War and Peace

Born into the racial tensions of rural Mississippi in the 1940s, Mary Mudiku has spent a lifetime trying to figure out what makes some people see only differences.

By her college years, when she was the first black woman to study in the art department at what is now the University of Memphis, it was the early 1960s, a time when some black citizens were starting to take a new approach to resisting their treatment as second-class citizens, especially in the Deep South. Instead of fighting back against violence physically, they were training people to protest peacefully – to defy their treatment but to do so in a way that required others, even their persecutors, as “children of God.” They fought back on the same spiritual terms their opponents were raised to cherish.

Soon after, she was taking her brushes and paint to a church, the historic Clayborn Temple, to paint signs for protests led by people like Martin Luther King Jr. as the Civil Rights Movement spread through Memphis. She attended marches led by the visionary of the movement, following Dr. King and others through the street, and she heard his last speech, stirred by his invitation: to see a future where everyone was afforded dignity. That’s the same kind of message she’s tried to share through her artwork and also as an employee at the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where Dr. King was killed.

“It appears passive, but it isn’t,” she says. “People were not fighting with guns or weapons. We couldn’t in this society. We couldn’t fight with any weapons. The big fight was the spiritual fight. That appealed to the world – that there was this society allowing this [mistreatment] to happen and feeling that they were correct. We showed they weren’t.”

But using a peaceful response as a method to overcome the identity block – the differences some white people saw when they looked at their black neighbors – took deliberate, careful training.

Because history books tend to oversimplify changes that required thousands of small shifts and catalysts, we often trace the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement to the Montgomery Bus Boycott – further sifted down to the actions sparked by just one determined woman. In reality, it was a long, excruciating struggle that finally came to a head and would require diligence and determination of many to continue what Rosa Parks’ admirable stubbornness started on Dec. 1, 1955. The seamstress was actually the third black Montgomery woman that year to refuse to give up her seat, but her story lit a fire.

In the days after her arrest, the Montgomery Improvement Association formed, members voted the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as president, and they scheduled a boycott that was more successful than they could have imagined. More than 90 percent of the city’s black community stayed off the buses for a full day. It was clear that the community had reached a tipping point. Emboldened, the group decided to extend the boycott until the city listened.

But the months dragged on. Organizers were bombed, threatened, and arrested – and yet they didn’t return any of those with violent acts. People kept walking or carpooling. They stuck with their peaceful demands, and they waited for a Supreme Court decision to end bus segregation, which finally came in November 1956. But even then they didn’t immediately return to bus seats. The group chose to extend the boycott until the decision was officially in place.

And they had to prepare to face angry white bus drivers and riders, but in an unexpected way. This is the lesser-known part of history.

On Saturdays in the city’s churches, they went through “dress rehearsals.” Dr. King and the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy set up chairs in rows to imitate bus interiors, and boycott members would practice the return. It was ugly. Yelling. Obscenities. Slurs. The two would berate “riders,” helping them to prepare for the verbal abuse that would inevitably come.

The instructors taught them how to respond if one of them dropped her dime on the floor and the driver exploded with obscenities. They taught them to count to ten before they reacted to verbal or physical attacks and other techniques to quiet the innate impulses of sudden anger in the face of demeaning insults. They trained them, through repetition, to respond to cruel taunting with Bible quotes that most church-going white people would recognize. They taught them to march bent over, elbows in and hands over ears and temples, to protect themselves if bottles and rocks were lodged at them. The core principle was this: Don’t strike back. No matter how hard opponents work to rile you to aggression, stay peaceful. Count. Pray. Respond with kindness.

The protestors had lived the scenarios before, had sacrificed to make a statement, and then had to practice responding to the same abuses – maybe magnified now – with patience and nonviolence. It wasn’t natural; it wouldn’t be for anyone. It was practiced. It was deliberate.

