Figuring Out Where You Stand During Turbulent Times: Nash and King Can Still Help Us

“Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.” — Martin Luther King Jr.

The Interfaith Justice Coalition is inviting me and others in the area to attend a candlelight vigil tonight for Alex Pretti. I am mulling over where I stand during this turbulent time.  What wisdom do I draw on? Two stories, two incidents, from the sixties help.

They were incidents that happened in my memory of the Civil Rights era that seem to rise up again and again, not only because they were dramatic, but because they ask of us all a question that never stops being relevant: what will we do with our fear, our anger, and our longing for justice, for fairness, when everything inside us wants to strike back?

In every generation there are times when the temperature rises. People become tense. Communities split into camps. Conversations become combustible. We stop speaking to one another as neighbors and begin speaking as enemies. We tell ourselves we’re protecting what matters, but we can feel something else happening too. The heart narrows. The imagination shrinks. The other person becomes a demonic symbol rather than a soul.

As two of my Chinese-American grandchildren asked me about Alex Pretti and what was going on in Minnesota and what did it mean and what might we do, I told them one of the stories and reviewed the other this morning in Frank Rogers, Jr's book, Practicing Compassion.

The first story took place where I was born, in Nashville, Tennessee, and turned on a single question asked in public. A beautiful, direct question uttered from the lips of a sweet- voiced, young “colored” woman. The other unfolded in Birmingham and turned on a single booming, authoritative, bold voice that stopped a crowd from becoming a mob. (Please do look at the three clips I provide at the end of the blog. The first one is probably the most powerful, all short. All relevant to this moment.)

In Nashville, 1960, when I was ten-years-old a young student leader, from Fisk University, named Diane Nash stepped into a moment that could have tipped in any direction. Sit-ins had been going on for weeks. Black students were sitting at lunch counters that served only white customers. They were dressed neatly and trained for nonviolence. They endured harassment, threats, and physical violence, yet returned day after day. Their calm was not passivity. It was strategy. It was courage. It was a refusal to surrender their dignity no matter what was poured on them.

Thousands marched to City Hall. The mayor of Nashville, Ben West, came out to face them. This was not an abstract conversation. This was a city being confronted with itself. And Diane Nash did something that still feels like a masterclass in moral leadership. She didn’t give a speech full of noise. She asked a question that was almost disarmingly simple.

“Mayor West,” she asked, “do you feel that it’s wrong to discriminate against a person solely on the basis of his race or color?” She basically asked him, "Does that seem fair to you, Mayor West, as a human being?"

There are some questions you can’t wriggle out of without betraying your own conscience. Mayor West answered that he DID in fact believe it was wrong. That answer didn’t cure everything. It didn’t erase racism or wash the pain out of Nashville’s history. But it cracked open the public moral consensus. It made denial harder. It changed what could be said out loud in the open air. Soon after, in a matter of weeks, Nashville began to desegregate lunch counters.

The power of Diane Nash’s question wasn’t that it humiliated the mayor. It didn’t. The power was that it forced clarity without violence. It demanded truth without revenge. It was resistance made of moral precision.

And then there is Birmingham. Birmingham was not a gentle place to be a civil rights leader. The city was deeply segregated. Tensions were high. Threats and bombings were not hypothetical. They were lived reality. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. carried the fatigue and danger of that reality in his body, even as he carried the vision of a different world in his spirit.

The Birmingham story I am including here is told by our mentor, Frank Roger's and shared with his permission because it captures something most of us rarely see: not just bravery in marching forward, but bravery in holding back.

“During his visit, King addressed a crowd of people in attendance at a church. The place was packed. People filled the pews and the aisles, the window alcoves and balconies. Even the parking lot was fitted with speakers for the overflowing crowd. As King began his closing remarks, a white man stood up and walked toward him.

King was weary. His house had been bombed three times already. He had received death threats in the mail for years. He had been stabbed in the chest while delivering a sermon in Harlem. But not until the man was directly in front of him did King see the hatred in his eyes.

The man lunged at King, knocked him backward, and beat him on the face and back. The church erupted. A mob swarmed around King, grabbed the attacker, and herded him toward the door. Cries rang out, ‘Kill the bastard! Lynch him! Beat him to a bloody pulp!’

And into the midst of all the cacophonous chaos, one voice boomed through the room: ‘Stop! Leave him alone.’

The church fell silent. The voice they heard was Martin Luther King Jr.’s, his face transcendently calm. King walked over to the man, put his arm around the assailant’s shoulder, and looked around the crowd.

‘What would you like to do?’ King asked the crowd. ‘Kill him? That isn’t our movement.

Would you like to use Molotov cocktails? That is not our movement.

I’ll tell you what our movement is. It’s to understand him. Yes, even him. It’s to ask what it would be like if you were taught since you were a child, since you were baby enough to crawl, that the Negro is a thing. If you were taught from your parents, from your teachers, from even your ministers and the people sitting next to you in church that it isn’t wrong to hate, what would you be then? That’s what this movement is. It’s to reveal these people to themselves.’”

I have read those lines more than once. What strikes me is not only King’s gentleness, but his clarity. He does not deny the violence. He does not excuse it. He does not say, “This doesn’t matter.” He does not say, “Oh, it’s fine.” He commands restraint in the moment when restraint is hardest.

