There are over 200,000 migrant domestic workers living in Lebanon today — a large number when you considered that Lebanon’s population is only a little over 4 million. Most migrant workers live with their Lebanese employers, cleaning their houses, washing their clothes, cooking their food and looking after their children. Yet these workers are not included under Lebanon’s labor laws — they are not entitled to basic rights such as minimum wages, maximum working hours, and holiday or sick pay. Many never get a day off. Those that do are often not even allowed to leave their employers’ houses.

The suicide last month of Ethiopian domestic worker and mother of two Alem Dechasa, who was publicly beaten in front of the Ethiopian embassy she had been trying to escape to for help, caused a wave of outrage around the globe after a film of the beating was circulated. But hers is by no means an isolated case.
According to a report by Human Rights Watch migrant domestic workers in Lebanon are dying at a rate of more than one person a week. The report revealed that many of these deaths are suicides; most of the rest are accidental deaths caused by workers falling from high buildings while attempting to flee abusive employers.

Last Sunday over 1,000 people gathered in Beirut in a march organized by the human rights watchdog Anti-Racism Movement, along with the migrant workers’ communities and several non-governmental organizations, among them the Danish Refugee Council, the Insan Association, the Nisawiya women’s rights group, and Pastoral Care of Afro-Asian Migrants.

The event was intended to raise awareness of migrant workers’ unfair treatment and demand improvements to their situation, in particular that migrant domestic workers be included under Lebanese labor laws and the abolition of the kafala, or sponsorship system which ties workers to a single employer. The event, also intended as a celebration of Labor Day, was held two days before the national holiday since most migrant workers get only Sundays off — if they get time off at all.

The march was followed by a cultural celebration in which migrant communities from Sri Lanka, Nepal, Cameroon, India, Madagascar, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, the Congo and the Philippines performed dances and served traditional food. Domestic workers from Nigeria, Sudan and several other African and Asian countries were also in attendance, along with Lebanese and international activists and supporters.

The sponsorship system in Lebanon means that migrant workers’ immigrant status in the country is dependent on them working for a single employer who is legally responsible for them. As a result the majority of domestic workers live as well as work in their employers’ homes “for their own protection,” leaving them subject to human rights abuses. These commonly include confiscation of their passports and other papers, restriction of movement — the majority of employers do not allow workers to leave the house or even make phone calls — late payment or even non-payment of wages, no restriction of working hours, as well as physical, sexual and verbal abuse.

The system makes it extremely difficult for migrant workers to seek legal aid. They are not allowed to leave the country or change employers without consent from their sponsors, who often demand enormous sums of money to return their documents. If they leave their employer, even under abusive conditions, they automatically lose their immigration status in the country because the kafala system legally binds them to their sponsor.

Workers from a large number of communities came together to promote their common cause in Sunday’s march, carrying signs which read “Stop human trafficking of migrant workers in Lebanon,” “When will we start criminalizing racism?” and “Workers not slaves.”

“The migrant workers make an important contribution to society and to the individual households,” said Pendaline Pinero, a Filipina community leader. “Their work should be recognized by the government. They should be part of the labor law.”

The atmosphere in Sunday was festive, as crowds gathered to watch traditional dances, eat, drink and celebrate the attendance at the peaceful protest.

In spite of the difficulties they face, however, the domestic workers attending Sunday’s event were the lucky ones — those who have time off and are allowed to spend it outside their employers’ houses.

A 2011 report on human trafficking in Lebanon by non-governmental organization and women’s rights group KAFA, quoted excerpts of telephone interviews with domestic workers unable to leave the house, many of whom are still working in Lebanon, but unable to attend events such as Sunday’s march.

“I cannot leave my employer’s house and I cannot even call my family,” one Filipina worker told KAFA, while an Ethiopian worker said: “I was beaten by my first sponsor and sexually harassed by the next one. I worked long hours and did not get proper food.”

Another Ethiopian worker reported: “I have been working for one year for my employer, but he has paid me only $500 so far. When I asked for my salary once my sponsor hit me. I want to change my employer. But I don’t know how. I don’t know how to get help.”

While Sunday’s event was a step in the right direction there is still a long way to go. NGOs such as the Insan Association and KAFA hold peaceful demonstrations in Beirut on a regular basis, aiming to raise awareness and increase pressure on the Lebanese government to make some much needed changes to the current situation.

Rola Abi Mourched, program coordinator at KAFA, said Thursday that the government has yet to respond to Sunday’s protest. “We’ve been having meetings with different stakeholders and ministers,” she said. “The next step is to continue putting pressure on the government and raising awareness to encourage the public to support these changes… We plan to continue putting pressure on the Lebanese government by conducting individual meetings with decision makers to advocate for alternatives to the sponsorship system.”

In February KAFA held a public discussion with the former Minister of Labor, Dr. Charbel Nahhas, who announced that he had submitted a number of suggested amendments to the labor law to the government before his resignation earlier that month. These include changes which would require domestic workers’ salaries be paid into a bank account subject to scrutiny to ensure wages are paid in full, that a translator be present when workers sign a contract at the Ministry of Labor, and allow workers to terminate their contracts through a notification system.

Prior to his resignation Charbel had announced that he would look at abolishing the sponsorship system, stating that migrant household and agricultural workers should be included under the labor law. “Any law that takes into account the nationality of workers,” the former minister wrote on Twitter, “is tantamount to racial discrimination.”

Charbel’s replacement as labor minister, Salim Jreissati, has yet to announce any plans to put an end to discrimination against migrant workers.

A leaflet published by the Insan Association and its partner AIDA states: “Much more needs to be done. Migrant domestic workers need to be able to socially integrate into Lebanese society and enjoy their rights as full citizens in this country.”

From StrikeEverywhere.net's "Efforts of the General Strike Public Redecoration Committee."

“So are we in solidarity with each other, or are we united?”

This question came up yet again on Monday night, at the final coalition meeting for May Day that included people from organized labor, immigrants’ groups and Occupy Wall Street. It came in the midst of a debate about whether or not we should designate separate zones for various coalition partners during our joint evening march. Trying to mash everyone into one giant group might create a sense of unity, but then the groups’ individual needs might not be met. Occupiers whispered to each other about how the lack of a defined OWS zone would mean the unions would end up marshalling our contingent. In the end, everyone agreed that separate zones were most appropriate; true solidarity with one another meant recognizing our diverse methods of organizing and tactics for resistance.

Achieving apparent unity is easy; whoever shouts the loudest or lobbies the hardest typically wins over the group. It is solidarity — respecting each other’s particular methods and skill sets — that is truly revolutionary. Trying to impose unity over the entire action would leave no one satisfied, and it would actually serve to divide us. This solidarity-versus-unity struggle has been playing out inside OWS as a whole for a while now, as well as in our May Day planning meetings. After months of trying to impose decisions upon each other, which was serving only to divide us, the May Day planning committee has quietly moved away from unity and towards solidarity. It’s about time.

The call to help organize a national general strike on May Day had no lack of interested parties in New York City from a diverse cross-section of activists. The first call to meet as an “exploratory committee” brought together around 75 people back in January, including radicals from Occupy Wall Street and across New York City, alongside seasoned labor organizers and others. This diversity has persisted throughout the planning process, resulting in some incredible breakthroughs and synergy, as well as deep reflection and sometimes painful challenges.

Anarchists like myself are accustomed to striving to create “safer spaces” where we do our best to check our privileges of every kind at the door. This compels us to develop particular strategies to raise up marginalized voices by adhering to consensus process and respecting each other’s autonomy to make our own tactical and strategic choices. Becoming accustomed to these ways of interacting with one another can make it difficult for anti-authoritarians to organize in other types of spaces, where people are more used to organizing hierarchically. The first few OWS May Day meetings were well-populated with radical feminists, queer anarchists, insurrectionists and others from the New York anarchist community. As has been happening in OWS as a whole, many of these people began feeling uncomfortable and marginalized in those meetings and, by and large, stopped attending. But many of us did remain in the project and continued working with an ever-growing coalition of OWS folks, labor and immigrant worker justice groups. This coalition, in itself, is historic.

Our coalition partners wanted to set up a “4×4” steering committee with four representatives from each of the four groups: organized labor, the May 1st Coalition for Worker and Immigrant Rights, community-based organizations and Occupy Wall Street. But since the Occupy movement tends to operate on the core anarchist principles of horizontality and consensus, having formal representatives of any kind at the 4×4 wouldn’t work for us. We informed our partners that we would feel more comfortable using a spokescouncil at these meetings. This would mean that as many OWS folks as wished to attend would be welcome, and the four people empowered to speak at a given time would act as non-autonomous spokes, reflecting to our partners the will of the group seated behind them. For large decisions, we would need to take a brief break and come to consensus as a group before reporting back to the coalition.

