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By Freeman Wicklund
Dr. Martin Luther King’s Six Principles of Nonviolence work together to provide important guidance for nonviolent activists to make their advocacy more effective. If you have questions about how to apply one of the principles, the other five principles often help answer those questions.
These principles were taken from Dr. King’s book Stride Towards Freedom. Having extensively studied Dr. King and nonviolence for decades, I explain his principles using my own words.
PRINCIPLE ONE: Nonviolence is a way of life that requires courage.
Nonviolent action is love in action. It is not apathy, passivity, or bowing down to threats of violence. Nonviolence moves to protect, heal, and reconcile. In opposing injustice, nonviolent activists will face repression and violence. Some of us may get injured, others may die. Nonviolence requires the courage and willingness to sacrifice in order to stand up to repression and face violence without retaliating.
PRINCIPLE TWO: The ultimate goals of nonviolent campaigns are reconciliation and the creation of Beloved Community.
In a Beloved Community, all people, animals, and life forms are treated with dignity, respect, and compassion. Disagreements are debated, resolved, or left unresolved without any hatred or violence between the parties. In Beloved Community, we create solutions that help everyone on all sides of the conflict get their needs met. In Beloved Community, we seek reconciliation and friendship with our opponents. To make Beloved Community real, we behave as though it already exists: we treat all life with dignity, we engage conflict without hatred or bitterness, and we seek reconciliation with those who cause social and environmental injustice.
PRINCIPLE THREE: We oppose the forces of harm, not the people who cause harm.
The forces of harm that we oppose are the infinite ways that greed, judgment, and falsehood arise. Rather than defining people who do harm as “bad” or “evil,” we recognize them as suffering. They are trapped by the forces of greed, hatred, and falsehood. Trapped by these forces, they suffer fear, hatred, and confusion. Acknowledging their suffering, we offer them compassion and seek to save them from these forces. Even when people do great harm, we still recognize their inherent worth, value, and potential for goodness and offer them our goodwill and love. They are not our enemies, rather they are family members who have strayed from our nonviolent community.
PRINCIPLE FOUR: We willingly accept suffering without retaliating to trigger political jiu-jitsu, inspire defections, and benefit our cause.
As we effectively work for justice, our friends who oppose us will respond by punishing us with repression. When we publicly face this repression without retaliating in violence, we trigger political jiu-jitsu (Also known as “backfire” or the “paradox of repression”). Political jiu-jitsu is when the public witnesses unearned repression, and withdraws their support and cooperation from those who repress, while giving their support and cooperation to those being repressed. The greater the contrast between our opponent’s selfish violence, and our selfless, courageous, nonviolence, the more we transform hearts and minds, and the greater the shifts in power that result. Therefore, we do our best to maintain a courageous and loving attitude at all times, especially in the face of violent repression.
PRINCIPLE FIVE: We purify our minds of hatred, greed, and falsehood while embracing unconditional love for all life.
None of us are immune to the forces of harm: judgment, greed, and falsehood. Therefore, we engage in regular practices to help us purify our minds of these forces so we can relate lovingly to all people, animals, life forms, and situations, regardless of the harm they may cause.
PRINCIPLE SIX: The universe is lawful and on the side of love and justice.
In this lawful universe, we reap what we sow. If we want to reap peace, justice, love, and compassion we need to sow seeds of peace, justice, love, and compassion. The ends do not justify the means, as our means must be as pure as the ends we seek. We confidently assert that the universe is on the side of love and justice, because love brings health and healing to the body, while committing or witnessing acts of violence often causes our brains to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder. We confidently assert that the universe is on the side of love and justice, because all life forms want to be safe, peaceful, happy, and healthy.
For More Info
To understand how these principles fit into a campaign, please watch our Direct Action Strategy Training.
For other wonderful interpretations of these principles, check out:
• The Dr. Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change
• Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm by Kazu Haga
• Stride Towards Freedom by Dr. Martin Luther King. He shares the principles on pages 90-95 in our version of the book. You can find them on the last five pages of the chapter titled “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence.”
Freeman Wicklund is the Mindfulness Teacher at the Boundless Love Project. His interest in movement strategy and effectiveness grew out of decades of activism in a variety of social and environmental justice movements.