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This is how single, small acts of courage become many, and many become unstoppable · INSIGHT TODAY

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: It's early morning in Pretoria, nineteen fifty two. The air
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: is still cool. The myst is just beginning to lift
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: off the wide stone steps of the Central Railway station
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: in Pretoria, a small crowd has begun to gather, quietly, deliberately,
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: above one set of doors. Like at every public building,
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: a sign reads whites only. At the other door, just
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: yards away, the sign reads non whites. Both entrances lead
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: to the same grand hall, inside the same trains, the
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: same platforms, the same South African morning, but the law
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: says otherwise.
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  Speaker 2: On this morning, both lines are full.
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: White volunteers, students, priests, railway clerks stand neatly at one door.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: Non White South Africans, factory workers, domestic laborers.
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: Are at the other door. They are peaceful, they don't
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: carry weapons. They just wait.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: Police officers watch from the curb, truncheons in hand. Scant
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: reporters hover nearby. Because apartheid South Africa censored its news,
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: the authorities know exactly what it's about to happen, and
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: then it happens. At the appointed hour. Someone nods, both
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: lines move. They step forward together through the forbidden doors
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: into the same grand hall. For a moment, everything is
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: still then come the orders, the arrests, the trucks. Four
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: years earlier, in nineteen forty eight, South Africa's National Party
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: had won national elections on the explicit promise of being
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  Speaker 1: blatantly racist, of codifying white supremacy into law. Apartheid was
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: no longer just a social order. It was the official
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: operating system.
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: Of the state.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: The Defiance Campaign against Unjust Laws was the first organized
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: effort to confront it head on. The volunteers were charged
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  Speaker 1: specifically with violating segregation laws. Brought before local magistrates, they
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: were sentenced to thirty days in jail or a five
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: pound fine, which was roughly a month's.
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: Wages for a working person.
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  Speaker 1: They chose jail every time because paying the fine meant
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: admitting that the law was legitimate.
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: Any had been trained for this.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: Some came from Gandhi's Tolstoy Farm, where earlier generations of activists,
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: including my grandfather, learned to live simply and to endure
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: hardship as preparation for nonviolent resistance. Life on that farm
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: was deprivation by design. No hot water, no meat, no beds.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: Everybody slept on thin blankets, ate sparingly, and worked communally.
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  Speaker 1: The discomfort wasn't punishment, It was practice, training for the
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  Speaker 1: moral and physical stamina that civil disobedience would one day
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  Speaker 1: demand of them. They knew how to go without comfort,
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  Speaker 1: They knew how to go without sleep, They knew how
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  Speaker 1: to go without fear. The inside of a jail cell
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  Speaker 1: frightened them less than a society without fairness, and so
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: they filled the jails. When their thirty day sentence ended,
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  Speaker 1: they walked right back to the same stations, the same doors,
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: and did it again and again and again. Within six months,
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  Speaker 1: more than eight thousand people had been arrested. The government, alarmed,
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: responded with new laws that expanded police powers, lengthened sentences.
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: Tighten the screws. But it was too late.
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: The moral balance had shifted, because when a government must
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: jail its citizens for walking through the wrong doorway, it's
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  Speaker 1: the government that stands accused. We are many, we are peaceful. Ultimately,
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: they can't jail all of us. This was not a boast,
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: It was a strategy. It was the beating heart of
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: nonviolent defiance. When the weight of the state is turned
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: against its own citizens for exercising conscience and dignity, it
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  Speaker 1: exposes the rot at its core.
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  Speaker 2: And when they call you lawbreakers, you answer which law
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  Speaker 2: the immoral one?
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: When they threaten show up the next day again, when
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: they try to silence you with repression, reply with more people,
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: louder voices, and undeterred steps. The nineteen fifty two Defiance
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: campaign transformed South Africa's resistance from scattered protests into a
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: nationwide act of conscience. What began at a route railway
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: station spread through cities, townships, and fields and prisons. The
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: world began to watch. The oppressed had taken the stage,
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: and they had taken control of the narrative. And when
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: years later American civil rights activists faced their whites only
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: signs on buses in Montgomery, at lunch counters in Greensboro,
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  Speaker 1: on bridges in Selma, they invoke the same moral equation
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  Speaker 1: that the surest way to expose an unjust law is
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: to break it peacefully and together. Today, if you organize similarly,
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  Speaker 1: not in imitation, but in inspiration, you force a reckoning,
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  Speaker 1: because ultimately they can't jail all of us. They can
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  Speaker 1: lock some of us away, but they can't lock away conscience, dignity,
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  Speaker 1: or the idea of freedom. And every arrest becomes a
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: spotlight on their injustice, not your so called crime. So rise, gather,
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  Speaker 1: walk in together, show them that their zip ties and
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: their handcuffs and their bars are no match for your resolve,
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  Speaker 1: your love of your country and of true justice and liberty.
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  Speaker 2: It is stronger than their decrees.
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: Because this, this right here, is how single, small acts
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  Speaker 1: of courage become many, and many become unstoppable