Our approach was not passive, as some people believed; it was uncompromising. Southerners saw it as forward and aggressive. Based on Mohandas Gandhi’s fundamental tactic, satyagraha, which means holding to the truth, or more literally, insistence on the truth, the sit-in confronted society and forced it to look in the mirror at its own reflection. Through our own independent study and our guided workshops with Rev. Jim Lawson, a man many called the mystic of the movement, we came to recognize that the pain of our social experience was in part due to our own acceptance of it. We all bore the
...more
