Divisions among the people contribute to the discouragement which many feel today. As I recently suggested, Pope Francis' climate encyclical, Laudato Si, calling for a politics of inclusive dialogue and empowering civic action, a "politics of a common life," offers resources for overcoming such divisions. It goes beyond the good versus evil mindset that often characterizes efforts to address challenges of climate change.
The Pope follows in the tradition of Martin Luther King and others in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Keenly aware of the power of southern segregationists, they advanced a politics aimed at winning over the broad middle of American society. This politics is not well known by a new generation of activists on college campuses and elsewhere who are schooled by door-to-door issue canvassing based on good versus evil scripts, mass media full of labeling and demonization, and polarizing interpretations of movements like civil rights. As Gerald Taylor, a black youth leader in the civil rights movement who became one of the greatest organizers and public intellectuals of my generation told me in an interview, "There is a place for protest in any movement. The question is, What comes next?"
King was schooled by leaders and organizers like Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Stanley Levinson who themselves had been shaped by the movements and politics of the 1930s. They had learned the hard lesson that to secure deep democratic change and to win the struggle against fascism required recognizing the immense complexity of every community and finding ways to build broad alliances. Saul Alinsky, a key architect of community organizing also shaped by the thirties' movements, summarized this lesson in Reveille for Radicals,
"You start with the people, their traditions, their prejudices, their habits, their attitudes, and all of those other circumstances that make up their lives....To understand the traditions of a people is . . . to ascertain those social forces which argue for constructive democratic action as well as those which obstruct democratic action."
In this vein, King constantly put forward a public narrative to "win over the middle of America," a phrase of Bayard Rustin. He recognized what community organizers called "the world as it is," full of diverse interests, ironies, and contradictions. His speech, "The Drum Major Instinct," March 4, 1968, conveys these themes and an alliance-building politics with a story.
"When we were in jail in Birmingham the other day, the white wardens enjoyed coming around the cell to talk about the race problem...showing us where segregation was so right. So we would get to talking...about where they lived, and how much they were earning. And when those brothers told me what they were earning, I said, 'Now, you know what? You ought to be marching with us...You fail to see that the same forces that oppress Negroes in American society oppress poor white people. All you are living on is the satisfaction of...thinking that you are somebody big because you are white.'"
When I was working for SCLC in St. Augustine, Florida, I told King about being freed by the Klu Klux Klan after we discussed how they were being used by big shots and the idea that they might make alliances with blacks. King assigned me to organize poor whites, which I did in Durham, North Carolina, for six years in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In our community organization, ACT, we saw many examples of poor whites giving up the satisfaction of thinking they were "somebody big" because of skin color. People reached across the color line in ways which continue to ripple through the political culture of the city.
Today's young activists know little of such experiences. Instead they mostly hear interpretations which neglect the pluralistic, inclusive politics at the movement's heart. For instance, in her influential biography of Ella Baker, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement described in my last blog, and in other writings, the activist historian Barbara Ransby weakens her account by dismissing King as a "top-down leader." She gives no recognition to the cross-partisan, pluralistic, democratic politics of SCLC.
Instead, she touts highly polarizing groups like the Black Panthers as exemplary. She neglects the fact that Baker believed in politics which could win broad majority support, based on her thirties' experiences. In her treatments of movements today such as a recent piece in Colorlines on the Black Lives Matter protests, Ransby praises "revolutionary" language and argues that "the most oppressed" are the vanguard of change.
An alienated stance is likely to alienate most people.
In contrast, the foundations of the movement were SCLC's grassroots Citizenship Education Program (CEP), as well as freedom schools of SNCC and youth councils and adult branches of NAACP. CEP's goal, according to Septima Clark, was "to broaden the scope of democracy to include everyone and deepen the concept to include every relationship." From 1961 to 1968, CEP, directed by Dorothy Cotton, trained more than 8,000 people at the Dorchester Center in McIntosh, Georgia, who returned to their communities and trained tens of thousands more in community organizing skills and nonviolent change-making. The focus was not only on skills but also on shifts in identity from oppressed victim to constructive agent of change. As Cotton describes in If Your Back's Not Bent: The Role of the Citizenship Education Program in the Civil Rights Movement, "People who had lived for generations with a sense of impotence, with a consciousness of anger and victimization, now knew in no uncertain terms that if things were going to change, they themselves had to change them."
King often spent time with participants, who showed him that people who experienced terrible injustice could discipline anger in ways that made them role models for the nation. He often told their stories.
Young people need to hear these. And as Gerald Taylor says, young activists need to move "from protest to governance." Taylor observes that skills of mobilizing are different than skills of governing, working with others across differences to solve problems and create civic goods, and building sustainable centers of democratic power. Without such skills of governing and building, preexisting power groups will take over.
In my next blog I take up this approach, using experiences from the 1990s.