The Third American Revolution: Interview with James Lawson

The following is a transcription of a conversation between members of the Saturday Free School and Reverend James Lawson in Philadelphia, October 2019 as a part of the Year of Gandhi, a yearlong celebration of the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi in Philadelphia. Minor edits to the transcription have made for clarity. A recording of the conversation is available here.

So there are a few questions that we’ve been discussing. And we wanted to ask you, and I think people will join in. But I just wanted to begin. 

Okay.

One of the things that you’ve said several times in these past couple of days is, you’ve talked about Western civilization, and the violence that is inherent in it. And I think you’ve said in the past that the children of the world are being sabotaged by Western civilization. And I just wanted you to speak a little bit more on how you define Western civilization. What do you mean by it, and what do you see it being replaced by? 

Yeah, okay. Well, you see, that’s a very hard question. Because as I have lived in my country, I think a major political assumption is, and it’s again not mine, but a popular—by power brokers—that the world suffers because of people outside of the United States and systems outside of the United States. Not because of the continuation of the Western discovery, conquests, wealth-seeking movements of the 16th century. So it’s the terrorists now who are the trouble, not that the terrorists are a creation of our several decades of foreign policies and economic policies and military policies. And before the terrorists it was the communists, the Cold War. In Vietnam, it was the communists, in Africa it was the communists, the ANC [African National Congress]. And that really doesn’t come from anywhere except from Western civilization as it’s been. As it has been, as that period of 600 years that has been appropriated and handled and used and shaped by the United States power brokers and leaders. So it’s never our use of slavery—that hasn’t caused any harm. It’s never the conquest of the Indian that has put poison into our history. It’s always those people who are at fault. So it’s not our military occupation in so many different countries, and the presence of our CIA. It’s never that. It’s always those people, you people. 

So I see that as a part of what I mean by Western civilization. If, as in let’s say, in Nicaragua, there was counter violence. The violence that Daniel Ortega and his people in their own country developed is reactive violence. It’s a reaction to the USA business interests and military interests and the development of the military of Nicaragua. So it—and see I’m trying to think of the name of the Archbishop of Brazil who uses that analogy, says years ago, decades ago in Brazil, this Roman Catholic Archbishop of Recife, called the—well, I’ll try to describe it—the first violence is the system that imposes violence on the people: economic, social, cultural, spiritual violence. And then people react to it. He calls it the spiral of violence. The first violence is the—so I would suggest the first violence is Western civilization, conquest, and wealth gathering. The second violence then, is reaction to that violence. I can’t think of this man. [Hélder Câmara].

At what point in history would you say this Western civilization comes into being? When is it you think this force in history begins?

Sometime in the 16th century, when especially the Portuguese began to go up and down the coast of Africa, and landed in South America, North America. Began to claim land and look for gold and wealth. I think that’s the beginning of the massive discovery of the earth that Europe did. Does that answer that? 

Yes.

Then it became settlers going to where there’s lots of land. And in many ways, Europe, in that century, was more of a closed society. The lands were pretty largely owned by the nobility, and the kings and queens in England, in Italy, in France, in Germany, in Bulgaria. So there was not land that people could settle on and farm on, except as sharecroppers—what we call in the United States sharecroppers. And so that’s a major reason why so many people fled from Europe, England, Ireland, to North America. Land hungry. Yeah, they could not find land. And that’s why they were also so adamant that the army should move ahead of them. In the United States, Congress should finance the army and the army would move ahead of them and kill off the Indians. Conquer them, get rid of them, so that they could then settle on the land. 

And there are a lot of books in the West—there are a lot of Western novels, a lot of cowboy Indian novels, there are a lot of Indian settler novels—that describe this, where the novelist has been honest about the reality. And so I think it’s General Sherman of the Civil War and post Civil War years. It said that the army was the best friend the Indian had, because they were soft on killing them off. They felt that that they were—that it was an invasion, and that the Indians ought to be respected, and could be moved to reservations, but they did not think the wars against them were that valid. Many did not, no doubt some soldiers did, but many did not. I would say to you that they were two units of the army, the ninth and the tenth cavalry unions, units that were all Black, led by white officers, and they became the major army in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado a little, and Arizona. And then that it’s that group of Black men, many of them ex-slaves, who were the army, in that part of Southwest, western part of the country, who fought the Apaches and the Siouxs. Some historians say that their work has never been appreciated, or really acknowledged by the folk who settled in those sections, huge land areas. But they’re very interesting stories.

I wanted to come back to the second part of that question. So as you’re saying, Western civilization and its violence, it starts with the transatlantic slave trades, and the genocide in the 16th, 17th centuries. 

Well, I’m not actually prepared to hang onto that. That’s one perspective. But there are other possibilities. The Europeans had, in the medieval years, a sense of what they called the “other.” Any number of major stories on babies raised by wolves out of Germany and out of the heart of Eastern Europe. 

