Diversity of tactics
Diversity of tactics is a phenomenon wherein a social movement makes periodic use of force for disruptive or defensive purposes, stepping beyond the limits of nonviolent resistance, but also stopping short of total militarization.
He stated: In March 1964, Gloria Richardson, leader of the Cambridge Maryland chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), took Malcolm X up on his offer to join forces with civil rights organizations.
Richardson (who'd recently been honored on stage at the March on Washington) told The Baltimore Afro-American that "Malcolm is being very practical...The federal government has moved into conflict situations only when matters approach the level of insurrection.
The text was published in response to liberal Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, who'd recently written (in his book Concerning Dissent and Civil Disobedience) that he supported Gandhian forms of direct action, but not tactics that involved resisting arrest; Fortas also rejected campaigns involving the strategic violation of normally just laws, or the destruction of another party's property, or the injury to an oppressive party, including in direct self-defense (All of these tactics were becoming widespread in the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power movement and in the campaign against the Vietnam War).
"[9] Zinn rejects the liberal's "easy and righteous dismissal of violence," noting that Henry Thoreau, the popularizer of the term civil disobedience, approved of the armed insurrection of John Brown.
In an unprecedented success for post-Vietnam era civil disobedience, the WTO Ministerial Conference opening ceremonies were shut down completely, host city Seattle declared a state of emergency for nearly a week, multilateral trade negotiations between the wealthy and developing nations collapsed, and all of this was done without fatalities.
[18][19][20] In the lead up to the shutdown, local group Seattle Anarchist Response (SAR) had circulated Ward Churchill's text Pacifism as Pathology freely among protesters.
The call for the Seattle protest had originally come from Peoples Global Action (a network co-founded by the Zapatistas) which supported diversity of tactics and a highly flexible definition of nonviolence.
Medea Benjamin told The New York Times that "These anarchists should have been arrested,"[23][24] while Lori Wallach of Public Citizen stated that she had instructed Teamsters to turn black bloc participants over to the police.
[25] In response five academics including Christian Parenti, Robin Hahnel, and Ward Churchill signed an open letter denouncing the "tide of reaction" that the NGO sector was organizing against militant protesters.
"[26] In her own response to the controversy, Barbara Ehrenreich decried the NGO leaders as "hypocrites," and wrote that nonviolent activists ought to be "treating the young rock-throwers like sisters and brothers in the struggle."
Ehrenreich concluded: "The people at Direct Action Network, Global Exchange, and other groups were smart enough to comprehend the workings of the WTO, IMF, and World Bank.
[28] The first major indication was in April 2000, when the NGO coalition involved in demonstrations against the World Bank in Washington DC resisted calls by the media to denounce protesters who did not practice strict nonviolence.
"[29] In the lead up to the protests for the 2001 Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) summit in Quebec City, a major direct action organization known as SalAMI suffered a mass defection due to its intolerance of diversity of tactics.
The anti-FTAA demonstrations were massive, involving sixty thousand people at its peak, and received largely positive media coverage, even as they included widespread clashes with police and destruction of government property.
Scholars such as Charles M. Payne, Akinyele Umoja, and Timothy Tyson explicated on the utility of militant activity (ranging from armed deterrence to mass rioting) in ending formal segregation in the United States.
[59] In the months prior to the Nineteenth Amendment's passage, American suffragists experimented with more militant tactics, breaking a window in a struggle with a police officer in October 1918,[60] and burning the president in effigy in front of the White House in February 1919.
[61] The civil rights movement was not consistently nonviolent in a Gandhian sense; even during the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–1956, most activists, including Martin Luther King Jr., kept arms in their homes.
Although initiated as a nonviolent campaign which would not respond to white violence, in some locations, including Portsmouth Virginia and Chattanooga, Tennessee, blacks forcefully defended themselves against assaults.
[68] Robert F. Williams led a successful sit-in campaign in Monroe where, he reported, no racists dared to attack his group because it was well-known his use of nonviolence was strictly conditional.
[71] Doug McAdam cited "Axe-handle Saturday" as an example of the specter of violent crisis that loomed over lunch counter sit-ins generally, finding that the threat of escalating chaos pressured authorities to make concessions.
[74] The Monroe Freedom Riders were brutally assaulted while picketing city hall, but were rescued by Williams and his group, who proceeded to exchange gunfire with white supremacist civilians and police.
"[77] Other civil rights figures who praised Robert F. William's contribution to the movement included Rosa Parks,[78] Julian Bond,[79] Howard Zinn,[80] Stanley Levison,[81] and Ella Baker.
