The Harlem Ashram
1940-1947: Gandhian Satyagraha in the United States; Paul R. Dekar
Gandhi made satyagraha,
truth-force, a word he
coined to describe direct, active, nonviolent resistance to oppression
work effectively as both a spirituality for living and a strategy for
overcoming evil. How did an approach developed in South Africa and
India come to the United States? As a case study in the diffusion of
Gandhian satyagraha, the Harlem Ashram existed only briefly, but its
impact was great, notably in shaping the direction the civil rights
movement took. (i)
(Please note that the lower-case roman
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Active nonviolence has a long history in the
United States. One
discerns the impact of Gandhi, specifically, as early as April 1, 1915.
On that date, John Haynes Holmes, pastor of Community Church in New
York City mounted his pulpit, announced he was a pacifist prepared to
resist U. S. involvement in World War I, and submitted his resignation,
an offer his congregation declined. Holmes explained that Gandhi had
addressed three needs of his life: for a spirituality of pacifism; for
insight into the wounds inflicted by western imperialism not simply on
India, but on the west itself; and for a method to save the world from
self-destruction. In a later sermon, Holmes declared, “When I think of
Gandhi, I think of Jesus. He lives his life; he speaks his word; he
suffers, strives, and will some day nobly die, for his kingdom upon
earth.” (ii)
Another activist influenced by Gandhian satyagraha, Richard Bartlett
Gregg, onetime corporate lawyer in Boston, lived four years in Gandhi’s
ashram and distilled what he learned about building “a new and better
world” in The Power of Nonviolence, first published in 1934. The book
went through several editions. In a foreword to the 1959 paperback
edition, Martin Luther King Jr. reflected on his own journey to India,
Gandhi’s relevance in the south, and the importance of struggling to
achieve social, personal, and political freedom in a manner consistent
with human dignity.
King was not the first African American to
recognize the potential of
Gandhian satyagraha in the struggle for racial justice. Earlier,
several of King’s mentors–notably Howard Thurman, Benjamin Mays, Bayard
Rustin, and Mordecai W. Johnson--met Gandhi in
India and returned to the U. S. to disseminate their understandings of
Gandhian practice.
These activists wrestled with this question: was it feasible to launch
Gandhian mass action in the U. S. to challenge racism? Some thought so.
Others did not. To frame the debate, I highlight the thought of two
African Americans. In 1941 James Farmer graduated from Howard
University’s School of Religion. Farmer opposed war in general and
objected specifically to serving in the segregated armed forces. When
the U.S. entered World War II, he applied for conscientious objector
status but was granted a draft deferment because of his divinity
degree. Farmer began work as race relations secretary of the Fellowship
of Reconciliation (FOR). Founded in this country in 1915, FOR members
have consistently supported nonviolent alternatives to war and
violence. (iii) In a crucial memo to the
National Council, Farmer proposed a
“mobilization plan.” He argued that the “Blessed Community and the
Family of Christ are rent asunder by the evil practice of apartheid in
America, which will not end until the decent and religious people of
the land will it so.” He urged FOR to organize a nonviolent movement of
noncooperation to restrictive covenants, residential segregation, and
other forms of racism.iv This led to creation of the Congress of Racial
Equality (CORE).
In a 1943 article published in the New York
Amsterdam News, W. E. B. Du
Bois stressed the limits of adapting Gandhi’s practices in the U. S. An
architect of the civil rights movement in the U. S., Du Bois believed
that the spiritual aspects of Gandhi’s movement had been bred into the
very bones of Indians for more than three thousand years. He doubted
that large enough numbers of European Americans could accept the
disciplines of fasting, prayer, and self-sacrifice in order to generate
a mass movement. Nor did he believe African Americans could copy
Gandhian methods without thought and consideration. Du Bois contended
that cultural patterns in the east and the west differ so vastly that
what makes sense in one world may be nonsense in another. (v)
Responding to Du Bois’ article, Ralph T. Templin agreed that an
oppressed population was not willing to submit indefinitely to powers
and principalities of domination. (vi) A former
Methodist missionary to
India, Templin disagreed that Gandhi’s ideas were alien to U. S. soil.
He observed that Gandhi borrowed ideas from the abolitionists William
Lloyd Garrison and Henry David Thoreau.
With this background, we turn now to the
Harlem of the early 1940s.
