The Soul Force

willing to take that punishment. In fact, they welcomed it as the price of change, even when it meant losing their own lives. And indeed, as the cartoon suggested, the principles of love and nonviolence that they preached did not die with them. What Gandhi called the Sole Force continues to live on in the hearts of millions, challenging injustice all over the globe. All in we go to find we have to we got to all up the good, save that we've got to all it up to wed.

I'm Sean Braswell, and this is the thread. This season, we've traced the origins of a powerful idea, one that has cross continence and transcended religion, class, and other barriers to change the lives of millions of people during the past two hundred years. That idea is non violent resistance, the counterintuitive notion that the best way to reform your enemies is to love them. The best way to counter

their blows is to absorb them. Here's a quick recap of where our journey through the history of non violence has taken us this season. We began with the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. The American most famous for you a nonviolent protest. Well several weeks now were the Migro citizens of Montgomery have been involved in a non violent protest against the injustices, which we have experienced on the

busses a number of years. King, however, was standing on the shoulders of giants, starting with his own mentor Buyer Rusting, a tireless activist who organized the March on Washington and transformed the civil rights movement into a powerful force from behind the scenes. The man who believes in non violence is prepared to be hard to be crushed, but he

will never crush others. Buyer Rustin's own arsenal of non violent tactics, in turn, were borrowed from a remarkable Indian I regard my tiv as a soldier Bill as a young lawyer. Mahandas Gandhi learned about the potential of non violence from another larger than life figure. After he accepted passive resistance, he wanted to learn a little bit more about it from Tolstoy, and so he started a correspondence with him, which we went on for several years. Meccan

for Leo Tolstoy. In his youth, the Russian wrote two of the most famous novels ever written. Then he underwent an awaken one that led him to a means for translating spiritual love into a force for political resistance. He didn't want to really have to deal at all with

coercion at any level. And this is really the sort of heart of the idea of non violence and what so inspired him about William Lloyd Garrison too, the American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, the man who influenced Tolstoy, was really the first thinker to realize the potential of mass nonviolent resistance. But the launch of Garrison's big idea and his influential anti slavery newspaper depended up on another made.

In this final episode of the Thread, we'll learn about that man and the single act of love for an enemy that kick starts our entire thread. We'll also tie together some of the themes that unite our history of non violence and find out about some of the surprising traits shared by the historical figures we've covered this season. Finally, we'll look at the history of non violence in the fifty years since Dr King's death and how this revolutionary

idea continues to change the world. In the last episode, we learned about how William Lloyd Garrison founded a newspaper called The Liberator. In one historian Bruce Laurie, Garrison's Liberator is the most important anti slavery newspaper in the United States, some would argue, in the world. In the pages of The Liberator, the white abolitionist argued not only for the end of slavery in the United States, but also for improving the treatment of all African Americans. To get his

messag joubt, Garrison depended heavily upon local black communities. At least three quarters of readership is black, very unusual for the time because he was one of the few whites

who openly espoused the quality. Garrison also cultivated relationships with prominent black intellectuals, business leaders, and activists in northern cities, and what would become the most important anti slavery publication in American history would never have made it off the presses if not for one prominent black businessman, in particular, a salemaker from Philadelphia named James Forton. The twenty five year old Garrison reached out to Forton for help in

December eighteen thirty. The mock up of the very first issue of The Liberator was ready to print, but Garrison had a big problem. He could not afford the paper required for its first print run, and so had to pay for it on credit. The day the bill came due, Garrison still did not have the money, but that very same day Garrison and received a letter from the wealthy businessman. This is Forton biographer Julie Wench. He sends Garrison a draft for fifty four dollars, which is a substantial amount

of money for Garrison. It was a life raft at a critical moment in his new venture. He often credited Forton with making the Liberator possible. But fort in support of Garrison, did not stop with that first issue. And he is just always there for Garrison, and that is so important. Garrison doesn't have that many friends, black or white. He is from a fairly poor background himself, so he does not have inherited money and inherited connections to rely on.

