robert f. williams makes a strong case for a negaive answer to the question many Negroes are asking these days: Can Negroes afford to be non-violent? The Montgomery bus protest, which was once hailed as a portent of greater victories to come, is fast becoming an icon for pacifist devotions. In Alabama and Mississippi, in North Carolina and Virginia, in Little Rock and Tallahassee, the organized movement for liberation is virtually at a standstill. In almost any southern town, the individual Negro who dares to assert his dignity as a human being in the concrete relationships of everyday life rather than in the privileged sanctuary of the pulpit is in danger of meeting the fate of Mack Parker or Emmett Till.

In such a situation, it would be arrogant for us to criticise a Robert Williams for arming in defence of himself and his neighbours. Gandhi once said that although non-violence is the best method of resistance to evil, it is better for persons who have not yet attained the capacity for non-violence to resist violently than not to resist at all. Since we have failed to reach the level of effective resistance, we can hardly condemn those who have not embraced non-violence. Non-violence without resistance to evil is like a soul without a body. Perhaps it has some meaning in heaven but not in the world we live in. At this point, we should be more concerned with our own failure as pacifists to help spread the kind of action undertaken at Montgomery than with the failure of persons like Williams who, in many cases, are the only ones who stand between an individual Negro and a marauding Klan.

When non-violence works, as it sometimes does against seemingly hopeless odds, it succeeds by disarming its opponents. It does this through intensive application of the insight that our worst enemy is actually a friend in disguise. The non-violent resister identifies so closely with his opponent that he feels his problems as if they were his own, and is therefore unable to hate or hurt him, even in self-defence. This inability to injure an aggressor, even at the risk of one’s own life, is based not on a denial of the self in obedience to some external ethical command but on an extension of the self to include one’s adversary. “Any man’s death diminishes me.”