So they have a notion that life is divided into two sections, that there are those of us who are like ourselves, there are those who are “other.” That was, according to a number of the anthropologists and the historians, that was a strong sensibility, even perhaps a spirituality that came out of Europe. And so when people from Asia, a dark-skinned people, fled military conquest and came into Eastern Europe; what we call the Gypsies are descendants of the dark-skinned people who escaped military conquest. They became the Gypsies and outcast people in Europe. What is that, the 11th century or the 9th century? And then the wars, the Islamic people, came in one of those two centuries. So both of those invasions or both of those historical experiences in Europe, strengthened this business that our civilization is a superior civilization in Europe. It also strengthened the notion that Jesus Christ is savior of the world, and your religions are inferior. So our civilization is superior, your civilizations are inferior. I think that’s a strong force that developed and matured the encroachment of Western civilization. And Western civilization was in some ways, the first, though there may be questions about it, that took gunpowder and turned it into technology—guns and cannon. I think Western Europe did that before anyone else did it. So the wedding between technology, science, and violence really was heavily advanced in the Western world, not in Africa, not in Asia.

But the second part of that question that I wanted to come to was thinking about the alternative, which partly—we’re talking about Gandhi and what he was—

Well, the first alternative, it seems to me, is not that China or India becomes a major power—or South Africa. The second alternative, I think, is through international travel and associations and organizations of one kind or another, and the U.N. That a world order begins to emerge in many, many different ways. That is an order that will allow for the world to become different and to overthrow where it needs to be overthrown, the Western advantage. 

Right, right. And you lived through the Bandung Conference. Were you in India when that happened? In 1955?

Yes.

And so I wanted you to speak about the significance of that.

Yeah, the Bandung Conference, and also, the United States advancing its military wall against the Soviet Union across Asia, and all. So both those events seem to be important. But the Bandung Conference, of course, was the critical one in which India played a major role in organizing in Indonesia. And that worthy invitation was to those nations of color, who had been under the governance of a Western nation. That was the invitation. And of course, the United States did not like that at all, and said it was essentially a communist and anti-American conference. Because, you have to understand, the United States became the primary power of the West, you know, out of the Spanish-American War primarily. But for one hundred—you know, for the 20th century, 21st century, we’re still the power economically and militarily that Europe tends to follow.

They tried to bomb, actually, a plane carrying a Chinese Premier to Bandung. But the Premier wasn’t on the plane, but the plane was Indian chartered by Air India. And it was called the Kashmir Princess.

And it was bombed? I don’t remember the details.

It was en route to the Bandung Conference. 

Yeah, but Bandung scared the heck out of some power brokers in the United States. That there’s gonna be a unity of Africa and Asia against the rest of us.

I had a question. Going back to some of the points you were making about the earlier period of Christianity, actually. I mean, you had mentioned war, and all of these other forces with religion. And it seems to me that what Western civilization does—did, was corrupt Christianity as a practice. And the origins of—

I’d agree.

And, and you know, if you could say, I mean. 

The Europeanization of Jesus has been a great distortion of Christianity. 

A distortion.

Yeah.

And the Crusades.

Yeah, the 11th century crusades, yeah.

You know, the othering that you spoke of comes so much—you know, the Turk was the devil. All of these Muslim groups became demonized during the 13th and 14th century. And then, of course, Africa is more advanced than Europe during this period, because Europe is feudal.

Yes and India, too. India was more advanced, and some other places in the world. The cities of the Aztecs were more advanced than the cities of Europe. So a lot of that is well established by the historians and paleontologists and whatnot. Yeah, that’s quite true. Africa, Asia, that was quite known. So this imposition of the Western orientation was really a conquest effort.

And an attempt at Christian hegemony over Islam. 

Yeah. Oh, yes. There’s no doubt about it. “We’re the only religion.” Yeah. “We’re the only faith.” Obviously, that has always been untrue. By the time I was in high school, I not only had a deep sense that I was called to become a pastor of local churches, but I was also deeply convinced that racism was sin, and unjust, and had to be always opposed. And then, in high school, I met anti-Roman Catholic and anti-Jewish stuff. So that persuaded me that the religion of Jesus was actually for human life, and not opposed to human life and human endeavor. 

And so I became an opponent of all forms of religious or nationalist bias in high school. And that’s still a major perspective with me. So the religion of Jesus was distorted. It was wrapped up in dogma, and I began to meet it in the United States in high school. The so-called evangelical group in the United States is a group that is fundamentally a cultural ideology and commitment and not oriented to the religion of Jesus. And this is where Howard Thurman helped me a good bit in ‘49, ‘50, in his little book, Jesus and the Disinherited, which is still a very fine little book. 

That was the first time I read a scholar’s account that the religion of Jesus is really a religion for people. I think Thurman says, it’s really for people, it’s a religion for people who have their “backs up against the wall.” Something like that, yeah. So, it’s a survival kit. Yeah, and I resonated with that, back when the book was published, and I think that’s still true. 

