That would be a big surprise to the hundreds of thousands of people of color in the U.S. who have used nonviolent direct action in campaigns for over a century. (In 1876 in St. Louis African Americans were doing freedom rides against discrimination on trolley cars, to take one of thousands of examples.) In any given week there are community-based organizations of people of color, all across the U.S., who are engaged in nonviolent action: marches, sit-ins, street blockades, boycotts, civil disobedience, and the like. Books could be written just about the unions of people of color, like the hospital workers, hotel workers and janitors, who go out on strike as well as using other tactics.

A far, far higher proportion of people of color have engaged in nonviolent action in the U.S. than have white people, and continue to do so year in and year out. Not to mention the role of nonviolence in the anti-colonial struggles in Africa and Asia. When we think of nonviolence, why do the names of Gandhi, King, Aung San Suu Kyi, Cesar Chavez, so easily leap to mind? They are only the tip of the iceberg.

Neither the mass media nor the schools have served us well in letting us know what's really going on. They glamorize violence. It's up to us activists to spread the information about people power. How many activists know that Kwame Nkrumah led a successful nonviolent campaign for Ghana's independence in the '50s? Or that Kenneth Kaunda led another in Zambia in the '60s? The successful struggle of Nepalese students for greater democracy just a few years ago? The prolonged nonviolent campaign for democracy in Taiwan which withstood torture, killings, and widespread suffering before success came in the '90s? The strategic shift of the ANC to major reliance on nonviolent action in the early '80s, leading to the end of apartheid government? The heroic 1990 struggle of the Mohawks in Quebec which saved ancestral land from being turned into a white golf course? (9)

I won't even start with the myth that nonviolent action is inherently middle class -- that's even more off base than the myth that it's white. A far higher proportion of working class people have engaged in nonviolent action than middle class people. Since unions have been the "shock troops" of class struggle, to read their history is to read a large part of the history of nonviolent action in the U.S.