According to Arundhati Roy, "There is no discussion taking place in the world today that is more crucial than the debate about strategies of resistance."

There is no greater strategist in American history, no teacher more relevant to our post-election malaise, than Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King was more than a moral visionary; he was a creative tactician. All of us-especially leaders of the peace movement-have much to learn from King's teachings on strategy and tactics.

In the late 1950s a major change took place within the civil rights community, a shift from representative government to direct action democracy. When the young Black movement broke away from the confines of electoral politics, society began to change.

Before 1960, the …show more content…
King, as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, developed a long-term strategy for desegregation. In his autobiography (replete with insights on tactics and strategy) King describes his debt to Gandhi and his strategic revelations about applied ethics and social movements. He raises the questions that all movements address: Do strikes and boycotts work? Are they fair? Are the hardships worth the gains? Where is the oppressor vulnerable? And where does the potential power of the oppressed reside? King gives an initial answer: "We would use this boycott method to give birth to justice and freedom....I came to see that what we were really doing was withdrawing our cooperation from an evil system, rather than merely withdrawing our support from the bus company. The bus company, being an external expression of the system, would naturally suffer, but the basic aim was to refuse to cooperate with evil. We were simply saying to the white community: We can no longer lend our cooperation to an evil system. >From that moment on I conceived of our movement as an act of massive non-cooperation."

King always recognized the significance of spontaneous actions, but he also realized that, without organization and long-range strategy, spontaneous energy easily dissipates. Planned, well-organized boycotts played a major role throughout all phases of the civil rights …show more content…
It disturbs the status quo. It intrudes on the complacency of the majority... It creates tension and trouble and thus forces the holders of power to move faster....What the civil rights movement has revealed is that it is necessary for people concerned with liberty, even if they live in an approximately democratic state, to create a political power which resides outside the regular political establishment. While outside, removed from the enticements of office and close to those sources of human distress which created it, this power can use a thousand different devices to persuade and pressure the official structure into recognizing its