Strategies Used to Strike a Blow - Essay Example

They may be not able to communicate in mainstream political discourse because of discrimination, disenfranchisement, economics, or other reasons. At this point, many oppressed groups such as Native Americans, Marxists, or anti-Colonial liberation movements may organize armed response through guerrilla movements or armies organized to resist oppression. In America, the non-violent path is represented by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the path of armed resistance by Malcolm X, in the context of the African-American liberation struggle.

But in that same context, W.E.B. Dubois's life and activism in organizing responses to oppression show a different division in methods: between the religious and the secular. For both Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. both organized their critiques of repression around a religious base, Islam and Christianity, but Dubois organizes his critiques on more secular themes of humanitarianism, socialism, and communism. Thus, we can conclude that there are not only non-violent and violent responses to oppression but also responses that are based on religious or secular values as fundamental categorizations of resistance types.

For example, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. organized resistance responses from the pulpit of a church, through sermons. From there he led greater movements and demonstrations in the larger secular society. Malcolm X organized from the prisons, gangs, and street-level of society, where outside minorities felt the crush of oppression through police violence, and he decided on a response based on armed opposition. When he organized from a religious base, it was not from the mosque in the same degree as King, but nevertheless, his pilgrimage to Mecca and the Nation of Islam are examples of the inseparability of religion from his philosophy of resistance.

With Dubois, we see an organization of resistance from the position of labor movements and trade unions. As Robin Kelley writes in ‘Race Rebels’: “Involvement in a movement often radicalizes workers who might have otherwise expressed their grievances silently. Hence, efforts on the part of grass-roots unions to mobilize Southern black workers, from the Knights of Labor and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters to the Communist Party and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), clearly played a role in shaping or even transforming the hidden transcript.

” (Kelley, 1996) Thus secular organizations such as labor movements and trade unions are an important means of organizing resistance in oppressed communities and striking a blow at the economic system, as exemplified by the efforts of W.E.B. Dubois in this sector.