Our partners were very receptive to us operating in this manner, and it even seemed like a bit of our horizontally rubbed off on them. When it was time to open up the process and call large meetings to plan the details of the solidarity march, they at first suggested that each group should get only one vote — total. OWS balked at this, and an agreement was reached to use a two-thirds-majority, modified-consensus system. This means that, first, we check for full consensus from the group, and if there are people opposed, we hear them voice their concerns before moving to a vote. Whether these processes will have a long-term effect on our partners remains to be seen, but it is something of which I am very excited and proud to have been a part.

Many of the radicals who stopped attending the early meetings moved on to work with Strike Everywhere, an autonomous group of anti-authoritarians who were agitating for a general strike in New York, outside of OWS. This model of working with exclusively like-minded folks was appealing to many of the anarchists in the OWS group, many of whom had started to feel similarly disenfranchised. A lot of the remaining anarchist organizers began working almost exclusively in clusters that featured a distinctly anti-authoritarian bent, with names like Action, Mutual Aid or Strike. Over time, as the character of each became more well-defined, all the various clusters in the project began to respect each other’s autonomy, unique skills and interests. Once we stopped constantly trying to make decisions for each other, our meetings became much more cohesive, and coordination went much more smoothly.

Meanwhile, both of the main decision-making bodies in OWS — the Spokes Council and the General Assembly — gradually became non-functional and were disbanded. Movement-wide projects are now being organized in more decentralized ways, with various groups simply coordinating with one another rather than trying to make decisions together. While some see this as a failure of process, I think it’s really one more stop in the movement’s ongoing experimentation toward a directly-democratic society. Trying to impose “unity” over the movement with the GA and Spokes led to infighting and marginalization. Being in solidarity with one another allows different groups with different backgrounds to work together effectively without trying to control one another.

Despite the struggles and the experimentation, the successes of the May Day planning group and the larger coalition are undeniable. A broad coalition of labor, immigrant worker justice groups, community organizations, Occupy assemblies and students has been forged. Through a decentralized action model, there will be dozens of simultaneous direct actions across the city, creating time and space between ones that are family-friendly and others that are more aggressive. Thousands of people will be sharing resources and skills, practicing and learning about mutual aid in Bryant Park and Union Square. Students will be walking out of their schools and opening a free university. Workers will be occupying their workplaces, kicking out exploitative bosses and managing the businesses for themselves. A call for a general strike was made, and endorsed by the largest labor organization in New Jersey, the Industrial Labor Council. Ways have been found for other labor groups to participate without breaking laws against striking, by calling for a “99 Pickets” action that will aim to shut down the flow of finance capital in Midtown on the morning of May Day.

I’m proud to have worked beside hundreds of others on this project, and I am confident that the effects of May Day will bellow out across the globe. But I can’t help but wonder how much more we could have accomplished if it hadn’t taken us three long months to realize that we needed to act in solidarity with each other, not in some kind of unity. Regardless, I count this gradual discovery among the many successes of anarchist organizing models in the brief history of this movement.

It was a great action. Three years ago, seven activists went to the Alamance County Detention Center in Graham, North Carolina. Two were dressed like ICE agents (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and a third looked like Lady Liberty. In a bold and creative action aimed at drawing attention to the unjust, unfair and racially biased immigration practices, the activists tried to convince jail officials to take Lady Liberty into custody. The rest of the activists blocked the doors to the jail facility.

Immigration is a hot button issue in this area of North Carolina, which has one of the fastest growing Latino populations in the country, mostly because of labor needed in poultry processing plants and agricultural fields.

Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson has taken a tough stance on undocumented people. Local authorities are part of 287(g), exercising authority as federal immigration agents under the Immigration and Nationality Act. The program is justified by its intent to pursue violent criminals and terrorism suspects. But in North Carolina, it has meant a lot of traffic violations for Latinos.

Deborah Weissman, a law professor at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, testified before the House of Representatives in April 2009 that:

In Alamance County, approximately seventy percent of immigrants detained through 287(g) were arrested on routine traffic offenses; another sixteen percent for driving while impaired charges, and only fifteen percent for felony charges. Furthermore, local law enforcement have set up roadblocks for the purpose of checking licenses outside of Latino markets on the weekends and on Sundays, they have stationed themselves at roads that provide access to Latino churches. Because these roadblock checkpoints are excluded from racial profiling data collection, it is difficult to know the statistics of individuals arrested pursuant to these tactics; however, their location is indicative of an effort to target Latinos as they go about their family shopping and worship.

That testimony is confirmed by a study from Elon University political science Professor Laura Roselle who reviewed Alamance police records and found that sheriff’s deputies stopped and cited 1,344 Hispanics over the same five-year period, or 850 more stops than the sheriff’s office reported to the State Bureau of Investigation. Professor Roselle concluded that “I believe the sheriff’s department is unfairly targeting Hispanics.”

All of this means money for the Sheriff Terry Johnson. It is a perverse engine of economic growth for the region. The federal government paying local authorities $66 per undocumented per night in detention. In February 2008 alone, “bed rentals” to ICE brought in $400,000 in federal money, the sheriff boasted.

But it is not just about dollars, it is also about bias, ignorance and prejudice. In a 2007 local newspaper interview, Sheriff Johnson complained that immigrants just aren’t like us: “Their values are a lot different — their morals — than what we have here. In Mexico, there’s nothing wrong with having sex with a 12-, 13-year-old girl… They do a lot of drinking down in Mexico.”

But getting back to Lady Liberty. The police eventually did arrest her and the six others and local courts put them on trial.

But, justice was not swift, because the last two defendants just reported for their jail sentences yesterday. Lady Liberty (aka Audrey Schwankl) has already served her sentence, another was convicted in district court, the cases against two defendants were dropped, and the last defendant — Juan Montes — died following heart surgery in October 2009. He was 44, married with two daughters.

The small drama of two men headed off to jail — Patrick O’Neill and Francisco Risso — is happening against the backdrop of a national furor over immigration as the Supreme Court hears the case of Arizona’s draconian immigration law — SB 1070, which requires that law enforcement personnel question people about their immigration status if they have a reasonable suspicion that person is an illegal immigrant.

Patrick and Francisco refused to pay fines stemming from their cases. They were sentenced to eight months unsupervised probation, ten-day suspended jail sentences, $200 fines, and more than $300 each in court costs. As O’Neill, a Catholic Worker and father of eight from Raleigh, told the court “On moral grounds with all due respect and good conscience, I cannot pay fines and court costs to a system that’s mistreating my Latino brothers and sisters.” We wish them luck as they begin their jail sentence, and say thank you for their nonviolent witness.

The manager of a Hot and Crusty bakery on New York’s Upper East Side watched through the window as a handful of workers speaking broken English passed out fliers to customers inside. Across the street, a private detective in a shiny black SUV surveyed the scene as potential customers and well-dressed women scanned the quarter-sheets detailing the chain restaurant’s abuses: below-minimum-wage paychecks, threats of cutting hours, refusal to negotiate with the workers for safer conditions. (Other violations were left off, including multiple accounts of sexual harassment.) One of the workers exiting the restaurant flashed those flyering a discrete thumbs-up.

The workers were from another branch of the chain bakery 20 blocks south, where they launched a successful organizing campaign with the help of the Laundry Workers Center. Now, as they continued to push for negotiations, the team was expanding to other restaurants to put pressure on the owners.

A coalition including Occupy Wall Street, unions and community groups have called for “a day without the 99%” on May 1. One of the greatest challenges in preparation for that has been organizing precarious workers — those in non-unionized sectors like restaurants, domestic care, retail and freelancing, where jobs turn over fast and some lack U.S. work permits. Yet the Laundry Workers Center, which is part of the May Day coalition, is organizing worker-led campaigns capable of escalating to actions such as walkouts and facility takeovers if wages and conditions don’t improve. Even within unionized sectors, these types of workplace actions are rare in the United States. Yet this is just the kind of radical, unsanctioned organizing that the Occupy movement is trying to help spread through the call for a general strike that many assemblies have issued for May Day.

The Laundry Workers Center (LWC) formed last year to fill the gap between unions and charitable service providers, which help provide workers with additional skills or U.S. work permits but little more. The mission was to organize laundromats — a sector that has never been organized in New York City on a mass scale — and the group plans to launch a 15-laundromat campaign later this year.

Workers from Hot and Crusty approached the young LWC in the fall, after being turned away by a handful of other organizations. Following an eight-week crash course in political consciousness and race and gender equality, the 14 workers launched their first action on January 21, the coldest day of the winter.

Amid the falling snow and bitter temperatures, a crowd of 50 workers, family members and Occupy Wall Street activists gathered a few blocks north of the restaurant at 63rd Street and 2nd Avenue, stamping their feet and blowing hot air into cupped hands. The week before, LWC organizer Virgilio Aran had laid out his honest expectations: it was almost a certainty that the workers would all be fired. The group marched toward the restaurant chanting “Jefes, escucha, el pueblo esta de lucha!” (Bosses, listen, the people are in the fight!) Inside the building, the remaining workers walked off their stations and, together, they presented the manager with the list of their demands: improved workplace conditions and wage increases.

