Teach-In: Non-Violent Direct Action

This presentation focuses on:

1) An overview of American tradition of direct action

2) The practice of nonviolence

3) How to run a successful action under a variety of circumstances

4) Civil disobedience as a tool of direct action for social change

5) Using the tactics of discipline and solidarity

6) The role of support, legal and non-legal, and marshals

7) From arrest to arraignment, what’s *likely* to happen

Other Resources on Direct Action:

Videos:

1) Berkeley in the Sixties — the rise of the Free Speech Movement.

2) Doctors, Liars, and Women — ACT UP responds to the minimization of the risk of women to HIV

3) United in Anger, Jim Hubbard

4) How to Survive a Plague, David France

5) Sex in an Epidemic, Jean Carlomusto — how the NYC gay community created its own alternative institutions and information to save the lives of its members. Alternative-institution-building is an essential part of direct action.

6) Erica Chenoweth’s TEDx Talk on “Civil Resistance”

Books:

1) Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism, L.A. Kauffman

2) Why Civil Resistance Works, Erica Chenoweth

3) How To Survive A Plague, David France

Articles:

1) Gene Sharp’s 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action

2) Erica Chenoweth’s, “It May Only Take 3.5% of the Population to Topple a Dictator”

3) Tim Snyder’s, “20 Lessons from the 20th Century”

4) Anything by Masha Gessen