Why Marshall Rosenberg Created Nonviolent Communication: Detroit, 1943

The year was 1943. Marshall was eight, and it was his first day at a new school in Detroit.

He arrived late, because he had gotten lost on the way. He tried to lift the top of his desk to put his books inside, the way he had in Ohio, and made a racket doing it. These desks did not open. You slid your books in from the back.

Then the teacher read the roll. “Marshall Rosenberg?” He said “here.” Two boys turned around in their seats, and one of them asked him whether he was a Jew, using a slur he had never heard before. He did not know the word. He knew the tone.

Ask why Marshall Rosenberg created Nonviolent Communication and you usually get a tidy answer: civil rights work in the 1960s, a psychology degree, a wish to help people resolve conflict. All true. But Rosenberg himself kept pointing somewhere earlier and more personal. This is that earlier story, not as a list of dates, but as the place where the question that became NVC was first asked.

Why did Marshall Rosenberg create Nonviolent Communication?

Marshall Rosenberg created Nonviolent Communication because of two questions he carried from childhood: what disconnects people from their compassion so that they hurt each other, and what lets some people stay compassionate even in the worst circumstances. Both questions took hold in Detroit in the summer of 1943, when he lived through a race riot at home and antisemitic violence at school, while watching his family care for his dying grandmother with great tenderness.

He says this himself on the first page of Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. His preoccupation with those two questions, he writes, began around the summer of 1943, when his family moved to Detroit. Everything he built later, the four components, the language of feelings and needs, the practice of empathy, was his attempt to answer them.

For the full arc of his life and work, see our biography of Marshall Rosenberg. What follows stays with the boy.

Marshall Rosenberg’s childhood: from Steubenville to Detroit

Before Detroit, the Rosenbergs lived in Steubenville, Ohio, where his father loaded trucks for a wholesale grocery and Marshall went to a school with three rooms. His mother’s family lived in Detroit, and when someone told them there was work there for his father, they moved.

Starting in 1985, Rosenberg sat down with the researcher Marjorie Cross Witty for a series of life-history interviews, about twenty hours across six meetings, which became part of her 1990 Northwestern University dissertation, Life History Studies of Committed Lives. Most of the details in this article come from his own telling there. He described his first school day in Detroit as one of the sharpest memories of his life.

After school, the boy who had asked the question came up to him and asked again. Behind Marshall, a second boy crouched down, and the first one pushed. Marshall went over, got up, and fought.

What he took from that day was a lesson he carried for decades: you can be hated for something about yourself that you never chose and barely understood. In the book he puts it in one plain line, that he discovered “a name could be as dangerous as any skin color.”

The 1943 Detroit race riot, seen from a window

That same summer, the city exploded. On June 20, 1943, fighting between Black and white young people on Belle Isle spread across Detroit on the back of rumors on both sides. Over the next days, according to the Detroit Historical Society, 34 people were killed, 25 of them Black, and hundreds more were injured before federal troops restored order. Rosenberg remembered the toll as higher, more than forty, which is how a frightened child would hold it.

His family lived in the middle of it. For three days they did not leave the house. From the window, he watched a neighbor across the street load his gun, pick up axe handles, and walk down to the corner, where Black men came looking for work.

Jewish, Black, white. People wanting to hurt each other for what they were. This is the moment he named, years later, as the beginning of his preoccupation with what he called the suffering in this world.

Learning to be invisible, then learning to be tough

There was pain inside the house too. His grandmother, his mother’s mother, was dying of ALS in the dining room. She could not speak. His mother and his uncle did the nursing themselves, because there was no money for anyone else. His parents were consumed by it.

So Marshall kept his fear to himself. There was already too much pain in the house, he said, to add his. He learned to be invisible. He looked for hiding places, under the porch, where he could simply not be seen.

When invisibility failed, he learned the opposite strategy. If other boys believed he might hurt them worse than they had ever been hurt, they would leave him alone. So he practiced the hard face, the growl, the walk. And inside, before every fight, his heart was pounding and he dreaded what was coming.

It is worth pausing here, because this is NVC’s view of violence in miniature. The tough walk was not cruelty. It was a strategy, chosen by a scared child to meet a need for safety. Decades later Rosenberg would teach that every action, including the ones we find hardest to forgive, is an attempt to meet a need. He learned that first by watching himself.

Uncle Julius: the other half of the question

If the street taught him the first question, his uncle answered the second before Marshall could even ask it.

