Nonviolence

Nonviolence, a potent force in the 1960s fight for civil rights, has become an "embarrassment, an instrument of the weak," lamented Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch. Seated in a wing chair Sunday afternoon in the chancel of First and Franklin Presbyterian Church in Mount Vernon, the author described how the strategy has fallen from favor. The Atlanta-born Branch, the son of a dry cleaner, wrote three books on the life of civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He was later invited by President Bill Clinton for a series of lengthy interviews at the White House for a work on Clinton's presidency.

Despite a barrage of public comments, many negative, Maryland State Board of Education members said Tuesday that they will push forward with plans to reduce the use of long-term suspensions and expulsions in student discipline. "Everybody gets that kids need to be in school," said board President James H. DeGraffenreidt Jr. "The question is how do we do that?" The board received more than 200 written comments after asking for public input when it released a report in late February, detailing proposed changes that would reduce suspensions for nonviolent offenses.

Atherton, Calif. -- JANUARY brings the anniversary of the violent end of Mohandas K. Gandhi, called the Mahatma, at the hands of one who today would be characterized as a crazed Hindu fundamentalist.As 1995 begins, world peace becomes ever more illusionary with ethnic and territorial clashes overtaking the global community. One cannot but feel nostalgia for the man who reinvented nonviolence to help the cause of beleaguered people everywhere.To many Indians, Gandhi symbolized the second coming of the Messiah in his austerity, love of fellow humans and his mission of peace.

Nonviolence, a potent force in the 1960s fight for civil rights, has become an "embarrassment, an instrument of the weak," lamented Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch. Seated in a wing chair Sunday afternoon in the chancel of First and Franklin Presbyterian Church in Mount Vernon, the author described how the strategy has fallen from favor. The Atlanta-born Branch, the son of a dry cleaner, wrote three books on the life of civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He was later invited by President Bill Clinton for a series of lengthy interviews at the White House for a work on Clinton's presidency.

Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, by John D'Emilio (Free Press, 568 pages, $35), is one of the saddest stories you will ever read. Rustin was a charismatic leader, a lifelong pacifist, an imprisoned conscientious objector during World War II, a leading American teacher of Gandhian nonviolence, perhaps the prime mentor to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and the major planner and organizer of black America's triumphal March on Washington in...

WALTHAM, Mass. -- He talked about the environment, the Internet, Judaism, and Christianity, whatever the thousands who came to Brandeis University to see him Friday and yesterday wanted to talk about. But in the end, the Dalai Lama talked about the things he and his admirers are interested in most: Tibet, nonviolence, the power of peace.Students, refugees, senior scholars -- the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize recipient won them all with his combination of personal humility and cosmic consciousness.

With the statue of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. firmly in place at Anne Arundel Community College, the committee that pushed for the memorial is turning to another effort, an education program based on King's philosophy of nonviolence. Officials at Sojourner-Douglass College recently agreed to house the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Institute on Non-Violent Studies and hired an assistant to research how to make it happen. "We are excited to do it. It fits right into our mission," said Charlestine Fairley, site director for the Edgewater campus.

YORK, Pa. - Thirty-two years to the day that a white rookie police officer was fatally shot as he patrolled riot-torn streets, about 350 children and adults marched through town to remember a past marred by racial upheaval and to promote a harmonious future. Chanting in support of diversity and equality, the throng, mostly children, wound from a park that was the site of a white power rally July 20, 1969, to the railroad tracks where a black preacher's daughter was gunned down a day later by a gang of white youths.

Bernard LaFayette has waged war against injustice most of his 61 years, but his battles always have been of a nonviolent nature. The Freedom Fighter who marched beside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and counted him among his closest friends will lecture today at Western Maryland College in Westminster on principles of nonviolence, weaving in stories from his more than 50 years in the civil rights movement. "I will share the campaigns and focus on significant strides as we move toward a nonviolent society," said LaFayette, an ordained Baptist minister and director of the Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies at University of Rhode Island.

Common Ground on the Hill opens for its 10th season today at McDaniel College in Westminster with artists plugging into the roots of American music, potters passing on tribal arts and peace activists preaching nonviolence. The traditional music and arts organization explores diversity and builds on commonality with a cornucopia of daily courses and evenings filled with concerts. The two-week event pulls participants into fiddling, song writing, storytelling, gospel choir, African dance, Native American philosophy, Irish folklore, Icelandic poetry and Civil War history.