Harlem pulsed with ferment, from Father Divine’s Peace Movement to
fakirs and charlatans (as journalist Roy Ottley called them): High John
the Conqueror, purveyor of love potions; Rajah Rabo, author of
dream-books; and a seer named Madame Fu Futtam. Harlem had a dubious
reputation. James H. Robinson, African American pastor of the Church of
the Master, characterized Harlem as a place “of poverty, filth, disease
. . . [and] seething crowds of Negroes living on the lowest possible
level of life.” However, he explained, there was another side to
Harlem, that of eminent churches and cultural achievements, notably the
Harlem Renaissance. People could be mobilized to use “the little power
and wealth at their disposal plus the enormous resources of their
spiritual capacity to create for themselves an important, a weighty and
an enduring position within the framework of democracy.” (vii)
The Harlem Ashram fell into this world. Along with Ralph Templin, a key
figure was Jay Holmes Smith, like Templin a former Methodist missionary
in India, where they had taken great interest in the nationalist
movement. The British government had asked them to stop their
pro-Gandhi work. Arguing they had been in India long enough to consider
it impossible to be pro-government, they did not. Rather, they called
for the government to change its policies. In response, Britain
expelled Smith and Templin. Once they were back in the U. S., they
first organized a nonviolent direct action committee that helped
hosiery workers in Reading, Pennsylvania press for change. Then in
1940, they helped organize the Harlem Ashram.
Templin, Smith, and other founding members
were European Americans.
They explained,
WE LIVE IN HARLEM
BECAUSE:
- We regard the problem of racial justice as
America’s No. 1 problem in
reconciliation, and most of our work concerns the Negro-white aspect of
this problem.
- Living here makes it easy for us to contact Negro
leaders.
- Harlem is the opinion-making center of Negro
America, the Negro capital
of the nation.
- Living here helps us who are white to get
something of the “feel” of
being a Negro in America. (viii)
To study the application of Gandhi’s way of
life to the U. S.,
especially in the arena of race, Harlem Ashram members organized a
Non-violence Direct Action Committee. Three African Americans joined,
along with a Hindu from India, Krishnalal Jethalal Shridharani. A
veteran of Gandhi’s 1930 Salt March and of his university Gujarat
Vidyapith, Shridharani spent over a decade in the U. S. as a student
and interpreter of Gandhi. His Columbia University thesis “War without
Violence. The Sociology of Gandhi’s Satyagraha” (1939) offered a
critique of traditional Christian pacifism, marked more by a philosophy
of non-resistance than of non-cooperation. His books, including My
India, My America (1941), an account of his time in the U. S., and The
Mahatma and His World (1946), gained a wide readership. According to
Shridharani, too many pacifists in the U. S. revered a Christ-like
Gandhi rather than a leader of a mass movement of social change.
The pacifists fail, because they regard peace
as an end in itself. As a
result, they minimize the significance of other human values, though
they may be subjective, such as freedom and justice, which roil
people’s blood and cause great social and political upheavals. The
pacifists’ dream is just a pious wish with underpinnings of mere “good
will.” Naive in their conception of human nature, they refuse to take
into consideration the pluralistic genius of the human psyche…. When
their hope of peace is frustrated in the process of social change, as
often happens, they are in a dilemma. The demand for social change
offers them but one alternative, viz., that of upholding the violent
method or of maintaining the status quo…. There is no other choice left
them, for the pacifists fail to realize that something more than good
will is required to grease the wheels of a changing order. (ix)
The number of African American residents of
the Harlem Ashram grew:
Farmer, jurist Pauli Murray, and educator Wilson Head. The community
included both single men and women, and families. Located at 2013 Fifth
Avenue, near 125th Street, the group adopted a primitive form of
Christian communalism, voluntary poverty. In prayer each submitted to
group discipline in money matters. Each gave to the common purse that
part of his or her
income they were led to give and withdrew only what was needed. Living
in solidarity with the Harlem community, members initially served by
• helping African
Americans migrating from the south to find housing;
• investigating the use of violence by the police
in strikes;
• creating a credit union run by and for African
Americans, Puerto
Ricans, or other minorities as well as a cooperative buying club; and,
finally,
• conducting street plays for African American and
Puerto Rican
children.
