Excerpt: Something Transcendent

Rosemarie Freeney Harding describes the reaction of her friend—Albany, Georgia-based civil rights leader Marion King—to a physical attack.

In the summer of 1962, in the middle of the Albany campaign, Marion and I were both pregnant. During the campaign, Marion often visited movement workers who were jailed in local facilities throughout Dougherty and Terrell counties—taking them food, checking on conditions where they were kept, relaying messages. On one occasion as she exited a jail, a policeman who felt she was not moving fast enough kicked her in the back so that she fell to the ground. Marion fell so hard that she lost the baby.

Some of us went to see her at her home when she was released from the hospital. As we waited our shock and pain mixed with anger. ... We naturally assumed she would share our sense of indignation and assault. But something else was happening. When Marion came into the room, walking slowly so as not to exacerbate her pain, there was something in her face. A kind of light. Like a victory, a resplendence. It’s hard to explain, because it wasn’t prideful and it wasn’t false. It helped to quiet us—our anger, our judgment. And we recognized it.

Many of us in the movement had the feeling at certain moments that what we were experiencing in our freedom work was something more than just the immediate events. It was in fact something transcendent—capable of transforming us, our adversaries, and our entire society. Marion’s countenance and her conversation in that moment reminded us of that quality of the movement. Clearly she had struggled with how to respond to the trauma she had experienced: Not only had she been attacked, but the child she was carrying had died. And it’s hard for me now to explain her actions in terms that do not sound like romantic idealism or a spiritual naïveté. But what I am trying to emphasize is how deeply and how seriously many people were grappling with the meaning of nonviolence during the movement days and how Marion’s reaction had a context and the support of a community of people who understood, or at least were trying to understand, the potential of compassion and nonviolence to transform individuals and societies.

Marion never condemned the man who had beaten her and, in fact, she directed our conversation to other matters and even to laughter. What she showed us in her refusal to disparage or judge the man who had spurned her so violently was a kind of triumph that did not come from a spirit of revenge or even of justifiable anger. Indeed, the words I am using to describe it—“victory,” “triumph”—may mislead in the sense that they imply a success over an opponent. What we saw and felt in Marion’s presence, in her response to the trauma she was living through, had the excellent quality of victory, but where otherwise a dominance might have been, there was instead dominion—a kind of understanding, a place where something very meaningful was shared.