Ten days ago, Taylor Branch left his home in Northwest Baltimore for the National Cathedral, in Washington, D.C., where he delivered a speech commemorating the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., gunned down 40 years ago. But Branch’s remarks went beyond King. They touched on an entire generation that learned to stir up America in the gentlest way it knew how.

Among them was Tom Lewis, who died the other day, at 68, almost 40 years since he and eight others slipped into the U.S. Selective Service headquarters in Catonsville on a May afternoon and destroyed hundreds of Vietnam-era military draft records.

The gesture enflamed the country. There was Lewis, along with the two Catholic priests, Philip and Daniel Berrigan, and six others, calmly standing there with the records burning in front of them. The image circled the planet.

And there was quiet, conservative Catonsville, an entire community stunned, much of it infuriated, at suddenly finding itself a kind of national symbol of the anti-war movement.

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If the burning of draft records doesn’t sound gentle, consider the alternative: 50,000 American soldiers dead in Vietnam, at the rate of several hundred a week in that awful year that took the lives of both King and Bobby Kennedy, and saw rioting in more than a hundred cities and political riots at the Democratic National Convention.

Lewis believed in the gentler alternative, and he clung to it until he died in his sleep the other night at his home in Worcester, Mass., insisting that nonviolence was more powerful than the deadliest bombs.

In the aftermath of Catonsville, he served three years in prison for that belief, and asserted it, several years ago, when he appeared on a Democracy Now broadcast and talked about that moment at the draft board.

“We knew we were taking a risk,” he said, “because drafter resisters were being sent to prison. … We did not consider the risk as much as the importance of the witness, the importance of making a statement against the war in Vietnam.

“And we used a weapon of the Army to destroy the records. We used homemade napalm made from a special-forces handbook to really illustrate the outrageousness of the use of napalm. Instead of using it on people, we used it on death certificates.”

The so-called death certificates were Lewis’ name for draft notices. Burning paper was better than burning flesh — that’s what the Catonsville Nine were saying.

And it’s what Taylor Branch implied when he delivered his remarks last week in Washington. In a fundamental way, the Catonsville Nine were Dr. King’s children. But so were many others who took their cues from the civil rights movement.

“To see Dr. King and his colleagues as anything less than modern founders of democracy … is to diminish them,” said Branch, author of the three-volume history of the modern civil rights era that includes the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63.”

“Dr. King said the movement would liberate not only segregated black people but also the white South,” said Branch. “It opened doors for the disabled, and began to lift fear from homosexuals before the modern notion of gay was in use. Not for 2,000 years of rabbinic Judaism had there been much thought of female rabbis, but the first ordination took place soon after the movement shed its fresh light on the meaning of equal souls…

“Now we (also) think of female Episcopal priests and bishops, with their colleagues of every background. Parents now take for granted opportunities their children inherit from the Montgomery bus boycott. … Dr. King showed most profoundly that in an interdependent world, lasting power goes against the grain of violence, not with it. Both the Cold War and South African apartheid ended to the strains of ‘We Shall Overcome.’”

Lewis was scheduled to return to Baltimore next month, to the Creative Alliance at the Patterson, on Eastern Avenue, for the showing of a movie, “Investigation of a Flame,” about the Catonsville Nine. The evening will be dedicated to him.

But now the country has entered the sixth year of another war.

“The civil rights movement remains a model for new democracy, sadly neglected in its own birthplace,” Branch said at the National Cathedral. “In Iraq today, we are stuck on the Vietnam model instead. … We recoil from nonviolence at our peril.”

Forty years ago, Lewis and the Catonsville Nine enraged many. But history has served them well, when we pay attention to it.

Michael Olesker can be reached at olesker@baltimoreexaminer.com