“You don’t know what you just did,” the manager hissed at one of the workers. Yet within months, instead of being fired, the workers had been offered keys to the store by corporate higher-ups, the branch manager asked to join the campaign and Aran won the right to organize in the restaurant — an unprecedented victory for a non-unionized workplace. Yet, behind the scenes, management is building its resistance, hiring an anti-union lawyer and threatening every worker and organizer with a lawsuit.

As the campaign builds, the stakes of repression are getting higher, with organizers warning of conspiracy charges and managers using the police and immigration offices to intimidate the workers. At one of the last actions, for example, a manager tried to disperse the protest by calling the cops. Yet the workers stayed put, even ridiculing their boss when the police couldn’t prevent illegal flyering.

“When he saw that, the boss was so nervous,” says one of the workers.

The Hot and Crusty workers are prepared to escalate as well, through walkouts, lock-ins and a possible occupation of the workplace itself — all tactics that might be expected in Buenos Aires a decade ago, but hardly in today’s mid-Manhattan. Today, the workers and their supporters plan to occupy restaurant chain owner Mark Samson’s Park Avenue office.

The workers’ fearlessness in the face of harsh consequences suggests that the campaign has become about much more than negotiating for these particular jobs at this particular chain store. Rather, it’s the beginning of a renewed struggle for precarious workers everywhere to gain power and control in their own workplaces, on their own terms.

Watch a video of a discussion about immigrant worker justice at an Occupy Wall Street planning meeting for May Day:

Poster by Nina Montenegro, via Occuprint.

An Occupy Wall Street organizer I know — one of the original ones, from the planning meetings before the occupation began last September 17 — has a striking banner atop his Facebook Timeline. It’s from the History Channel series Life After People, an artist’s rendition of a cityscape after which all the humans in it somehow disappear. It’s quiet, and still, with trees growing out from the sides of crumbling towers.

To say that this image has anything to do with the movement’s plans for May 1, which the person who posted it is involved in making, might cause both paranoid-style right-wing radio hosts and the most anarcho- of primitivists to froth a bit at the mouth. And so they should. Ever since the idea of working toward May Day started catching on in Occupy Wall Street last January, it has been infused with the impulse of creating the vision of a radically different kind of city.

The visionary impulse, however, has also mixed with things more mundane. Over the course of the May Day planning process in New York, in at least two meetings each week, OWS organizers have been patiently patching together an historic joint rally and march with labor unions, immigrants’ rights groups and community organizations, many of which were invited to participate in the planning process since the beginning.

The members of this tenuous coalition, however, have refused to demand the impossible together — which is to say, a general strike. Instead, the coalition speaks of “a day without the 99%” and the slogan, “Legalize, Unionize, Organize.” But at just about every other opportunity, people from OWS have been echoing the call for a general strike on May Day, which originated from Occupy Los Angeles’ General Assembly in December. During the April 4 press conference announcing the New York coalition’s plans, the OWS representative avoided saying those words, but after his speech he stripped down to an undershirt with “general strike” scrawled on it in red.

Meanwhile, a group called Strike Everywhere, consisting of “anarchists, anti-capitalists and autonomists,” has made a general strike its unapologetic mission, and it is busy covering the city and the Internet with propaganda, both beautiful and obscene, to agitate for revolt. Some of its members have even constituted a tantalizing Central Park Exploratory Committee, which has yet to disclose its intentions to the public.

Such calls for a general strike raise challenging questions about what a strike could even look like in a society with the lowest rates of union membership in generations. Employment is often episodic, inadequate and undemocratic, yet people seem to lack any inkling that things could be otherwise. Unlike more traditional union-based strikes, also, OWS offers no provisions for long-term support for strikers who suffer retaliation from bosses. What, then, could feasible striking mean? What new forms of workplace organizing could there be, besides unions that have their hands tied in contracts and repressive laws?

A strike, if it actually happens on May 1 or thereafter, may not look like one ever has before. Strike Everywhere, for instance, has been holding assemblies for “precarious and service workers” as a way to create new solidarity networks, and numerous social media accounts are trying to do the same online. Tumblrs have appeared  collecting people’s various ideas for how and why they plan to strike. For those who can’t skip work or school, OWS recommends at least a consumer boycott: no housework, no shopping, no banking. And, of course, “TAKE THE STREETS!!!!!” Much like the Adbusters call that resulted in Occupy Wall Street itself, the logic of May Day has been to start with the impossible and figure out the possible from there.

The plan for the day, insofar as there is any single plan, starts at 8 a.m. in Bryant Park, in Midtown. From there, Occupiers and allied organizations will break off into pickets and other kinds of groupings, each targeting one or several of the many corporations with offices in the surrounding skyscrapers. Meanwhile, in the park, there will be a bazaar of “mutual aid,” with food, trainings, medical care, teach-ins, radio transmitters, massages, bike repair, free stores and more. Over the course of the afternoon, the theater of action will shift (likely by way of a ruckus march) down toward Union Square, where the unions and immigrants’ rights groups will by rallying. From there, at around 5:30, there will be a safe, taxi-led, permitted march further down, through Foley Square and into the Financial District. The general consensus seems to be that the bulk of arrests will be saved for after that — for whatever the night will hold.

When the subset of Occupiers preparing for May Day aren’t planning, or wheatpasting posters, or viral-video making, or negotiating, or tweeting, they’re studying history — the Haymarket Massacre, Rosa Luxemburg, and so on — through old films, teach-ins, zines and the movement-made magazine Tidal. They’re also warming up in the streets.

Every Friday, there are “Spring Training” marches to greet the closing bell of the Stock Exchange, and at each Occupiers test out a new creative tactic, like “civilian,” in which they revert to non-protester status so as to evade police blockades, or “melt,” in which they collapse into a disarming die-in or cuddle-puddle. Spring Training culminates in the “people’s gong,” replacing the NYSE’s bell with the voices of Occupiers standing in concentric circles and crying, “Ding!”

On April 17, too, Occupiers will be testing their synergy in the streets for Tax Day actions with many of the institutional allies who will come out in much greater force on May 1. This comes at the end of a nationwide effort called the 99% Spring, in which 100,000 Americans are supposed to be receiving training in nonviolent action, and it will be the first test of a newly-trained populace, just in time for May Day.

After the big day itself, though, nobody knows what will happen. There is a suspicious, almost apocalyptic silence about this among organizers. They call for a general strike on May 1, but is the idea to go back to work on May 2? They talk about building power for the 99 percent, but for what? Some, at least, have been murmuring about the international days of action called for in Europe on May 12 and 15. The 12th, in New York, is also the anniversary of a major march on Wall Street last year. A few Occupiers here are planning to go to Chicago to protest the NATO summit on May 20 and 21. But above all there’s the feeling that if May Day goes well — as, for the movement not to suffer a crushing disappointment, it must — then what follows will unfold organically from there, in a city somehow not quite like the present one and which, from this side of May 1, we cannot really imagine.

Memorial in Delhi to Ganhi's Salt March. By Tom Jordan, via Flickr.

What do Native Americans, Costa Ricans, Thai villagers, Hispanic students in U.S. colleges, Indian independence activists and Maasai women have in common? They’ve all organized long marches as part of campaigns for justice. Their campaigns’ very different choices about how to use the tactic raises strategic questions for us today. In some campaigns the long march was used primarily to heighten awareness, while in others it was to gain new allies. Sometimes it was used to launch other kinds of direct action. It has also been used at the end of a campaign, to escalate the pressure (just as a general strike is sometimes used). But what conditions make a long walk a truly effective tactic in a campaign, rather than just a chance to get some good exercise?

For me, that question is personal right now. On April 30, I will begin a 200-mile walk to the Pittsburgh, PA, headquarters of the PNC Bank to challenge its funding of mountaintop removal coal mining. The march is organized by the Philadelphia-based Earth Quaker Action Team as part of its BLAM! campaign: Bank Like Appalachia Matters! For that reason — and with the help of the Global Nonviolent Action Database — I’ve been reviewing the ways in which long marches like this have been used by others, with varying degrees of success.

One of the most recent long walks was taken by four Miami College undocumented students who walked from Florida to the U.S. Capitol in support of the immigration reform proposed in the Dream Act. They called their 2010 march The Trail of Dreams. They not only ended up expanding support for the legislation, but also stimulated five students to add an additional walk of 250 miles from New York to Washington, timed to arrive at the same time as the walkers from Miami. Although the Dream Act was not passed, the action certainly increased the momentum behind it.

In 2009, Tanzanian police set fire to eight Maasai villages to evict 3,000 people who were living on traditional land that the government secretly leased to a wealthy businessman from the United Arab Emirates for his hunting and recreation. Widespread protests were stonewalled by the government. Thousands of women in the region then decided to march back to the village area in April 2010; despite arrests and blockades along the way, 1,500 women made it. The women had as allies a network of NGOs, three leaders of which were arrested as well.

