alt Hacker NewsI think the underappreciated part isn't "violence vs non-violence", but the role that malcolm x and black pathners actually played.
They weren't primarily organizing armed revolt.. it was more about the idea that they were articulating moral clarity. They were, in the most credible way, refusing to accept endless delay.
This allowed them to shift the baseline of what was politically tolerable.
In that sense, the movements worked collectively because of a kind of good-cop/bad-cop dynamic. MLK JR offered a path to reform that felt (to some) constructive and legitimate _because_ there was a visible alternative that many people udnerstood as worse.
I think violence is already far to prominent today, but I think successful movements do need both moral persuasion (if morality is still a thing that persuades) and _also_ a credible way of making inaction feel unsafe.
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> good-cop/bad-cop
The first essay in "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" deals with this dichotomy and how it's been used many times. Great read.
I think we also shouldn't sell the nonviolence short. It wasn't merely nonviolence. It was subjecting yourself openly to state violence and not resisting. It was letting the brutality of the state be made manifest as it washed over you. As the cops abused and beat people who were not responding even remotely in kind.
That was part of Malcolm's moral clarity, though in the alternative. He suggested it was immoral to subject yourself or people you loved to such an exercise, tantamount to one of self immolation.
Malcolm X essentially advocated a system of sovereignty not unlike the American founders, who of course were violent, not nonviolent.
In that way MLK JR really was America's Christ. He was willing to be nailed to the cross if it meant bending the arc towards justice.