by J. Pharoah Doss, For New Pittsburgh Courier
Everyone thinks they have a good movie idea. Since it’s the week between MLK’s holiday and Black History Month, here’s my movie idea about a significant moment in MLK’s philosophical development.
My film would resemble the televised version of Jeff Stetson’s 1987 stage play The Meeting. This was a fictional meeting between MLK and Malcolm X in a hotel room days before Malcolm X was assassinated. The two men debated non-violence and self-defense, then pondered the future.
In one scene, Malcolm X tells MLK about a dream he had the night before. In the dream, both men had been dead for decades. And there was a generation of Black people who didn’t know who they were or know anything about the struggle.
Fortunately, Malcolm’s dream didn’t come true. MLK and Malcolm are legendary figures. Each generation after MLK and Malcolm are aware of the Civil Rights Movement, but the passage of time has eclipsed other contributors to the movement.
In The Meeting, Malcolm X questioned the strategy of non-violent direct action, and MLK replied, “Non-violence isn’t a strategy, it’s a way of life.”
MLK could never have made that statement if it wasn’t for Bayard Rustin.
Rustin was eighteen years older than MLK. While MLK was entering manhood at Morehouse College, Rustin took a pilgrimage to India.
My film begins in 1948 with Rustin in India.
Rustin spent seven weeks in India learning the philosophy, technique, and discipline of nonviolent civil resistance from Gandhi’s closest associates. (Gandhi was assassinated earlier that year.) During Rustin’s course of study, the audience will get glimpses of Rustin’s past.
Rustin was raised by his grandmother, who was a Quaker and a member of the NAACP. Figures like W.E.B. Dubois, Mary McLeod Bethune, and James Weldon Johnson were frequent guests at his grandmother’s home. Rustin attended different colleges and was an openly gay man. In 1942 Rustin co-founded CORE (Congress of Racial Equality). By this time, the United States entered World War II. Rustin told the military he was a pacifist and refused induction. He was jailed for over two years as a conscientious objector. In prison, Rustin organized protests against segregated facilities.
Then the film jumps forward and shows several newspaper headlines.
December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a White passenger.
December 5, 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott began.
January 30, 1956, MLK’s home was bombed by White supremacists for leading the boycott.
Now, the film gets to the heart of the matter.
Bayard Rustin shows up at MLK’s home days after it was bombed. MLK has armed bodyguards outside and inside the house. MLK also had his own handgun.
The veteran organizer meets the young pastor in his kitchen, and they debate all night. Rustin tells MLK that guns will be detrimental to the movement. MLK believed protecting his home had nothing to do with the bus boycott.
At this time MLK described the bus boycott as an “act of mass noncooperation”. The term “non-violence” wasn’t a part of MLK’s message, it was “love thy enemy”. MLK read Thoreau’s essay Civil Disobedience at Morehouse but understood it as a strategy to confront the power structure. MLK knew little about Gandhi’s philosophy and the Indian Independence Movement.
Rustin explained to MLK that nonviolence is not a strategy employed because it’s expedient, it’s something a man lives by due to the absolute morality of its claim. Rustin also emphasized moral nonviolence without strategic vision is hollow. It’s only when the principles of unarmed direct action are fully implemented and turned into weapons of political persuasion that nonviolence reaches its maximum power.
By the morning, MLK was convinced to give up the guns for a higher purpose.
The film shows more headlines about the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, but the film doesn’t end here. Now, everyone knows about Malcolm X’s pilgrimage to Mecca, but after the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, MLK contemplated going to India like Rustin to get a deeper understanding of Gandhi’s philosophy.
The film ends with MLK’s 1959 pilgrimage to India.
The point of the story is to prove historian and philosopher Will Durant correct when he wrote in The Lessons of History, “The only real revolution is the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character [therefore] the only real revolutionaries are the philosophers and saints.”
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