Also in 2010, Costa Rican protesters marched from San Jose to Las Crucitas, over 100 miles, to overturn a government decision that permitted open-pit gold mining. The stakes were high: A Canadian subsidiary wanted to mine an estimated $1 billion gold deposit, even though it would remove 600 acres of yellow almond trees — the main food for the endangered green macaw. The march, along with an occupation, hunger strike and other actions, forced a Congressional vote to ban all new open-pit mining projects, and in a court case the protesters won a ban of the Las Crucitas mine.

Most U.S. activists have heard of the 1965 Selma–Montgomery march in Alabama that brought to a peak a national crisis that forced the U.S. federal government to pass a voting-rights law to allow African Americans to vote in the South. The strategy in the previous cases I’ve mentioned was to use the long march as a “wake-up call” to mobilize a broader campaign for their cause. But in the 1965 civil rights movement, the long march was placed strategically at the end of the campaign, to escalate the pressure when allies around the U.S. were already mobilized.

A variety of tactics had already been used before the march: Alabama blacks showing up at voter registration offices even though they wouldn’t be allowed to register; sit-ins and picketing of white-owned businesses; short marches (sometimes even escalating to night marches — a highly dangerous tactic in that context); and other tactics usually involving tense confrontations and thousands of arrests. The young black protester Jimmy Jackson was shot and killed by police, and the white Unitarian-Universalist minister James Reeb was beaten to death.

The rising storm of protest around the U.S. forced the Attorney General in Washington to begin working on a voting-rights bill. President Lyndon B. Johnson urged Dr. King to de-escalate in view of the increasing violence. King, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and others in leadership believed that more pressure was needed. They planned a five-day march from Selma, which had been the center-point of the campaign, to Montgomery, the state capital of Alabama — since voting laws are usually decided by the state government.

The march would be extremely dangerous, passing through rural areas “owned” by the white terrorist organization Ku Klux Klan. Three hundred trained people were allowed to go the whole way, with the understanding that thousands could join on a day-by-day basis. Eight thousand people left Selma for Montgomery on March 21. Demonstrators marched through rain, singing and chanting, arriving safely on March 25, although the Ku Klux Klan murdered one more protester as she drove back to Selma.

This successful campaign spotlights two important strategic decisions: one was to place the timing of the walk near the campaign’s end, as a functional alternative to the tactic chosen in some labor-based campaigns: the escalatory general strike. The other was to base the campaign in a location other than where the power holders sit (in Alabama, the state capital, and in the U.S., Washington, D.C.). Because empowerment was a fundamental theme for civil rights organizers, emphasizing the grassroots rather than the seat of official power — and forcing the power holders to deal with the results — was often seen as most effective.

The Selma–Montgomery march was directly influenced by knowledge of the March to the Sea in India led by Gandhi in 1930. In that case, the long walk initiated the entire campaign: the Salt Satyagraha. The 240-mile march began at Gandhi’s ashram and ended at the sea, where the marchers made salt in defiance of the British Empire’s monopoly of salt manufacture. While the country was already well-organized and probably didn’t need the march to mobilize, the leadership wanted drama to kick off the campaign. The drama was provided by suspense: would the British arrest Gandhi or not? It was a classic dilemma demonstration. If the British arrested Gandhi they would make him a martyr and prove correct his claim that their presence was repressive and illegitimate. If they didn’t arrest him, he, the “Great Soul,” would be the first to make salt and defy the British. Either way, the British were in trouble; the campaign continued on a mass scale for two years and paved the way for India’s independence.

In Thailand, a rural campaign to re-open the Pak Mun Dam, whose construction had turned out to be an economic and ecological disaster for the region, used the long walk in the middle of the campaign. In 2000 the Assembly of the Poor first did a series of protests that culminated in seizing the dam and building villages there, preventing dam workers from gaining access. Although they had studies by academics and the World Commission on Dams to back them up, they realized that their struggle needed more allies, including among the urban poor, working class and middle class. So 150 representatives of impacted villages participated in a long march of 400 miles to Bangkok to win more allies. Once there, they began a hunger strike, created a mock village outside the seat of government, and did a “die-in” to dramatize their outreach.

Their success in winning allies even among the middle class resulted in the government not only compromising substantially — opening the dam gates four months each year — but also effectively ended new dam construction in the country.

In 1978, 26 Native American activists walked 3,000 miles in what they called the Longest Walk – from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. Thousands of people joined them at various points along the way. Symbolically they were reversing the Trail of Tears that marked the history of so many tribes, ejected from their homes by white supremacy and made to walk westward. Practically, they were walking to catalyze a new level of energy among allies, against the threat in the U.S. Congress. Congress was considering a set of 11 bills that would — once again — injure indigenous people in the U.S. The Longest Walk succeeded in blocking the bills.

The Global Nonviolent Action Database contains more campaigns that used long walks. Many activists have used this method, turning it into a tactic — as militaries use the term — by attaching it to a very specific objective. Campaigners in various situations have placed the long walk in the beginning of a campaign, or the middle or the end, making it serve one or another of a variety of campaign needs. Its strategic flexibility makes it tempting.

A downside is that effectiveness requires a great deal of organization, and many protest groups simply don’t have the infrastructure to carry it off to get what they want. I’ve known long walks that were intended to build allies but didn’t because the walk attracted hyper-individualists with nothing better to do than string along with the walk and alienate the potential allies along the way. Depending on the culture, those who initiate a long walk need to have serious skills in organization and conflict resolution. Depending on the level of danger, they also need skills in training. I was once called in to assist a group whose long walk resulted in several injuries and deaths among the walkers; we worked hard to build the capacity of the organization in nonviolent self-defense. In future walks, no one was killed.

The long walk is not the only method that has advantages and challenges to implement — most do. However, campaigners who rely simply on marches and rallies risk death by boredom, which is one reason why one of the most effective recent campaigns I know of began with a solemn agreement never to hold a march or a rally! Maybe a long walk is for you. Maybe you’d like to join us on ours? Follow #greenwalk and #m16 on Twitter for more details.

• Tens of thousands of students protested on Thursday against a 75 percent tuition hike at universities in Canada’s mostly French-speaking Quebec province, bringing downtown Montreal to a standstill. Since mid-February, nearly 300,000 students have boycotted classes, blocked bridges and held smaller protests around the province.

• More than 1,000 indigenous protesters reached Ecuador’s capital Thursday after a two-week march from the Amazon to oppose plans for large-scale mining on their lands. The protesters were joined by thousands of anti-government protesters in Quito.

• Hundreds of farmers gathered in the Vietnamese capital on Thursday to demand the return of rice fields they say were confiscated by heavily armed police just days after receiving an eviction notice.

• More than 1,000 people gathered in a downtown Brattleboro park on Thursday to call for the closure of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. It was the first day of the plant’s operation after the expiration of its 40-year license. Over 130 protesters were arrested for unlawful trespass as part of a civil disobedience action.

• More than a thousand people rallied in New York City’s Union Square on Wednesday evening with the parents of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager who was shot dead in Florida in late February.

• Portuguese workers halted trains, shut ports and paralyzed most public transport in the capital Lisbon on Thursday to protest austerity measures and labor reforms imposed as a condition of a 78-billion-euro ($103 billion) bailout.

• Three Tibetans who have been on hunger strike outside the UN headquarters for the past month ended their protest Thursday after the UN said investigators would look into events in Tibet.

• Several people were arrested on Tuesday after a rally in a Phoenix intersection to protest immigration policies of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Forty-seven years ago this week, Martin Luther King Jr. set out with 3,200 civil rights activists from Selma to Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, to call on the state and the nation to dismantle the structural obstacles to suffrage for African Americans. Two weeks before, on Sunday, March 7, 1965, hundreds of marchers had been brutally attacked on the Edmund Pettus Bridge by Alabama state troopers and local police officers on horses wielding clubs and whips amid a storm of tear gas.

“Bloody Sunday” horrified the nation and motivated a reluctant Lyndon Johnson to provide federalized National Guard protection for a renewed march, after the movement succeeded in getting a court order to allow the demonstrators to proceed. As federal judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. ruled, “The law is clear that the right to petition one’s government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups … and these rights may be exercised by marching, even along public highways.” Over the next four days, the marchers walked 50 miles, sleeping at night in fields alongside Jefferson Davis Highway. Over 25,000 people arrived at Alabama’s Capitol building on March 25. Less than five months later, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law.

Though this watershed moment took place nearly five decades ago, its power remains undiminished. For years this event has been marked with gatherings, speeches and reenactments of this now-archetypal journey for justice. Nonviolent change is often a journey that is new and uncharted—breaking new ground, setting a new direction; at the same time, its power can also derive from retracing and giving new meaning to a past path for freedom. It can be improvisational and creative. And it can be rooted in acts of remembrance and reenactment. A word that works for both of these realities is “pilgrimage.”

