Joanne Sheehan on the impact of nonviolence training

Joanne Sheehan on the impact of nonviolence training

nonviolence, training, feminism, Clamshell Alliance, anti-nuclear, Journey of Reconciliation, affinity groups

Joanne Sheehan, WRL New England founder, WRL Feminism & Nonviolence Task Force member, and Clamshell Alliance organizer, reflects on the importance of nonviolence training for coordinated protest.

Joanne Sheehan

anti-nuclear movement, women's liberation movement, 1970s

Kimber Heinz

Joanne Sheehan, Oral history interview with Kimber Heinz, August 25, 2023.

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English

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New England, anti-nuclear movement, women's liberation movement

It's also something that you're putting yourself in that we're not necessarily prepared to do. I think training is both helping us immerse ourselves in that understanding of that power of nonviolence, and not thinking of it as weak, not thinking of it as simply turning the other cheek, "go ahead, do whatever you want with me" kind of thing. It's helping us understand that power. It should also help us understand kind of the context for this action and the strategic reasons for this action.

It wasn't so much the case in the early 70s, but I think—when you're in front of the White House and you're doing a big demonstration, and then the tallest white man with a bullhorn says, “You may all lie down now,” then it's like, to me, I'm there, but I realize I don't know any of the people lying next to me when the police come, or how long we lay there, or those things. There's no structure that feels empowering to me. There is a power about laying there.

Later, when I did get to understand the power of affinity groups, the power of training together, the power of knowing who you are acting with—at least a small group within a bigger group—really felt it was easier to take those risks. You didn't feel quite, "It's me and the 300 people"—or "is it me and my affinity group of six or eight people and all these other people in those affinity groups?"

We have a process and a way of talking to them. I think training has developed a lot over the years in that—but to find out that they did training for the Journey of Reconciliation in 1947—Bayard Rustin and George Houser did that training—sparked a lot of my interest in, "Oh, what is this? [chuckles] How can we learn that?"

For me, the thing about training is it's something I felt I could embrace, and also, training, as it became developed—not at the beginning, as it became developed—had such a strong feminist perspective as part of it. Just the affinity groups being something that was inspired by women's consciousness-raising groups as well as the Spanish anarchist cells. Something that really does put us all on some equal footing, rather than somebody telling us now what we can do.