And that is what Forton really comes out for for him and assists him with. And not just once, but repeatedly. Garrison and Forton became close friends, and fort never refused his friends please for help. So this is somebody who gives everything he has, uh just being generous in terms of money, but giving energy and moral support and friendship two people black or white, whose support what he thinks

will make America a better place. Forton had been a leading figure in Philadelphia's black community and had been fighting to end slavery before Garrison was even born. He had overcome incredible odds as a black man to make his way in the business world in a mass of fortune. But despite the obstacles he had encountered in his life and his hatred of slavery, Forton was a devoted patriot who believed in the ideals of the young nation he had grown up in. When the American Colonies went to

war with the British, Forton enlisted to fight. He was just fourteen years old, and it was during the Revolutionary War that the man who made William Lloyd Garrison's career possible nearly became a slave himsel elf. Indeed, Forton's fate and that of our entire thread, turn on a single game of marbles. When the Revolutionary War began, the young James Forton joined the war effort as a sailor in the ship he was aboard was pursued and attacked by

a British vessel just off the coast of Virginia Julie Winch. Again, the British vessel is bigger, more heavily manned, and the American vessel is forced to surrender, at which point Foughton and all the other people on board become prisoners of the British. Fort knew fullwell what happened to most black men who were taken as prisoners of war by the British. They were shipped off to the West Indies and doomed

to a life of slavery. Luckily, for the teenage Forton, Captain John Baisley, the man in charge of the British ship that had taken him prisoner, had his own problem, his twelve year old son, Henry. And apparently the twelve year old is board and his father is trying to find somebody just to keep an eye on him. He cannot have any of his own sailors do this. He can't take men out of a gun crew and have them babysaid as kid. So he's going to use one

of the prisoners to do it. And he's obviously looking for somebody close to his son's age, and he lights upon Forton, and so Captain Baisley enlists Forton to keep his son company and keep him out of trouble on the warship. The two youngsters hit it off and fought in apparently, cements his friendship with the young British boy through a game of marbles on the gun deck. That game of marble's captures the boy's imagination, and the captain is impressed by the good influence that Forton is having

on his son. The friendship between Forton and young Henry aboard the ship deepens in the coming weeks, and when it comes time for the British prisoners to be offloaded, and the black ones among them to be shipped off to the West Indies. Captain Baisley intervenes to ensure that Forton is not among them. He never forgot Captain Baisley's kindness.

The story that James Funton tells friends and relatives is that he really believed that had the baseless not taken a liking to him and this friendship that's really cemented by this play of a game of marbles, uh that he could have been sold into slavery in the West End. Is So, this is something he really sees as one of those events in his life that's absolutely pivotal, and it's pivotal to our threat as well. Think about it.

In a game of marbles between two boys takes place aboard the deck of a British warship in the Atlantic Ocean, a friendship ensues. As a result, a young black man, James Forton, is given in his freedom through a single act of love and understanding from a sworn enemy, sparking a series of events that will culminate two centuries later with another young black man, Martin Luther King Jr. Becoming the embodiment of the idea that loving one's enemy is

the best way to achieve one's freedom. In that way, our story comes full circle from the American colonies of the eighteenth century to the civil rights movement of the twenty Indeed, the non violent idea that James Forton helped unleash did more than just change the way that ordinary citizens protest injustice. It helped to redeem the promise of an entire nation. Up next, we find out about some of the surprising traits shared by the historical figures we've

covered this season. From its beginning, the history of America has been one that is steeped in blood and violence, and in the end, the question of slavery in the US could only be resolved to the massive loss of human life. Martin Luther King, by Ed Rustin, and the leaders of the U s Civil rights movement chose to pursue widespread social change in a different way, one that required the difficult decision to jettison violence and choose love

over hate. This is King in nineteen sixty six talking about the message that non violence sends to one's opponents. We will match your capacity to inflict suffering our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we will still love you. King had a name for the redemptive potential of non violence, the power of love to redeem not only the oppressed, but the oppressor as well.

He called it quote a double victory. And one day we will win our freedom, but we will not only win freedom for ourselves. We will show appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory. And that is what made the nonviolent protests of the civil rights movement such a remarkable force for change in

American history. King Ruston and others succeeded where previous activists had failed, and what they accomplished through non violence, imperfect and incomplete as it was, was in many ways more impressive than any American war victory because it was a double victory. Indeed, those who fought and struggled peacefully to win both their rights and the hearts of their oppressors

deserve a special place in history. King and the famous letter he wrote while imprisoned in the Birmingham jail claimed, quote, one day the South will recognize its real heroes. He did not mean its Confederate war heroes. King meant the grand mothers who walked miles to work rather than to ride on a segregated bus, The students who refused to give up their seats at a lunch counter, the demonstrators

who faced down the hoses and the police dogs. What King and Rustin and before them William Lloyd Garrison accomplished through non violence was not just the redemption of their immediate opponents, but the redemption of the very idea of a nation dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal. So where does such a capacity for helping others, including one sworn enemies come from? How did Gandhi, King, Rustin and other leaders managed to adhere to their message of

love even when confronted with overwhelming violence and hatred. Well, it starts with a trait that we don't usually praise, one we even stigmatize, maladjustment. King often talked about this. Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word in psychology is a word maladjusted. This is King at U c l a in n. Certainly we all want to live the well adjusted life.

