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03 Wernitznig Modello Scholar and Practitioner of Nonvio- lence: The Life and Work of Mary Elizabeth King di Dagmar Wernitznig Abstract: This article chronicles the life and work of Mary Elizabeth King, a scholar and prac- titioner of nonviolent civil resistance for more than five decades. As a participant in the 1960s U.S. civil rights movement, she handled communications and the national news media for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Atlanta and Mississippi. From within the movement she co-authored Sex and Caste with Casey Hayden, which in the United States spurred the launching of the so-called “second” wave of feminism. During the Carter Admin- istration, as a Presidential appointee, she had worldwide responsibility for the Peace Corps, and as Deputy Director of the umbrella agency that housed all national service corps pro- grams was responsible for VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) and other such programs. A political scientist, prize-winning author, and acclaimed international expert on nonviolent struggle, she is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University for Peace, affiliated with the United Nations, main campus in Costa Rica; Scholar in Residence with The Ameri- can University Center for Peacebuilding and Development in Washington, D.C.; and Distin- guished Rothermere American Institute Fellow at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. “Scholar and Practitioner of Peace” attempts to contextualize Mary’s leadership for widening the understanding of nonviolent civil resistance, gender and peacebuilding, and women’s rights. She has been honored by both her alma mater and the British university that bestowed upon her a doctorate in international politics, and is the recipient of juried awards from the Jamnalal Bajaj International Award, the El-Hibri Peace Education Prize, and the James M. Lawson Award for Nonviolent Achievement. There is a critical need to study nonviolent movements as a body of knowledge, because today there is so much faith in violence. People question the concept of nonviolence, but no one talks of violent struggles and how they don’t work. We must strengthen the arguments for fighting with political, nonviolent tools. It is ridiculous to think that one can get rid of terrorism with warfare. I believe that we must spread the knowledge of nonviolent struggle so widely that persons who now choose to be- come terrorists instead are aware of nonviolent alter- natives to a blind faith in violence. For over five decades, Mary Elizabeth King has been a practitioner and scholar at the intersection of peace and gender. As the eldest child of a nurse educator and © DEP ISSN 1824 - 4483 Dagmar Wernitznig DEP n. 33 / 2017 a Methodist minister who was the eighth pastor in six generations of clergy from Virginia and North Carolina, she was instilled with a sense of taking responsibility for community and society from a very early age. She took with her an understanding of practiced Christianity when she left her family home to study at Ohio Wesleyan University. Watching news about the first student sit-in conducted by four students from the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro in 1960 on her dormitory television, she became fascinated with the concept of noncooperation and nonviolence, as dis- played by the student activists. Freshly out of college two years later, she was in- vited by two senior figures who were advising the movement, Ella J. Baker and Howard Zinn, to join them in the southern region of the National Student YWCA based in Atlanta on a project supported by the Field Foundation involving campus travel to promote academic freedom, and she came in contact with the student sit-in campaigns then in full force in a hundred cities across the South. “It sounds pious and dopey, but I took my father’s sermons seriously”, she later explained1. She went on the modest payroll of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”) in 1963 as one of a handful of white staff to enlist in this exceptional civil rights organization that grew from the student sit-ins. SNCC concentrated on rural areas to mobilize nonviolent resistance in the South, includ- ing some of the most marginalized and remote pockets, mainly conducting voter registration campaigns and organizing direct action such as sit-ins and demonstra- tions, where possible. Predominantly a grassroots movement of young people, SNCC complemented organizations like the National Association for the Ad- vancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led by Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (no relation). By age 23 she was locked up in Atlanta’s city jail, called Big Rock, within sight of the state capital’s gold dome, having been arrested as part of an interracial staff group from the SNCC office who met with a Kenyan official, Odinga Oginga. She spent Christmas in prison. Mary later