Veteran of Many Conflicts Teaches Nonviolence in Time of War

Glenn Smiley knows that giving peace a chance isn’t easy.

For more than 40 years, Smiley has tried to teach others how to apply a philosophy of nonviolence to dealing with conflict.

The 80-year-old director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolence, a recently established research center in Los Angeles, spoke Wednesday to a group of USC students, who invited him to talk about how to practice nonviolence during an impassioned and war-heated time.

He had history to draw on when he advised the students how to practice a difficult discipline.

In the 1940s, Smiley used nonviolence to help desegregate the tearoom of Bullocks department store in downtown Los Angeles.

In the ‘60s, he influenced a friend, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to use nonviolent protest as a tool to challenge the nation’s thinking about racial equality.

Then came a tour of Central and South American countries in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during which Smiley helped people develop a pacifist approach to labor conflicts and trained them to deal with police aggression. During that time, he began using the phrase “militant nonviolence.”

“To me, nonviolence is a shot,” Smiley said. “I apologize for the military terminology, but the reason I use it is because people understand it. Ours is a violent society.”

The students asked Smiley to speak after a recent clash between anti-war demonstrators and war supporters at a campus rally.

Members of a group supporting U.S. presence in the Persian Gulf took over a stage during an anti-war speech. One of the hecklers grabbed a microphone. The other waved a pro-war placard.

Anti-war demonstrators forced the intruders off the stage.

“They were pushed, I guess you could say,” said David Wells, 27, a graduate student in public policy and one of the founders of the anti-war group, Get U.S. Soldiers Out. “When they tried to yell us down, we’d respond by trying to shout them down with louder chants. It didn’t help anyone’s understanding.”

After the incident, organizers thought they needed advice, and asked Smiley to speak.

Although he spoke for three hours about the power of nonviolence, he did not give specific directions on how students should react to hecklers.

“My heated-up leftovers of 44 years of nonviolent teachings isn’t going to serve as well as their developing their own tactics--which is what I see them trying to do,” he said.