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Dick Kroeger
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Published on Tuesday, January 11, 2005 by CommonDreams.org 
Beyond Elections
Dr. King's Teachings on Strategy and Tactics 
by Paul Rockwell 
 
According to Arundhati Roy, "There is no discussion taking place in the world 
today that is more crucial than the debate about strategies of resistance." 
There is no greater strategist in American history, no teacher more relevant 
to our post-election malaise, than Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King was more 
than a moral visionary; he was a creative tactician. All of us-especially 
leaders of the peace movement-have much to learn from King's teachings on strategy 
and tactics. 
In the late 1950s a major change took place within the civil rights 
community, a shift from representative government to direct action democracy. When the 
young Black movement broke away from the confines of electoral politics, 
society began to change. 
Before 1960, the NAACP was the most prestigious civil rights organization in 
the U.S. It handled legal cases, achieved an historic victory in Brown v Board 
of Education, and carried out valuable work within the normal channels of 
government-Congress and the courts. Its leaders were drawn primarily from the 
professional class, and its approach to segregation was institutional. While the 
NAACP was widely respected throughout the U.S., it did not have a mass base in 
the South. 
The rise of mass-action strategy changed the course of history. It was a 
boycott-the Montgomery bus boycott, led by Dr. King-that launched the modern civil 
rights movement. African Americans made up 70 percent of the passengers in 
Montgomery, and the boycott was based on the simple recognition that the local 
merchants were economically dependent on Black riders. "The oppressed have 
power." That was the ironic revelation on which the entire civil rights movement 
was based. All great social movements-movements that convert dissenting opinion 
into leverage, movements that become a force in history-are based on power, 
not mere communication of discontent. 
It was during the Montgomery bus boycott, spontaneous in origin, that Dr. 
King, as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, developed a 
long-term strategy for desegregation. In his autobiography (replete with insights on 
tactics and strategy) King describes his debt to Gandhi and his strategic 
revelations about applied ethics and social movements. He raises the questions 
that all movements address: Do strikes and boycotts work? Are they fair? Are the 
hardships worth the gains? Where is the oppressor vulnerable? And where does 
the potential power of the oppressed reside? King gives an initial answer: "We 
would use this boycott method to give birth to justice and freedom....I came 
to see that what we were really doing was withdrawing our cooperation from an 
evil system, rather than merely withdrawing our support from the bus company. 
The bus company, being an external expression of the system, would naturally 
suffer, but the basic aim was to refuse to cooperate with evil. We were simply 
saying to the white community: We can no longer lend our cooperation to an 
evil system. >From that moment on I conceived of our movement as an act of 
massive non-cooperation." 
King always recognized the significance of spontaneous actions, but he also 
realized that, without organization and long-range strategy, spontaneous energy 
easily dissipates. Planned, well-organized boycotts played a major role 
throughout all phases of the civil rights movement. 
On February 1st 1960, four Black college freshmen sat down at a whites-only 
lunch counter at Woolworths in Greensboro, North Carolina. The sit-in movement 
was born. Supported by Dr. King, SNCC (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating 
Committee) called for a boycott of Woolworths, "a nation-wide campaign of 
selective buying." Pickets went up throughout the country. 
White students in the North were eager to support the civil rights movement. 
The national boycott provided a vehicle for their pent-up energy and 
creativity. They put up posters, set up pickets, devised new chants, sang songs in 
front of stores, and turned shoppers into activists for civil rights. Some of the 
students who participated in the boycott later became founders of Students for 
a Democratic Society, a massive nation-wide student organization committed to 
participatory democracy. 
Students are more easily aroused and energized by direct action than by 
electoral campaigns for pre-selected candidates. The vitality of the civil rights 
movement was due in part to its independence from the confines and 
self-censorship of electoral politics. Under the leadership of Dr. King, the civil rights 
movement kept the initiative and put the supporters of the status quo on the 
defensive. The boycotts enabled millions of supporters to participate in the 
movement on a weekly and daily basis. For King, the calender of justice was not 
determined by the dates of Presidential and Congressional elections. Civil 
rights leaders chose their own battlefields according to their own needs and 
strengths, and they set the deadlines for their adversaries. King did not wait to 
see how others voted. For King, no deformed franchise can make human 
subjugation legitimate. Over protests from liberals and Democrats, the boycotts, the 
sit-ins, the freedom rides, the freedom schools spread and grew. 
Woolworths not only lost Black business in the South, it suffered economic 
downturns from demonstrations and pickets in the North. It was only a matter of 
time before Woolworths adopted its policy of total integration. 
