Praying With Our Feet: Organizing Nonviolence and Economic Power

We recently came across this article from Vox, “Americans have a secret weapon against Trump…”

Metta board member Erik Olson Fernández had this to say about it:

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[The article] makes some very good points. I have always thought that we need to organize not just all working people, but also to organize their financial resources, which are small individually but large collectively. Imagine, for instance, if all working people took their money out of the big banks and put it in credit unions. Or if unions pushed their pensions, like CalPERS (the largest defined-benefit public pension fund in the United States), to disinvest from corporations that kill people, harm working people, and destroy the environment, etc.

I thought this sentence below was interesting, as I think it reflects a common misunderstanding of the civil rights movement, Gandhi, and movements in general:

"For this reason, the civil rights movement wasn’t just street demonstrations and sit-ins. It also took actions, like the famous Montgomery bus boycott, designed to impose costs on elite actors who sustained or supported segregation."

The sentence conveys the idea that street demonstrations and sit-ins did not have an economic strategic component like the bus boycott. Yet, as you know, the street demonstrations in Birmingham, AL, and the sit-ins across the South also closed downtown businesses in those cities and pushed downtown business leaders to advocate for desegregation. You probably recall the great A Force More Powerful – Nashville film episode that talks about how even whites unwillingly joined the boycott as they sought to avoid the downtown area. I also remember Rev. Dr. Bernard LaFayette, in a training I attended, sharing that a little-mentioned strategic piece of the sit-ins in Nashville was that, at the time, downtown businesses were beginning to be challenged by suburban businesses. This added more economic pressure on the downtown businesses to desegregate.

Well, I know I’m preaching to the choir, but I do think that those of us who are committed to nonviolence should be asking ourselves:

“Where can we help create the equivalent of our Montgomery that can help show that nonviolence works? That can help launch a long-term strategic movement across the nation that transforms people (minds, bodies, and spirits) and simultaneously our nation’s (and world’s) values?”

Unions and working people are too weak to organize a general strike across the nation, but maybe this is possible in specific strategic cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Memphis—where the military/ICE are in the streets and the mayor in Chicago has called for a general strike. The Chicago Teachers Union has gone out on strikes in 2012, 2019, and 2021–22, and the community has greatly supported these strikes. As you probably remember, a couple of weeks before his assassination, while helping striking public sanitation workers, Dr. King said:

“Now you know what? You may have to escalate the struggle a bit. If they keep refusing…I tell you what you ought to do…in a few days you ought to get together and just have a general work stoppage in the city of Memphis. And you let that day come, and not a Negro in this city will go to any job downtown. When no Negro in domestic service will go to anybody’s house or anybody’s kitchen. When black students will not go to anybody’s school and black teachers…”

Maybe we can follow his recommendation toward community instead of chaos. About the same time that MLK was calling for a general strike in Memphis, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said that “The whole future of America will depend on the impact and influence of Dr. King.” Heschel was also famous for encouraging us to “pray with our feet.” Maybe those prayers are answered on strike picket lines in Chicago or Memphis?