Americans know how to defeat a tyrant

Mohandas K. Gandhi, an Indian lawyer who became the nonviolent leader who successfully led the resistance to British colonialism, put his life on the line to peacefully demand India’s independence and freedom during the early years of the 20th century. Millions faithfully followed the Mahatma (“great soul”) and his dream of a secular, self-governing nation.

Beginning in the 1950s, a relatively new pastor in Montgomery, Alabama, adapted Gandhi’s successful tactics of nonviolence and civil disobedience. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. aimed at redeeming “the soul of America.”

In the winter of 1955, Montgomery was like every other sinfully segregated city across the South. Then, on Dec. 1, a seamstress named Rosa Parks was arrested for disobeying a racist Alabama law requiring African Americans to yield their seats to White passengers when all other seats were occupied.

King was asked to lead a boycott of the Montgomery public transportation company, whose bus ridership was almost 80 percent Black. After being elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, he set in motion a prodigious protest movement. Pastors, rabbis, priests, labor leaders, independent activist groups and courageous college students came together with what they believed to be a preordained mandate to develop in the United States a system of equal justice for all.

As a result of their steadfast protests, over the course of a single decade, Uncle Sam overturned nearly a century of Jim Crow’s tyranny, with historic legislation including the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act and Fair Housing Act signed into law to bring America closer to the ideals espoused in our founding documents.

Finally, although few Americans can explain what began the United States’ engagement in a senseless and protracted war in Vietnam, they remember how it ended. All over the United States, young Americans participated in sit-ins, conducted teach-ins on college and university campuses, and even burned draft cards. These were not just hippies and “flower people” but members of church groups, labor unions and civil rights organizations, calling upon Americans to bear witness to the fact that when war is waged, the wealthy get wealthier while the young and poor pay the price.

The thread that ties each of these points together is the collective power and influence wielded by large groups to provoke major reforms desired by the public at large. Such consequential change is scarcely made by politicians or political bodies alone. It is the people who control whether a republic sinks or survives. In this tumultuous time of MAGA-manufactured chaos, we elected officials certainly have a major role to play in the halls of Congress. And play it we must. But the people, not the politicians in Congress, are the architects of this nation’s future, and they will ultimately decide whether we revive our democracy or slide further toward autocracy.

I like to remind my constituents that not one politician spoke at the 1963 March on Washington — but several organizers who spoke attended the signing of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in the two years that followed.

Now, here we are at a time when, debatably, many in our nation believe these are the most politically perilous days since the Civil War. Simultaneously, parts of the world are literally on fire and looking to the United States to extinguish the flames before they widen and engulf much of the globe. We owe it to the American people and to our allies to quickly get it together. The best way to get beyond the present-day autocratic leaning of our government rests in our ability to follow the well-worn path of our ancestors.

Because of our forebears, we challenged a king and became a republic. Because of the abolitionist movement, we challenged slaveholding elites and became a truly free state. Because of America’s greatest generation, we defeated the Nazis and upheld freedom around the world.

And because of the American people today, we will once again ensure liberty lives on for generations to come.