This year, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the Hispanic Council and the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA) joined with countless of other civil rights organizations in the Selma-to-Montgomery march as an opportunity to take a stand against Alabama’s anti-Latino legislation, HB 56, considered the strictest anti-immigrant bill passed by any state in the U.S. The president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Wade Henderson, wrote:

Last week’s 47th commemoration of the Bloody Sunday March of 1965 marks a new phase in the civil rights movement. It represents a turning point for people from all backgrounds, who are joining together, not only to remember our shared past, but also to fight for a shared future. It’s a moment of recognition from all sides that, though our nation has progressed since 1965, we are not yet finished with the struggle to include everyone in the fullness that American life has to offer.

For Henderson, the past and the present are colliding, and just as people took action half a century ago, it is critically important to draw on that same energy and example to continue to struggle: “The state of Alabama … is once again using fear and intimidation as weapons against those without power. This time, the targets are Latinos and the aim is to drive them from their homes and their communities.”

The original Selma-to-Montgomery march was not a choreographed or historically enshrined ritual. It was a radically ad hoc set of strategies that had to be revised over and over again until, improbably, the waters parted. Improvised as it was—playing each new factor by ear—the journey nonetheless was a pilgrimage: “a sacred journey” or “a journey of transformation.”

At the same time, this ongoing pilgrimage deepens the march’s original meaning by using its memory on behalf of unfinished business. Like many geographical nodes of the civil rights itinerary spread across the South and beyond, Selma is a destination that joins past and present in new and creative ways. The route to the capital is even memorialized as the Selma-to-Montgomery Voting Rights Trail, a U.S. National Historic Trail.

The anthropologist James Preston speaks of pilgrimage as “spiritual magnetism.” Theologian Richard R. Niebuhr writes that pilgrims “are persons in motion—passing through territories not their own—seeking something we might call completion.” For me, pilgrimage is a journey to the depths of reality, including its woundedness and sacredness, seeking the power and possibility of healing and transformation.

Pilgrimage, in this sense, is not simply a solo act—it is not simply a quest for individual fulfillment. It is a process of engaging the reality of injustice and violence as well as the potential for nonviolent change, and even reconciliation.

This is why I have a keen interest in the many forms of social change that literally involve movement, including Gandhi’s Salt March, the United Farm Workers’s 1966 march to Sacramento, the decades of nonviolent civil disobedience at the Nevada Test Site (which requires a journey into the simultaneously empty and rich Nevada desert), or innumerable marches organized by the peace, environmental, labor and Occupy movements.

Marches, walks and processions are not simply a way to “be visible”; they are symbolic journeys from A (the grinding present) to B (a more just and peaceful world). They are dramatized expeditions to a center of significance. They seek a metamorphosis of conditions. And they deliver the message in person. Such journeys accrue their meaning by taking each step, by sleeping by the side of the road, by gauging the tremendous dangers and possible opportunities of doing so. No doubt the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or its allies could have rented a fleet of buses to make the trip from Selma to Montgomery in about an hour. The meaning of the experience, though, included the totality of the journey. Without this tremendously symbolic and tremendously physical dimension, the exercise may well have been pointless.

In their book The Archetype of Pilgrimage, Jean and Wallace Clift identify many motivations that spur pilgrims to set out: to experience a place of power; to get outside the normal routine of life so something new can happen; to reclaim a lost or abandoned or forgotten part of oneself; to give thanks; to answer an inner call; to seek pardon; to look for a miracle. While the Clifts are mostly drawing on individual-oriented pilgrimages, many of these elements are at work in pilgrimages of social liberation, like the one to Montgomery in 1965—and 2012.

In 1995, on the 30th anniversary of Selma, then-former Governor George Wallace attended the commemoration. The one who had once staked his political career and national reputation on such inflammatory racist rhetoric as “Segregation then, segration now, segregation forever,” held hands with African-Americans and sang “We Shall Overcome.” Colman McCarthy describes the scene:

It was a reaching-out moment of reconciliation, of Wallace’s asking for—and receiving—forgiveness. In a statement read for him—he was too ill to speak—Wallace told those in the crowd who had marched 30 years ago: “Much has transpired since those days. A great deal has been lost and a great deal gained, and here we are. My message to you today is, welcome to Montgomery. May your message be heard. May your lessons never be forgotten.” In gracious and spiritual words, Joseph Lowery, a leader in the original march and now the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, thanked the former separatist “for coming out of your sickness to meet us. You are a different George Wallace today. We both serve a God who can make the desert bloom. We ask God’s blessing on you.”

In reflecting on this exchange, McCarthy was reminded of what Dr. King had once said:

Forgiveness does not mean ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act. It means, rather, that the evil act no longer remains as a barrier to the relationship. … While abhorring segregation, we shall love the segregationist. This is the only way to create the beloved community.

Dr. King wrote an autobiographical essay entitled “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence.” As it did for him, the pilgrimage metaphor can capture for us the struggles of the journey. But it can also hold out the possibility of arriving at the spiritual center, what he deemed “the beloved community.” Such a move can, if only for a moment, reward those longings that have propelled us forward, including the desire to experience a transforming kind of power, to discover a new reality, to answer an inner call, to reclaim our true selves, to answer a call, to seek pardon—and even to experience a miracle.

El Fondren, © Bob Fitch, all rights reserved.

In Bob Fitch’s photo of El Fondren, the 106-year-old man who registered to vote for the first time in 1966 in Mississippi has his hand raised triumphantly in the air as the crowd hoists him up. Alongside it one also sees the hands of reporters — holding out microphones, snapping photographs, trying to capture the scene for the evening news, grasping for access to El Fondren — and they are all white.

Like many others who documented the civil rights era, Bob Fitch, now 72, was a white man covering a black people’s movement. But unlike many mainstream-media reporters, in his mind this was not just another job. Fitch was a principal photojournalist for the African-American press. He had been hired by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference to provide coverage for outlets across the country who could not risk sending one of their own reporters because the risks for black journalists were too high.

This job meant not only photographing King, the movement’s most prominent leader, but also capturing everyday life among Southern blacks as they built a grassroots movement for freedom. Rather than simply viewing this work as an “assignment,” Fitch — the son of a Christian ethicist — pursued it as a spiritual mission. Documenting the civil rights movement was Fitch’s way of actualizing what he saw as the cornerstone of religion: a commitment to social justice.

Fitch’s career has been propelled by a desire to not simply observe social justice movements from afar, but to be immersed in them, working alongside people who are dedicated to changing society. Some of the most iconic photos of the American civil rights movement, and other movements since, are his. Fitch’s 1966 photo of Dr. King in his Atlanta office, with Gandhi’s portrait nearby, is the basis for the recently-inaugurated King memorial in Washington, D.C. But, perhaps more importantly, Fitch’s work directly contributed to the struggle for racial equality by providing black news agencies with reliable information and images that depicted the progress of their movement.

After King’s death, and after Fitch had photographed his funeral, he continued photographing the foot soldiers of social justice, including the Catholic Worker movement, the United Farmworkers, the anti-Vietnam and draft-resistance movements, and more. As he had with civil rights, Fitch worked for the organizations he was documenting, which kept him close to the people doing the everyday, nitty-gritty work of social change.

Even in his 70s, Fitch is unstoppable. When we spoke recently over the phone, he emphasized that he carries on that work today in Watsonville, California, where he resides and works for Latino immigrants’ rights. His journey as a photojournalist has also been a pilgrimage toward a world in which ordinary working people — whom Fitch sees as the real heroes of social change — receive recognition for their struggles and sacrifices. At the end of our conversation, Fitch seemed keen to discuss today’s Occupy movement. Before we got off the phone, with a sense of hope in younger generations, Fitch told me to continue the work — as King had once said to him in a vision. I hung up thinking of what Fitch had captured, of lives risked and lost so that a 106-year-old black man could vote, and wondering whether Occupy Wall Street’s archives would one day boast an image like this.

What motivated you to begin documenting social movements?

I always worked for the organizations I was documenting. Early on I worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and more recently I photographed an electoral campaign in the emerging Latino community in California. I worked as the photographer of Luis Alejo, who was elected the state assembly member for our district.

While I have been employed occasionally by magazines and newspapers, I am always an ally of the cause in which I believed. The root of that goes back, I would say, ironically, to my conservative Christian upbringing. My father was an oft-quoted conservative professor of Christian ethics. I personally tossed most of his institutionalized and ritualistic beliefs, but I was deeply moved by a few sections in the New Testament, such as the Beatitudes of Jesus: someone’s hungry, duh, feed them. If they need clothing, give them clothing — duh. If they are lonely, they need company, be company — duh. Those very simple words and the words of “treat others the way you want to be treated” had a profound impact on me as a kid and drew me toward issues of injustice.

On top of being raised by a conservative family — which was a very unemotional family, very cold, with no hugging and not a lot of laughter — I spent my high school and junior high school years in Berkeley in the 1950s. At that time, Berkeley was the nesting ground for socially committed people who had bailed out of the autocratic culture of the communist and socialist parties. So, in spite of my parents’ inclinations, I grew up in this community of socialists and communists, who started the co-ops in Berkeley, who started KPFA, the first community-supported radio station in the U.S., with whom I sang in song circles every month at the home of this old lady, Malvina Reynolds, who wrote great songs but had a terrible voice. And once in a while this tall skinny kid with a banjo — Pete Seeger — or this huge black woman with a powerful voice — Odetta Holmes — would come and sing with us.

