in Egypt.
