The legacy lives on

It's a simple word, but a word that started a revolution.\nWhen Rosa Parks said "no," refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala. city bus, she attracted nationwide notoriety as well as the attention of the young Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr. King organized a yearlong bus boycott that nearly bankrupted the bus company and spurred a movement that changed the country.\n"The bus boycott was very important because it brings all the elements of peaceful protest together," said Claude Clegg, associate dean of arts and sciences for graduate education and program development at IU. Clegg specializes in African Diaspora as well as modern U.S. social movements.\n"(The boycott) captures the essence of the movement," he said. "Especially since there was a focus on a leader, King. There's always the need to focus on an individual who captures the imagination of the country."\nClegg, along with other IU faculty members, said it would be impossible to mention the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s without its force of civil disobedience embodied by King, whose birthday will be celebrated Monday.\nClegg said without the element of peaceful protest, the civil rights movement would never have gotten off the ground. Instead, the federal and state governments would have seen the actions as a law-and-order issue, not a moral or social movement.\n"If they had violated the law using violence, the movement would have lost the moral force that gave it strength," Clegg said.\nAssociate Professor of Sociology Fabio Rojas said it was this moral high ground that gave the movement the strength it needed to succeed.\n"The key tool in a peaceful protest is a moral argument," Rojas said. \nAlong with a strong moral tug to American heartstrings, the media helped peaceful protests succeed by showing the protesters as average middle class Americans, an image the majority of America could identify with, Clegg said.\n"Don't discount the power of TV," Clegg said. "The TV showing Rosa Parks and people holding hands and singing all looked very American and very middle class."\nRojas said he thinks violence is usually not the answer, even though it is often the first reaction to conflict.\n"Peaceful protest is underestimated," Rojas said. "The hard part is getting people to believe it will work. Even within the black community (during the civil rights movement), it's hard to believe (peaceful protest) will help."\nPart of the reason some might find this method so difficult to stomach is because sometimes peaceful protests end in violence, and protesters are told not to fight back.\n"It sends a message to those oppressed of 'don't defend yourself,'" Clegg said. "Tactically, it's the only way to go, but how psychologically good is it to do nothing when someone is throwing bottles at you constantly?"\nClegg said it's a hard idea to grasp because it's a natural act to try and minimize the damage and defend yourself if someone is attacking you, making the act of peaceful protests seem passive.\nHowever, Rojas said peaceful protests are actually an aggressive tool.\n"Nonviolence is not random," Rojas said.\nProtests, like King's March on Washington in 1963, are extremely organized, and protesters even practiced how they would react if police came.\n"They were taught not to lose their cool and fight back," Rojas said. "It was actually very strategic. They knew people were watching."\nInspired by prominent peaceful protesters in the past, civil disobedience is still a popular method of gaining attention for a cause.\nYogesh Simmhan, graduate student and president of Association for India's Development, organized a rally in Dunn Meadow in early December to protest a chemical spill that killed thousands in Bhopal, India in December 1984.\nSimmhan said AID and its volunteers have always been inspired by the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi who showed 60 years ago that nonviolence can be a strong weapon in the hands of the masses.\n"This brought about the Indian independence," Simmhan said. "MLK did the same with his civil rights movement, inspired by Gandhiji," referring to Gandhi. "With such great precedents set for us, it was obvious we follow in their footsteps."\nBecause peaceful protests are confrontational in a civil way, they have the ability to change the mentalities of large masses.\n"The stakes were high," Clegg said. "People were being asked for a fundamental rethinking of race relations."\nBut the power of peaceful protests was never in question.\n"We've changed for the better, and we're not going back," Rojas said. "It wasn't an easy fight, but we won."\n-- Contact Features Editor Kathleen Quilligan at kquillig@indiana.edu.