Well, can you hear me?
(Audience) Yes.
Why do they ask me to come and speak behind this guy?
(Laughter)
This is absolutely incredible, absolutely.
But I'm happy to be here and to join you and to share with you
some of my experiences.
I first want to say that my wife has joined me here,
Kate LaFayette, okay?
(Applause)
She's part of history;
she was one of those who were from Tuskegee, Alabama, Macon County,
and she was part of the first group of college students there
who was the test case for voter registration,
back in the early days there.
So she's done some very incredible things.
She knew George Washington Carver -
okay? -
when she was a little girl, growing up.
He taught her mother how to take care of the plants
and that sort of thing.
So she's a part of a very, you know, unique history in our country, there,
from Tuskegee.
But more importantly, for me, that's why I know that God loves me.
I've been reassured
because he gave me an angel to guide me through
so I'd know what heaven was like before I get there.
That's my wife, Kate LaFayette.
(Applause)
And she lets me have ice cream every night.
(Laughter)
Well, I want to share with you
some of the concepts and the philosophy related to nonviolence,
and I just thought that what we've done so far here that I've experienced
is so apropos to what I'm going to share with you this evening
because you're right on it.
There's no question about it.
You're right on it, and I'm so proud to be associated with Emory University
when I see what you're doing as young people and students here.
Makes me very proud. I can tell you that.
Nonviolence
is old as the history of mankind,
and yet it's a foreign term to many people.
My first exposure to this concept
did not bear the name "nonviolence."
It basically described what love was all about.
And we've heard this many times in growing up,
you know, how important it is to love,
and there are many different loves, of course, and the Greeks have five.
We talk about love -
in the nonviolent context, we separate it.
The eros,
which is mainly the love
for the, you know, spiritual realm of life
but that has come to be
the love between those who have affectionate relationships,
more intimate.
And then, of course,
there's philos or philia,
which has to do with relationship
between brothers and brothers and sisters and sisters
and more fraternal - that's the basis of our fraternities,
the philos, philia.
But nonviolence is based on agape,
the Greek definition of love
which means that you love, expecting nothing in return.
It's a love that's not reciprocal;
it's not the basis of an exchange, equal exchange,
but it's a love that goes beyond
the particular kind of rewards
that one would get from each other.
You love me, I love you.
You don't love me, then I don't love you.
No.
This agape has to do with something
that's much more powerful;
and in fact, it's regenerated
based on the ability to give,
that you give only to gain, but you gain more to give,
but it's not reciprocal in the sense that you gain from those that you give to
but rather within itself becomes self-generative.
So the concept, then, of nonviolence is based on this type of love.
And I came to experiment with this
in the context of the movement for social change
when I was in Nashville, Tennessee, as a student.
I got involved in the student sit-in movement,
and I started to learn about this concept of nonviolence
from James Lawson Jr.,
who was a Methodist seminary student at Vanderbilt,
worked for the Fellowship of Reconciliation,
and he started these trainings there in Nashville, among us.
There were people like our congressman here.
John Lewis was involved in those workshops,
and Diane Nash,
who some of you have been exposed to
since she's been involved in the Freedom Rides and that sort of thing,
and many others -
Reverend C.T. Vivian,
who was an icon in the movement as well.
There are a number of Freedom Riders who live here in Atlanta.
We were involved in this real important experiment:
How do we change these segregated conditions?
And is it possible to change these conditions
without using revolutionary methods,
without using force and arms?
Is there another power that's not destructive,
but a power that's constructive, reconciliatiory, transformative?
We became really fascinated by this idea.
Mahatma Gandhi -
we were exposed to Mahatma Gandhi.
This little man -
dressed in this little, skimpy outfit -
had the power to change England.
My goodness.
But first he had to change the people in India.
But as an experiment, actually started in South Africa.
That's where he was, in South Africa, in Durban.
And this little Indian fellow - okay? - Mahatma Gandhi,
decided to experiment with this notion, satyagraha,
and he started that experiment.
We call it an African roots with,
you might say, Indian and American fruit,
but it's really global, around the world.
So here we find this concept of nonviolence,
the one that's the noun rather than the adjective.
Not the one with the hyphen.
The one with the hyphen could be "without violence,"
but the concept of nonviolence as a noun
is a name of a philosophy,
a name of a way of life,
a name of a system of thought.
And here, we find this Indian man
was able to embrace this concept
and be able to demonstrate it
in such a way that people began to find new ways and new tools
to struggle for social change.
But it had to start from within.
Yes.
It had to start from within.
The overcoming that we sang in the movement
starts with overcoming our own inability to control our emotions.
Yes.
Because if we can control our own emotions,
then it means that we can control situations.
Most of the violence that occur, we think of physical violence,
but I would say if there was a survey done,
the massive amount of violence is not physical,
but it's how people treat each other.
Unfortunately, there are some people who did have a family reunion,
one time,
and then they decided that "We can't have any more family reunions.
Let's just text each other."
(Laughter)
"You know, call each other up on the phone or something like that."
But they won't come together
because of the relationships and perceptions that people have.
So this is an important kind of experiment
because not only does it deal with countries
or either factions or groups within countries,
yes,
because of ethnic reasons and because of so-called racial,
and I want to clarify this right now.
The basic problem that we have in relationship to people many times,
we call it racism
and we call it racial conflict,
racial oppression.
Well, you see, actually,
the racial part is just a symptom of a deeper problem.
The racism is really based on what Dr. Chester Pierce,
a former professor at Harvard University's School of Education,
called "childism."
Childism is much more pervasive and universal
than any other kind of ism.
So that is a basis of all the other:
ageism, sexism, okay, we call it racism
or all kind of other isms like that.