Muriel Lester, British-born
international secretary of the
International Fellowship of Reconciliation who had lived in Gandhi’s
ashram in India, became an advisor to Harlem Ashram members. She helped
the community develop a training course in “total pacifism.” She
encouraged members to “out-train the totalitarians, out-match their
‘intrepidity, contempt for comfort, surrender of private interest,
obedience to command’ with a superior courage, frugality, loyalty and
selflessness.”
As well as advisors such as Muriel Lester, several books provided
members help in bridging the Indian and North American contexts:
Gregg’s The Power of Nonviolence, Shridharani’s War without Violence,
and A. J. Muste’s Nonviolence in an Aggressive World (1940). Jay Holmes
Smith explained, “If we are not to go off ‘half-cocked’ in our
nonviolent direct action campaigns, we must get the benefit of study of
the history of such action and the best thought of pacifist sages, past
and present.” (x)
Members began to carry out satyagraha
campaigns. The first successful
effort entailed desegregating New York City’s YMCAs. Then in 1942, they
undertook a two-week interracial pilgrimage. Fourteen persons walked
two hundred and forty miles from New York to the Lincoln Memorial in
Washington D. C. to support anti-lynching and anti-poll tax bills then
before Congress. Members worked on campaigns such as the March on
Washington movement led by A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Porters. While that
effort was postponed because of the war, members continued to target
systemic racism. A broadsheet for an anti-poll tax rally held April 24,
1944 advised, Here’s our plan. Will you cooperate? We will throw a
picket line around
the Capitol area when the filibuster starts and we will walk as long as
the senators talk. We’re asking as many men and women of all races and
creeds as can to make a continuous, disciplined and peaceful
demonstration for the duration of the filibuster . . . Are there 200
people to defend democracy at home and keep faith with the millions of
men fighting fascism abroad?
Harlem Ashram members also formed a Free India
Committee. Members often
participated in demonstrations at the British Consulate in New York
City, or in front of British agencies. Members promoted Puerto Rican
independence.
Perhaps the most challenging project was the
establishment of a Play
Co-Op on thirteenth Street. Deemed a cell of “The New World Movement,”
the Harlem Ashram used a vacant lot in a poor residential area teeming
with New York City’s Puerto Rican and African American populations. The
project began with week-end work camps with spiritual activities such
as inter-racial worship, study, and dialogue about alternatives to war.
Participants cleaned up trash-filled neighborhoods, sang, sewed, or did
other crafts.
Like many communities, the Harlem Ashram was
short lived. Members moved
on: Templin to an academic career; Smith to India after the country
gained independence; Ruth Reynolds to Puerto Rico to support the
nationalist cause led by Pedro Albizu Campos. On November 2, 1950 she
was arrested, charged under a repressive gag law, and found guilty of
sedition. In 1954 she won her case on appeal. James Farmer established
his residence in Chicago when he helped organize CORE, and therefore
lived only for a while at the Harlem Ashram. Drawn by the courage of
the members and by the economic benefit of reasonable housing, Farmer
did not accept the idea of voluntary poverty. His poverty was wholly
involuntary, an unfortunate reality for many African Americans.
The enduring significance of the Harlem Ashram
was that it created a
bridge by which nonviolent direct action techniques crossed from India
to North
America. Rooming together at the Harlem Ashram, John Swomley and James
Farmer discussed the potential for transforming satyagraha into a tool
in the struggle against racism. When Farmer moved on to Chicago, he and
another CORE worker, George Houser, formed race relations cells or
Fellowship Houses modeled on the Harlem Ashram.
A parallel “experiment in truth,” was Ahimsa
Farm, located in Aurora,
Ohio near Cleveland. From May 1940 Brownson Clark, Bill Hefner, Bob
Luitweiler, Paul Smith, and Paul Minor met for study, discussion,
advocacy, simplification of life, and nonviolent direct action. When
the Selective Service and Training Act of 1940 became law, the young
men asked James Farmer to train them in techniques that became common
during the civil rights movement. One example was role-playing
sessions. Men rehearsed their claim to conscientious objector status in
advance of appearing before draft boards. In advance of trying to
desegregate public facilities, participants simulated arrest.
