Non-Violence is More Radical than Barack Obama Realizes
In doing research for a podcast on the history of American pacifism, I’ve studied Bayard Rustin, the great organizer and expert in non-violent resistance and primary spearhead of Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington. Over the past few years, there’s been a Rustin revival, which is what this inspiring and transformative American life deserves.
It's hard to miss the source of that revival: Barack Obama. The 2023 film Rustin, critical darling and receiver of awards, was produced by Barack and Michelle Obama's Higher Ground. And the anthology of Rustin's writings that I'm reading (Time on Two Crosses) features a foreword by Barack. Rustin, he says in the language of 10 years ago, "fought tirelessly for marginalized communities at home and abroad."
Barack and Bayard have some things in common. Well, one anyway: they’re both black, as we assign races to individuals in America. And it may be true that without the King movement that Rustin did so much to make effective, Barack Obama could not, decades later, have been elected president. ("Martin marched so Barack could run," ran the t-shirt slogan in 2008.) But after that, the two men and the two careers have little in common. Indeed, they’re opposite. One could regard Obama's ascent to the presidency as the realization Rustin's activism. One could also regard it as a betrayal.
Pacifism of the sort that Rustin learned from Philadelphia Quakers and Gandhi's movement in India is magnificently radical. One of Rustin's first published essays, from 1942 (long before he met King), describes his own refusal to move to a segregated car on a train journey from Louisville to Nashville, an early version of the sorts of sit-ins and boycotts that King's movement helped make famous and effective. Rustin was a draft resister in World War 2, serving years in jail for it.
"Our war resistance is justified only if we see that an alternative to violence is developed," he wrote in the late-1940s, connecting the causes of peace and civil rights. "Today, as the Gandhian forces face their critical test, we can add to world justice by placing in the hands of thirteen million black Americans a workable and Christian technique for the righting of injustice and the solution of conflict." Rustin accomplished this task with amazing effectiveness.
As in many of Rustin's and, later, King's presentations of non-violence, this statement appears ambiguous: they appeared to claim that non-violence was a spiritual demand, a kind of absolute Christian law, and the claim it was an effective strategy. Perhaps King emphasized the practical aspects. Rustin often emphasized the spiritual or absolute side. Non-violence, he said, stems from "the basic spiritual truth that men are brothers in the sight of God," and the biblical injunctions to love your enemies and beat your swords into ploughshares. This question, whether "non-resistance" is a strategy or an absolute moral command, has persisted since the earliest statements of American pacifism. Rustin held it was both, but he constantly emphasized the moral imperative.
A moral prohibition on violence is incompatible, completely incompatible, with Barack Obama's actions as POTUS: many of them in particular, and all of them together. As commander-in-chief of the armed forces Obama proudly commanded "the greatest military the world has ever known." "Greatest," here, means most effective, that is, most destructive, most irresistible, most fatal. He bombed the hell out of Libya, at the urging of Hillary Clinton. He prosecuted a massive "surge" in Afghanistan, which may have extended the conflict there for years before the humiliating withdrawal under Biden. Perhaps 2500 American soldiers died on Obama's watch, and American soldiers killed tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
Obama presided over a sprawling system of federal prisons, housing over 200,000 people. Millions of people were forcibly deported during the Obama administration, which was sitting throughout on a world-annihilating nuclear arsenal. These aren’t things that Bayard Rustin did. They’re things that Rustin asserted again and again were monstrously incompatible with the laws of God, love, and reason.
Non-violence of the sort preached by Rustin is incompatible with operating state power at all. Obama's commander-in-chiefery, like Trump's for that matter, was funded by involuntary taxation, backed by the threat of force. Without the weapons and the violence, there would be no government to run.
I hope that somewhere in his heart and his head, Obama knows that the values he pursued as president and the practical basis of all his actions were incompatible with the values that Rustin so beautifully and effectively professed. I think that’s extremely hard to miss, and that missing it would require a disturbing degree of self-delusion. So I'd like to read Obama's role in spearheading the Rustin revival as an attempt to expiate some guilt, or as a late moment of reflection and regret for his whole presidency. That seems unlikely, however, and the alternative is that it’s an expression of hypocrisy.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X and Bluesky: @CrispinSartwell