And he does something psychologically astonishing: he asks the crowd to imagine the forces that shaped the attacker. He doesn’t call evil good. He does not pretend hate is harmless. But he refuses to let hate recruit the crowd into becoming hateful in return.

If we translate that into the language of modern science and crisis intervention, what King did is exactly what we now know prevents disasters from multiplying. When crowds become punitive, chaos grows fast. Injury increases. The possibility of weapons rises. The original moral purpose gets buried beneath revenge. In that kind of spiral, everybody loses.

De-escalation works because it changes the momentum of a crisis. It creates separation. It buys time. It allows accountability to move out of the hands of adrenaline and into calmer hands, warmer hearts, and cooler minds. It protects human life in the moment, and it protects the moral legitimacy of a movement in the long run.

That is why King’s words matter today, not only as theology or inspiration, but as wisdom. It is not enough to care about justice. We also have to care about the kind of people we become while we pursue it! (Here I ask you, if you want to read the thoughts of a more contemporary African American leader, to read the books or articles by John A. Powell. Powell is the Director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley.)

Our country right now is full of volatile moments. Immigration enforcement and anti-ICE protest activity has become one of the places where fear and outrage collide. Many people feel compassion for families who are terrified. Many people feel fear about safety and disorder. Many people believe the system is broken. Many people believe it must be defended. It is easy to see how quickly crowds can harden into hatred, and how quickly fear can justify cruelty.

This is where Diane Nash and Martin Luther King Jr. become teachers again, not because they offer easy answers, but because they model something rare: resistance without dehumanization. It makes coming together possible.

Diane Nash shows us how to confront power with truth, not rage. She asks a question that forces a moral response. She insists on dignity, and she does it in the open.

King shows us how to confront violence without becoming violent. He stops the crowd, not because the crowd’s anger is incomprehensible, but because he knows what happens if anger becomes the driver. Then the movement becomes the mirror image of what it opposes! Read that line again, please. Everyone forgets why they came.

We don’t have to agree on every policy question to learn from these moments. We simply have to admit we need a better way to handle conflict than humiliation, revenge, and escalation.

So what can we do, practically, when our communities feel tense and the cultural air feels electric?

Start with one honest question. Diane Nash didn’t start with an insult. She started with moral clarity. When conversations get heated, try asking, “What would fairness look like here?” or “What outcome are we trying to create?” or “What would protect human dignity and public safety at the same time?” A good question is sometimes stronger than a loud argument.

Practice a short de-escalation phrase. King’s words stopped a room. We need phrases that stop us too. Simple ones work best: “This is not our way.” “We don’t hurt people.” “We can be firm without being cruel.” In a tense moment, a steady sentence can be a lifeline.

Choose one constructive action instead of ten angry ones. Call an elected official. Write a calm letter. Attend a local forum. Volunteer with an organization that supports what you stand for (for me that is Braver Angels in particular). Donate to groups that provide food, housing support, education, and conflict mediation. Build the world you want instead of only cursing the world you fear.

Refuse to treat human beings as demons. Even when you believe someone is wrong, resist the temptation to strip their humanity. It doesn’t make you weak. It makes you wise. It’s one of the few ways we break cycles rather than repeat them.

And finally, decide in advance what you stand for, what your “movement” is. King said, “That isn’t our movement,” and in that moment he defined the soul of a cause. We need to define ours before the crisis arrives.

That’s what I am mulling over. Will my - will your “movement” be fueled by contempt, or by dignity? Will it be fueled by humiliation, or by truth? Will it be fueled by rage that burns everything down, or by courage that builds something better?

The pressure is rising in many places. The question is no longer theoretical. It’s close enough to feel.

When the moment comes, what will be our way?

Sidebar:

In a heated moment, here is what I am reminding myself -

1. Pause and breathe low and slow. A single calm breath can keep you from escalating the situation.

2. Ask one clarifying question. “What do we want the outcome to be?”

3. Use a steady phrase. Say: “This is not our way,” or “We don’t hurt people,” and mean it.

4. Create space. Step back, and give everyone a few feet of dignity.

5. Choose one helpful action. Call a friend, leave the scene, or offer to listen instead of arguing.

   
   

Remember the goal. Justice that humiliates usually creates backlash. Justice – fairness with dignity can change hearts and systems.

And…my friends, I am glued to all the different videos and pictures of the monks marching for peace and unity.

How might we journey together to The Good Life by finding stories that hold moral and often practical wisdom for us so that we can figure out where we stand and what actions we will take as we are caught in turbulent times?

Youtube 1 of Diane Nash and Nashville (ironic), Tennessee Civil Rights Era,

Youtube 2 of Nash and West

PBS interview with Diane Nash later years https://thinktv.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/iml04.soc.ush.civil.nash/diane-nash-and-the-sit-ins/

Also a book I go back to quite often written by a conservative, Arthur Brooks, who also writes a happiness column for the Atlantic which is quite good, is Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America From the Culture of Contempt. Lots of practical as well as moral guidance (he's a strong Catholic.) Born in Spokane, lived in Seattle, now in the D.C. area.