The second chapter, which I'm partway through, discusses the challenges of keeping people focused on non-violent resistance in the 1960's. This passage is striking:
Over the last decade they have seen America applauding non-violence whenever the Negroes have practiced it. They have watched it being praised in the sit-in movements of 1960, in the Freedom Rides of 1961, in the Albany movement of 1962, in the Birmingham movement of 1963 and in the Selma movement of 1965. But then these same black young men and women have watched as America sends black young men to burn Vietnamese with napalm, to slaughter men, women and children; and they wonder what kind of nation it is that applauds nonviolence whenever Negroes face white people in the streets of the United States but then applauds violence and burning and death when these same Negroes are sent to the field of Vietnam.
All of this represents disappointment lifted to astronomical proportions. It is disappointment with timid white moderates who feel that they can set the timetable for the Negro's freedom. It is disappointment with a federal administration that seems more concerned about winning an ill-considered war in Vietnam than about winning the war against poverty here at home.
Yep, he was definitely a follower of the Carpenter from Nazareth. And that last sentence (highlighted here, but not in the original) could be written about almost any era of US history, if the word "Vietnam" were replaced with some other country.
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