But all religions, of course, become cultural features in their own countries, in their own climate. And so Christianity isn’t any different with the conquest. And as the Roman Empire took over the leadership, at least, of Christianity in the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th centuries, Christianity became wedded to the kings and to the armies and therefore became a part of the conquest. I think there’s no doubt in my mind that that’s precisely what happened. Karenga, who thinks that St. Augustine was a Black man, which he probably was, and an African. Yet, St. Augustine, you know, some of his theological perspective does help the conquest of Christianity—the wedding of Christianity to a political power, and to armies. 

City of God. 

Yes, right. Yes, absolutely. There’s no doubt about that in my own mind.

I was wondering if you could talk about the influence of W.E.B. Du Bois in the Civil Rights Movement, and if he’s influenced your personal thinking.

Well, I did not begin to read Du Bois until after I’d made strong commitments in high school against injustice and bigotry. I think that the intellectual world tends to be a help to broadening one’s understanding, but after the event, not before the event. 

I’m not prepared to say that the intellectual, the Black intellectual world, is what caused my activity, it did not. So I don’t know about other people. The Black intellectual world is something I began to understand in college, and ever since. But not before my own awareness. I would say that Frederick Douglass had more—his historic agitation across the 19th century had more to do with the creation of struggle and movement than any of the intellectual perspectives. Now, that’s my perspective, looking at it. I’ve become much more a reader of Black books after high school than before high school. I don’t even know if I had read one during high school. But then I don’t remember everything I was reading in high school, I really don’t. The intellectual pursuit, I think, is largely an observation, an after-major-events pursuit, rather than before-major-event pursuit. I may be wrong about that, but—

But I mean. We were talking yesterday, and you, when we were talking about how Dr. King went through this training in Western philosophy. It seems to me that he did intellectually pursue, you know, all of these philosophers and then intellectually pursue all those books by Gandhi before he came to a method that he found satisfying.

Yeah, but there, I have a study and research issue. Because the question, and I never got a chance to talk to King about this; because I didn’t know enough about the Montgomery experience, too, that was true. Because his book was the first major book, ‘58.

I have not been able to find a place where Martin King talks about nonviolence between December 1st, 1955 and January 30th, 1956. In those eight weeks that the bus boycott was organizing, and forming, and launched, he does not use the word nonviolence. He does not use the term soul-force or spiritual struggle. He shapes his speeches in those early days entirely around Christian love and the ethics of Jesus.

So I’m bewildered by the fact that it’s only on January 30th, at the bombing of his house while he’s in a mass meeting. And four or five days after Bayard Rustin has come to town, as an emissary of the War Resisters League and the Fellowship of Reconciliation and Howard Thurman and other people, who, and the New York people who were supportive of the boycott from day one, and encouraged and then raised the budget for Bayard Rustin to go to Montgomery, and explore it. 

And he went there about the last week, the last several days of January, he’s in Montgomery. Coretta King knows him. Martin King does not know him. She went to Antioch College in Ohio, which was a hotbed of pacifism and activism against war, and some against racism, and whatnot. So she greets him cordially. He’s under suspicion by others. He is especially disliked by the publisher of the Atlanta World Black newspaper, who is a conventional Black leader and who is fairly anti-communist, whatever that means. And the reporter from the Atlanta World threatens King and Bayard Rustin with, “If you don’t get rid of him, we will expose his homosexuality.” Because by that time, Bayard has had an arrest, maybe on the West Coast, and an arrest on the East Coast. There were two or three arrests that he had had in his lifetime, because he did not hide his, he did not declare himself gay—that was way before that talk, but he did not hide his homosexuality. He lived it to the best of his ability.

So in that tense scene, there was a Black reporter reporting from the Atlanta World, and I think he took orders from Atlanta and said, “If you don’t get rid of Bayard Rustin…” So the story is that Bayard Rustin left Montgomery in the trunk of a Cadillac because of the threats that were being made against his being there. You have to recognize now that 1955 is only ten years in the development of the severe anti-communism that is like racism. It’s like male chauvinism. And I said that in the ‘60s, so I mean, I saw that and heard that. So you know, but so—that’s my understanding. 

Up to that time, January… no words of King about Gandhi. Or about nonviolence. Or about the sit-ins in Chicago. Or the sit-ins in Boston. When people say to me, “Well, you started studying this when you went to India.” Well that, as I’ve said, that’s wrong. 

I started resisting racism from age four and systematically, not knowing what I was doing, tried to detect it and see it and hear it and work against it all my life from age four. I’ve known it to be wrong. Now I’m grateful for that struggle. See, it’s intellectual and spiritual. Because, having been born Black in the United States, I had to begin to assert very early in life, “Why am I alive? Who am I? What am I?” 

In the presence of this name-calling that I get, you see, where I discovered what restaurant I couldn’t go into in Massillon, Ohio. See? So I, I’m grateful, because I had to hammer out my humanity against and in a hostile society. And I think therefore, it helped to create me, in an important fashion—I have a strong sense of belonging to life. So that is, that has enabled me to go a lot of places that otherwise would be lonely. Accepted thy self, that I belong, I’m alive.