Ahimsa Farm’s first action was a “Food March
to the Sea.” The seeds
from which the initiative sprouted were Gandhi’s Salt March to the Sea
and Muriel Lester’s reports from Europe of starvation and disease
because of an Allied food blockade. Lester called to “speed the food
ships.” Joined by the Harlem Ashram, Ahimsa Farm members walked from
Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to New York City, a distance of about a
hundred and seventy miles. The pilgrimage took place from December
21-25, 1940. Pilgrims pulled handcarts with humanitarian aid for
starving Europeans. Along the route, they met occasional hostility as
well as support. The following Easter, pilgrims undertook a second trek
along a route from Wilmington, Delaware, to Washington D. C. Believing
that racism had no place in a just social order, Ahimsa Farm also took
up the race challenge.
When the Cleveland group of the National
Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) appealed for help in breaking
down segregation at the Garfield Park swimming pool Ahimsa Farm members
followed steps that became commonplace in the Civil Rights era.
They studied the facts, developed an action plan, and prepared to act.
Planning entailed two basic concerns. One was
to make sure that justice
was done, that is, to make certain that the pool was integrated. The
second was to accomplish this first goal by nonviolence. The
possibility of violence was worrisome. Elsewhere, undertakings that had
been arguably equally provocative had sparked race riots.
On a hot summer day, an interracial group of
four African American boys
and twelve European American boys bought tickets. This posed no
difficulty as there was officially no discrimination in the matter of
admission. When they entered the pool area, they met antagonism. One
person shouted, “Christ! Niggers! What’ll they let in here next?”
Another person called out, “They won’t stay in here long.”
Ignoring the catcalls, the youth plunged into
the water and swam for
about ten minutes. The hostility intensified. European Americans were
calling “Niggers! Everybody out!” Soon the activists were the only
people still in the water. The group decided to go to the changing
room, but they were surrounded by an angry crowd of about four hundred
who had formed around the edges of the pool. As Lee Stern recalled, the
situation was “terribly tense.” A man blocked his path. Stern extended
an arm to shake the man’s hand and said, “My name is Lee Stern. I come
from around here. These people are my friends, and we have no intention
of doing any harm. But we feel all people are human, all people have
feelings, and that all people have a right to be using this pool.”
This response of sympathy and courtesy disarmed Stern’s opponent.
Probably without intending to do so, he shook hands with Stern and
walked away. The nonviolent behavior of the activists threw the crowd
off balance. They left after the time they had planned.
Some activists believed the initiative raised
the consciousness of pool
employees and European American swimmers. However, the African American
youth were dissatisfied with the results. They felt that they had not
really accomplished anything on their own, nor had discrimination
ended. Long discussions followed during which a second attempt to
integrate the pool was planned. According to this new action strategy,
before the
African Americans went into the pool, at least twenty sympathetic
European Americans were already mingling with other white swimmers.
Thus, when the African Americans came to swim, they were acting on
their own. They were supported by allies, the group who ignored the
attempt to keep the African Americans out. Farmer reacted, “That’s
exactly the type . . . of model which I think we need to follow.” (xi)
Three summers passed before interracial teams
again attempted such
experiments with truth force. In 1944, an additional dimension was the
inclusion of females. Again the interracial teams experienced
hostility. Organizers had already taken the precaution to meet with
officials and the police. Threats dissipated. Over time, the
interracial teams overcame opposition to the integration of Garfield
Park pool and other public facilities.
Other initiatives included tackling race
prejudice in employment and
housing, de- segregation in prisons and of the military. Race Relations
Institutes were held in several northern cities including Indianapolis,
Dayton, Denver, Boulder, and Cleveland.
Characteristically, an institute began on
Friday night. James Farmer,
John Swomley, or another theologian would deal with the fact of human
unity, while a scientist would demonstrate such unity in the fact that
descendants of both Europe and Africa had similar blood types. They
emphasized this point because there were objections during World War II
to the use of blood drawn from African-Americans for white casualties.
Saturday activities generally involved integrating establishments such
as a restaurant, theater or bowling alley.
As a concrete example, Farmer and Swomley went
to Detroit in June 1943
after a race riot to investigate whether FOR could make a contribution.
On another occasion Bayard Rustin went to Boulder where Marjie
Carpenter was a student. The campus chapter of FOR organized a sit-in
in the off-campus drugstore-sandwich shop. The demonstration led to
making services available to everyone, African Americans included.
