We Can Organize

History is not just an objective record of what has been. It is a reminder of what can be. Useful history offers inspiration but not hagiography, cautionary tales but not empty moralism. The Founding Fathers’ success in establishing new, stable political institutions is tempered by how relatively quickly the society served by those institutions devolved into a civil war. We should never forget that the success of the Civil Rights Movement occurred in the shadow of the earlier, quite enduring success of the Redeemers at the end of Reconstruction. We must never lose hope, for others have succeeded against far worse odds, but we must not forget just how bad things can get, either.

Here at Liberal Currents we are all quite afraid of what Donald Trump will try if he is allowed a second term. Between his track record, his campaign promises, and his Supreme Court effectively granting him legal immunity for his actions, there is ample evidence that his administration would attack the pillars of liberal democracy with impunity. All of us have felt that the ordinary methods of political opposition in regular use today have proven insufficient, that the problem has proven too large, too systematic, that more needs to be done even in the event of a Trump defeat at the polls. Each of us has, therefore, looked back to American history for methods of positive political action that might be useful today. Samantha Hancox-Li, seeing in the constitutional crisis of our moment a parallel to the constitutional crisis precipitated by the Articles of Confederation, looked back to the Founding Fathers. The Founders leveraged a concept of democratic legitimacy in order to circumvent the formal procedures needed to overturn the Articles of Confederation. They successfully replaced the Articles with the Constitution of 1788; we should not assume a repeat performance to be impossible.

Paul Crider, observing the viciousness of red state governments as Trump has successfully remade the party in his image, looked back to Frederick Douglass, who thought seriously about what it meant to be a good liberal who respects rule of law when the evil of slavery is legal. Douglass did not sit passively and wait for the evil laws to be changed; he developed a method of constitutional hardball that still has value today.

In this essay I will look instead to the Civil Rights Movement, in particular, Thomas E. Ricks’ interpretation of it as presented in his book Waging a Good War. Ricks describes the Movement structure and campaigns in military terms, as they often did themselves.This is a useful lens for understanding how they organized themselves, why they made the particular tactical choices they did, and what their overarching strategy was.

The challenges that the Movement faced were distinct from those emphasized by Hancox-Li’s subject or Crider’s. While the Founding Fathers were a cohesive elite that had fought a war together and represented the groups with all the economic and political power in their young country, Movement figures represented a minority of just one region of the country. Where Douglass opposed a slavery enshrined in the Constitution and affirmed by legal institutions, the Jim Crow states were lawless regimes that bucked the Constitution and the federal government, and relied heavily on mobs and the Klan for their enforcement.

A second Trump term would not conform precisely to any of these scenarios, but it is precisely in offering a range of them that history provides its value. Gaining an understanding of the different methods used in different times for different types of problems allows us to be flexible, to expand the options we are able to imagine being available to us today. The opposition to Trump would not be a regional minority the way the Movement was; instead, as Hancox-Li puts it, it “is a majority of the population, controls the majority of the national economy, the major financial, economic, intellectual, and cultural centers.” There is legitimate fear of political violence from MAGA types, but for the most part the problems we face institutionally are more intrinsic to the structure of American federalism and the legal system as currently constituted than was the case for the fight against Jim Crow; in that sense, Crider’s focus on Douglass’s methods is apropos.

Nevertheless, it beggars belief to say that the dominant economic and cultural elites of the country will act boldly of their own accord. They must be galvanized. And while Douglass’s insights are still valuable and relevant today, he was writing before the dawn of mass politics and mass media. The Civil Rights Movement, by contrast, had to galvanize moderates even among Blacks, and ultimately found their success in galvanizing white moderates across the country. They operated at an early stage in the birth of a truly national American media system, a system to which they owed their most dramatic successes, but which was also arguably a chief cause in their undoing.

The Civil Rights Movement has lessons to teach us still. And contrary to conventional wisdom, their methods are very much available to us today.

The methods

The critical components of the Movement, in Ricks’ military interpretation of them, were:

●      Training

●      Discipline

●      Support structures

●      Planning

●      Strategy

●      Reconciliation

All six emphasize the less visible aspects of the Movement. The boycotts, the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides; these were specific, very public actions that activists took which are retold in popular histories of the era. But all of these actions were aimed at some specific strategic objective. All were conducted by activists who had been trained for weeks or months ahead of time, and were monitored by other activists who were given the role of maintaining discipline. All required extensive planning and logistical support. And in every case, there was a great deal of follow-through that occurred once a political victory was won.

