Nikole Hannah-Jones: ‘Nonviolent Protests Are Not Going to Resolve the Issues’ Black Americans Are Facing

EXCERPT:

HANNAH-JONES: "So, nonviolence was a strategy, and the strategy was actually to use nonviolence to reveal the violence of oppression. And so, part of that strategy was to court, to kind of prod white racists into physically harming protesters in order to shame the racists and force white Americans to actually pay attention and care enough about what was happening, particularly in the south, but in other parts of the country. So, I think nonviolence in a way is a misnomer, because without that violence, the media didn’t pay attention. There's a great book, it's one of my favorite books, it's called 'The Race Beat', it won a Pulitzer some years back, and it really shows how Dr. King, for instance, in Albany, Georgia campaign, when the sheriff there refused to arrest and beat protesters, the media was disinterested. It didn’t make national news and that campaign had to be abandoned. So they had to go into places like Birmingham, where they knew that Bull Connor was going to act in the most egregiously violent way, just so the media would pay attention and white America would pay attention. So we’re comforted by this notion of kind of docile black people humbly kneeling, of having to be so respectable that you’ll force white Americans to feel your pain. But this came at a great cost. And what ends up happening, of course, is the Civil Rights Movement leads to this massive civil rights legislation being passed, the '64 Civil Rights Act and a '65 Voting Rights Act, and at the same time, urban ghettos all across the north are going up in flames, people are having uprisings. Folks were so confused because there’s a huge expansion of black rights happening, but they aren't doing anything about the living conditions of black people on the ground in northern cities. And those people realize that nonviolent protests were not going to resolve the issues that they were facing. And frankly, many black people got tired of just taking beatings and absorbing white violence to get their citizenship, and I don’t think we're in a place in America where lots of black people are willing to do that."