[MUSIC] Thank you, Dr. Lafayette for agreeing to come and spend some of your time with us today here at Emory University. It is truly a pleasure to speak with someone of your magnitude and statute. You are truly a living legend, and we appreciate all that you've done in he work of nonviolence and to try to make the world a better place. We hope today that the questions and the conversation that we have will inspire others to walk in the footsteps that you have created, and make a profound and positive impact on the world. What I would like to do is start off by just helping people understand what is meant by nonviolence and nonviolence organizations. If you could, could you give us a framework for what that looks like? >> Yes, I'd be happy to do that and I want to assure you that this is my life's work and I'm delighted to be able to share the theory, philosophy, concepts but also, the actions and the results of the action. So nonviolence has its own unique concept. There are many different forms of nonviolence. One would be nonviolence as a tactic and a method, and the other would be a philosophy or a theory, or a way of life. Many people would want to separate those two because they are different. There are people who would say I would use nonviolence under certain conditions but other conditions, I would not. There are those who would say that no, nonviolence to me is a way of life, and I would use it in all situations, regardless. When we study nonviolence, that's one of the first things we want to do is understand how different people perceive nonviolence. Then we have to understand that the people who have made tremendous contributions like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Thoreau and others. Some of our New Testament readings, for example, and other literature, some secular literature, and some more faith oriented. But nevertheless, this material that's been developed and created by so many all contributes to the understanding of how we can transform our society, the world, from a less violent place and a more nonviolent community. >> That sounds great and I'm sure they're folks that are listening to this that would say there are aspects of our society that have to confront violence. For example, the law enforcement community. Their role seems to be to stop crime, to use violence. What role would organizations and entities in our community and society, what would they be able to do to contribute to this nonviolent social change? >> It is understood that we're not there yet. The role of the law enforcement and police officers, is to provide safety in our communities and if we have a peaceful community, that will be a safer community. The idea is how do we create a more peaceful community? In fact, the police officers were commonly referred to, when I was growing up, as peace officers and so that meant that they were there to keep the peace and to prevent violence. Not to perpetrate violence but to prevent. Our emphasis would have to be on the role of policemen in preventing violence because if you prevent it, you won't have to stop it. But there are those exceptions. So what we've done in the past has been very interesting and what I will share with you, I have been surprised myself at the results. I just gave you one example. The Rodney King situation in Los Angeles, this was a black man who was attacked by a policeman. It was filmed and you could see he obviously was not armed, and they didn't claim that he was armed but yet, he was beaten by more than one policeman at a car stop. That really was incendiary because people all over the country just really went wild. That's because they saw it on television, and there were riots that took place to express their discontent, riots in many cities, where there had not been riots before, even. There were riots in Miami, Florida. In fact, during that period there were riots like every summer, at least two riots. Some people thought it was the climate in Miami, Florida that created the discontent. But we found out that after that Rodney King incident, it so happened that the Martin Luther King commission in Miami, Florida invited us and the team of us who do nonviolence training. We gathered a team of people who were well experienced and they wanted us to work on training the policemen in Miami-Dade, that's the county. We said okay, if they're interested. They got the resources together, and we trained 3,000 day and night because the shifts changed. The upshot of it was this, that when the verdict came down on the police officers in Los Angeles, who had attacked Rodney King and they were found not guilty, they were exonerated. More riots occurred, even riots that had not occurred, when the incident happened. Check the record, there was no rights in Miami, Florida because the policemen had been trained how to work with the community and the prevention of violence. That's the emphasis, we have to learn how to respond when violence occurs but a good deal of our resources would have to be put on prevention.