LITMIR.BIZ

      Figure 1

      Source: Donatella della Porta and Bernard Gbikpi, “The Riots: A Dynamic View,” in Seferiades and Johnston, eds, Violent Protest, Contentious Politics, and the Neoliberal State (Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), 95.

So why haven’t police been understood as a core concern by older and more establishment respondents? This is a question for future research, but for the purpose of understanding the particular situation faced by contemporary social movements, one brief hypothesis will suffice: the centrality of policing, particularly in the neoliberal era of hypertrophied penality, is not taken up as a legitimate social concern because of its very centrality. Seeped in the ideology of the age, even policing’s strongest critics find it next to impossible to imagine life without policing—although the Ferguson and Black Lives Matter movements have begun to change this.52 The purpose of the vast networked apparatus of dissent management might well be understood as an elaborate means of talking around this difficulty. While I will return in the next chapter to the slippage of “nonviolence” from a means of conflict with power to an excuse to avoid it, the propensity of such “talking around” the issue at the center of contemporary conditions of repression suggests a tragic, self-defeating hope for risk-free social change—one often expressed in our time through appeals to nonviolence.

      From Masses to Publics

      Why Elizabeth Is Alive but Erin Is Dead

On the morning of September 4, 1957, taking the recent Brown vs. Board of Education at its word, Elizabeth Eckford and eight other black students attempted to attend classes at Little Rock Central High School, Arkansas, but were prevented from doing so by the National Guard, in coordination with a virulent mob of whites. After three-quarters of a century of the rule of white terrorism that undid the gains of Reconstruction, themselves won by force of armed freed slaves,53 Eckford and her colleagues’ dignity and courage could very well have been met with immediate and lethal response. Only two years before, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till had been murdered and horrifically mutilated in Money, Mississippi, for allegedly flirting with a white woman. After Till’s gruesome murder, Till’s mother had courageously insisted on circulating a photograph of his disfigured face to recently established Black newspapers and magazines around the country, and the image played a key role in galvanizing national support for the civil rights movement. Just as that photograph worked to bring the systemic violence of southern white-supremacist rule into the national arena, so the mass media coverage of the Little Rock Nine helped ensure Eckford’s survival in the midst of a venomous white mob and the quick success of the immediate aims of the integration campaign:

The drama…was played out before a national, even a world, audience. The affair at Little Rock was not an isolated event in a provincial backwater. News cameras and reporters captured every move of both Elizabeth and the segregationists. In the contest for this larger audience, although greatly outnumbered, Elizabeth won.… When Elizabeth, joined by eight other black students, reenrolled at Central later that month the reporters were again there. This time the crowd beat four reporters—a sign that racist whites understood the implications of the presence of the media—and officials withdrew the students for their own safety. Again, however, isolation was not possible. On the next day President Eisenhower federalized the National Guard and sent paratroopers to guarantee that the nine African-American youths could proceed with their education.54

Strategists of the civil rights movement were well aware of their dependency on mass media; their articulation of nonviolent tactics was an explicit response to the novel occasions presented by television and the still novel technologies of newsreel, radio, and print. Such tools opened unprecedented opportunities for a heavily disenfranchised minority population to turn the local balance of power. This dynamic corrects a frequent misconception among the critics of nonviolence (and many of its less-informed proponents as well): classic nonviolence never, in truth, sought to convert its opponents; rather, it played to the cameras of mass media by embarrassing its opponents before a wider audience—and very effectively so. As one civil rights movement participant said, “We were not simply addressing our immediate opponents. What we were doing was addressing the larger audience, the nation, the world, because the strategy in nonviolence is that you educate a large number of constituents and win them on your side. In fact, even though we as African Americans were the minority, no change could happen unless you have the sympathy of the majority, if not the active participation.”55

Classic nonviolence, in the hands of figures such as Gandhi and King, was anything but a naive faith in the innate goodness of the imperial British officers with their bludgeons or the Bull Connors with their dogs. However, just as past means of successful

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