In order to avoid new rotican schizophrenic personality. And I must honestly say to you this afternoon, my friends, they're some things within our world, in our nations, of which I'm proud to be maladjusted, but I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination. King would go on to add the quote human salvation lies in the hands

of the creatively maladjusted. He was right, and even more than he ever knew, Martin Luther King Jr. Believed that being maladjusted to the world and to the status quo was essential to the fight against injustice. But it was also a big part of what made King the leader he was. This is the Seer Gami. He's a psychiatrist at Tufts University and Harvard Medical School who studies depression and bipolar illness, and who has written about leaders who

have suffered from manic depressive illnesses. So I think King's idea was that we need to be maladjusted enough with the world to want to change it for the better. My view is that this is not a purely intellectual concept or even a purely spiritual one, although it certainly has aspects of both. I think it's also emotional and psychological in that King himself, being depressed as well as having manic symptoms as part of his personality, was maladjusted to the world as it was as a human being.

That's right, Martin Luther King Jr. Almost certainly suffered from manic depression. He was clinically maladjusted. King experienced depression during his adolescence, which manifested itself in two suicide attempts, but it went beyond that. He had periods of depression throughout his life where he would, for a few days to a few weeks, often need to go into a medical hospital.

He was hospitalized for exhaustion was the diagnosis that was frequently given, but he never had any physical medical cause for his hospitalizations. King was often in despair. Near the end of his life. He lamented that his dream had turned into a nightmare and he was likely in the grips of a deepening depression when he was murdered fifty years ago in Memphis, Tennessee. King was not alone in

his battles with depression. Mahandas Gandhi also suffered several bouts of severe depression in his life, starting in adolescence when he was around twelve years old. He decided to kill himself and went with a friend to a temple with poison and was on the verge of taking it until he backed out at the last second, and as with King, it did not end there. And then later in his life he would have periods of time where for a week or a couple of weeks, he would just take

to his bed. He would feel very sick physically, and doctors would tell him that there was nothing medically wrong with him, but he would describe how he would go to bed at night and be convinced that he was going to die. Another champion of non violence who could identify with such experiences was Leo Tolstoy. This is Tolstoy

biographer J. Parini Tolstoy was bordering on bipolar. He he seemed to have, you know, periods of extreme exhilaration with periods of very dark depression, and he often talked to his friends about wanting to commit suicide. Tolstoy's own psychological condition, however, is also arguably what made him such a good novelist, and like Gandhi and King, it gave him a profound sense of empathy. Why is empathy so important? Because it

is the secret ingredient of non violence. Gandhi once said three four of the miseries and misunderstandings in the world will disappear if we step into the shoes of our adversaries and understand their standpoint. Stepping into the shoes of your adversary is not an easy thing to do, but it wasn't as hard for individuals like King Gandhi and Tolstoy. And we are starting to understand why that's the King. So there's research that shows that people who have depression

are more empathic than people who don't have depression. The year got me again. We know that. What we don't really know the how and why we know that people are depressed or more empathic. Um. Now, if I were to speculate about it, I've talked to patients of mind who have had depression, and they describe that when they're depressed and in amount a great deal of psychological pain, and they can understand the pain of others more they

feel the pain of others. One patient of mine once said that when she was really depressed, she could barely walk outside because she could feel every blade of grass crumble under her feet. And um. Most of us who are not depressed most of the time, just ignore those things. In other words, dealing with depression is painful, but in some ways, depressed people see reality more clearly than others do, and that experience deepens their natural empathy for those around them.