It's like, for example,
you would not give a child a $20 bill, a four-year-old,
even though you want to make a contribution, make him happy,
and then take the $20 bill,
what do they do with that bill, that money?
They turn around and give it to their parents
because, after all, they're children
and you would expect them to be responsible
and to use it responsibly.
So childism.
Nigeria produces about one-fourth of the oil for the United States,
but you wouldn't expect them to be able to have a refinery
over there, in Africa.
No, we'd have to bring the oil here,
we'll refine it, and then we'll sell it back to them.
Childism.
That has nothing to do with race. No.
Race becomes a convenient line of demarcation
so we can decide who we're going to exploit.
Yes, there's some women who are hired, and people don't even know they're women.
Thought they hired a man.
Uh huh. Yeah.
That's what I'm talking about.
And by the way,
there's some blacks who are hired, and they think they're black,
but we know them, we can look at them and tell, okay?
Yeah.
In Louisiana, one time,
they had about 2,000 black people move North and became white.
It had nothing to do with race;
it's trying to identify a color.
And see, if you put race on the base of color,
you'll mess up every time.
Yeah. It happened in Nashville.
We were demonstrating at the movie theater,
and we had this situation where 20 of us would go to a theater,
and we would stand outside -
you couldn't go inside and buy a ticket, had to stand outside -
and we would go round and round,
and then we would try to get a ticket.
And we were refused.
This woman got out of the car, her husband went to park the car,
she got up there, she was trying to get a ticket,
and they wouldn't sell her a ticket.
We knew she was white, but she had a deep suntan.
And she could not buy a ticket.
That had nothing to do with race,
that had to do with the color line
in trying to figure out, okay, who they're going to exploit.
Moving on very quickly,
I want to share with you an example of nonviolence.
I was parking my car one night in Selma, Alabama,
the same night that Medgar Evers was killed.
Medgar Evers was state president of the NAACP,
and when these people came on to me, who had a car parked across the street,
the hood was up, so I assumed they had car trouble, two white men.
They came in; one of them walked up to where I was,
and I knew that that was it for me.
So I turn around because we're trained to face our opponents
or potential assailants.
And he said, "Buddy,
how much you charge me to give me a push?"
I was glad that's all he wanted.
I said a push, no problem - I'll give you a push.
I jumped in my car - had a '48 Chevrolet -
and I drove it behind him to match the bumpers.
He stood down, out there,
and then he finally got down on his knees, looking to see if the bumpers matched.
Then he finally told me, said,
"You know, you better come out and take a look."
And when I got out there and bent down -
because it was late at night, I was trying to hurry up and get this push over
so I can get back to bed -
and he boom!
I went straight down to the ground.
I got up; I knew it was a trick then.
I stood up and faced him.
He was huge,
had a crew cut haircut, sleeves rolled up.
And then he hit me again, right on the top of my head.
I fell to the ground, rolled over in the streets,
got back up again.
I was only weighing 136 pounds.
I looked at him again.
I could hardly see him because the blood was all over my face.
I could look through my eyelashes and I could see him.
Then he hit me again.
Rolled over, got back up.
Struggle.
Looked at him.
The theory is
unusual but genuine behavior
has the potential to arrest the conscience of your assailant.
Unusual but genuine behavior.
What was I thinking about when I stood up and looked at him
and maintained self-discipline?
I was thinking about the fact that here he was -
I don't know what his profession was,
but probably he didn't have a lot of things in life, all right?
So I thought about the fact -
and you have to be preoccupied;
you can't be black-minded when you practice nonviolence.
You've got to be active-minded; you've got to fight,
and what you're fighting - okay? - on the inside.
You see my point?
Yeah, maintaining your own discipline.
Fighting fear.
Yeah, that's one thing you had to fight.
When someone attacks you, you've got to fight fear.
I was thinking about this:
if I had grown up white in his community,
had his parents, had his minister, had his relatives,
had his, had his, had his,
why, I would have behaved probably the same way as he did.
It's an accident.
You didn't choose what race you were going to be born in -
so-called race.
You didn't choose what ethnicity you all had.
You didn't make those choices.
Here you showed up on earth,
and by the way, we're not born in cities and countries,
we're born on a planet,
and we share it with the folks right now that we are with,
but it won't be long.
We're just here for a season.
But what I was thinking about - as I close, end is now, close time -
a song that I heard in Nashville
when I couldn't find a good station on the radio.
I decided - I just kept hearing those hillbilly songs -
yow, yow, ang, yang, yang, yang, yaw.
In Nashville, now, 96 stations -
and I say, "Well, I don't know; I'm just going to turn that thing off."
Then I thought about it, "No, no. I need to -"
I was hearing the music, but I was not listening.
That's the key to nonviolence: listening.
So I turned the station on,
and the first one I got, so I close,
here's what I heard,
here's what I think about all of the time
when I look at how, sometimes, some white folks behaved towards blacks,
and you know what I discovered?
You ought to see how they behave to each other.
People accuse folks of behaving a certain way because they're black.
Uh uh. Not all the time.
You ought to see how they treat each other.
And I heard this song:
(Singing with a twang) "She was poor, but she was honest.
Victim of a rich man's pride.
When she met that Christian gentleman,
Big Jim Folsom,
and she had a child by him.
It's the rich who gets the glory.
It's the poor who gets the blame.
It's the same the whole world over.
Now ain't that a dirty, cryin' shame?
Now he sits in the legislature,
making laws for all mankind
while she roams the streets of Carmen, Alabama,
selling grapes from her grape vine.
It's the rich who gets the glory.
It's the poor who gets the blame.
It's the same the whole world over.
Now ain't that a dirty, cryin' shame?"
(Applause)
Thank you.