When they returned on Dec. 21, 1956, the expected encounters happened – but the responses the oppressors’ expected did not. Some bus drivers harassed black patrons. One demanded a woman pay twice. On another bus, a rider slapped a woman. But none of the returning bus patrons retaliated.

The role play workshops are a part of the story that seldom garners much attention. You can find it tucked in the pages of a 1957 booklet distributed by the peacemaking group the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which promoted the “Montgomery Method” as a system of nonviolent Christian action that encourages seeing an enemy as a human being. It shows the hard work and bravery behind peaceful protests, aligns with Christian principles – the admonition from Jesus to “turn the other cheek” – and stems from Dr. King’s studies of Mahatma Gandhi. But it also happens to align with the power of identity, which is critical in creating a sense of Belonging.

Why did that provide results? Why did it help some of those white supremacists see their adversaries as more human? It helped bridge the Identity gap, the most difficult of all to cross.

We gravitate toward people who seem most like us – in age, interests, viewpoints. Unfortunately, when someone doesn’t look like us, it creates an instant barrier, unless we make a conscious decision to take it down.

The white establishment had created an image of the protestors: Angry. Violent. Dangerous. Dr. King fought back – but only through peace. He surprised the enemy by showing him that his followers were not aggressive, even in situations when almost anyone would react that way. Instead, they were kind and Christian, the way the white people saw themselves. The members of the black community demonstrated what white folks should have already known, that the black community was made of fellow human beings.

Dr. King and other movement leaders taught the protestors to break down racial barriers, the most formidable challenge to Identity, by breaking the stereotype that had been shaped of them. They did it by emphasizing virtuous character traits, like patience, that their enemy shamefully assumed was exclusive to the white race. He made them see similarity, not difference.

When we consider a relationship, we look for people who will think like us and act like us. We seek people who appear to be similar to us, who would serve as appropriate proxies for our needs and concerns. What if you don’t look like the people you’re trying to reach? What if you worship differently than them? Dress differently? What if you aren’t the same gender? What if you have a physical disability that makes you look different? That’s why obvious differences, and especially racial boundaries, are the most challenging, and the most heartbreaking, if you think of the amount of struggle and suffering they’ve caused and still cause today. Most other differences can be hidden, but not race.

On August 28, 1963, a quarter million people gathered in Washington D.C. for the largest civil rights demonstration Americans had ever seen. The crowd called for better civil and economic rights for African Americans in a walk that culminated, unforgettably, with Martin Luther King Jr. standing before the Lincoln Memorial to deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech.

After the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the stalled Civil Rights Act finally moved forward, passing in 1964. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 followed it. It didn’t affect instant, dramatic change – though it is remembered as a historic moment where, finally, the silenced cries of black Americans were brought to light on a national scale. It was representative of the long, slow march of suffering African Americans had endured for centuries. There was much more work to be done. It was less than three weeks after the march that four black children were killed in the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Even then, in the continuation of the city’s mounting violence against the black race, Dr. King urged his followers to maintain their nonviolence.

Not everyone saw it his way, of course. Another young black leader had come to represent a different avenue to demand better treatment, one of hostility. Malcolm X – at the time a minister in the Nation of Islam, a religious-political black nationalist group growing in cities around the country – thought the march was a farce. Where others saw peaceful demonstrators, he saw signs that had been filtered through white establishment. He heard censored speeches and watered-down demands. He saw an event too well-orchestrated, something that turned his people into “puppets” instead of the militants.

Dr. King called on his followers to defy discrimination and oppression by holding onto nonviolence, an expression that his people were not who they were made out to be. They were nonviolent and he asked them to stay that way, even while they acted in peaceful defiance against how they were being treated. Malcolm X didn’t agree. He thought that, if white people were interested in a reconciliation, it would have happened already. He didn’t want to see them “turn the other cheek.” He worked to shock people out of their acceptance of a second-class role in society, a brain-washing he said would be no longer tolerated. He “fished” – as he called his proselytizing – outside churches, in ghettos, and anywhere he could to appeal to the open wound of mistreatment.

