Contemplating Nonviolent Resistance

Dear God of Justice and Mercy, On a sweltering August afternoon in 1963, Fannie Lou Hamer stood before a crowd in Mississippi with welts still fresh on her back from a jailhouse beating. She had tried to register to vote. For that crime, she was fired from her job, shot at in her home, and brutalized by police. Yet when reporters asked if she hated the men who beat her, she said, "It wouldn't solve any problems for me to hate."…