Abstract
The connection between a set of ideas and political mobilization – their material praxis – presents the movement analyst with a fascinating and formidable task. Where those ideas originate, how and why they are taken up elsewhere, and how they are changed or develop within different social and political contexts historically, are essential questions that guide Sean Chabot’s Transnational Roots of the Civil Rights Movement: African American Explorations of the Gandhian Repertoire. Nine chapters (including an introduction and a conclusion), present a clear argument that focuses on the importance of ‘collective learning’ as an analytical aid to our understanding of how the Gandhian repertoire travelled temporally and spatially – its transnational diffusion – from its early 20th-century origin in South Africa to its seminal influence on the US civil rights movement between 1955 and 1965.
The Gandhian repertoire did not begin as a fixed set of ideas. Emerging as a movement of innovative collective learning, strategies were made meaningful through contestation with British colonial rule and distinctive from those adopted by other movement tendencies, especially Western-inspired nonresistance and passive resistance forms. In Chapter 2, Chabot carefully presents the unique importance of satyagraha (nonviolent civil disobedience) as both the means and the end of ‘holding firm to truth’ (p. 22). Key to the influence of satyagraha was the emergence of Indian opposition in 1906 to the Draft Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance, or the ‘Black Act’ as it was subsequently called. Resisting a racist law that sought to register all Indian residents and deport those who had arrived in the Transvaal after 31 May 1902, marked a turning point in confronting oppression, a transformation from passive ‘appeal’ to ‘direct action’ (p. 21). From this point, ‘truth-seekers’ adopted ahimsa (nonviolence), not merely in the sense of passive resistance toward realization of a short-term political goal, but in pursuit of a deeper transformation of self and society through ‘enduring resolution of the underlying causes of oppression’ predicated on nonsentimental ‘loving action’ (p. 23). This appeal not only to the head but to the ‘heart’ of the oppressor entailed disciplined organization, mass noncooperation where necessary, and self-sacrifice, which included accepting the risk of imprisonment, brutal physical attacks, and ultimately the possibility of death. Chabot charts the nonlinear evolution of satyagraha as it was extended to India through the Gandhian constructive program – an open-ended response (including community self-sufficiency development, i.e., ashrams). Constructive programs were integral to empowering satyagrahi’ resistance during the 1930 Salt March through to the Quit India Campaign and beyond.
Chabot’s historical account of the subjective emergence and innovation of Gandhian discourse, organizing, and action is an important prelude to our understanding of how satyagraha is taken up innovatively and reinvented by African Americans’ collective learning. Early media representations of the Gandhian movement, accounts that reinforced ‘hyper-difference’ and ‘over-likeness,’ acted as barriers to serious reception by activists in the United States, and in this other movement actors such as the NAACP and UNIA initially ‘obstructed rather than facilitated transnational diffusion’ (p. 192). Reception began to change in the 1930s due to transnational journeys by African American leaders and public intellectuals such as Howard Thurman and Benjamin Mays following the Salt March. Direct encounters with Gandhi and the publication of Richard Gregg’s The Power of Nonviolence and Haridas Muzumder’s Gandhi versus the Empire paved the way for future action. However, it was during the war period that the Gandhian repertoire was relocated to the United States through reinvention. Local experimentation by key activists and leaders, creative mediators such as AJ Must and A Philip Randolph among others, the strategic guidelines of Krishnalal Shridharanini, and the campaigns of CORE represented the transnational diffusion of satyagraha pressure politics. Despite a period of McCarthy era retreat, satyagraha rules, steps, and methods were fully implemented during the peak civil rights period (1955–1965). The Montgomery bus boycott, student sit-ins, and the Freedom Ride were aided by Gandhian veterans and workshops in Gandhian resistance. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and CORE, the three main contentious communities, each drew on satyagrahi’ methods including mass nonviolent direct action and local constructive empowerment work, as exemplified by the Birmingham and Selma campaigns and the Freedom Summer.
Chabot’s work has many strengths. By stressing the relationship between the innovative content of the Gandhian repertoire and its reinvention in the United States, Transnational Roots provides a more holistic approach than is possible through social scientific cause–effect analysis. There is a universal foundation underpinning Chabot’s study and this connects the human agents of Indian independence and US civil rights as creative subjects. Indeed, there is a clear link between the universal applicability of the Gandhian philosophy of nonviolent resistance and Chabot’s approach. For example, an early discussion of Gregg’s Power of Nonviolence skilfully draws out how this pioneer of translation narrated the universal applicability of Gandhian ‘moral jiu-jitsu’ (p. 69) by presenting nonviolent resistance to a US audience in a scholarly way. Likewise, Chabot’s nonlinear approach moves us away from a ‘history as stages’ analysis and captures the ebbs, flows, retreats, defeats, and successes that epitomize collective learning as the universal vehicle of transnational diffusion. Effective comparison is made between the high point of experimentation with the Gandhian repertoire in the 1940s, particularly the establishment of CORE with its satyagraha-inspired four steps – investigation, negotiation, publicity, direct action – and postwar ‘doldrums’ when the repertoire was kept alive through actions such as Randolph’s publicity campaign against Jim Crow in the military.
Chabot’s approach dovetails with his professed intention to promote Gandhian activism today, and he makes specific reference to the diversity of experience that congregates annually in the World Social Forum. His focus on ‘how transnational communication and relationships contributed to the ability of African Americans to understand and apply satyagraha in their own contexts’ (p. 192), provides us with an important addition to our understanding of how protest methods can circulate across difference and distance. The result is that we are offered collective learning both as an analytical device and as a strategy of political engagement – clever! In respect of this approach, some critical observations can be made, which do not, however, downplay the utility of collective learning. Chabot’s sensitivity to the subtlety of historical research is evident, but the collective learning needs to be related more critically to geopolitical and ideological processes that can initially lie beyond while affecting the reach of contentious communities. The Gandhian repertoire emerged and established itself against a British Empire that was already facing considerable contestation by other nation-states, as epitomized by the inter-imperialist world wars. Decolonization represented an imperial retreat in which movements played a role, but that also influenced their learning. A sense of weakness on the part of British colonial elites must surely be enlisted in our understanding of the Indian independence movement – actions and content. Likewise, the global transference of power from British to US empire paralleled the emergence of a Cold War dynamic in which Soviet support for the oppressed was a key geopolitical strategy that ultimately affected the US civil rights movement, both directly and indirectly. There is a specificity to the successes and failures of the Gandhian repertoire as it was articulated within the wider historical processes of global politics in the 20th century. The collapse of that Cold War dynamic must tell us something about the emergence of the World Social Forum, the relative applicability of the Gandhian repertoire today, and the effectiveness of collective learning.