For years, if my dear friend King heard Mordecai Johnson, when he read Gandhi, why didn’t he adopt some of that language to the boycott from the very beginning? And see, I suspect, there are some people in our freedom movement who say that, in actual fact, Gandhi and nonviolence entered the whole campaign with my life, with my work. They use Gandhi as a clear example all the time from 1958. His thinking, Jesus’s thinking all molded what I thought. And I justify that because I know that Gandhi and the social scientists who say that if you’re going to be and create a movement of social change, social justice, that however you have to be within the spiritual, moral, intellectual, social, cultural geography of the people among whom you’re working. That you can’t force upon them strange stuff. So in the King-Parks movement, or the Parks-King movement, or campaign or dimension of the Civil Rights Movement, we were very much within that grasp. 

Black folk were deeply in a despairing mood concerning the racism that was considered the freedom of speech in the United States. Where we could hear political figures express their racism publicly, in Congress, you know, in the governor’s mansion, the James Eastland, the James Bilbos and Henry Russells. We heard this stuff in the ‘40s and the ‘50s. And the United States said that was freedom of speech. That’s one of the problems today that’s still going on intellectually. The way in which the power structures identify the First Amendment as meaning you can have hate speech that is legitimate speech. That’s what we have not cleared up yet.

We Black folk, in 1930, 1940; or when I was a kid, a baby, an infant in 1930, we Black folk; my parents generally considered all racist nuances as being not free speech, but unholy speech, sinful speech. See, there’s a big difference between Black religion and white religion, emergence in the United States. We knew this speech not to be—we knew that speech to be sinful. And many, many preachers in the Black community said that. There was no kind of playing around. There were First Amendment advocates that resented that that kind of hate speech was legitimate speech in the public arena and private arena. The Black community never agreed to that. And I’m sure the Japanese community did not, the Chinese. I know the Mexican American community did not agree with the notion that racist speech was ordinary and justified kind of conversation.

I had a question about some Japanese, Chinese. You had mentioned that we’re living in the shadow, the Cold War, but also World War II. So, maybe go to the—I wanted to read you something that Gandhi wrote. And it’s an essay called “Nonviolence and World Crisis.” And he has something very important to say about the role of Jews, Germans, and Chinese. 

And he says, “In my opinion, nonviolence is not passivity in any shape or form. Nonviolence, as I understand it, is the activist force in the world. Therefore, whether it is materialism or anything else, if nonviolence does not provide an effective antidote, it is not the active force of my conception. Or, to put it conversely, if you bring me some conundrums that I cannot answer, I would say my nonviolence is still defective. Nonviolence is the supreme law. During my half a century of experience, I have not yet come across a situation when I had to say that I was helpless, that I had no remedy in terms of nonviolence.”

And he says, “Take the question of the Jews on which I have written. No Jew need feel helpless if he takes to the nonviolent way. A friend has written me a letter, objecting, that in that article I have assumed that the Jews have been violent. It is true that the Jews have not been actively violent in their own persons. But they called down upon the Germans the curses of mankind, and they wanted America and England to fight Germany on their behalf. If I hit my adversary, that is of course violence, but to be truly nonviolent I must love him and pray for him, even when he hits me. The Jews have not been actively non-violent or, in spite of the misdeeds of the dictators, they would say: ‘We shall suffer at their hand; they know no better but we shall suffer not in the manner in which they want us to suffer.’ If even one Jew acted thus, he would save his self respect and leave an example which, if it became infectious, would save the whole of Jewry and leave a rich heritage to mankind besides.

“What about China, you will ask. The Chinese have no designs upon other people. They have no desire for territory. True, perhaps, China is not ready for such aggression; perhaps, what looks like her pacifism is only indolence. In any case, China’s is not active nonviolence. Her putting up a valiant defence against Japan is proof enough that China was never intentionally nonviolent.”

So he has this critique of world history as it’s developing and how I think right now, it seems to me that the Jews, the European Jews, are often prioritized in how the history of World War II is told. And here Gandhi is offering a criticism of that way of looking at what happened. So I wonder if you can comment on the Jewish question, to recall Marx, and how Gandhi saw it, and how King saw it perhaps.

I stand with Gandhi in his analysis pretty clearly, that’s where in many ways I stand. The Jewish community has not been pacifist. In Europe, it tended to be more passive than actively in opposition, though there were also lots of opposition within the Jewish community. The USA Jewish community has been far more activist than anywhere else in the world. So that needs to be said.

The fourth major wave of nonviolent action in the ‘60s was 1962 when Albany, Georgia sought to desegregate public life in Albany. The media universally called that a failure. But when you talk to Charles Girard, or people in Albany, or Robert Anderson, who was the chair of that struggle and see what—he was a medical person, he later had to flee. He later had to leave Albany, became a professor at Michigan State in the medical school. But they all said it was not a failure. I say it was not a failure. 

One of the important things that happened in Albany, Georgia was that the Black community said, “We no longer have to put up with segregation and we’re not going to do so. We’re not going to put up with this hostility.” Though they did not get a major agreement, in the first six months, the first 12 months of the Albany movement, even the white leadership, and especially the business leadership and the police leadership, knew that segregation was over in Albany. 

