Like Manchester, he realized that people will do unreasonable things to come through—not for grand ideas or incentives or bosses or hierarchies or even recognition, but for each other. Smith came away from his Vietnam experience with an increased faith that if you start with basic respect for people, and you show trust by putting them in situations where they have to come through because others depend on them, they’ll summon whatever it takes to achieve the mission.

The Party understood the racialized lens through which Black Americans rightly viewed the world, but Newton knew that coalition and international politics were necessary elements of the revolution. To help make this point, Morrison helped him arrange the book to reiterate the idea that revolution is a process that must be practiced in a community with others, not just analyzed or theorized in relative isolation.

He faced these conditions not because he was George Floyd the individual but because of where his identity located him in society— a location he had no choice but to contend with.

Believing that one’s moral responsibility begins and ends with seeing people as individuals tends to push identity contingencies like these out of view. It pushes us to see people in terms of internal characteristics, or what we imagine their internal characteristics to be. On the last day of George’s life, we just see a large, middle aged Black man in a tank top possibly trying to pass a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill in a corner bodega. We look for things about George the individual that could explain this— poor impulse control, a broader lack of executive self-control, dysfunctional cultural beliefs, deficits in employable cognitive skills. We downplay, or miss completely, the gauntlet of conditions tied to his race and class that he would have had to surmount in order to gain a secure connection to school, the economy, and society.

Still, what Chenoweth and Stephan found was dramatic. The Selma march and the larger American civil rights movement were not exceptions. Nonviolent campaigns were ten times more likely to be successful than violent ones. They seem better able to inspire trust between people on opposing sides of a divide, reduce the doubting churn that otherwise exists between them, and thus enable more cooperation going forward. As Chenoweth put it in an interview with the Harvard Gazette in 2019, “Countries in which there were nonviolent campaigns were about 10 times likelier to transition to democracies within a five-year period compared to countries in which there were violent campaigns— whether the campaigns succeeded or failed.”

The Selma marchers, in their willingness to suffer people’s inhumanity out of faith in people’s ultimate humanity, had tapped into a less obvious but long understood source of power.

In the founding documents of the Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, an arm of the movement that organized the Freedom Rides and the Mississippi voter registration drives, the religious historian Charles Marsh describes how SNCC drew from this concept: “Only ‘redemptive community’ could supersede ‘systems of gross social immorality’ and nurture an ‘atmosphere in which reconciliation and justice’ [become] actual possibilities.