Training was a pivotal part of what enabled the success of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1958, James Lawson, then a student at Vanderbilt University’s divinity school in Nashville, Tennessee, began a training program. As Ricks puts it:

Lawson believed that he could turn the city into “a laboratory for demonstrating nonviolence,” and that doing so could plant the seeds for “many Montgomerys.” He set to work, conducting on March 26, 1958, the first of what he called “workshops” but the American military would call intense training and indoctrination. These took place on Tuesday nights, Saturday mornings, and Sunday evenings in church basements, at first with about ten participants, none of them students. But in the fall of 1958, students began to participate, and the workshop group doubled.^[1]

These workshops included discussions of principles and best practices, but it also involved actual practical training, in which some participants roleplayed nonviolent protesters, and others roleplayed the “harassing whites.” Trainees learned to resist their impulse to fight back or flee, as well as to protect their fellow activists if the violence escalated too far against one of them.

Lawson’s workshop was not exceptional in the Movement. Later on, Freedom Schools would attempt to scale up the approach to a certain extent. Even before the Movement properly took off, Rosa Parks had attended a session at the Highlander Folk School, which chiefly focused on preparing labor organizers but from which she took important strategic lessons. As I will discuss further down, much could be gained if the cultural center of gravity for activists in America could shift from the humanities departments of our universities to the more pragmatic type of programs that the Civil Rights Movement benefited from.

Training and discipline of course go hand in hand, as any military expert would tell you. Of course, training is not all there is to discipline; otherwise there would be no need for court-martials. In the case of the Movement:

Protesters needed to be held to their training. Internal observers especially would monitor marches and try to stop anyone deviating into violence, which was essential to maintaining public support. This is also useful in deterring provocateurs working for the foe.^[2]

Activism is a voluntary pursuit where activists cannot truly be forced to do anything by their organizations; unlike an actual military, the enforcement here lacked real teeth. But simply having people on hand who were skilled at defusing conflicts and could intervene before situations spiraled out of control made a difference time and again. These monitors were just one aspect of the support structures in place behind every protest, which “ranged from employing those observers to compiling lists of potential marchers who needed babysitters.”^[3]

It may sound obvious to say that you need a plan and a strategy, but the fact of the matter is that most mass protests today are truly spontaneous, without much pre-planning, if any. The Movement, meanwhile, emphasized having an ultimate objective for every action, and a planning stage in which they thought through the basic details of “If we do this, and they do that, what do we do next?”^[4]

Finally, the Movement’s greatest victories came not through the political defeat of their enemies but by “winning the peace,” the step which Ricks refers to as reconciliation. “The goal is not to crush your opponents but to change them, to find a way to live together down the road.”^[5]

An example of politically defeating their opponents might include the victory of the Montgomery boycotters in court; the Movement did not simply take that victory and move on. Consolidating it took real work. As Ricks recounts, Martin Luther King, Jr. and his colleagues had been preparing the community for what to do after victory for weeks before victory arrived.

Any boycotter who could not behave on the bus with restraint, they instructed, should “walk for another week or two.” And when integrated rides began, the Montgomery Improvement Association assigned two ministers to ride on each line at the morning and evening rush hours to monitor passenger behavior.

This kind of planning and disciplined behavior post-victory helped to entrench the gains. The core organizations of the Movement—the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)—were all exceptionally good at the follow through for every campaign. This is perhaps the most underrated aspect of their success.

The media and its discontents

The birth of broadcast media and big, national mass audiences was a tremendous boon to the Movement. The brutes who formed the backbone of the Jim Crow system relied heavily on the fact that the audiences for their actions were by and large local audiences. Those with the power to change the system did not want to, for their interest was tied up in it or at any rate they did well enough that the risks associated with disrupting the status quo seemed higher. Those who suffered under it were regularly taught lessons in fear.

Television changed this reality. Backwater toughs found themselves faced down by media-savvy activists who exposed them to national audiences. Moreover, activists had the luxury of being selective in their targets, though they did not always succeed in this. History has familiarized most Americans with two high profile Civil Rights campaigns in Alabama, at Birmingham and Selma. Few are familiar with the campaign in Albany, Georgia. In that town, Chief of Police Laurie Pritchett had done his research on the Movement’s tactics and was prepared for them when they arrived. He had done groundwork with authorities outside of his jurisdiction in order to expand the jailing capacity he had personally available to his department. This allowed him to stymie the Movement’s tactic of overfilling jails in order to apply pressure. He also ensured that his deputies all treated the activists gently and respectfully, both when arresting them and when overseeing their imprisonment. Eventually, the Movement had to pull out with little to show for it.

