At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68

by Taylor Branch

NONVIOLENCE is an orphan among democratic ideas. It has nearly vanished from public discourse even though the most basic element of free government—the vote—has no other meaning. Every ballot is a piece of nonviolence, signifying hard-won consent to raise politics above firepower and bloody conquest. Such compacts work more or less securely in different lands. Nations gain strength from vote-based institutions in commerce and civil society, but the whole architecture of representative democracy springs from the handiwork of nonviolence.

When King defined nonviolence in a Los Angeles interview as a leadership discipline for public conduct, and said he could in good conscience defend his family from attack in their home,

one isolated Unionist balefully observed that his state was “too small to be a republic and too large to be an insane asylum.”

a Methodist but demanded to know what Christianity had to do with the vote.

“I know that President Johnson has a serious problem here, and naturally I am sympathetic to that,” King told the Howard convocation, but said he saw no solution in violence. “The war in Vietnam is accomplishing nothing.”

“God still has a way of wringing good out of evil,” he said. “History has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive.”

We must not be bitter, and we must not harbor ideas of retaliating with violence. We must not lose faith in our white brothers.”