I think of non violence as radical empathy. And Um, you can turn the other cheek and not strike back because you care about the other person who's hitting you. Uh, that's a very hard thing for a human being to achieve. Gandhi, King and Tolstoy not only shared a philosophy of non violence,

but also a very similar psychological profile. My thinking is that that these aren't coincidences, that the reason they took this political philosophy of nonviolent change has to do in part with the fact that they had experienced depression repeatedly in their lives. Enhanced empathy, though, is only part of the equation. J Parini again, people who live on the edges like Gandhi, Um, Martin Luther King. These are people who are visionaries and who can see both the very

bright sun and the very dark sky. And I think that they they swing between yes and no all the time. And I think Tolstoy was always hovering between the yes and the no. And if the no side of things led such visionaries into a greater sense of empathy, the yes side, the manic side drove them to excel in an entirely different way. Many people don't understand what mania means, or the term to them is um pejorative. All it really means is that you talk fast, you move fast,

you think fast, you have a lot of energy. Usually such persons are very productive. Take Martin Luther King. Usually Dr King was very high energy, both physically and sexually. He only needed about four hours of sleep at night or buyer d resting, So generally he was a high energy person with a high sexual drive, who spent a lot of money, who was very flamboyant and very talkative, and very creative. In fact, steadies show that having manic symptoms as part of your personality can help make you

both more creative and more resilient. You are less likely to experience major traumas or stress even in the face of incredible adversity, and that is precisely what you need in a nonviolent leader. One thing you can say about all of them is that they had a lot of courage, and you can especially say that about Dr King perhaps the most, but also Gandhi certainly and Rusten. They had

a lot of personal courage. They were not scared by people easily um or if they were scared, they didn't let that fear stop them from being true to their principles. And they were able not only to channel their own energy and aggressive impulses into the courage needed to resist violence, they were able to show their followers how to do the same. But their examples teach us about much more

than just how to battle injustice. So Gandhi and King and Rusten are important because they were trying to to change our mindset on race and and sexuality. But at the same time, if we understand them well, we have to change our mindset around psychiatric illness. And I think that's an important, important aspect of really knowing who they were. The legacy of non violence continues to be felt today.

Up next, we look at some of the most powerful examples of non violent protests in the fifty years since Dr King's death, and here about new scientific research confirming just how effective non violence is as a means for accomplishing social change. The twentieth century was an extremely violent one, almost two million people died in war by the end

of it. But the century also witnessed the emergence of non violent protests on a whole new scale, and well beyond those we have covered in our particular Threat of History. This season, in the wake of Gandhi's Indian Independence movement and the Civil Rights Movement, peaceful demonstrations seemed to break out everywhere. This is Bayard Rustin talking about the impact of the Civil Rights movement. I think the movement contributed

this nation a sense of universal freedom. The fact that the people who were against the war in Vietnam saw us go into the street and win made it possible for them to have the courage to go into the street and win. Thousands of demonstrators opposed to the Vietnam war assembled in the nation's capital for a mass protest, convinced they could take to the streets and win. Millions of American women started a new movement during the nineteen

seventies to demand change. Across the world, non violent scored major victories. During the late nineteen eighties, non violent protesters in the former Soviet Union gathered in the streets to sing band patriotic songs and defiance of their occupiers. It became known as the Singing Revolution and it worked across Eastern Europe. Millions of people from the Baltic States to Hungary and Czechoslovakia also refused to cooperate in their own oppression.

This is Mark Kurlansky, author of non Violence, The History of a Dangerous Idea. The whole downfall of the Soviet Union was done without violence. You know, the Soviet Union was a powerful and violent force that was completely destabilized and overthrown without the use of violence. By non cooperation. In some places, non violent protests has become the new norm. Most of the political movements in the US since the

Civil Rights Movement have been essentially non violent movements. There has become a pretty deep tradition in this country of resisting non violently, and in an age of information and social media, those non violent protest movements continue to evolve. This year, after a school shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, a group of students banded together to push for gun control reforms. Then it's time for victims

to be the change that we need to see. The Parkland protest movement, which became known as the March for Our Lives drew on past American protest movements, but it also transcended them in new ways. I don't think it was a conscious choice that, you know, we're going to be non violent because it's effective. This is reporter Alex Dockerty,

the Washington correspondent for the Miami Herald. What I think makes the advocacy that the March for Our Lives students engaged in so unique was that it didn't come from a Martin Luther King or an older figure saying, look, you know, it would be a very powerful message to have the kids on our side and to have the kids conveying our argument. It was the kids themselves driving

that argument. Another recent example of new voices driving an argument through non violent resistance is the group of professional football players led by Colin Kaepernick, that began kneeling during the national anthem to draw attention to police brutality in America. It's the rare occasion when sports and politics collide at an NFL quarterback has has certainly ignited a firestorm. We're

talking about Colin Kaepernick. Kaepernick's protest has been called divisive and unpatriotic, and he has been criticized by everyone from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to President Donald Trump. Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, get that son of a drop the field right now out. He's fired. But one thing that nobody has done with respect to