Birmingham’s “Bull” Connor and Selma’s Jim Clark, meanwhile, were vicious by disposition and not particularly canny opponents in general. They unleashed almost theatrical levels of cruelty on the protesters, and theater is exactly what it became. In the case of the famous Selma march, the performance made it to a stage viewed by an audience of 48 million, nearly a quarter of the country’s population, in one single night.^[6]

The growth of a national broadcast media may have been the Movement’s salvation but in many ways it was also its undoing. As Ricks notes:

[I]n the years after Freedom Summer, the image of the civil rights worker inexorably shifted from the low-key voting rights organizer to the angry activist shouting into a microphone in front of a camera. Moses said of Stokely Carmichael that he became “a national media figure, and the organizers stopped organizing because it was more glamorous to do what Stokely was doing.” (. . .) “For the media, you don’t need even an organization, all you need is a charismatic personality,” Moses commented years later. He noted that Jesse Jackson rose to prominence in a similar way: “He is a genius at exploiting the media.” Meanwhile, SNCC’s field operations dwindled, and it became a group less focused on organizing and more on speaking.”^[7]

This was a trend that impacted more than just the Civil Rights Movement, of course. Increasingly, those with the skill of performing on camera displaced those with the skill of training, planning, and executing. In our own era, this trend has accelerated beyond what mere television could cause, as everyone now has a social media profile in which they can aim to make themselves the star of their own story, rather than a good, disciplined, rank and file member of a movement.

Some have understandably concluded from this that the kind of organizing that the Movement engaged in is simply impossible now. After all, how can we possibly expect behavioral discipline at an in-person protest when we cannot even have message discipline under normal circumstances? The idea of even attempting that kind of discipline seems far-fetched; who would want to join an organization that restricted your use of your personal social media?

It is undeniably harder now to pull off what they did than it was at the time. But we greatly underestimate just how hard it was to begin with when we focus on a handful of spectacularly successful organizations over a ten to fifteen year period. There is a reason that segregation and mass disenfranchisement lasted as long as it did, after all.

Moreover, there is a great distance between hard and impossible. We absolutely can organize today, as they did then.

Adapting their approach

Richard Rorty once sang the praises of campaigns over movements because the former is “something finite, something that can be recognized to have succeeded or to have, so far, failed.” Movements, meanwhile “neither succeed nor fail. They are too big and too amorphous to do anything that simple.”

I share Rorty’s fondness for the focused and concrete nature of campaigns, but have to disagree with his assessment of movements. The Civil Rights Movement in particular, was clearly not a single discrete campaign, and did have clear, overarching goals that guided how campaigns were decided on and planned. Though the distinction is muddy, you do need strategy as well as tactics, and to effect drastic change over the long term, you do need a movement as well as particular campaigns.

With the prospect of a second Trump term in front of us, what we need now more than ever is a movement to implement true liberal democracy in America, to shore up its institutional weaknesses. As Samantha Hancox-Li put it, “The constitutional order must be reforged if it is to uphold the fundamental American ideals of freedom, democracy, and equality.” She framed this in particularly American and patriotic terms; the Civil Rights Movement always made sure to do the same, even (or perhaps especially) when they were laying out their heaviest criticisms of the American status quo. That is simply a good rhetorical strategy. The bottom line is that we all know that the American institutional order has grown sclerotic and that this has put Americans in general and our most vulnerable communities in particular at increased risk. Hancox-Li’s suggested end-point is a good one, though it will ultimately be a matter of ongoing discussion among movement members as well as those they attempt to bring into the fold.

The chief infrastructure of the movement should be a replication of the Freedom Schools, or Lawson’s workshops, or the Highland Folk School. These training outfits can be set up as nonprofits, but we must be cautious about how this is pursued. There are an enormous number of liberal-aligned nonprofits that exist today who nevertheless are simply part of the established base of social power that is unlikely to do anything particularly drastic unless properly galvanized. We do not want to simply create another nonprofit of this kind, merely another sponge for cash from Democratic donors. Instead we should aim at more focused, leaner organizations like Run For Something that do just one thing and do it well.

Right now, the drift of some humanities departments towards a high level of abstraction, combined with the discursive incentives created by our present media environment, have resulted in a political culture that is vague on particulars. Large concepts such as patriarchy, structural racism, and capitalism loom over the discussions, but we never seem to get actual analysis of the specifics of these structures. Pragmatic analysis aimed at specific action is entirely absent.

