“ See also: Food riot
E.P. Thompson’s classic article “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18th Century” emphasised women’s role in many food riots. He argued that the rioters insisted on the idea of a moral community that was obliged to feed them and their families. As one contemporary commentator wrote: ‘Women are more disposed to be mutinous … [and] in all public tumults they are foremost in violence and ferocity.’ [4]”
And - speaking of intersectionality - the Compton Cafeteria Riot preceded Stonewall by three years and was by women with trans backgrounds.
Riot as the language of the unheard? Not quite. Two years after Rev King said that came the police riot at the Chicago 1968 DNC convention. The police certainly made themselves heard. Lynch mobs and klan rampages are riots too, right? Or are only outbursts by the repressed ‘riots’? When whites riot, it’s only a civic disturbance, right? Move along; nothing to see here.
It takes a lot for LeVar to lose his cool.
I think we’re all probably aware of the context that King was speaking of (probably the Watts uprising) and he was being asked specifically about that, as it was from an interview with him. He was putting into the larger context of power dynamics that long existed in this country (and continue to exist today).
Do you think honestly that King was unaware of the history white violence against the black community when he made that statement or that he meant that every single riot is always the same? 
My point (I hope) is that in US vocabulary, white insurrectionists don’t riot, lynch mobs don’t riot, cops don’t riot, the state doesn’t riot – only the repressed riot. The powerless have always been acceptable targets of violence; their protests are always riots to be put down. That’s the national DNA.
What insightful observation.
I have seen some shit in my life but I have never seen anything like this
Especially by quoting things they didn’t actually say.
You haven’t been alive long enough. You’ll see it again.
“Minneapolis, corporate home of Target, a $77 billion company, is still deeply segregated, and the poverty rate for Black people in the city is more than three times that of white residents. The downtown Minneapolis Target store was built with a public subsidy of $60 million. Nearby Brooklyn Park gave $22 million in tax breaks for Target’s headquarters. In 2015, the company laid off 1,700 people. Who exactly is looting whom?”
-Camille Squires, MoJo
Yes. I’m aware. AGAIN, nothing you said invalidates King’s statement. He’s correct that a riot is often the language of the unheard.
Martin Luther King is not justifying rioting.
He’s just explaining why it happens. Stopping the riot isn’t tge fix, dealing with the underlying issues is the only way to fix things.
WWII pacifist jailbirds sat out WWII, extending Ghandi’s techniques, and then extended that to pacifism in general, and tge civil rights movement. Some of them campaigned to desegregate the prison dining halls once they landed in prison.
The were white like Jim Peck and David Dellinger, and they were black like Bayard Rustin and James L. Farmer. Non-violence wasn’t a tactic, it was a belief system.
Bernice King keeps mentioning that it was her mother Coretta who swayed MLK to speak against the Viet Nam war.I’ve read somw hints that Coretta was interestedin pqcifism when she was in university, but I’ve yet to see anything concrete.
John Lewis, beaten on the Freedom Ride and beaten on the march to Selma still believes in nonviolence. Unlike many, he didn’t change his mind, he still believes in civil disobedience.
Most people don’t know the rage of being picked on, of being left out.
White people often want that rage, except it’s abstract. Their need to protest, their need to riot is about idea rather than a reaction to something done to them. They think rioting shows how important something is, but overlook that for the oppressed it’s a very different thing, and nonviolence is a force because the cause speaks for itself. Ghandi’s “truth force”. Nonviolence isn’t the lack of violence, it’s an active force.
150 years ago Manitoba came into confederation, but only after resistance. That resistance wasn’t quite nonviolent, but my great, great grandfather is said to have stopped a beating, and my great, great grandmother on the other branch went to Louis Riel to urge him for no more deaths. So Thomas Scott was the third casualt, my great grandmother’s brother the first. I interpret this as my great, great grandmother aware of how easily it coukd have slipped into a war.
Most people don’t know much about protest, most don’t know much about nonviolence.
