How did African Americans learn nonviolent resistance during the civil rights movement in the 1950s?

Nonviolence required compassion, commitment, courage, faith, and discipline.

A group called the Fellowship of Reconciliation printed an illustrated pamphlet entitled Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Montgomery Story and distributed it throughout the South.

It gave instructions on passive resistance. In workshops throughout the South, James Lawson, a young minister, helped Martin Luther King Jr. teach students and other activists how to use the tactic of passive resistance. The workshops demonstrated that nonviolence was not for the weak.

Participants had to sit quietly while other students, pretending to be racists, jeered, poked, and spit at them.