Every day, his uncle Julius came to the house to nurse the grandmother. And every time Marshall walked into the room, Julius lit up. Rosenberg said it was as if the most wonderful child in the world had just arrived. Julius would beam and say the same thing every time: “That’s my boy!” He was like that with everybody.

Hated in the street. Loved, without conditions, by his uncle.

Much later, when Julius was dying, Rosenberg went to ask him how he had been able to give like that. Julius said he had had good teachers, and that the best of them was the woman he had cared for all those years: Marshall’s grandmother, his mother-in-law. Rosenberg tells a version of this conversation in Nonviolent Communication too.

This is the part of the origin story most retellings leave out. NVC did not grow only out of a wish to understand violence. It grew just as much out of a wish to understand people like Julius, who stayed compassionate inside the same hard world. The question was never only “why are people cruel?” It was also “how do some people stay kind, and can that be learned?”

The question that became NVC

Somewhere between the street and the dining room, a question was born in him. In his words to Witty, it was a desire, vague at first, to figure out why people caused each other to suffer, and to find something he could actually do about it.

You can trace that question through everything that followed:

• High school. For a term paper, he chose criminal psychology: why do people behave in criminal ways toward each other?
• Psychology. He went on to a PhD in clinical psychology at the University of Wisconsin and studied with Carl Rogers, whose work on empathy shaped his own. We tell that part of the story in Marshall Rosenberg and Carl Rogers.
• Civil rights. In the 1960s he worked on school desegregation and mediated in some of the most tense rooms in the country. Out of that work came the Center for Nonviolent Communication, which he founded in 1984.
• Language. While studying what keeps people compassionate, he wrote, he was struck by the crucial role of language and our use of words. That observation became the four components of NVC: observation, feeling, need and request.

So the honest answer to “why did he create it?” is less a career decision than a lifelong attempt to make sense of one summer. A boy who learned that a name could get him beaten, and that an uncle’s welcome could undo a day of it, grew into a man who spent the rest of his life asking which kind of language produces which kind of world.

If you want to see how that question looks today when ordinary people practice it together, our year-long NVC Learning Community is built around the same two questions: what disconnects us, and what brings us back.

Why the name “nonviolent”?

Rosenberg chose “nonviolent” in the sense Gandhi used it: our compassionate nature when violence has left our hearts. Many people find the word odd, since most of us do not think of our everyday talk as violent. But the boy at the window had seen where judgment of a whole group of people leads. To him, the line between a slur at roll call and a neighbor with an axe handle was not a long one. He also used the name “compassionate communication,” and you will find the practice under both names; we explain the overlap in compassionate communication.

Frequently asked questions

Who started Nonviolent Communication? Marshall B. Rosenberg (1934 to 2015), an American clinical psychologist and mediator, developed Nonviolent Communication starting in the 1960s. He founded the Center for Nonviolent Communication in 1984 and taught the process in more than 60 countries.

What happened to Marshall Rosenberg as a child? His family moved from Ohio to Detroit in 1943, shortly before the Detroit race riot. He spent three days locked in the house during the violence and was beaten at his new school for being Jewish. At home his grandmother was dying of ALS, cared for by his mother and his uncle Julius.

What were the two questions behind NVC? In his own words, he wanted to know what disconnects us from our compassionate nature and leads us to behave violently, and what allows some people to stay connected to that nature even under the most trying circumstances. NVC is his answer to both.

What is the purpose of Nonviolent Communication? Its purpose is to help people connect in a way that lets compassion flow naturally, so that everyone’s needs can be met. It does this by shifting attention from judgment and blame to observations, feelings, needs and requests. Our plain-language overview of what NVC is covers the basics.

Is the origin story in his book? Partly. The first chapter of Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life describes the summer of 1943, the riot and the roll call. The fuller story, including Uncle Julius and the boy’s strategies of invisibility and toughness, comes from life-history interviews he gave Marjorie Cross Witty starting in 1985, published in her 1990 dissertation.

Before it had a name

There is something steadying in knowing that NVC was not invented by someone who had it easy. It was built, slowly, by a boy who learned to hide under a porch and to fake a scary walk, and who never stopped wondering why his uncle could do what the street could not.

Most of us carry some version of his two questions. Maybe not from a riot, but from a family dinner, a classroom, a workplace. The practice he left is one way of keeping both questions open at the same time.