That the hostility, the signs, the lack of work and jobs was over. So that’s what Gandhi partially means by the fact that nonviolence never fails. Among other things, as King talks about, too, there was a new spiritual dignity. That then, that sizable number of Black people in Albany lived out from then on, continued the personal struggle and the other struggle. So does that partially answer… 

Oh yes, the first part but then, the—I guess, what is the future, you know, with the relations between Jews and Christians, and Hindus, and Muslims? And here we are, amongst—

That the emergence has already happened—it began to happen in the 20th century, where you had places in Europe and in the United States where the major religion, religious elements of the world came together in common working efforts within their own localities. That was very true in Europe, it is also true in the United States. I mean, you know, since ‘74 in Los Angeles, when we see some of the—when I’ve seen some of the shenanigans of people like [Sheldon] Adelson of Las Vegas, that multi-billionaire, who’s Jewish and who funds a lot of Jewish conservative, racist right-wing stuff. In Los Angeles, my associates, at a city-wide level, included any number of Jewish rabbis who were more critical of him than I was. Far more critical. In Los Angeles, we’ve had for a long time, working together on an interfaith basis with all kinds of people, in the labor movement, for example, which I helped to organize. I organized a group called Clergy and Laity United against Economic Injustice: CLUE, we called it. 

Well CLUE has brought together local congregations of all kinds to work on the issues of working people who are poor. So we’ve helped to organize any number of unions: International 11, SEIU, Teamsters, healthcare workers, hotel restaurant people which I’ve already named, security workers in Los Angeles around by 2004 or ‘5. Security workers in the high rise buildings and the office buildings of Central L.A.—in downtown L.A.—were 85 percent Black. And we organized that into one of the largest local unions. And that had multi-religious support. Across the board, food workers have just finished calling off a strike, because the negotiators—but when we had a name, in the demonstration we had all sorts of religious people engaged: Baptist, Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian came to the public demonstrations that forged the agreement that that union recently assigned. So, that work of the religious groups coming together at the local level, there’s a lot of that happening on levels of active concern for justice and equality. Not enough!

And, so I say in that sense, let the local communities where this kind of work is happening lead what eventually becomes nationwide or international. And I prefer our using Kingian language for the world rather than “global” language. He speaks of the world house, he speaks of the human race. So I really think that that’s better language, more humanistic language, than adopting the global concerns. What is it that—? 

It’s the idiom of neoliberal globalization.

Yeah. “Global citizen.” Yeah, I think that’s a language that’s very seductive. A language that’s quite seductive.

That’s one thing we’ve been discussing also, how you don’t hear the language of King, like the beloved community.

You may or may not know that the beloved community comes from Josiah Royce, philosopher at Harvard, at the turn of the 19th, turn of the 20th century, around 1899 and 1905, 1910. 

But you were talking right now about economic injustice. And would you be participating in economic injustice. And when you talk about the structures of economic injustice, and you mentioned yesterday, what you call plantation capitalism. And I actually discovered that King as early as 1951 said that, I’m quoting, “I’m convinced that capitalism has seen its best days in America, and not only in America, but in the entire world. It is a well known fact that no social institution can survive and it has outlived its usefulness. This, capitalism has done. It has failed to meet the needs of the masses.” And I was interested in your own relationship to what you see as an economic system that is more humane, and replacing the one we have right now.

Well, much of my work has been really engrossed in the dismantling of the things that are wrong, so I really haven’t tried to think or work that much on what are the forms of economic order that will be more just and more humane. I think very strongly that in the United States, the economy cannot change if we do not have millions and millions of people at the local level. In unions, lift up the issues that become more, not president-centered or trade-centered, but community-centered. 

And so just as I think that local religious organizations must be a major part of the way that democracy takes place. Although European people, European Christians would say to me, that, you know, we have pushed hard in helping to get Christian thought into the economies. Christian Social Democrats and Social Democrats, those kinds of parties that have had a fair amount of Christian support, church support in Europe, have tried to humanize the economies and they’ve done a better piece of work there than we have done here, by and large. 

But I still maintain that activism in the United States, and we in the Black community, still have a sizable dismantling process to do of the structures of injustice and inequality. And while I want other people to do this other work, of parallel institutions, of course, which is a Gandhian notion. You have to have people who will do the services that they ought to be able to do in place of the government, until you get a government that’s doing those services. And then a lot of, you know, there’s a lot of effort that brought various kinds of issues of stopping the wrong to the foreground, in the local communities. But I see the need for nonviolent action and direct action in the United States for the dismantling job, if not for the reconstruction job.

Black reconstruction. And its reversal.

I would say not just Black reconstruction, but that certainly, I mean, in a place like Los Angeles where we have we have a city now that is 65 percent, Hispanic, and only about 12 percent Black, about 7 percent or 8 percent Asian, with a sizable, visible growth of an Ethiopian immigrant community going on. And an increasingly visible Nigerian immigrant community going on. So I don’t—in some places, New York would be another example. And Portland would be another example. Many cities, you have to have a multi-ethnic, multi-people coalition to have real strength. And I maintain that we are letting white people off the hook; white leadership bosses. So there’s a real need to make certain that we’re taking the game to the enemy camp.