In the struggle for identity that black Americans faced – the constant message that they were less-than, the loss of their family roots and native culture after they were forced into slavery – Malcolm X and the leadership of the Nation of Islam attempted to help American black men understand not only who they were – people robbed of their own identity – but also who their enemy was: the “blue-eyed devil.” His group didn’t want reconciliation. He didn’t believe in “begging the white man” by “all of this sitting-in, sliding-in, wading-in, eating-in, diving-in, and all the rest …”

He was angry. He didn’t insist on unprompted aggression – but he did call for “any means necessary” to respond to cruelty and violence against his brothers and sisters. He’d seen first-hand the hardship of growing up black in America in the ‘30s and ‘40s. He’d watched his family’s home burn to ashes. His father was crushed by a street car when Malcolm was 6 years old; his mother, then a widow with seven children, believed her husband was killed by white men who didn’t want Malcolm’s father to continue spreading the teachings of Marcus Garvey, an early proponent of black nationalism. She would later be committed to a mental institution and Malcom sent to foster care.

Discouraged by a white teacher from becoming a lawyer, Malcolm turned to street life in Boston and hustled in Harlem before he was arrested and charged with breaking into a Boston home and stealing jewelry. The white women who were working with him received light sentences; he was ordered to eight to ten years at the Charlestown State Prison.

His transformation started there, when he discovered the Nation of Islam, a political and religious movement that called for a separation of black and white Americans. After Malcolm’s release, he would apply his charisma and his passion for the plight of the black man to spreading the organization’s message of black superiority in American cities, fighting back against physical and psychological oppression black folks still suffered at the hands of their white neighbors. He would come to be the most visible and controversial leader for the organization, a man quoted by frustrated black people everywhere.

For more than ten years, Malcom worked to spread the Nation of Islam’s message, but eventually a rift was forming inside the organization. Malcolm X left, seeking a deeper personal truth. He went to Mecca for the pilgrimage Muslim doctrine requires of any true follower. There, he said he experienced, for the first time, a unity beyond race. He knew his image during his 12 years with the Nation of Islam was one of anger and division. He felt something else when he wrote from the Middle East.

“Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and the overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as is practiced by the people of all colors and races here in this Ancient Holy Land, the home of Abraham, Muhammad, and all the other prophets of the Holy Scriptures. For the past week, I have been utterly speechless and spellbound by the graciousness I see displayed all around me by people of all colors.”

He knew his change of heart would shock people who’d followed him so closely, who’d found hope in what he used to encourage, and he knew many weren’t ready. “The American Negro can never be blamed for his racial animosities – he is only reacting to four hundred years of the conscious racism of the American whites,” he wrote in the same letter. But he’d found something that united people in a brotherhood, something stronger than racial divides and it was heartbreakingly beautiful, to a heart-changing degree. He’d found a spiritual state of mind where commonalities were stronger than differences. For him, the tie was Sunni Islam. For Dr. King, it was a cry for peace, an invitation to see our common humanity.

Malcolm took a new name, El Hajj Malik el Shabazz, and returned a changed man, leading a new organization he’d formed, the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Less than a year later, at age 39, he was killed. Convicted in his murder were three members of the Nation of Islam. His voice – his new message – was silenced by the very people he’d once inspired to separate themselves and to take up arms if they had to do so. It was the same message the Black Panthers would evoke, counting Malcolm as a predecessor, when the militant group called for revolution.

Mary Mudiku encountered those same tensions in the black community, and even in her own mind. There were those who wanted to react violently; they’d been pushed to a breaking point. When she studied in the ‘70s at Howard University in Washington D.C., where her thesis considered an African response to the European worldview, she encountered those who saw violence as the only answer. She felt it at times, too, when she thought back to the stories of her childhood: the crying infant killed by an annoyed, white bus driver; her mother’s friend who was shot by a white man to prove to his wife that he didn’t care about her; or the fact that, when she was born, there were only a few hospitals in the entire state of Mississippi where a black woman could deliver a child. “I went through an angry period,” she says. “The anger is understandable, but it’s not effective.”

