The March from Selma to Montgomery and the Nonviolent Movement in Analysis

Abstract

From January 18, 1965 to March 25, 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. and his civil rights lieutenants conducted a series of marches in Selma, Alabama, which ultimately won African Americans the right to vote. These marches would become the tipping point in the civil rights movement, leading to the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Selma marches provide a glimpse into the American psyche and the development of consciousness in culture through the implementation of nonviolence. Utilizing the Eightfold Path of Nonviolence, which combines Mahatma Gandhi’s two foundational principles of satyagraha and ahimsa, along with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s six tenets of nonviolence, the civil rights movement briefly closed the psychic split of racism in America. The archetypal experience of nonviolence confronts, mediates, and breaks apart violence, providing a path for peace, or psychological wholeness, in the individual or culture. Following three nodal points in the marches, the reader will begin to understand how the tenets of nonviolence are utilized in analysis as a powerful paradigm of the analytic stance.