Power Of Nonviolence

In the speeches, “Facing the Challenge of a New Age,” “The Most Durable Power,” “The Power of Nonviolence,” and “A Look to the Future,” Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed the issues of nonviolence and faith. The first two were given in Montgomery in 1956. The latter two, were both given in 1957, however “The Power of Nonviolence” was given at UC Berkeley, while the latter was given to the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee institution for training social activist leaders. Through these speeches, King used faith, both political and religious, to persuade his audiences towards the use nonviolence in the Civil Rights Movement.

By encouraging people to stand by their Christian ideals, King used religious faith to promote the use of nonviolence

In King’s 1957 speeches “The Power of Nonviolence” and “A Look to the Future,” he gave air to an inevitability of the movement ending favorably through this political faith, a term encompassing a faith in the people and systems that truly are on the side of truth and justice. For example, in “A Look to the Future,” King described a precedence of the government enacting laws confirming what the public held to be true, such as the Dred Scott decision during the age of slavery and the Plessy v. Ferguson decision during the time of segregation. King believed, that with a majority of the public favorable to a new time of integration, a similar government confirmation would arise. He explained that this pattern was already starting to be confirmed through the Brown v. Board of Education decision, “which came to give legal and constitutional validity to the dominant thought patterns of this period.” After these three stages represented through the government decisions, Kind exclaimed that “we have moved through the wilderness of ‘separate, but equal,’ and now we stand on the border of the promised land of integration” . Through King’s explanation, the government seemed to slowly, but inevitably come to the side of integration. This inevitability is punctuated by King’s remark “that as we struggle for justice and freedom we have a cosmic companionship.” These ‘cosmic’ forces against segregation

Most notably, however, King used religious faith as a strategy in 1956 in his Montgomery speeches, while using political faith in his 1957 speeches that were farther North. It brings to mind questions of King’s plans to move North and what message he was hoping to bring as he did