Organizing for Nonviolent Direct Action

During the 1950s and 60s, the struggle for civil rights and freedom carried on in lunch counters, buses and streets throughout the South appeared chaotic at times, but behind the headline-making demonstrations, both planning and training held participants to a non-violent commitment. Charles Walker, a Quaker activist and trainer in nonviolence, was determined to win social justice and racial equality. Seeing the need for a guide to help people seeking to make changes in their communities, he wrote this, the first manual on organizing for nonviolent direct action for the American Civil Rights Movement. Drawing on his work at the Fellowship of Reconciliation in the 1940s and his studies of Gandhi’s successes in India, Walker wrote concretely about the challenges workers for social justice would face and the discipline necessary for success -- methods still applicable today. Charles Walker’s daughter, Brenda Walker Beadenkopf is republishing this manual after his death, as an important piece of his legacy. She hopes Organizing for Nonviolent Direct Action will be utilized as it was in the 1960s with constructive programs that exemplify “nonviolent attitudes in action.”