More on U.S. Nonviolent Actions
There is a rich tradition of non-violent direct
action in the United States. American revolutionaries used
tactics such as tax and tea boycotts to mobilize thousands of colonists against
the British. American peace churches have a long tradition of non-cooperation
with military conscription and taxation. Beginning in the late 1800s, the
women's movement for the right to vote carried on a century of silent vigils,
mass demonstrations and hunger strikes.
The labor movement has used nonviolence with striking
effectiveness in a number of instances, such as the Industrial Workers of the
World free speech confrontations; the Congress of Industrial Organizations
sit-down strikes from 1935-1937 in auto plants involving 400,000 people and the
United Farm workers grape and lettuce boycotts.
Using mass nonviolent action, the civil rights movement
changed the face of the South. The successful Montgomery bus boycott in
1955 electrified the nation. Then, the early 1960s exploded with
nonviolent actions: sit-ins at lunch counters and other facilities, freedom
rides, freedom schools, voting registration drives, jail-ins and the 1963 March
on Washington, which drew 250,000 participants. Civil rights activists
developed many of the nonviolent techniques used by peace and justice movements
since then.
Opponents of the Vietnam War, in the late 1960s and early
1970s, employed the use of draft card burnings, draft file destruction, mass
demonstrations (such as the 500,000 who turned out in 1969 in Washington, D.C.),
sit-ins, blocking induction centers, draft and tax resistance and the historic
1971 May Day in Washington, D.C. in which 11,000 people were arrested for
blocking traffic.
Since the mid-1970s, we have seen increasing nonviolent
activity by women's, antinuclear power, environmentalist, anti-intervention,
anti-apartheid and antinuclear weapons movements. Nonviolent civil disobedience
actions have taken place at dozens of nuclear weapons research installations,
storage areas, missile silos, corporate and government offices and other places
necessary to the pursuit of the arms race. Some 1,750 people were arrested
on June 14, 1982 at the missions of the five major nuclear powers during the 2nd
UN Special Session on Disarmament. In 1982, and again in 1983, over 1,000
people were arrested for blocking traffic at the Livermore Labs where nuclear
weapons are designed. In a series of actions in 1983, over 1,000 people
were arrested at Vandenberg Air Force Base for nonviolently disrupting the
flight testing of MX and Minuteman III first strike missiles. In 1983,
American women set up peace camps at Puget Sound, Washington and Seneca
Falls, New York to disrupt the production and deployment of Cruise missiles.
Many actions have been specifically directed against Trident. In 1975,
members of the Pacific Life Community planted a garden within the fence at the
first Trident submarine base in Bangor, Washington. There have been
ongoing civil disobedience actions at the Trident manufacturing plant in Groton,
Connecticut. And from Pantex, Texas (where all nuclear weapons are
assembled), to Bangor, people continue to sit on the tracks to block the white
train as it carries nuclear warheads to the submarines. Protests against
Trident have also taken place in King's Bay, Georgia at the second Trident base;
Wisconsin and Michigan against the Project ELF communications system; Sunnyvale,
California against Trident II's prime contractor, Lockheed; and the Knolls
Atomic Power Labs in Albany, New York. Of the 14 Plowshares actions,
enactments of the biblical injunction to "beat swords into
ploughshare," six have been aimed at Trident. On January 15, 1987,
just under 200 people were arrested for blocking the first Trident II test
launch at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Source: from the Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Handbook published
by the Alliance to Stop First Strike, Santa Cruz, CA (1987). Web site: www.activism.net/peace/nvcdh/history.htm