What do you mean by that? What do you mean by letting white leadership off the hook? 

I think that we cannot afford movements in the United States that do not intentionally involve white people in our localities. No matter how perplexing that might be, in our organizing of our own troops, we have to bring in white people and get them to work with us in this business. Many do not like it, and many are very, very fearful. We have to help them cleanse themselves of their sins, as well as we ourselves cleanse ourselves of our sins. 

So, I think the white power brokers must be challenged. That means they must be challenged by the whole community and not by just one fragment of the community.

Martin King would say that in Montgomery, they had allies who were afraid to come forward but who secretly were engaged. Well, we have to help them gain the courage to come forward and call for the emergence of the human family in the United States. That is multi-creedal, multi-color, multi-philosophies and theories that have a common consensus about the ridding of every form of sexism or racism or economic injustice, and the emergence of a society that’s more fair, more just. And then increasingly, that does increase in the numbers of people who are able to embrace it and live in it.

I’d like to return to the question I asked you last night, and it involves the question of violence. And it is, you know, violence of the state, and at the very time that Gandhi takes over the Indian National Congress, so about that same time that you have the Russian Revolution, and with it, and a part of the ideological and intellectual authority that it carries, is Lenin’s theory of the state—in particular, the state and revolution, where he argues that a revolution cannot be successful until the revolutionaries have seized state power, one. And secondly, smashed the bourgeois state, which is the capitalist classes—instrument of legitimate violence against the people. 

Now, on the one side, I was thinking about this all night. On the one side, you could see a commensurability with Gandhian or Kingian thought that—or King in particular—that the most violent nation, or the most violent state in the world, is the United States. As he said, my own government is the main purveyor of violence. And at that point, he is almost saying what Lenin is saying, that the U.S. state, or the state in general, is an instrument of violence. 

But it is only in Leninism, to my knowledge, that there is the concept of seizing state power. Not reforming the old state, but destroying it, which is a violent act. Although up till that point, even in the Russian Revolution, we could say it was pretty much on the side of the revolutionaries, on the side of the people, a nonviolent affair. Strikes, general strikes. And the class struggle, even in Marxist, Karl Marx’s classical thinking, or even Gramsci, or even Rosa Luxemburg, or any of them—it’s pretty much not involving, you know, satyagraha. And one could even suggest that Gandhi may have incorporated that experience of the 19th century in his own thinking. 

But then when it comes to the state, and this is a problem that I think we’re having in the Free School—an intellectual problem, a theoretical problem. What do advocates of the Gandhian [philosophy]—King, and others—for example, like Diane Nash has said, the greatest invention of the 20th century for social change is nonviolence—but then without a theory of the state, how deep and how permanent can the change be? Lenin, you know, was bold enough to say that all of our efforts would evaporate and could easily be overturned, unless we seized state power. I just posed it again, and I’d be interested in how you think about these things.

I think that of course, I think that the Leninist observation from theory is an excellent one. The advance of Western civilization across the earth has been an advance of France and Belgium, and Holland and Germany and even Sweden, Great Britain and so forth—has been an advance of the empires. And the empires have all produced forms of racism. The gathering of wealth, the gathering of domination and control. There’s no doubt about all that. So I think that this analysis means that you have to take over the state. You have to use state power, state governance, for the advance of the revolution. So it seems to me that the only major issue: can you take over state power with violence? And it seems to me that in the modern era, all of our civil wars have been handicaps to taking over state power.

I raised the experience I had with the war on poverty in the ‘60s, where I think Lyndon Johnson tried to put in place a new way of governance. Where in the war on poverty, a local non-government agency could organize with the approval of the local government, or without the approval. And again, receive state, federal dollars to do their work at the local level as a parallel institution. 

I did that with an agency that we called Memphis Area Project South—it was an anti-poverty agency with workers who organize block by block. And our local government said that there was no poverty in Memphis. And we had one of the largest urban poverty elements in the country. As many as 40 percent of people, largely Black, but also many whites were in poverty. And so we were able to persuade the Office of the Anti-Poverty, the War and Poverty offices, try there and others. We couldn’t get the approval of our mayor, or city commissioners, or of the county, and the office approved our programs in Washington. In spite of that, we got local government consent. Several years later, before local government had changed enough that they could see that the work as being important work in the city. So… but I would tend to agree there has to be a taking over of the state power, I would have to agree with that entirely.

But Dr. King also said, and this is the thing with Gandhi and King, they saw the limitations of the state itself as a misuse of the state, and King said, “Man is not made for the state, rather, the state is made for Man…”

The government has made—well that’s the Declaration of Independence, and the government is supposed to serve the human.

