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About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 16, 2019)
Page 20 The Skanner Portland & Seattle January 16, 2019 Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Love and Nonviolence The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a staunch believer that violence was not the way to resist injustice e and his sup- porters believed in transforming Christian love into powerful peaceful change through grass- roots organizing and nonviolent protests such as marches and boycotts. H Agape Agape is a term large- ly found in Christian belief that means a love that spontaneous, un- motivated, groundless and creative. The term is at the heart of King’s belief in a knowable God and that love and nonvi- olence could fix Ameri- ca’s racial problems, says the King Encyclopedia maintained by Stanford University’s The Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute. “At the center of non- violence stands the prin- ciple of love,” King said. “When we rise to love on the agape level, we love men not because we like them, not because their attitudes and ways appeal to us, but we love them because God loves them. Here we rise to the position of loving the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed that the person does.” Nonviolence King was introduced to nonviolence when he read Henry David Tho- reau’s “Essay on Civil Disobedience” as a fresh- “ “ University encyclopedia. First, that evil can be re- sisted without violence. Second, that through nonviolence, the pro- tester seeks to win the friendship and under- standing of the oppo- nent, not humiliate him. Thirdly, that evil, not the people perpetrating the evil, be opposed. Fourth, that people committed to nonviolence must be At the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love. — Martin Luther King Jr. man at Morehouse Col- lege. He was fascinated, he wrote, by the “idea of refusing to cooper- ate with an evil system.” During his education, willing to suffer without retribution and suffer- ing can be redemptive. Fifth, that nonviolence avoids both physical vi- olence and the “internal All men are brothers be- cause they are children of a common father — Martin Luther King Jr. , The Drum Major Instinct, Feb. 4, 1968 King refined his ideas about nonviolent protest and social reform, but he didn’t put it into practice until the Montgomery bus boycott. To King, nonviolence had six principles, ac- cording to the Stanford violence of the spirit,” meaning the protester refuses to shoot his op- ponent but also refuses to hate him. Lastly, the protester must believe in the future and be con- vinced that the universe is on the side of justice.