Later, when she created an art therapy program for inmates, she used those same lessons to help them focus on what they had in common with others – even past religious dogmas – in hopes that they could share a culture she worked to inspire, one that taught creativity as God-given gift, shared by all people, regardless of how they saw God. “I couldn’t go in with a Christian or Muslim format. It had to be something that would allow whatever choices people made in terms of their spiritual background, or their ethnic background. I was able to do that by bypassing what made them different and focusing on what was the same for everybody. It was culture-centered.”

***

Nothing is more powerful or central to creating a sense of belonging than identity. As our lives became more crowded and complicated during the Agricultural Revolution, we needed people who could act in our stead. We could no longer handle the details of managing every task that affected our lives – someone else might be baking our bread or looking after our sheep while we toiled away at our own chosen field. We needed a way to find people who could make decisions the same way we would. We needed people who would think like us and act like us. So we started to look for clues to help us find those people. It’s a part of our evolution that still shows up in how we act and make friends today; it’s why you’re more likely to click with someone who shares similar interests. But it runs much deeper than casual friendships. It affects not only who we strike up conversations with, but also who buys from us, who we hire and retain, who chooses to be loyal to us.

When you are working to connect with people, to bridge differences in identity, there are things you can change. There are other things you can’t (gender, race, sexual orientation) and wouldn’t want to. What Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers show us is that differences on one level don’t need to mean difference altogether. The struggle, the painful role play in church basements, were part of this brave demand: to be seen as the same. Even when it called for unnatural patience and suffering, he asked that society see what they had in common with others.

That’s where some of today’s movements falter. Compare the millennial-led Black Lives Matter movement to the ‘60s civil rights activists. A key distinction between the two is that the civil-rights movement sprung from the church. It was, at the time, a part of life for most Americans – black or white. Like the Nation of Islam and like the Black Panthers, the focus for Black Lives Matter is on what separates races, working off fear and amplifying mistrust. The civil-rights movement was an effort to find some common ground, to find the overlap where both sides could agree. It was an opening up instead of shutting out – an offer of reconciliation, rather than the expected retaliation.

If the racist white man in the Deep South in the 1950s couldn’t see a black man as a man like him, how could that be changed? The white man could at least, perhaps, come to see a black person as someone who believed the same way he purported to believe. A racist white man in Montgomery believed himself to be a God-fearing, church-going Christian. He might at least be shaken or convicted of his hypocrisy by a display of Christ-like love and forgiveness from the persecuted black man. That was something he had been raised to recognize and to emulate.

Militant and black nationalist movements moved the other direction. They confirmed the white race’s fears – and reinforced the differences they assumed came with skin color. They divided.

There’s a reason those divisive actions can backfire; they work against Belonging.

The key concept in understanding how Belonging makes our lives Easier is this: We need proxies. We needed someone to include us, to see who we were and what we needed, and to make the same decisions we would have. It made us “bigger” in a more crowded environment. To have someone who could make the same decisions we would – to think like we would and act on our behalf – we needed to find someone who was the same as us. It’s the same explanation behind the folly of trying to match couples who don’t share common interests and goals. In a relationship, including in Loyal relationships, we need someone who is as similar to us as possible.

If you want to show someone you are like them, it doesn’t mean you have to change who you are. But you do have to find where the similarities lie and do the hard work of emphasizing those shared qualities. You might have to change how you think, move determinedly past the limitations of your own nature, but it’s a higher path, one that makes for the most hard-won – but also the most precious – rewards. That’s how you build bridges instead of walls. If you’re working to spark a movement or influence that won’t fade, it’s the means to affecting lasting change.