Compare this to Ricks’ description of Lawson’s workshops:

The first step in the workshops was to explain the theory and philosophy of nonviolence. The next step was to introduce tactics—how to translate theory into practice. The third was to determine procedures—how to implement those tactics, step by step.^[8]

We need more organizations and individuals who are focused on creating a culture of activism that is fundamentally practical and not purely theoretical. As Ricks emphasized, there is certainly a role for theory. But the theory of nonviolent direct action was always grounded in the high practical stakes of those putting it into practice, something that cannot truly be said of whatever analogue we may wish to draw to today.

The movement for “the fundamental American ideals of freedom, democracy, and equality” needs to aim to develop, through training and regular community-building, a class of competent and flexible activists. The training will impart knowledge of the best practices needed to conduct a successful campaign, and develop the skills to pull it off. These activists will then be able to come together, either for years at a time as the Civil Rights Movement organizations did, or just to accomplish some goal at some specific time and place, and then disperse.

Truly spontaneous mass protests are here to stay. In many ways, this is a good thing. But horizontalism does not work as a strategy for enacting change. Smaller, disciplined organizations with competent activists can exist alongside unpredictable, unplanned protests. Among the best practices that need to be developed for this community of activists are tactics for taking advantage of spontaneous mass protest when it occurs, turning surprise mass action into specific, concrete gains.

Another important best practice needs to be the development of social media policies for activist groups. I mentioned above that social media has made message discipline very difficult, if not impossible, for any given group these days. Just about every member of any organization is going to be used to casually offering opinions in public, even if only for very small audiences made up largely of acquaintances. When an organization is attempting to walk some political tightrope, they can very easily get pushed off of it because a member posted something which angered the wrong people or was perceived as at odds with the mission of the organization. Less innocently, some members may attempt to better their position in the internal politics of an organization by airing their grievances externally, something that can be fatal for a group’s cohesion and credibility.

People seeking to participate in a particular group’s activism should be required to agree to the group’s social media policies. Just as the SCLC had individuals that monitored marches, contemporary groups need social media monitors to ensure these policies are followed. Enforcement actions can include asking a particular participant to stay off of social media for a week if they are found to have violated the policy. Even in the absence of punishments that have real teeth behind them, expressing clear disapproval on the part of the group for a member’s social media behavior can be a potent tool for reining them in, especially if it is done through a set of rules that all have agreed to. If that is not enough, recalcitrant posters should be removed from the group entirely. This is unlikely to be sustainable in a big organization that is going to be around for years and years, but may be achievable for specific, time-bound campaigns with discrete actions and goals.

A great deal of the original principles of the Movement can be taken on board without modification. For example, the practice of carefully laying the groundwork before engaging in direct action, through information gathering (or “reconnaissance” as Ricks puts it) and by making contact with the local leadership of the communities you seek to mobilize. Or the mantra to “turn negative energy into positive action,”^[9] which sounds a bit New Age but in practice meant that when white supremacists bombed a church, the Movement seized the initiative to get political concessions. The basic playbook still works; there is no reason to reinvent the wheel.

We are already organized

I am not here seeking to pretend that we are lacking for activism, even good, effective activism, on behalf of liberal ideals today. Organizations like Fair Fight Action in Georgia drive voter registration and turnout despite absurd hurdles the state of Georgia has put in place. If the institutionalized nonprofit iteration of Black Lives Matter has faced similar failure modes as other such organizations, its many local chapters (affiliated or not) have done good, nuts and bolts work that we will be hearing about for years to come. Even Occupy Wall Street, which was a failure from all practical points of view on its own, can reasonably be read as step one in the learning process of a new generation entering into the world of activism.

With this essay I hoped only to play my own role as a liberal writer, to unpack the methods of a group of activists which we have had decades to analyze and discuss. The history of Black Lives Matter and everything they have done and will do has yet to be written. But the Civil Rights Movement ended long ago, its most successful actions and greatest failures have been turned over and scrutinized again and again.

What is important to remember is that they did do it, then. And we can do it, now. Whether we must face a second Trump term, or not.

[1] Ricks, Thomas E.. Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 (p. 43). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

[2] Ibid,332.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Gurri, Adam, Law and Social Action (March 20, 2021). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3808658 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3808658. 12.

[7] Ricks, Thomas E.. Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 (p. 246). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

[8] Ibid, 45.

Featured image is James Lawson, by Laura Garcia