Other less-known boycotts took place throughout the South. The boycott of 
Rich's restaurant and other restaurants in Atlanta had immediate effects, and 
Rich's ended its policy of racial segregation. 
King was almost fastidious about timing and tactics. At one period he noted 
that, "except for Christmas, Easter is the main shopping period of the 
year...the best time to bring pressure to bear on the merchants for the needed 
change." King argued that it is almost impossible to change the political power 
structure without attacking the economic power structure as well. 
A student activist captured the essence of movement strategy when he said: 
"You got to find out what your opponent cares about. Then go after it. We ask 
ourselves- What do we possess that our enemy needs? Man, if you answer that 
question, you'd be surprised how quickly negotiations take place." 
In 1966 and 1967, King launched a major boycott in Chicago-the first Black 
employment affirmative action program in the U.S. Blacks refused to spend money 
where corporations refused to hire Blacks. "By 1967," King writes, "the 
results were remarkable....Operation Breadbasket completed negotiations with three 
major industries: milk, soft drinks, and chain grocery stores. " King argued 
that direct action against merchants is often more effective than verbal appeals 
to government officials and members of Congress. A strong non-violent 
movement beyond the halls of Congress is a pre-condition to legislative success. 
We often remember King for civil disobedience, but civil disobedience 
involved relatively small numbers of activists. King never required participants in 
the movement to break the law. Boycotts and demonstrations enabled millions of 
people to participate in the broader movement for empowerment. It was the 
combination of many kinds of non-cooperation that made King's strategy effective. 
A Strategy Beyond Elections 
Howard Zinn, the indefatigable activist and historian, veteran of the civil 
rights movement, summed up civil rights strategy as early as 1966 in a seminal 
essay: "Non-violent Direct Action": 
"I speak of non-violent direct action....Whatever the specific form, this 
technique has certain qualities. It disturbs the status quo. It intrudes on the 
complacency of the majority... It creates tension and trouble and thus forces 
the holders of power to move faster....What the civil rights movement has 
revealed is that it is necessary for people concerned with liberty, even if they 
live in an approximately democratic state, to create a political power which 
resides outside the regular political establishment. While outside, removed from 
the enticements of office and close to those sources of human distress which 
created it, this power can use a thousand different devices to persuade and 
pressure the official structure into recognizing its needs."
Americans were converted to civil rights through creative tension, through 
planned confrontations that made it impossible for Americans to avoid the 
consequences of their own wrongs and deeds. 
In defense of his open-housing marches through white communities in Chicago, 
which caused a huge outcry from whites, King wrote: "The purpose of our direct 
action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will 
inevitably open the door to negotiation." Within a year Mayor Daley's Chicago passed 
open-housing laws. 
King Strategy Applies to Imperialism as well as Segregation 
We have much to learn from the strategic concepts of Dr. King. Today's peace 
movement is rightly focused on ending the occupation of Iraq, a failed 
conquest driven by the psychology of the master race. However, our movement has yet 
to tap the social power that exists beyond elections, beyond the politics or 
verbal argument and contained moral suasion. American elections are degenerating 
into a system of bribery and corporate control. No imperialist system was 
ever dismantled through electoral politics within the aggressor country. Gandhi's 
mass strategy, not the British Parliament, brought down the British empire. 
The Vietnamese resistance, not legislators in Paris, ended French colonialism 
in Indochina. And no illegal, immoral war has ever been ended without direct 
action and grassroots protest. 
King's teachings about non-cooperation with evil are as relevant today as 
they were forty years ago. Like apartheid, imperialism is a social system, not a 
mere policy of one president or a single government. 
In the teachings of King, respect for human rights is the pre-condition for 
genuine, constitutional majority rule. No white majority, no matter how large, 
has any constitutional right to subjugate another people, whether it is a 
domestic minority or a foreign nation. One hundred thousand Iraqis are dead, 
hospitals and mosques destroyed, cities in rubble, thousands of children and 
civilians maimed with cluster bombs, all victims of America's military tsunami. 
If we dare apply the teachings of King, we cannot change the existing system 
without challenging the people who live inside it, who take it for granted, 
who refuse to measure human rights by one yardstick, who support imperialism and 
war even when they too are victims. It is impossible to end the U.S. 
occupation of Iraq, to halt the march of empire, without first confronting-in King's 
spirit of compassionate indignation-the people of our own beloved nation. Let 
the memory and teachings of King inspire us to carry on his struggle against 
elective despotism in America. 
Paul Rockwell is a columnist for In Motion Magazine. He can be reached at 
rockyspad at hotmail.com.



Dick Kroeger
65 Stubbs Bay Road
Maple Plain, MN 55359
952-476-6126