You must struggle to truly remember this past in all its nuance, error, and humanity. You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance - no matter how improved - as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children.

Holding onto one’s faith in people’s capacity for fairness from a disempowered position, and in the face of intense opposition, while saturated with risks, has a moral power capable of moving a presidential election or, for that matter, the soul of a nation.

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.

But another concern was how they should protest, and how the kind of society they wanted to achieve should shape their protests. In answer, Martin Luther King Jr. borrowed from Josiah Royce (1855-1916) the construct of the “beloved community”— in which people live as brothers and sisters, recognize their interdependence, and act with compassion for one another across identity lines.

The concept of “beloved community” is perhaps too dated for contemporary use. But it does point to the value of keeping the endgame in mind: achieving a climate in these places in which our identities— the full breadth of them— feel safe and like they can belong and flourish.