The concept of civil disobedience was something that I learned firsthand from Julian Bond, the co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, in 1960.
Bond was a professor at UVA in the 1990s, and I was among the fortunate ones to get into his History of the Civil Rights Movement class.
On top of the lectures, books and papers, the coursework included seminars in which students were directed to role play a 1960s lunch-counter sit-in.
Bond told us that SNCC used the same approach to prepare its volunteers for actions aimed at integrating lunch counters and other nonviolent demonstrations.
Students took turns playing the roles of protestors, employees, cops, angry townspeople.
At the outset, the angry townspeople and cops were reserved, but as the sessions went on, it got heated.
I was among the kids who were protestors at the end of one session.
Bond stressed that we needed to be willing to accept the consequences of our protest action, which included being arrested – the act of being arrested itself was, indeed, a key part of the exercise, the aim being to highlight the injustice of the laws in place that kept Blacks from being able to eat in white-owned establishments.
Fast forward to today, and it’s obvious that the lessons of Bond, of Martin Luther King Jr., of Gandhi, have been forgotten.
The students leading the protests against Israel’s military actions in Gaza want to be able to break laws with no repercussions.
It’s to the ridiculous point that a spokesperson for a group of students that took over a building at Columbia University held a press conference on Tuesday to complain that the school wasn’t delivering them food and water, which, seriously, you can’t make this up.
“I guess it’s ultimately a question of, what kind of community and obligation Columbia feels it has to its students? Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill even if they disagree with you?” the spokesperson, who declined to be identified, but stood at a microphone in front of TV cameras, so, good luck with the anonymity, told reporters.
“If the answer is no, then you should allow basic, I mean, it’s crazy to say, because we’re on an Ivy League campus, but this is like basic humanitarian aid we’re asking for. Like, could people please have a glass of water?” the spokesperson said.
Scorecard here: we’ve gone from students in the 1960s protesting Jim Crow and getting thrown in jail, beat up by cops and white supremacist goons, in some cases, worse, to kids in the 2020s protesting one side of a two-sided war expecting the people they’re protesting against to send a catering truck.
The kids in 2020 have the privilege of being able to leave the building they’ve taken over, without facing arrest, and take a short walk over to the dining hall.
The students in the 1960s were lucky if they weren’t lynched.
I’d suggest to the kids of 2020s, maybe read a book, but I’m not sure kids read books anymore.
Maybe somebody can make a TikTok to explain it to ‘em.
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Chris Graham
