Organizing for Nonviolent Direct Action

During the 1950s and 60s, the struggle for civil rights and freedom carried on in lunch counters, buses and streets throughout the South appeared chaotic at times, but behind the headline-making demonstrations, both planning and training held participants to a non-violent commitment. Charles Walker, a Quaker activist and trainer in nonviolence, was determined to win social justice and racial equality. Seeing the need for a guide to help people seeking to make changes in their communities, he wrote this, the first manual on organizing for nonviolent direct action for the American Civil Rights Movement. Drawing on his work at the Fellowship of Reconciliation in the 1940s and his studies of Gandhi’s successes in India, Walker wrote concretely about the challenges workers for social justice would face and the discipline necessary for success -- methods still applicable today. Charles Walker’s daughter, Brenda Walker Beadenkopf is republishing this manual after his death, as an important piece of his legacy. She hopes Organizing for Nonviolent Direct Action will be utilized as it was in the 1960s with constructive programs that exemplify “nonviolent attitudes in action.”

Charles Coates "Charlie" Walker (1920-2004), a Philadelphia Quaker and American activist in the civil rights and peace movements, participated in the vast network of individuals and groups who supported Dr. Martin Luther King's nonviolent crusade for racial justice. In 1949 Walker helped introduce King, a student at Crozer Theological Seminary near Philadelphia, to nonviolence. Besides meeting with King twice and corresponding with him, Walker worked with King, A. Philip Randolph, Ralph Abernathy, James Farmer, James Lawson, Bayard Rustin, George Houser, baseball great Jackie Robinson and other key civil rights proponents. Walker organized marches and conferences, becoming a key trainer and writer of training materials.

Martin Luther King wrote that Walker was a key figure in producing a very helpful earlier pamphlet on nonviolence used in the South and said he was a man of skill and understanding. A. Philip Randolph said Walker had served under him as an organizing field worker for various marches and performed his tasks with competence and dedication. He praised Walker as a very valuable person in the struggle for civil rights and racial justice who understood the discipline of nonviolence while serving the cause of interracial brotherhood.

Organizing for Nonviolent Direct Action was the first handbook of its kind and was translated into seven languages. Walker helped organize the March on Washington in 1963 and its forerunners the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom and the Youth Marches for Integrated Schools in 1957 and 1958. He was on the training staff of the Mississippi Summer Project in 1964 and conducted the nonviolence training workshops for the Poor People's Campaign. In the 1970s and '80s Walker worked primarily in the Peace Movement. He co-founded World Peace Brigades, Peace Brigades International, the Gandhi-Woolman Institute and The Pennsylvania Committee to Abolish the Penalty of Death.