Unlike my own family, which was cool and cold, the empathy and warmth and acceptance of that community was quite overpowering. My self-created Berkeley family was also receptive to my ideas about social justice. So, it was there that I was nourished in my teen years. I worked at KPFA as a volunteer, and we had very radical and exciting programs; it was a very exciting community. That was my springboard.

How did those experiences in Berkeley end up affecting your outlook?

To give you an idea of how high I jumped — when I was age six, ten years before then, I had been asked by my Presbyterian church to go home and write about things for which I was thankful. And as a very young child I wrote a prayer which said, “Thank you God that I’m a boy, thank you God that I’m white, thank you God that I’m born in America, thank you God I live in Eagle Rock which is near Hollywood.”

So, I had, at a very young age — which I believe is true for most kids — a very clear sense of my entitlement. But by the time I was 16 I’d been exposed to an entirely different environment and had taken some grasp of my own internal beliefs about justice and what fairness is. Throughout my life I have almost always had leaders and bosses who were women and men of color, and they turned out to be my mentors and heroes. Were I to write a prayer today, I would give thanks for those leaders, mentors and communities to which I was introduced by my Berkeley family.

But religion remained important — you went on to become a minister.

After college, I went on and trained to be a clergyman at a liberal theological seminary, Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. I enrolled not really because of the gospel or the theology but because of the fieldwork. I worked in juvenile halls, I worked in rural communities, I was one of the first interns for the brand-new Glide Foundation, which transformed from an old, Evangelical Methodist church to an inner-city organizing center. I lived and worked with gangs in the Mission district of San Francisco. I worked with the gay, lesbian and transsexual empowerment movements in San Francisco. In those seminary years, thanks to their outreach, I was exposed to, embraced and learned from a wide range of life.

Also, for about four or five years, I brought a lot of speakers from the black civil rights movement to the Bay Area, sent workers to the South and developed a series of strong friendships with people working in the movement. My opinion was then, and is now, that the best thing to do was not spend money for personal trips but send the cost-of-travel money to the organization, and let them decide how to spend it.

So work for the cause from wherever you are and send them your travel money?

Well, I’ve gone when I’ve been invited. It’s better to support the people there in the community doing the work than it is to go down and check it out as a stranger; some call this “zoo tripping.” After five years of supporting civil rights work I was invited to be the permanent SCLC staff photographer. I had finished college and graduate school; I’d done everything my parents wanted me to do, so now — what do I want to do?

Two years before graduation I had a strange vision. I had read James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time straight through one night and early morning. At the end of that reading I was entranced; I had a vision of myself being engaged with what I had encountered in the book in some sort of aesthetic manner. I didn’t know what that meant. I decided the next morning that the “aesthetic” would not be writing — writing’s too hard — and it wouldn’t be as a painterly artist — I couldn’t draw for shit — but maybe photography, since I had developed those skills as a hobby. A year and a half later, or two, I was invited to be photojournalist for King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. This was just after the Selma march, and everybody had left just when workers were needed for the first viable electoral voter rights and election campaigns.

When you say “everybody had left,” do you mean the activists, or the media, or both?

Well, not completely everybody. But after Selma, and the new Voting Rights Act, the work that remained was drudgery — knocking on doors, phone-calling, driving, teaching, education. And that big crowd that marched to Montgomery didn’t stay for the drudgery.

Local organizations needed people to do that work of finding candidates, training candidates, supporting candidates, through the whole election process. There were roughly 50 African-American candidates for various offices in Alabama in ’66. That meant a lot of work.

There’s a certain kind of irony — I mentioned the Latino campaigns in Watsonville, where I live now. Watsonville reminds me of some of the work in Alabama because it is an 80-percent Latino community, and we’re transitioning from an agro-business, Anglo, old-guard power structure to a more representative government. We’re knocking on doors, we’re making phone calls, we’re getting people to the polls, we’re training and running empowerment campaigns. By “we,” I mean a progressive coalition of multi-age, multi-ethnic people — and the drudgery work is much the same as the black civil rights campaigns.

How did you come to be the person that the SCLC invited to document them?

I was told, “Bob, we can’t send African-American journalists and photographers into the field ’cause they’ll get beat up and killed, so we’re going to send your little white ass out there. Every week you’ll come back with a news story in print and photos, and you’ll send them to the major black print media around the nation.” There were at that time about 20 major African-American newspapers all the way from Oakland to Harlem to Chicago to Atlanta.

So I took the photos, wrote the notes, typed up an article, mimeographed the article, developed the film, printed the pictures, addressed the envelope, put the story and the photos in the envelope, bought stamps and put them on the envelopes, and sent it off. It was me. I was the Afro wire service! By then, the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC) photographers’ group that emerged out of the Mississippi Summer pretty much diminished — so, at that time, I was the only movement photographer in the field.

Sounds like a lot of work — but what did it entail?

SCLC would announce a list of the African-American candidates running for office and declare that a picture of all candidates and their families was needed for leaflets to be distributed in local communities. I would go hunt down farms with no address, people who were in the fields or teaching at schools or an attorney, and take pictures, and get those back to Atlanta and develop those. That was a typical assignment.

We had another campaign where we were identifying contemporary lynching: African-American people who were killed because they had crossed the cultural line, in some manner, by not smiling at whites, or resisting in a march or demonstration. We had 16 of those murders in Alabama in one year, in 1966, and I simply followed through to photograph and write on those as they came up.

A photojournalist knows that three-quarters of the work is waiting, or getting there, and planning or re-planning, double-checking supplies and schedules. My entrée into the situation was very simple. All I had to say was “I’m Dr. King’s photographer,” and it opened doors in the black community — or shut doors in the Anglo community — or evoked a response that generated significant word and photo content.

Martin Luther King, Jr., © Bob Fitch, all rights reserved.

Berkeley had a powerful impact on you personally. Did working in the South have a different sort of impact?

The experience in the black civil rights movement set up my life. After Dr. King was murdered, and after I went back to Atlanta to photograph the funeral at the invitation of his family, I returned to the Bay Area. I went to a retreat on racism where blacks and whites were meeting to see what programs they could come up with. It got very contentious, and it was fueled by alcohol, and I didn’t like the mood. So I went out and sat on a log in the forest. And there in the wilderness, a very strange thing happened: Dr. King appeared to me! He was as real as the lamp that’s two feet from my eyes right now. I don’t believe in ghosts, nor do I really believe in the afterlife. But he was there, and he spoke to me and said, in his deep voice, “Bob, continue the work!” Then he left.

Wow. What do you think caused you to see him in that way? It sounds like you needed inspiration to keep going after he was gone.

I don’t know where it came from. It may have come from inside me. But the next day I began to think, Okay, the people I most follow and respect are being jailed and killed. It’s important to document their work and their workers. I made a list, which at that time included Chavez, who was emerging with United Farmworkers Union; David Harris who was a leader of the West Coast anti-Vietnam draft resistance movement along with his partner Joan Baez; Daniel and Phil Berrigan, two of the Catonsville Nine who were part of the war resistance movement on the East Coast; Dorothy Day, titular parent of the anarchist nonviolent Catholic Worker movement; Pete Seeger, who has been the life affirming “bishop,” spiritual guide and mentor for all us Anglos for decades; and Ron Dellums in Alameda County who was running for Congress with the endorsement of Coretta King — kind of a first post-King’s-death political connection.

I had this list of figures — some well-known, some not — and I literally mapped out how to connect with them, how to begin the work, how to fund the work. I acted as advised: to “continue the work” right up to today’s community campaigns for social justice.

Has anyone else inspired you the way King did?

I’ll tell you a story. I was in Eutaw, Alabama, photographing a segregated Anglo high school. Stepped out of my car, took the photograph. A cop car pulls up behind me, four cops got out and grabbed me, saying, “You’re going to jail.” I asked, “For what?” They said, “Trespassing — you stepped on the lawn.” So I was in jail four days before they even let me make a phone call, and finally they opened the cell to release me. It was one of these old jails where the bars clang — I hate that sound. And they said, “Bail’s made, you can go.”

I looked at the documents to see who would put up their own property to bail my ass out of jail. Maybe Andrew Young, who was the field organizer — no, his name’s not there. Maybe Hosea Williams, my immediate boss — no, his name was not there. The names that were on that bail document all had the same last name, probably three brothers — Kirksey, a local family in Alabama, farmers whom I had never even met. They put up their precious land to get my white ass outta jail. And I had an immediate flash, a kind of experience I’ve had many times, but at that time a lightening bolt of consciousness.

