A Noble Tradition of US Nonviolent Resistance

By Howard Zinn, Professor Emeritus of History, Boston University.

    So long as those in power have brandished weapons, supported slavery, stolen the wealth of the earth for the benefit of a few, human beings of courage have found it necessary to break the law and challenge that power. The philosophical base for such disobedience rests on the words of the Declaration of Independence, written at the high point of revolutionary idealism, before the practical needs of the colonial elite manifested themselves in the Constitutional Convention.  The Declaration insisted that government itself is an artificial creation, not divinely ordained but established by the people for certain ends, those ends being the equal right of all to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  And when the government itself failed in its duties, when it became destructive of those ends, then it was the right of the people to "alter or abolish" it.
    Even before those words were written, the colonists put that philosophy into practice.  For when their British rulers tried to enlist them in the imperial wars with France, they surrounded the house of the governor, locked up a deputy sheriff and stormed the town house where the General Court sat.  They were condemned by a merchants' group as a "Riotous Tumultuous Assembly of Foreign Seaman, Servants, Negroes, and Other Persons of Mean and Vile Condition."
    The events leading up to the American Revolution were filled with actions of civil disobedience, which guardians of "law and order" in our time would like to forget: the protests against the Stamp Tax which went as far as destroying some of the property of a tax collector, and the famous Boston Tea Party, in which bales of tea were dumped into Boston harbor. When, after the Revolution, farmers in western Massachusetts rebelled against the oppressive measures enacted by the rich men who controlled the state government, and some of the Founding Fathers became fearful, Thomas Jefferson wrote from Paris to Abigail Adams: "The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive."
    The reluctance to participate in war was strong enough so that in the War of 1812 Congress was not able to pass a law for compulsory military service.  The spirit of resistance to war and militarism was kept alive all through the nineteenth century, by people like Adam Ballou, a member of a New England pacifist society, who declared that it was impermissible to "kill, maim or otherwise absolutely injure any other human being." Henry David Thoreau, jailed for protesting against the Mexican War by
refusal to pay his taxes, wrote in his 1849 essay "Resistance to Civil Government:" "Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right." Soldiers in the Mexican War, without benefit of philosophy, but repelled by the carnage all around them, went further than Thoreau and deserted by the thousands.
    Civil disobedience became widespread in the 1850s, as blacks and whites in the antislavery movement, defying the Fugitive Slave law, joined to rescue escaped slaves, in Christiana, Pennsylvania; in Syracuse, in Boston, in Oberlin, Ohio.  When they were apprehended and brought before juries, in a number of instances the juries refused to convict them, recognizing that the moral law against slavery superseded human law.
    For instance, in Boston in 1851, a fugitive slave named Shadrack was seized by authorities and brought to court.  Fifty black people went into the court and rescued him.  Eight blacks and whites were indicted for obstructing the Fugitive Slave Act.  A jury refused to convict. The formal structure of the U.S. government, whatever its claims to democracy, has never been adequate to remedy deep-rooted injustice. Working people all through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have had
to go on strike, to defy laws of trespass and private property, in order to achieve an eight-hour day, raise wages and improve conditions of the workplace.  In his book The Wise Minority, Leon Friedman writes: "There is hardly a reform movement in the history of the U.S. that did not feel it necessary or desirable to violate established laws as part of the campaign for justice."
    The sit-ins of young black people in 1960 were not just a violation of local segregation laws but of federal law as expressed in Supreme Court decisions that exempted private enterprises from the equal rights provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment.  Civil disobedience in a dozen different forms became the central tactic of the Southern movement against racial segregation.  Without that, it is doubtful that the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) would have passed.
    Civil disobedience has always been the recourse of people of conscience, of people facing overwhelming power and needing to awaken their fellow citizens to action.  That was the situation as the U.S. went to war in Vietnam.  Stopping the American juggernaut seemed hopeless until people began defying the law in larger and larger numbers, defying the draft, trespassing on the property of draft boards, blocking buses and trains, occupying public buildings.
    When the Catonsville Nine were arrested for entering a draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, removing draft records, and setting them afire in a public "ceremony," one of their number, Father Daniel Berrigan, delivered this meditation:
    "Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children....  We could not, so help us God, do otherwise....  We say: killing is disorder, life and gentleness and community and unselfishness is the only order we recognize.  For the sake of that order we risk our liberty, our good name.  The time is past when good men can remain silent, when obedience can segregate men from public risk, when the poor can die without defense."
    That spirit, of defying the law on behalf of the children of the world - the most helpless victims of war and militarism - has been carried on in the decades since the end of the Vietnam War by the men and women of the various Plowshares actions, beginning with the action of eight men and women against a General Electric plant in Pennsylvania where nose cones for nuclear weapons were manufactured.

Source: Forward, Disciples and Dissidents: Prison Writings of the Prince of Peace Plowshares. Edited by Fred Wilcox.

To order: Haley's, P.O. Box 248, Athol, Mass. 01331, USA.