Non-Crime in the South

Southern policemen these days are up against an outbreak of a non-crime called "nonviolence." Last week it forced a key gain for Negroes in Atlanta, where white merchants agreed to desegregate lunch counters when school segregation ends (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). In Durham, N.C., professors at Duke University and North Carolina (Negro) College joined students in picketing segregated movie theaters. In Columbia, S.C., 190 Negro students began to stand trial for singing hymns outside the state capitol. The year-long success of such demonstrations has raised a thirst for knowledge of the first principles of the weapon. Washington, D.C.'s Howard University, the nation's leading Negro campus, is answering this curiosity with what is probably the first credit course in "Philosophy and Methods of Nonviolence."

The teacher at Howard's School of Religion is small, earnest Vice President William Stuart Nelson, 65, a longtime religion professor and onetime friend of Mahatma Gandhi. His 20 students, one-third of them white, attend for good academic reasons but also to learn wiser leadership in sit-ins.

The Uselessness of Hate. Dr. Nelson defines nonviolence as neither coercion nor pacifism. It is "a weapon of the strong, not of the weak. The object is to convert not by making someone else suffer, but by suffering yourself. The very sight of that suffering will draw attention to the problem. It is a way of life, a religion."

The concept, he tells his students, first appeared between 2000 and 1000 B.C. in Indian Hinduism's sacred Sanskrit Vedas, which emphasized the idea of one universe where all creatures are interdependent parts of God. In the Upanishads, nonviolence (ahimsa) became one of the five moral virtues. Gautama Buddha (500 B.C.) preached the impracticality of selfishness and hatred, saying that "hatreds are not quenched by hatred. Hatreds are quenched by love." Side by side with Buddhism in the 6th century B.C. came the similar, if sterner, ethics of Jainism, which held that because "all beings hate pains," the "quintessence of wisdom is not to kill anything."

Hard-Boiled Self-Sacrifice. Gandhi, who grew up in Jain-strong western India, was particularly influenced by Jainism. But in perfecting the strategy that peacefully defeated Britain in India, Gandhi drew heavily on the New Testament, which awakened him to "the Tightness and value of passive resistance." Gandhi's conviction was further bolstered by Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You and Thoreau's famed essay Civil Disobedience, both written by men who made celebrated attempts to carry out nonviolence. What emerged in Gandhi was a hard-boiled idea that sacrificing oneself is ultimately more effective than sacrificing others.

Having got this far, Dr. Nelson's students are deep in such endeavors as trying to understand Southern cops and judges. He advises them to "try to consider the judge's whole life, his inability to rise above his limitations." But though he denies that his class is a "workshop" of nonviolence, Nelson does intend soon to weave in some practice along with history and theory. Sample future topics: deportment, choosing the place for nonviolence, the importance of going to jail. He believes that the practice will ultimately "reshape the entire structure of race relations in the U.S."

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