The nonviolence movement a method of protest which is developed by Mahatma Ghandi and leveraged by Martin Luther King in the civil rights movement.
The idea is to achieve civil disobedience and allowing oneself to be punished so egregiously without inciting violence so at to elicit sympathy across the nation.
The civil rights movement leveraged training tactics and training to ensure its participants would be completely nonviolent and so elicit the correct response.