Whereas King and Stokley Carmichael and Floyd McKisick all appeared to be heroes, they stood on a scaffold of Afro-American property owners, workers and families who maintained their hope and values for roughly 350 years prior to the emergence of the civil rights movement. My heroes were the Kirkseys, and today, my heroes are communities of people like them.

I was loved and inspired by Dr. King. He was a brother and a friend. But the real heroes for me have always been those people who nickel-and-dime for their community organizations, who build that scaffold which promotes and allows the historical justice movements.

So here I am again in Watsonville, a member of a progressive democratic coalition whose members are those people — cooks, parents, lawyers. They run emergency shelters, they’re political officers, they drive trucks, they work in the fields — and they are my heroes. I try to choose heroes who are not people I couldn’t be. King really was a genius, or David Harris, an extraordinary tactician. I’d rather have heroes whose lives I can emulate.

Of all your photos, do you have a favorite? 

The photo I took in 1966 of the 106-year-and-9-month-old man who registered to vote for the first time. It was during the Mississippi Meredith March, named after James Meredith, who integrated the University of Mississippi, where the words “black power” were first used. This was in Batesville. El Fondren, this man, was probably born in slavery, so imagine the courageous fullness of his experience, from that slavery to registering to vote in the same lifetime — he survived it all. When I was photographing — I photographed him registering to vote, and then we came outside, and the crowd threw him on their shoulders — I had a moment I’ve experienced a few times, where the image was such a perfect representation of all I was feeling at the time, I disappeared!

The only way I can describe it is in mystic terms: I became one with all. I photographed automatically for the few moments it took me to get through the roll of film. And whenever I have that experience, the photos always turn out very well. El Fondren was not only a hero, not only engaged in a courageous act of personal empowerment; he did that with his community — those people who threw him on their shoulders. That moment for me was the life and work we must nourish and continue.

• About 20,000 Russians angry over an election campaign slanted in Putin’s favor and reports of widespread violations in Sunday’s voting rallied in Moscow on Monday. Riot police quickly moved in, dispersing the crowd and detaining hundreds of demonstrators.

• Lakotas on Pine Ridge Indian land in South Dakota were arrested as they blockaded tar sands pipeline trucks from entering their territory on Monday.

• Thousands of students and activists marched on the California State Capitol in Sacramento Monday to protest cuts in higher education in an action dubbed “Occupy the Capitol.”

• As U.S. President Barack Obama met with visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington Monday, over 100 protesters converged at a park in front the White House, urging the United States not to support a potential Israeli military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

• A dozen female environmental activists in Ecuador were detained inside the Chinese embassy Monday for protesting Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa’s decision to sign a deal with a Chinese firm to open a massive copper mine in the Amazon.

• On Saturday, over 100 Bulgarian environmentalist staged a protest rally against looming amendments to the Forestry Act.

• On Friday, thousands of Bahrainis launched what they said would be a week of daily sit-in protests in a Shiite village to commemorate an uprising crushed a year ago.

• On Friday, over twenty-five hundred students protested the possible deportation of 18-year-old student and valedictorian Daniela Pelaez at the North Miami Senior High School.

• Several hundred public school students rallied in support of teachers at the offices of Premier Christy Clark at the World Trade Center in Vancouver on Friday.

• In Cambodia, more than 500 employees at a shoe factory in the capital’s Dangkor district went on strike on Wednesday morning after managers failed to respond to a list of workers’ demands.

• Hundreds of protesters blocked streets in eastern Venezuela on Wednesday to demand clean water after a recent oil spill polluted rivers and streams that supply local storage tanks.

• Thousands of supporters of Iran’s opposition Green Movement marched silently through the streets of Tehran on Tuesday to urge the Islamic regime to release political prisoners.

• Outside the White House, hundreds of people rallied on Tuesday to protest China’s treatment of Tibet, ethnic Uyghurs and members of the Falun Gong. Alim Seytoff of the Uyghur American Association urged President Obama to pressure Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping on alleged human rights abuses.

• Six Greenpeace protesters were arrested after unfurling a sign in front of the Duke Energy building Wednesday morning, protesting the company’s recently-approved rate hikes.

• In what was billed as a Valentine’s Day message to the state’s lawmakers,  hundreds of activists gathered on Tuesday at Alabama’s Statehouse to protest the state’s  controversial immigration law.

• Flight attendants and ground workers at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport marched in picket lines Tuesday to protest American Airlines’ plans to outsource jobs and cut pay and benefits under a bankruptcy reorganization.

• Thirteen people were arrested inside the lobby of the AT&T building in Atlanta on Monday during a sit-in to stop the company from laying off 740 union workers across the southeastern United States.

• Some 200 Indonesians converged on a Jakarta square on Tuesday to denounce an Islamic vigilante group known for its armed attacks on minorities and moderates.

Most Christians—and all who celebrate the shop-til-you-drop version of Christmas—are in the final week of hubbub and to-do lists before the big day where Santa drops through the chimney with a bag full of plastic toys made of toxic petro-chemicals that were imported from China. Is that a tad too cynical? As the holiday season is upon us and folks celebrate (which I, too, enjoy) by generously giving to their favorite charities, baking homemade treats for neighbors, sipping eggnog with family, making foolish decisions at the work holiday party, my thoughts—as a Catholic Worker—inevitably turn to peace.

“What do you want for Christmas?” asks my mother. “World Peace.” I’ve made the joke so many times that it is no longer funny—was it ever? Nonetheless, I slug through the commercialized, state/religious-authority approved versions of Jesus that bear no reference to the poor, to social justice, or to the radical teachings of sharing, inclusivity, and nonviolence that the “Prince of Peace” spoke. “Nothing political,” my mother warns me before any family dinner. Each year, my immediate family gathers with our friends of over 20 years from across the street for games, drinks and a Christmas skit. The Olzen family script is in the works but I’ll give a little teaser for this year’s theme: “Occupy North Pole.” Again my mother forewarns as her eyes settle squarely on me, “but we don’t want to get too political.”

While Easter is, theologically speaking, the most important holy day for the Christian church, it probably enjoys more public specter around Christmas as it has deep roots in American consumer culture. Still, many people will head to church on Christmas who may not any other day of the year. Church leadership, choosing not to alienate its congregations, will steer clear of anything resembling close to a political statement. Christmas Mass—for Catholics—will predictably be a sing-song of beautiful carols and elaborately decorated altars and nativities. We will be urged to give thanks for what we have. Pray for what we don’t have and asked to be generous to our less fortunate neighbors. So long as decorum is kept, controversy kept at bay, and sides are not drawn, it will be a good Christmas… and totally misses the point about Jesus, Christianity, and the state of society.

Lines have been drawn and tipping points reached. The economy continues to falter, the cost of living goes up, social support networks disappear, and war spending, environmental costs, and corporate profits skyrocket. As Occupy Wall Street seeks sanctuary, somewhat controversially, at Trinity Wall Street—an episcopal church—I wonder at how long most churches can avoid the politics of economic, environmental, and social justice? Of course, this is not a new pondering as tomes, dissertations and Glenn Beck have tackled the issue in a myriad of ways. But this Christmas seems different. The politics are different. The possibilities are different. World peace is more than a Christmas wish. There are U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq. There are glimmers of hope—US negotiations with Taliban, a 2014 deadline to end the occupation—that the Afghan war has an end in sight. And where are the churches preaching that good news, even if it is not perfect?

During the civil rights movement, churches—particularly African American ones under the leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)—played a significant role not just in raising awareness but in organizing and training people in nonviolent activism. To be sure, there are plenty of churches involved in nonviolent struggle today. The Sanctuary movement of the 1980s was largely a Christian church movement and many of those churches are now leaders in immigrant rights work. St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. has long opened its door to activists descending on the nation’s capital for protest. Programs like JustFaith and Advent Conspiracy are trying to get Christian church people connected to social justice and get them involved in social action both globally and locally. It is a good thing and powerfully transforms people’s lives, but there is a little bit of Dickens’ Scrooge in me. I want more. I think we can do better.

So what do I want for Christmas… besides a new soil thermometer? All I want for Christmas is for churches to become the agents and leaders for social change that their creeds profess. All I want for Christmas is for Christians to choose to nonviolently struggle for the love, justice and peace that their faith in Jesus promises. All I want for Christmas is that the 1 percent leadership of political, economic, and religious institutions make the choices that work for all—and that the 99 percent will help them do it through creative and courageous nonviolent action. This Christmas, I want ordinary folks to realize that there is no Christmas without the elves; that Santa relies on their cooperation to make it happen. It is because of the elves—through their hard work, their obedience, and their adherence to the status quo—that Santa gets the milk and cookies. Where are our milk and cookies this Christmas? Well, I guess it’s time to get organized, to get trained. With the late Howard Zinn reminding us “that we can’t be neutral on a moving train,” it’s time for the churches to get moving.