Kaepernick is ignore him. The non violent protests that leaders like King and Rustin let in places like Birmingham, were, like Kaepernick's kneeling, designed to be divisive to get people's attention. Kaepernick is a troublemaker, and as we have learned this season, non violent troublemakers can accomplish a surprising amount. Why it turns out that non violent is a very effective tactic for achieving social change, and we are only now starting

to understand just how profound its impact can be. Love, the soul force, whatever you want to call organized nonviolent resistance, is not only a moral force, it is also a highly effective one. Gandhi realized this fact early on Mark Kurlansky. He said, we don't have to worry about people who don't believe it will work, because it's like gravity. It will work whether we believe in it or not, and recent research by two American political scientists appears to back

up Gandhi's intuition. Kit Miller, there's a substantial research study that was done by Erica Chenowit and her colleague Maria Stephen studying two hundred and six occurrences of of non violent when it was used to deal with issues of conflict between the years and two thousand six. The study found the campaigns of non violent resistance were more than

twice as effective as their violent counterparts. Non violent campaigns were more likely to usher in peaceful, democratic governments and to ensure that nations did not relapse into violence or civil war. Why do these campaigns work. The research suggests that non violent protests not only attract more people into

their ranks, but a more diverse set of people. The fact that protesters don't resort to violence also means that they are more likely to receive broad public support, not to mention sympathy from the soldiers or police officers whose job it is to put down the resistance. Non Violence, however, is no silver bullet when it comes to achieving freedom and reform. Mark Kurlanski, and you know doesn't always work. The Tibetans have been non violently resisting the Chinese for

decades and seemed not to be getting anywhere. And sometimes such movements don't even get off the ground. And Israeli general said to me, you know, you're just never going to convince anybody of the here because it's the Middle East. It's really too bad. I mean, the Palestinians could be so effective against the Israelis with non violence. It is not easy to love one's enemies. Anger is a powerful force, and overcoming it requires each of us to engage in

a personal transformation. That is something that are ruined. Gandhi learned from his grandfather when he came to stay with him as a teenager. If we want to put out that trial of physical violence, we have to cut off the fuel supply. And since the fuel supply comes from each one of us, we have to become the change we wish to see in the world, and change begins with individual acts of sacrifice and kindness, not mass social movements.

This is civil rights leader Timothy Jenkins think one of the things we need to remember is that small efforts can become big efforts if they're persistently followed. When dr king and by arresting and others UH were able to get things started. They were not a majority, they were not even a movement. They were just individuals who were committed. It's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, and they lit a candle and they were able to

overcome the darkness. And one of the big reasons that King and others were able to overcome that darkness and the power of the organized violence aligned against them was because of the fact that the candle they were using was lit by the flame of love. Less than a year after the successful Montgomery bus boycott, doctor King delivered a sermon at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery called Loving Your Enemies. He talked about how responding to

injustice with violence creates more problems than it solves. But according to King, there was another way. That is to all the nine math non violent resistance based on the principle of love. It seems to me that this is the only way. Its eyes look to the kitten. As we look out across the years and across the generation, let us develop and move right here. We must discover the power of love, the power of the empty power

of love. And when we discover that we will be able to make them this old world a new world. We will be able to make men better. Love is the only way we are solgers in. We had to find, We had to all God. We got to all up. The Thread is produced by Libby Coleman, Robert Coulos, Sofia Perpetua and me Sean braswell. Chris Hoff engineered our show. This episode features the Montgomery Gospel Choir with a song

called We Are Soldiers. To learn more about The Thread, visit ausi dot com, Slash the Thread all one word, and make sure to subscribe to The Thread on Apple podcasts, follow us on I Heart Radio or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Check us out at Aussie dot com or on Twitter and Facebook. If you love surprising, engaging stories from history, look no further than the flashback section of ausy dot com. That's o z y dot com. I'm a soldier, I've got my hands on the gospel.

One day, gett and a cat fought anymore, but Austin, we are so in the amy. We got to find out all we have to find. We've got to all up the blast. Stay bab got t to all eat up until he die.