But then Gandhi, I mean, his programs, economic programs—it’s almost like he, there are parts of you know—when he’s right in his writings, where he very much focused on the individual as well—the transformation of the individual will, the collective, that’s what the ashrams that he set up, for training…

The way I tried to put this yesterday, though, is that the gift of life is—I don’t like the word autonomous, but it is an autonomous life entity, with all the potential of life, spirit, mind, soul, strength, character; each newborn baby is a self-contained illustration of what life is, with all the potential. So that point of view, it seems to me, has to be central to nonviolent struggle. Being able to come to terms with that, and to blend it with other autonomous centers of light, is the only way that struggle, community, will grow and develop and gain power. So you cannot take away from the human experience the fact that the centrality of this singular gift of creation that I think our Declaration of Independence repeats so powerfully.

Can I just return to this question of the state? Because, you know, you could see in the events around the upcoming and the year of Gandhi, there are no DSA members that I can identify, no members of Trotskyist organizations. No Antifa, in other words, the left…

No Students for Democratic Action [Students for a Democratic Society], no Weathermen, no Semiotic [Symbionese] Liberation Army… [laughing]

And even though they don’t confront us—the Free School directly, you know, there’s every kind of whispering and smear campaign, suggesting that we have retreated from a revolutionary position. And you see, that we have gone over to idealism and metaphysics; philosophical idealism and metaphysics, and abandoned historical materialism and the basic truth that revolution, the object of a revolution, the revolutionary movement—is first and foremost, to achieve state power, to destroy the old state, and then to liberate society from the oppressive exploiting classes. 

Now in my mind, there are many arguments, and your argument about the historical evolution of Western civilization and its roots in violence, externally and internally: empire, imperialism, and internal violence, but never as severe as the violence against the other—the colonies and so on. And so this violence is deeply rooted in the Western philosophical tradition, and just and unjust war concepts, but war.

And also rooted economically in building the structures of inequality.

Absolutely, I agree with you.

Both culturally and otherwise, economically.

Yes. And Gandhi, he seems to completely abandon Western philosophy, except for maybe Tolstoy and I don’t know how Western that is, it might be both. King does the same thing. I forget the essay where he makes the point, you remember the essay?

It’s where he’s talking about the one where he questions the origins of the Christian church.

And of Western philosophy.

And epistemology.

Of Freudian psychology, Nietzscheanism. I mean, he literally abandoned, and says in effect, that he looks to the east. So this, you see the grappling point here. And I think that there’s a need for us to further develop and extend this theory of change that both—an alternative, but a more, a fuller, I would say, understanding of what the revolutionary process is. 

I mean, King talked about it all the time, it was so obvious that when he said a revolution of values, the creation of a beloved community, that—he’s almost saying, what does it mean to take state power if there is no fundamental change of values? So I would just like to hear your—I mean, I hate to talk so long, but I’m so interested in how you would address these issues.

Well, frankly speaking, I have to admit that I fundamentally reject the notion that the only way to seize state power is by the violent process, which is in and of itself, an evolutionary process and not a massive over-evil. Because… 

Could I just interrupt you quickly, just I wanna say—

Yes that’s okay, yeah that’s good.

It’s so obvious that the Russian revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks, did not seize power that violently. It was almost as though the army refused to defend the regime any longer.

There was great division in the army.

That’s right. That’s right. So they kind of walked in and took power… 

And in one way, Castro found the same experience.

Absolutely. But let’s take Germany, or the United States, wherever the concept is that we have to, by arms, seize the state. The state is never seized. Which means that the door is open. Henry Winston, I wrote a little piece on Henry Winston and Gandhi, Divya asked me to. And in it, Henry Winston, chairman of the Communist Party, in his book Strategy for a Black Agenda, he writes this deep defense of Martin Luther King, where he says that King’s concept, not of coalition and other things, would lead to a political realignment, which could suggest, and I put, quote, “the peaceful seizing of state power.” If the realignment is that complete, that total; and so, it’s a quite interesting thing. And Winston is unquestionably a defender of Lenin. But also equally a defender of Martin Luther King.

I would certainly concur in that is another form of putting the pressure on the state to take the state over. There is a good illustration that’s going to be very, very perplexing. That is very, very perplexing to me. Because Mississippi, as a state now boasts of the fact that they have more Black elected officials than any state. It also, however, remains the state where Black people are in the poorest conditions. So the big question is, there, the Black folk are over 900 Black elected officials; that’s sheriffs, county clerks, city council people in government offices; appointed and elected officials. But the state is still the poorest state in the union. And the poverty is rapacious in James Eastland’s Sunflower County, and in every county across Mississippi, with many now Black appointed elected officials. So what’s the next step for the movement of the Black community against the economic deprivation? How is this going to take place, you know? I have not studied the scene enough at all locally or read enough about it to know if the scene is improving or not. But here, Black folk have assumed state power, responsibility for governance.

So I would agree firmly with Lenin at the point that the revolutionary movement must become the government, and therefore use state power and local power for governing in a fashion that is…. and here again I think that in many ways, you have governments in Europe that have exemplified that. That’s given us some models. And they did not take over government—they did take over government with fierce labor struggles. They did not take over government with a lot of violence. So I think that’s another place where there needs to be studied and reflection on how we do it. Certainly, the struggle in the United States has to assume mass action over a period of time with specific targets, as I’ve tried to say in part yesterday. But I think that the… as we talked this morning, I think even more so that yes, we have to take over the government. 

