When Silence is Deadly: A Quaker Calls for Radical Nonviolence in Our Streets

I am a Black Quaker, writing about nonviolence at 6 am on a December morning in Boston. As I write, I ask my daughter, who is 14 and getting ready for school, "How many of your friends have been murdered?" "Not many," Marya replies. "Six or seven."

My own cousin Michael, walking home from a movie, was shot in the head three times. His last act was pushing the girl he was with to safety in a doorway. I was 14, and my entire extended family was traumatized by this event. From the day it happened forward, we have been in mourning. There were other deaths in my youth - six in eighteen years, two of them violent - but such direct interaction with violent death and dying was a rare occurrence. My 14-year-old daughter, who has always lived in fairly "safe" neighborhoods, has had more experience of violence than I, and reached my limit four years early! Six murders to her is "not many."

Youth violence is on the rise, and we Quakers ought to be asking publicly, "Why?" Why, in our urban centers especially, are Friends - who claim an historic testament of peace - so quiet? Are we afraid to embrace the truth of nonviolence?

The silence of modern Quakers is deadly! Do we not know how to respond effectively to the violence that plagues our youth? I am convinced our silence offers no one any hope of change. We who believe in nonviolence need to broadcast our belief. We need to speak out about ending a domestic war that exacts a terrible toll. Yes, doing so entails risk, dramatic risk.

But today's youth walk around with notebooks filled with pictures of the dead. I watch them on mass transit flipping through the pages. They have button collections of smiling dead faces. Many of these kids, teenagers and younger, harbor an unspoken fear that they will not live beyond their youth, as I have heard from them in workshops over the past 20 years. Like me since 14, many live in perpetual mourning and anger.

How can we Quakers ignore all the death and dying? In Boston alone there were 66 murders in 2007. There are many more in poor urban neighborhoods across the nation, hard killing, most of it irrational, all of it wrong.

Nonviolence, if not part of our daily experience, will do nothing for us.

The Black community of my youth was one of life! Violence was being done to us. Black folks were not out there lynching and killing. We were not blocking the schoolhouse door. We were trying to get into the school! We knelt in prayer, endured racial insults, beatings, dogs, water cannons, murder and mutilation. We did not bring the guns and the drugs that have destroyed our community into our communities. The guns and the drugs, like the smallpox-laden blankets sold to Indians in the 19th century, have become our deathtraps. They blind us and everyone else to history, when so many Blacks created a nonviolent hope for human society around the globe during the Civil Rights Movement of the fifties and sixties.

The lives of many Black youth today have been filled with violence, a violence that feeds on itself. Places once considered safe, like street memorials - many of which dot communities of color - have been violated. A culture of death muffles the Black community in sadness.

Nonviolence, if not part of our daily experience, will do nothing for us. If we wait until times of need to pull it out, dust it off, and put it on, it won't fit. We need nonviolence without dust. It has to be a part of our ongoing experience, our thinking, our actions, and our spiritual reality.

"One either serves life or is in complicity with death," explains the Jesuit Dan Berrigan. For most of us, nonviolence is the path we walk in ordinary lives, as ordinary people. Most of us are not asked to take deadly risk. However, if we are serious and engaged in the struggle for justice, there will be risk. In her book Practicing Peace, Cathy Whitmire writes about stepping out of her car and changing the dynamic of an urban street beating taking place in front of her. There is a power in our taking risk, and when we commit to it, strength to proceed will be there - if we have prepared ourselves.

There are many ways and traditions to walk as one considers a nonviolent life. It is a living process, not just a tactic. As long as we understand this reality about nonviolence, we should be able to live in that sacred moment, speaking truth with our lives wherever we are led. Urban Friends should be in the streets of our cities promoting our understanding of a living peace. At the same time we have to grow in our understanding of what is happening on the street. We must be willing to learn, as well as teach. But before we can do either, we need to be there! Witnesses in the streets!

For more information

Bayard Rustin's "Nonviolence & Jim Crow,"Fellowship: The Journal of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (July 1942) is at <www.explorepahistory.com/cms/pbfiles/Project1/Scheme40/ ExplorePAHistory-a0k1d0-a_512.pdf>