An idea whose time has come?

Abstract

‘An Idea Whose Time Has Come’, so intoned Gandhi's most influential translator, Richard Gregg. It was April 1962, and he referenced the power of non-violence. Gregg's memory extended to the false prophecies of the 1930s and the timid experiments of mid-century. But by now he could also survey nearly a decade of unprecedented activism. From the mid-1950s, movements for civil rights and against nuclear arms perfected satyagraha as a form of mass politics for the West. The landmarks loom large, still half a century later. In Britain, the campaign to ‘ban the bomb’ encompassed invasions of rocket sites from 1958 and ‘sit-down’ demonstrations in central London from 1961. At Easter time, a year before Gregg's commentary, 150,000 people joined the fifty-two-mile march from the Aldermaston reactor to the national capital; later that September, 1,300 were arrested in a knowingly illegal demonstration underneath Horatio Nelson's stony gaze, in Trafalgar Square. Alex Comfort's tuneful incitement, ‘Sit, Brothers, Sit’, captured the developing sensibility with perceptive whimsy: Then sit, brothers, sit, And let every brother sit, The bombs and bases to picket: While you've still got an arse you can say they shall not pass. Sit down and the cops can't kick it. In the United States, the movement for African-American civil rights mobilised earlier and ranged even further. A boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama began in December 1955, when 50,000 residents united under the leadership of a young pastor, a certain Dr Martin Luther King Jr. From February 1960, a ‘sit-in’ movement spread from Greensboro, North Carolina.