In response to the op-ed piece by Kimberly Katz ("Nonviolent protest nothing new in the Middle East," March 7th) I would point out that there is nothing new in her misrepresentations of the Middle East situation. If she were to check original sources and data rather than unquestioningly repeating the unverifiable "Palestinian as victim" ideology, she would learn among other things that: • "Israel's brutal occupation" is actually Israel administering territories captured in an Arab war of aggression against Israel.

The Maryland Institute College of Art recently hosted the Baltimore premiere of an award-winning documentary, "Budrus. " The screening was timely: Audience members could see connections to broader events now taking place across North Africa and the Middle East. One thing they learned is that nonviolent resistance to oppression, of the kind now sweeping through the region, is not a new phenomenon in the Middle East. Budrus is a Palestinian village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank that has demonstrated stirring examples of nonviolent resistance.

An elected state's attorney's job is a tough one. The professional prosecutor's mission to "do justice" requires convicting the guilty and seeking appropriate punishment, while protecting the innocent and respecting the rights of the accused. Safeguarding an individual's liberty before trial also is essential, except where the defendant poses a clear danger or flight risk. Doing justice has dual responsibilities. In this year's heated election for state's attorney of Baltimore City, media reporting on killings, shootings, rapes and robberies has pressed a frightened public to focus almost exclusively on which candidate will succeed at prosecuting the violent criminal.

A Johns Hopkins School of Nursing graduate, who was one of 10 medical aid workers ambushed and killed in Afghanistan last week, was recalled Monday as an ardent believer in nonviolence who liked the challenge of an overseas assignment. Glen D. Lapp, 40, who graduated from Hopkins in 1995, had volunteered for a posting through the Mennonite Central Committee, based in Akron, Pa. "He was the kind of person who, when something needed to be done, he would roll up his sleeves and do it," said Ron Flaming, the committee's director.

State officials describe Paula Jordan as a nonviolent inmate at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women in Jessup. That made her a perfect candidate to work at a Howard County horse farm as part of a rehabilitation program. Here is what the 41-year-old from Baltimore did to get locked up: In January 2005, she chased after her boyfriend swinging a butcher's knife, stabbed him in the leg, mopped up the blood, cleaned the blade and put it back into its holder before police arrived.

The line was a block long outside the Metropolitan Baptist Church on McCulloh Street on Wednesday when the city kicked off its Safe Surrender program, which allows city residents wanted for minor, nonviolent crimes to turn themselves in and get their records cleared. Saturday is the last day for people to seek amnesty under the program. The city wants to clear some of the 40,000 outstanding arrest warrants on its rolls by encouraging nonviolent fugitives to resolve the charges against them and avoid spending hours in jail at the Central Booking and Intake Center.

A few hours after the streets of Baghdad filled with cheering Iraqis in a scene that, for some, confirmed the righteousness of putting American military might to use, Mahlia Joyce recited a poem taken from a Web site. "War - does it have to start again?" she read. "Why can't we stop all of this?" To Joyce, a student at Westminster's McDaniel College, reading poetry at a small gathering in the school's student center seemed an apt response to Wednesday's fall of Baghdad. Having joined with three generations of peace activists to protest the war through teach-ins and candlelight vigils, the apparent success of fighting in Iraq only seemed to hasten the need to rally against additional bloodshed.

On the last day of a program for people wanted for nonviolent crimes to turn themselves in, more than 80 people were already in line at 9 a.m. The program, which kicked off Wednesday at the New Metropolitan Baptist Church on McCulloh Street in West Baltimore, provided a chance for 985 people with outstanding warrants to turn themselves in and aimed to reduce some of the 40,000 outstanding warrants in the city. "It's been an overwhelming success," said Deputy U.S. Marshal David Lutz, spokesman for the agency.

On May 29, two days before Israel's botched raid of six "humanitarian" ships bound for Gaza, Robert Naiman, the policy director of something called "Just Foreign Policy," wrote an item on the Huffington Post headlined "Gaza Freedom Flotilla Shows Awesome Power of Nonviolent Resistance." Mr. Naiman waxed lyrical about how the moral authority of nonviolence had compelled Turkish-controlled Cyprus to help the flotilla, while Greek-controlled Cyprus had allegedly caved to Israeli pressure in refusing to help the heirs of Gandhi (it couldn't have been because the Turks were up to no good)