reminisced about what it was like to work for SNCC: It was the most pure manifestation of democracy that I have ever encountered. A group of young people who were intense, who cared passionately but who came without ideology and without foreordained conclusions. We believed that determination and working together would produce change. There was a certain amount of naïveté in all this, but my naïveté gave me strength and power because I didn’t know how awesome the odds were2. Mary’s work for SNCC was occurring in a formative time in a sweep of anti- colonial and civil rights mobilizations that girdled the worlds, and her fight against segregation was also a personal and professional rite of passage. Within SNCC ranks, she worked in the communications office with Julian Bond, where they wrote news releases about atrocities or reprisals by vigilante groups of the local movements in which SNCC organizers were instrumental. Getting a reporter from 1 Mary E. King in Kandy Stroud, “Mary King: A Key Carter ‘Brain Truster’ from the Beginning”, New York Times, 8 July 1976. 2 Mary E. King in Barbara Gamarekian, “One Woman’s Chronicle of the Civil Rights Struggle”, The New York Times, 31 August 1987. 19 Dagmar Wernitznig DEP n. 33 / 2017 the national news corps to a county jail might be the only way to interrupt the often brutal, obstructive responses by sheriffs and law authorities. The communications office was vital for the movement, because barbarities against black people, or their deaths, were generally not considered newsworthy by the white mainstream south- ern press. Liaising with the media to help them have the information necessary to report on what was actually happening in the isolated rural hamlets where the civil rights movement was deeply rooted, as well as coordinating with the Friends of SNCC for raising funds in northern cities was a critically important function for the movement. Operating from a tiny SNCC office in the west side of Atlanta’s black community, Mary and Julian sought to push into national awareness the eclipsed news of injustices and brutalities against black people. Utilizing a network that they created for telephone calls, news releases, sworn testimonies, affidavits, and feeding radio stations, in Mary’s long days she managed to keep the general public informed about and alerted concerning the segregationist terror groups that were instigating fear in the black community. Her diligence and dedication earned her the nickname “meticulous Mary”3. Publicly and openly working for a desegregated society in the American South required courage and passion. Associating oneself with SNCC meant becoming a conspicuous target for violent attacks. Being Caucasian bestowed no advantages; to the contrary, whites might be singled out for targeting. Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Turé) would in his autobiography write about his white fellow workers: Was I quite serious in saying that there were no ‘whites’ in SNCC? […] They were friends, allies, comrades, SNCC staffers, and brothers and sisters in the struggle. […] I never said no whites ever joined SNCC. […] So how could I say there were no ‘whites’ in SNCC? Because upon joining us, those comrades stopped being ‘white’ in most conventional American terms, except in the most superficial physical sense of the word. […] When they experienced the full force of racist hostility from Southern white politicians, police, and public opinion, com- pounded by the indifference or paralysis of the national political establishment, whatever class and color privileges they might have taken for granted were immediately suspended. At mo- ments of confrontation they were at as great a risk as any of us, and as ‘race traitors’ were sometimes in even greater jeopardy4. Police brutality, arrests, shootings, and other organized segregationist hostilities were constant threats for anyone working in SNCC, whether black or white. For instance, in 1963 in Danville, Virginia, Mary had to seek refuge at a Catholic con- vent across the river in North Carolina, because she was about to be indicted by a grand jury for “acts of violence and war”. The juridical panel had dredged up an archaic Virginia statute, which held that it was “illegal to incite the colored popula- tion to acts of violence and war against the white population”. This statute was passed after the Nat Turner slave uprising in 1831 in Southampton County in southside Virginia, and was the basis upon which John Brown was hanged follow- ing the Harper’s Ferry raid. The potential indictment Mary was facing would have 3 Susan Brownmiller, “Grasping the Nation by the Scruff of Its Neck”, New York Times Book Review of Freedom Song, 30 August 1987. 4 Stokely Carmichael, with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Strug- gles of Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Turé], Scribner, New York 2003, p. 308–9. Kwame Turé was Carmichael’s African name.
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