Remembering Non-Violence

Remembering Non-Violence

My first recollection of non-violent struggle came when I was about six years old. My father, a New York City actor who also was an advertising genius, was standing in a Bohacks supermarket in West Islip, Long Island handing out candy canes and pamphlets about CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, to which he and my Mom belonged. I stood with him there as he spoke quietly to people going in and out of the market with their groceries loaded up in shopping carts, the pneumatic doors whooshing open and closed on thin carpets of air.

I didn't know it at the time, but in February 1960, in Greensville, North Carolina, four well-dressed black students, trained in the non-violent civil resistance techniques of Gandhi, had already staged their first lunch counter sit-in. Within a few days a group of Negro students in Nashville staged another round of sit-ins; this time James Lawson, a non-violent activist and teacher from Vanderbilt University, had trained them. TV cameras captured white toughs pouring soup all over the protesters, knocking them off their seats and bashing their heads with soup bowls and fists. In March 1960 a Houston man named Felton Turner was beaten and hanged upside down from a tree, the initials KKK carved on his chest. Martin Luther King Jr. was indicted in Alabama for tax evasion and later went to jail with 50 others for staging a sit-in at an Atlanta department store.

Fast forward to 1979: I am a career journalist working for The Detroit Free Press as a features reporter. I am a white woman living in a black and white city. My beat is to cover mostly positive social movements for change and improvement to education and health care in the city, especially among children. I have come to Detroit right after the riots, after Kennedy's death, before Martin Luther King's and Robert Kennedy's death. I recollect my high school speech teacher proudly boasting that he kept several rifles at his bedroom window poised to fire on any Negro who crossed Detroit's 8 mile Rd.

In Detroit for several years, I nurtured a love of journalism as a way to speak. I have watched and listened and read the newspapers, books, and magazines for signs of wisdom. Somehow I came to believe that words -- speech -- photographs -- film -- media, can help reach people and transform lives. I remember, as my father died painfully at age 40, the words he used to describe his own non-violent resistance to social injustice and disease: "I shall fight with speech and treasure the grossness of the human condition," he wrote from his hospital bed. "I shall go on...a day, a week, a decade or more. I'll take all [the life] that I can get."

A decade after he died, I had a dream under a full moon and violet sky in Detroit that I had killed my father. In my dream I discovered a cache of guns in my basement and a coffin with the face of John F. Kennedy on it. Was it my father I murdered, or was it Kennedy, or Martin Luther King? I'm not sure. Perhaps I borrowed from the memories of the riots, or the whiff of death and violence and guilt one feels being comparatively privileged in Detroit. Anyway, as a young woman reporter in Detroit, I felt orphaned. I lived in a city of bullets in a post-apocalyptic time. My heroes, with the exception of Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Toni Morrison, and my mother, a political activist since the 1930s, had been men. What, I asked myself, does this city, this country -- any country -- on earth, do now? How can we apply the lessons of civil resistance to the enormous, crushing tasks at hand? How do I find my own strength as a woman, and as a woman journalist, when the violence and deprecations, insidious corporate backbiting, unspent racial heat, oppressive regimes, and my own struggles to gain self-confidence as a writer and woman, conspire to defeat me?

For the past 4 decades I have tried to answer these questions. I am stronger now. When I falter, I try to remember my father's words. "I will fight with speech and treasure the grossness of the human condition. I'll take all that I can get."

In 2010, I have continued on as a writer. I have become a mother of grown children. I am divorced and finishing my doctoral degree. Although I have seen my beloved newspaper industry begin its fast devolution from primacy as the "watchdog"/independent monitor of American and international power to a more confused, diluted state as just one of many forms of digital expression worldwide, I still believe in the power of journalism.

Words are a democratic thing; the press is still essentially about democracy: seeking truth, above all, verifying facts, giving voice to the voiceless, serving as an independent monitor of power, providing loyalty, first and foremost, in stories written for and by citizens. Words and images are instruments to measure desire; they reflect our need to make sense of that which makes no sense most of the time. We will never stop needing people to practice journalism in all its forms; if anything, given the current state of the planet, we need good journalism as never before.

Citizen journalism, in particular, is a tool that digital democracy gives all of us to capture and reflect back the world we see. I believe that no matter what the struggle, people who write well, who ask penetrating questions, who carefully verify facts, who photograph and film with unrelenting creativity and vision -- especially those citizens who serve as journalists of a conflict, violent or otherwise, and have the background and knowledge to help contextualize for viewing audiences exactly what they see: these people are desperately needed.

Mainstream media can no longer accommodate the huge demand for accurate, thoughtful, incisive journalism necessary to cover the depth and breadth of civil resistance around the world. From the West Bank to Zimbabwe, from South Africa's Black Sash movement to the Women in Black movement in the United States, we need a new and highly personal form of multimedia journalism that maintains the best of the old practice with the jewels of the new. By jewels, I mean the freedom to practice "parachute" journalism in territory that is rarely explored. We need to unearth stories that are hardly, if ever, told. There is a wealth of material out there, in both desolation and abundance, and I believe that women journalists, in particular, are uniquely equipped to document these stories in a way that transgresses conventional boundaries.

Although we live in a world of two-minute broadcast stories and sound bites, what we really require is depth. Depth with nuance means reporting that is more truthful to real-world experience, especially the "world" of someone else's existence. Women journalists, whether "professional" or citizen journalists who are women, can step forward with courage to articulate a journalism of real life that does not count on continuous exposes of violence to keep it alive. The men, especially male leaders (if not male publishers and network presidents) have largely blown it. As a woman journalist, my goal today is to a new language of journalistic expression -- photography, writing, film, multimedia -- that is neither dryly "objective," purely subjective, nor stridently political. I want to know, with accuracy and subtlety, how to create journalistic reportage that shows us the best and worst of this condition we call "humanity."

In particular, I want to see citizen journalists cover democracy movements in ways that produce viewer surprise, delight, and anger at the truth. Though I'm not in favor of giving up conventional journalism altogether, which I believe does have its place and time, advocacy journalism can be used quite effectively to document important stories of people and their civil resistance movements that are going untold.

I call on all women to join me. To learn more about women's roles in democracy movements, and to see citizen and feminist journalism in practice, go to http://inwomenshands.wordpress.com/