I’m not sure where this was originally published; this copy indicates that it’s copyright 2001 by the FOR, but that was long after Glenn’s 1993 death.

by Glenn Smiley

From the beginning of humankind’s time on the earth, for about 250,000 years, conflicts between individuals and groups have been settled on the basis of force, or domination or submission. In time, the use of force became more or less institutionalized, and continues to this day in many places.

While in all societies throughout history, there must have been men and women who, by reason of superior intelligence were able to compensate for lack of strength by more innovative means, it has not been until the relatively recent past that an organized third way of addressing conflict has emerged. It is to this third way that we address ourselves, as we seek to develop a method of training in nonviolence. In a world of superpowers armed with unthinkable weapons, the search for alternative means of defense and changing the social structures has become an absolute necessity.

It is important to know at the outset that nonviolence has absolutely nothing to do with passive acceptance or acquiescence to evil done to a person or nation. I, for example, am a pacifist, but it makes me ill to have the word associated with passivity. The fact is that nonviolence can be considered as the art of seeking alternatives to violence in conflict, for conflict is inevitable in life. While history is replete with instances of creative action without violence, there are not many incidents of organized nonviolence on record.

The sort of militant nonviolence I am talking about seems to have more or less begun with Mohandas K. Gandhi, now called the Mahatma (Great Soul), who became the father of Indian independence. The west was interested in the man at times, but cared little for his queer ideas, and Winston Churchill spoke of him scornfully as a “half-naked fakir.”

From the preface to an article written by Glenn

That genial apostle of nonviolence, Glenn Smiley, was a staff member of FOR for twenty-five years. During World War II he went to prison for refusing to serve in the armed services. He is best remembered for his work with Martin Luther King, Jr., beginning with the Montgomery bus boycott. In his late sixties, he had forty-four small strokes that affected his memory and speech. For fifteen years, he could not make a public address. Then one morning he woke up and was apparently perfectly normal. He immediately embroiled himself in work with FOR and with gangs. Two years before his death in 1993 at the age of 83, he gave 103 major lectures. (Fellowship 56 [October-November 1990], 18-19]

From The King Papers Project My comments are italicized.

28 Feb

Fellowship of Reconciliation field secretary Glenn E. Smiley arrives in Montgomery and interviews King. This is shortly after Dr. King was indicted on bus boycott charges.

12 May

King, King, Sr., and (Ralph) Abernathy attend a meeting of eighteen leaders of the Southern desegregation movement organized by Glenn E. Smiley and the FOR at Morehouse College in Atlanta. This group would evolve into the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

17-18 July

King, King, Sr., Abernathy, Steele, and Smiley attend a two-day FOR-sponsored workshop stressing nonviolent social protest tactics at Tuskegee Institute.

21 Dec

Montgomery City Lines resumes full service on all routes. King, Ralph D. Abernathy, E. D. Nixon, and Glenn E. Smiley are among the first passengers to seat themselves in the section formerly reserved for whites.

[Update: Glenn paints a much more nuanced and less reductionist explanation in his article How Nonviolence Works ]

Here’s a succinct but insightful article about King’s assumption of leadership in Montgomery’s civil rights struggle written by Stanford’s King Papers Project. (This article is the source for all the quotes below.)

Culling from the article key elements of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and remembering lessons from Glenn Smiley I’ve extracted eight elements of successful active nonviolence campaigns.

1. Resist a single, concrete manifestation of injustice. This was one of Glenn’s favorite strategic points to make. You can’t meaningfully resist racism. You can meaningfully resist educational or bus segregation.
2. Have a population in motion already. Prior to Rosa Parks’s arrest was Claudette Colvin’s; prior to Montgomery’s bus boycott was Baton Rouge’s. These particular events were the tip of the iceberg of an entire disaffected population.
   

   King’s Gandhian nonviolence … was a spontaneous response to masses already in motion rather than a carefully developed ideology capable of stimulating mass struggle. Montgomery activist Mrs. A. W. West expressed a similar point in less polemical terms: “The leaders could do nothing by themselves. They are only the voice of thousands of colored workers.”

   
   
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The Stanford King Papers Project has written an insightful distillation of how 1956 was the year that King came to grips with Ghandian nonviolence, not just as a strategy, but also as a moral imperative:

“Living through the actual experience of the protest, nonviolence became more than a method to which I gave intellectual assent; it became a commitment to a way of life,” he would later explain. “Many of the things that I had not cleared up intellectually concerning nonviolence were now solved in the sphere of practical action.”

The article discusses the role of both Glenn Smiley and Bayard Rustin in King’s transistion from intellectual assent to committment to nonviolence.

On my about me page, I mentioned that I had worked briefly with Glenn Smiley, formerly a key figure in the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and one of Dr. King’s tutors in nonviolence. When I worked with him in the summer of 1992, he was the founder and head of The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolence in Los Angeles.

Glenn was a great story-teller; here are a couple of the highlights from stories I remember him telling. He started participating in non-violence in the 1940’s with FOR by conducting sit-in’s at segregated department store dining rooms in L.A.; in the mid-1950’s he was sent to Montgomery by the FOR at Dr. King’s invitation; he helped organize and train participants for the Montgomery Bus Boycott; and he mourned from jail when Dr. King made his “I Have a Dream” speech.

He had a playful, jovial, mischevious sense of humor. He used to love to say that he had been a Playboy centerfold—he and Dr. King sat together on the first integrated bus, and their photo was featured in newspapers across the country and, evidently, in Playboy. I’ve scoured the net for this photo, but oddly I can’t find it. If anyone knows where this is, please let me know .