Immediately after World War II these
initiatives led to the first
inter-state journeys of reconciliation, protests of school quotas
before local boards of
education, and other efforts to achieve desegregation. In these ways,
the Harlem Ashram proved the seed of King’s emerging vision of the
Beloved Community. Nurtured in Gandhian satyagraha at the Harlem
Ashram, African Americans, Japanese Americans, Hispanics, and European
Americans fed Gandhi’s ideas to the civil rights movement. As
participants have recalled these events, one senses the excitement they
experienced by virtue of being present to the creation of a new and
better world. (xii)
i This paper draws from interviews of former Harlem Ashram
members;
autobiographies of participants, including James Farmer, Lay Bare the
Heart. An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement (New York, 1985);
Wilson Head, A Life on the Edge: Experiences in “Black and White” in
North America : Memoirs of Wilson Head (Toronto: Dr. Wilson Head
Institute, 1995); Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat: An American
Pilgrimage (New York, 1987); John M. Swomley, Confronting Systems of
Violence. Memoirs of a Peace Activist (Nyack, 1998); Swarthmore College
Peace Collection files; and secondary literature including Daniel
Levine, Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement (New Brunswick,
2000); August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, CORE. A Study in the Civil
Rights Movement 1942-1968 (New York, 1973); David Scott Cooney, “A
Consistent Witness of Conscience. Methodist Nonviolent Activists,
1940-1970,” Ph.D. dissertation, Iliff School of Theology and The
University of Denver (2000). Back
ii John Haynes Holmes, My Gandhi (New York: Harper &
Brothers,
1953), p. 31. Back
iii “The Fellowship of Reconciliation envisions a world of
justice,
peace, and freedom. It is a revolutionary vision of a beloved community
where differences are respected, conflicts addressed nonviolently,
oppressive structures dismantled, and where people live in harmony with
the earth, nurtured by diverse spiritual traditions that foster
compassion, solidarity, and reconciliation.” http://www.forusa.org. For
a history, see Paul R. Dekar, Creating the Beloved Community.
Journeying with the Fellowship of Reconciliation (Telford: Cascadia and
Scottdale: Herald, 2005). Back
iv Farmer, Lay Bare the Heart pp 85ff, 102, 355-60. Peter Mayer,
ed.,
The Pacifist Conscience (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967), pp.
363-70. Back
v Richard G. Fox cites W. E. B. Du Bois, “Passage from India,”
Between
Resistance and Revolution. Cultural Politics and Social Protest, ed.
Richard G. Fox and Orin Starn (New Brunswick, 1997); S. Chabot,
“Submerged Diffusion and the African American Adoption of the Gandhian
Repertoire,” Passages 3 (April 2001): 32-56; John Vijay Prashad, “The
Influence of Gandhi on the American Nonviolence Movement,” http://www.littleindia.com/*.htm.
Back
vi Fox cites Templin’s “Letter to the Editor,” New York Amsterdam
News
May 29, 1943. Back
vii James H. Robinson, “This, Too, Is Harlem,” Fellowship
8 (March 1942): 39-40; John Clarke, ed., Harlem, U.S.A. (Berlin: Seven
Seas, 1964); Holmes Smith, “Our New York Ashram,” Fellowship 7 (January
1941): 1; Cooney thesis, passim; John H. Bracey, Jr., August Meier, and
Elliott Rudwick, eds. The Afro-Americans: Selected Documents (Boston:
Allyn and Bacon, 1972); interviews and correspondence with John and
Marjie Swomley and George and Jean Houser. Back
viii September 9, 1942 brochure, Harlem Ashram papers, SCPC
Collected
Documents Group. Back
ix War without Violence. The Sociology of Gandhi’s Satyagraha
(New
York: Harcourt, Brace, and CO., 1939), pp. 270-1. 10 Back
x J. Holmes Smith, “Nonviolent Direct Action,” Fellowship 7
(December
1941): 207. Back
xi Andrew Lightman, “A Pilgrimage of Nonviolence” (honors
paper, Department of History, Bowdoin College, 1985), pp. 34-40; Bayard
Rustin, Interracial Primer (New York: FOR, 1943); George M. Houser,
Erasing the Color Line (New York: Fellowship Publications, 1945).
Back
xii Letters from Marjie Swomley, June 8, 2004; George M. Houser,
October 18, 2004. Back
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