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We have an agenda
“ F ro m the beginning a basic philosophy guided the m ovem ent. This
g u id in g p rin c ip le has since been referred to v a rio u sly as n o n vio len t
resistance, noncooperation, and passive resistance. But in the first days o f the
protest none o f these expressions was m entioned; the phrase most o ften
heard was ‘Christian love’ . . . ”
“ W hat we were really doing was withdrawing our cooperation from an evil
system rather than merely withdrawing our economic support from the bus
com pany. The bus com pany, being an external expression o f the system,
would natu rally suffer, but the basic aim was to refuse to cooperate with
evil.”
The
M o n tg o m e ry
bus
boycott ended 13 months later
when the U .S. Supreme Court
affirm ed that A lab am a’s bus
segregation laws were uncon­
stitutional.
Mass meetings to promulgata tha philosophy of nonviolence bacamo a hallmark
of tha Movement. Above. Or. King, Dr. Ralph Abarnathy, Rosa Parks.
"W e were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society
and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast
Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And we
have repeatedly been faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white
boys on T.V. screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been
unable to seat them together in the same schools. We watch them in brutal
solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they could not
live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel
manipulation of the poor."
-1 9 6 8
LJ
HOFFM AN
C O N S T R U C T IO N
COMPANY
An Equal Opportunity Employer
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