And I guess my argument would be that the so-called revolutionary groups that are committed to the violent acts, have not been given any illustration on how this can be done, anywhere. In my own analysis back in the ‘60s, in the ‘50s, during World War II in fact, I saw myself as a guerrilla warfare person behind the scenes, which I came to recognize is not possible in the United States. I used an illustration in some places of how—I said this last night, said part of it—that I could have worked in Nashville with the athletes to go downtown and, forcibly with crowbars and with others, pull all the signs down. And I thought about that possibility as an option. But that would have been an option that would have multiplied the hatred and escalated the violence. And Gandhi also says that sabotage is a form of violence. It doesn’t have the debate that I’ve had in the United States over that issue. So if I moved in that direction, rather than being in the circle of friends of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, who organized as an affiliate of SCLC; and in that group, launching a very specific, Gandhi-oriented methodology for going after, finding the target, and planning the attack upon the targets. That is left out of many of the books, that in Nashville, 30 or 40 of us, met for six months, every month, every day, every week. Every Saturday morning, as I recall, analyzing the plight of the Negro in Nashville, and making the decision, where do we begin? And I’ve never forgotten.

In June, I don’t remember when, but it was at one of those final meetings in June, where we agreed, almost unanimously, we were going to launch a campaign against segregation in downtown Nashville. 

I’ll never forget that chill that went in, you know, having made that decision, which I had not even thought about. But that group made that decision. No one in the city, no one in the United States, in the Black community, any of the community and made a decision, “We’re going to desegregate downtown Nashville.” That put a whole new dimension. Yes, Montgomery points to that. But here’s a group that said; and it was the Black women in our group that pushed us the most. Because they said among other things, “You men don’t shop downtown, we shop downtown.” 

They said in our meetings, and they were quite open, frank meetings, “You don’t shop downtown, we have to shop for our families, we have to shop for our children’s shoes, we have to shop for groceries downtown. And it’s always a horrible experience, you don’t know, at what point you will be confronted with a hostile clerk or by a hostile white person. And you can’t drink at the fountains that are marked colored.” 

They said, “We can’t drink at those fountains. Because that is to participate in the system, even a tiny bit. And if you drink at the other fountain, you open up yourself to a physical attack on the spot. There’s no restroom that I’m going to go to. I’m not going to go to the colored restrooms at Cain Sloan department store and I’m not going to enter that.” That’s what they said. We had to have that strategy. That became our goal, desegregate downtown Nashville, which of course, we did begin. Don’t pretend that it’s finished yet. But we began the process, which has to be continued.

If I could actually follow up on what you were saying a little bit, because the state, and you were talking about taking over the state, but the state particularly today has various arms to it. And one thing we will also be discussing, you said right now that there is a need of mass action to take over the state and even yesterday, you emphasized the importance of direct action of campaigns. But one part of this is the influence of non-governmental organizations and which we have seen also ourselves that often, you take up a local issue and you try to participate in it but then you figure out, actually, you’re trying to help someone get elected. It is not about the economic justice…

I minimize my participation in elections. As a pastor, of course, I could have in place the process by which the congregation was sensitized to election, participate in voter education, but they do a minimal point.

But I wasn’t talking about the election so much as the influence. Or I was wondering if you see this as a new thing, whether a lot of non-governmental organizations will take up local campaigns, but not fundamentally challenge the structures.

But in L.A., and also, I know in Nashville where I visited for Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter has too narrow a strategic and theoretical base. You’re not going to, we are not going to get rid of the violence of our society through the police. If the police themselves, and the police union, does not become a target of direct action. We’re not, I mean, I know that sounds strange. But I think the police is one of the places where power is exercised for the government which has to be challenged. I think the Chamber of Commerce and business organizations is the second, is another power element in our local communities that must be challenged. 

The wedding between the KKK and the plantation owner, which spread out into a community of resistance and pushing racism—that wedding has to be separated. So I maintain that in the Black Lives Matter movement, if we don’t go after business organizations, and the police union, and the police, and the City Council, and the county government, and the media, we cannot build a movement.

I just want to follow up. I think what Raju is talking about is in the 21st century, this whole thing of the diffusion, or the apparent diffusion of power, through non-governmental organizations that are funded by corporate philanthropy.

So you don’t have any argument from me, that is to me a very, very dangerous affair going on.

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, you’re right. Especially young people—in this room, almost everyone in this room as a student has been drawn into some kind of a nonprofit affair, thinking they’re doing good. So I just—how would you respond to that?

Well, I agree. I’m right there. And we have foundations that will not, will not put money into programs that have justice as a major vision. Will not do it. I’ve had some conversations with such foundations in the Los Angeles region. And many non-government organizations, I think, in my mind, are avoiding the structural issues. Complicity issues. And I know that there are some social scientists who say that the non-governmental organizations will change the nature of government. But I am not sure of that. I don’t see that yet at all. So how we fund the revolution that really does change the United States is a significant problem. How we can fund it is a significant problem.