The main themes in A Manual For Direct Action is the value and effectiveness of nonviolent protest in its history in the civil rights movement. Another theme is being prepared to engage in civil disobedience in the practical, physical aspect, in organizing protest, and in understanding the different methods of civil protest and their legal and historical ramifications.
live there all the time and share the life of the neighborhood) can begin to build community organizations to do the jobs which need to be done, the jobs which have come from specific and deeper complaints of your neighbors. This turns you and your team into a political force, for you are now organizing the community to do for itself what it formerly received as favors from the white power structure” (Lakey 27).
“This is nonsense. Why should the innocents be made to suffer? Who are these leaders, to be willing to sacrifice their followers to racist madmen? It is important to safeguard our lives and the lives of our families” (Lakey 116).
A parallel to this book is to Khan-Cullors When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir. It relates to this book in that Khan-Cullors takes the steps in becoming a community organizer and protest leader in the same ways which Oppenhiemer and Lakey lay out. Choosing a strategy and recognizing how a problem might be best suited to a specific type of civil protest, then enacting that community is exemplified in Cullors actions of forming the BLM organization and could be taken as a textbook example of what to do.
Manual For Direct Action relates to When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors in that Khan-Cullors actively uses many of the non-violent strategies incorporated in Manual For Direct Action. However, nonviolent civil disobedience has also been a major theme in the movie Rustin which fictionalizes the story of Bayard Rustin organizing the march on Washington. In relation to Rustin I want to highlight the section on theory of nonviolent protest because it actively engages in themes which find themselves in many readings regarding black thought, including Du Bois and Khan-Cullors and that is of identity, and that in order to have a successful non-violent protest, by definition, identity can not get in the way of participation. In the case of Rustin, his being gay was a factor which saw him face hardship and almost lose the position of organizer which he had. Or in the case of Khan-Cullors her identity as queer and a woman distinctly separated her from the rest of her black community. But these same otherings based upon identity are the same tools which the racist oppressor uses in its tactics, tactics of violence, tactics of fear. Only by eliminating these otherings in a given community, can a protest succeed.
