As I read Sudarsan Raghavan's Washington Post article yesterday on Yemen's women activists, I was reminded that America's very best export is the civil rights movement.
Tawakkol Karman sat in front of her laptop, her Facebook page open, planning the next youth demonstration. Nearby were framed photos of her idols: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. These days, though, Karman is most inspired by her peers. 'Look at Egypt,' she said with pride. 'We will win.'
There is an intellectual and spiritual lineage from the 20th century that is being played out on the streets of Cairo, Sanaa, Riyad, and elsewhere today.
In the 1850s, Russian aristocrat Leo Tolstoy became disgusted with violence after doing tours of duty in Chechnya and after seeing a public execution in Paris. His conversion toward nonviolence and Christianity led him to write The Kingdom of God Is Within You (published in 1894).
In 1908, Tolstoy wrote A Letter to the Hindoo laying out a plan for a massive nonviolent civil resistance campaign to free India from British imperialism. The letter fell into the hands of Mohandas Gandhi who was working as a lawyer in South Africa at the time and in the beginnings of becoming an activist. This prompted an exchange of letter between the two that was foundational for Gandhi's nonviolent strategy. Gandhi listed Tolstoy's seminal work The Kingdom of God is Within You as one of the top three influences on his life. He called Tolstoy "the greatest apostle of nonviolence that the present age has produced."
Less than 10 years after Gandhi was assassinated, a young American conscientious objector named James Lawson went as a Methodist missionary to Nagpur, India, where he studied satyagraha, the principles of nonviolent resistance that Mohandas Gandhi and his followers had developed.
In 1955, Lawson returned to the United States and was introduced to Martin Luther King Jr., who had also studied Gandhi's principles of nonviolent resistance. King told Lawson to come South, telling him "Come now. We don't have anyone like you down there." Lawson began implementing large-scale strategic nonviolent civil resistance training that was deeply rooted in Christian faith and spiritual principles. The Civil Rights Movement in the United States became the most massive civil resistance movement in U.S. history.
When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, South African freedom leader Nelson Mandela was entering his fourth year of his life-sentence for "sabotage." It took awhile for the news of King's murder to reach Mandela in prison. Over the course of his 27 years in prison, Mandela studied deeply the work of Gandhi and King. Mandela was uncertain that the tactics of either would work in the South African context.
But the church leaders leading South African freedom movement outside of prison -- particularly Archbishop Desmond Tutu -- were highly motivated by both Gandhi and King. South Africa's freedom struggle became known for taking the power of song to the streets. It became an image iconic of the freedom movement to hear South African children singing "We Shall Overcome" -- an anthem of the American civil rights movement -- and dancing the toyi-toyi.
Thirty-one years after being imprisoned, Mandela was elected president of a free South Africa. Coretta Scott King was in the audience for Mandela's acceptance speech as the new president. He looked at her and said: "This is one of the most important moments in the history of our country. I stand here before you filled with deep pride and joy
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