Nonviolent action should be a truth-telling act. Gandhi, famously titling his autobiography Experiments with Truth, understood his life of nonviolent action to be intimately connected with seeking “satyagraha,”—truth force—a rich, depth-filled praxis as a means of transforming conflict and winning hearts and minds. Truth-telling holds enormous power for social change. Storytelling, like SmartMeme’s ReImagining Change or Utah Phillip’s Wobblie-inspired folks songs, tugs at the heartstrings needed for individuals to engage in the struggle. Information sharing, like Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers or Wikileaks’ caches of classified communiqués, forcibly change the direction of public discourse by disclosing the secrets intended to hide the truth. Human rights reporting, like Amnesty International’s global advocacy for political prisoners, has contributed to increased people-powered and institutional pressure for policy change. Truth-telling, then, in a public, honest and transparent way can hold a central function in pulling the curtain back on injustice and be a means for organizing creative, effective responses.

In September 2011, the humanitarian aid group No More Deaths released a shocking human rights report entitled Culture of Cruelty: Abuse and Impunity in Short-Term U.S. Border Patrol Custody. This is the organization’s second report; in 2008, it published Crossing the Line which narrated the stories of over 400 individual accounts of abuse of migrants while in Border Patrol custody. Their new report contains even more detailed evidence, concluding that “the abuse, neglect, and dehumanization of migrants is part of the institutional culture of Border Patrol.” Data collected from almost 13,000 individuals in 4,130 interviews—over the course of a three year period while simultaneously providing direct aid to repatriated and deported migrants—unmask an often-untold (or at least, unheard) story of pervasive and systemic human rights violation committed by a federal agency in the United States.

Vicki Kline, a spokesperson for No More Deaths who also co-wrote the report, commented on the report’s findings:

We hope to achieve increased public (and policy-maker) knowledge of the complex set of contextual circumstances that have led to 1) the current border situation, and 2) an institution [Border Patrol] that has the capacity to institute simple changes that make them more accountable to the public and their stated policy of treating people with respect and dignity. They do not appear to be making those change and has, instead, continued to be a place the creates a culture in which abuses of people’s dignity are permissible.

Culture of Cruelty documents more than 30,000 instances of abuse from respondents—the most frequent being denied or provided insufficient food while in custody; length of custody ranged from a few hours to more than 2 days. This may not seem “that abusive,” but considering that migrants in detention are often held after having been arrested in the desert, the punishment is particularly harsh. It is not uncommon for migrants to have been in the desert for days at a time—many without enough food or no food at all. But there is more. The report highlights twelve areas of concern regarding Border Patrol treatment of detained migrants:

• Failure to Provide and the Denial of Water

• Failure to Provide and the Denial of Food

• Failure to Provide Medical Treatment and Access to Medical Professionals

• Inhumane Processing Center Conditions

• Verbal Abuse

• Physical Abuse

• Dangerous Transportation Practices

• Separation of Family Members

• Dangerous Repatriation Practices

• Failure to Return Personal Belongings

• Due Process Concern

• Psychological Abuse

The report copiously substantiates—quantitatively and qualitatively—its findings regarding the areas of concern. For example:

April 15, 2010, with Angélica from Mexico. Angélica has a son in Oregon. When the Border Patrol apprehended her group, agents handcuffed them to one another and made them walk in a line for 20 minutes in the dark. She fell because it was difficult to walk and agents pushed her. While she was in custody in Yuma on March 14, agents threw away all of her possessions, including medicine. Border Patrol agents kicked Angélica in the stomach and denied her medical attention. When No More Deaths volunteers met her on April 15, she reported persisting pain in her abdomen.

May 18, 2010, anonymous man from Mexico. He stated that he had lived in Wisconsin for 14 years and Texas for one year, and has family in the U.S. The interviewee and his group were apprehended by Border Patrol agents. Many people asked for water and did not receive it. Some were wounded and did not receive medical care. They were told neither where they were being taken nor where they were being held in custody. The agents used curse words and racial epithets and told the detainees, “You are illegal, you don’t have rights.”

The story CNN ran on the report detailed Border Patrol council President Brandon Judd denying the report’s findings; “it just doesn’t ring true,” Judd said. Analysis of news sources highlight similar institutional responses from the agency to deflect the reports’ findings by not responding to the findings directly or making unrelated statements affirming Border Patrol’s professionalism.

Yet what is remarkable about this report is not just its finding, but that the process that produced it—like its 2008 predecessor. It was born out of the painstaking work of a community-based human rights groups: non-professionals. That is, No More Deaths is an all-volunteer community group of concerned citizens (not all of whom are documented) who, for the most part, are rather ordinary. They are students, retirees, teachers, pastors, skilled workers, and social service providers. Bringing together young and old alike to “end death and suffering on the U.S.-Mexico border,” No More Deaths funds itself, has no paid staff, operates by consensus, and is rooted in a tradition of nonviolence called civil initiative. A problem was identified, the root causes were identified, and a small group of concerned people got together to come up with a response that took personal responsibility for finding solutions for the issue.

Both reports were a direct response from the aid work No More Deaths was engaged in and it informs decisions as to where its limited energies and resources should be put. “The abuse documentation project sprang out of humanitarian work; so that has always been really important—we started documenting things that people told us in the course of providing first aid, or responding to crises,” said Kline, who recently returned from presenting the report to the Human Rights Commission in Mexico City and migrant aid groups in Oaxaca. Kline continued:

We didn’t just go in with an idea that we wanted to document what we believed what was happening; we began documenting the repeated stories and experiences that people were sharing with us. The point of the reports is to inform people of the situation on the ground; policy and history; the lived experience of people who have been in short-term border patrol custody.

Culture of Cruelty represents an activist group at its best: relevant to the needs of a community, collaborative sharing of power, high quality results, accessible to the public and other institutions, and has the freedom to engage in activities that respond directly to the identified problems. “We’ve only focused mostly on abuses in short-term Border Patrol custody,” said Kline. “But our documentation uncovered other issues within the larger immigration detention system, issues related to the health impact of deportations of people who’ve been living in the U.S. for extended periods of time, and the impacts of changing demographics of repatriations and the flow of migration. The deportation impact report will be released this season. The rest is leading to other conversations about where do we go from here?”

On Monday, a close friend of Waging Nonviolence, Francisco “Pancho” Ramos Stierle, was arrested while meditating at Oscar Grant Plaza during the early morning raid on Occupy Oakland. (Several moving photos of his arrest can be seen here.) As a petition on Change.org explains:

He is currently being held by the Oakland Police Department on $10,000 bail and they plan to turn him over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for immediate deportation. He could be sent to Arizona as soon as tommorrow morning. That means we need to act now!

On Facebook, Leenie Venet offers this update:

Pancho is now at Santa Rita in Dublin, CA.  His arraignment for the civil disobedience charges has been fast tracked to Wed. 11/16/11 at 9:00 AM in Room 107 at the  WILEY W. MANUEL COURTHOUSE.  There is a possibility that he will  be transferred after this hearing to the custody of the immigration officials. Please attend this hearing and show your support for Pancho Ramos Stierle!!

Before he goes to court later this morning, please read and sign the petition to free Pancho, which can be found here. An email from Janine Schwab at the American Friends Service Committee says that you can also:

call the following federal officials NOW and ask them to ask Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) to release (or lift) the immigration hold on him. Barbara Lee 510-763-0370. Nancy Pelosi 415-556-4862. Diane Feinstein 415-393-0707. We have 12 to 24 hours to act on this.

According to the petition, Congresswoman Barbara Lee can intervene and has the power to release Pancho.

Signing this petition or making these calls will only take a few minutes tops, and may be able to help keep a truly inspiring advocate and practitioner of nonviolence in the United States, so that he can continue his important work for social justice and peace—including his ongoing bold and creative effort to challenge gang violence in his Oakland neighborhood. As Venet writes on Facebook:

Pancho used his power of love to nonviolently stand against Arpaio’s immigrant sweeps in Arizona last summer and was faced with a similar situation.  We were successful in helping Pancho get out of that situation by using the power of collective intention.

Now we must muster whatever people power we have to defend Pancho once again and to challenge our unjust immigration policies.

UPDATE: Susan Koppelman has written on Facebook that Pancho’s arraignment was been postponed until 2pm PST, which means we now have roughly another 3 hours to spread the petition and call the congresspeople above. The How to Help tab at this link provides the most comprehensive list of things you can do, with many more ideas and phone numbers than I provided above.

Local community-based immigrant advocacy groups, including VOZ, Oregon New Sanctuary Movement (ONSM), and the Partnership for Safety and Justice, converged in a peaceful demonstration this past Saturday outside of the Wells Fargo building in Portland, Oregon as part of a nationally coordinated effort in support of the National Prison Industry Divestment Campaign. Demonstrations, workshops and other actions were held by partner organizations across the country in the cities of Wichita, New York and Seattle.

Protestors called for the immediate divestment of investments made by Wells Fargo and other major shareholders in private prison corporations such as the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and Geo Group Inc., whose business models actively pursue harsher immigrant incarceration policies such as those seen in Arizona, Georgia and more recently Alabama.  The detention centers and prisons that these and other corporations bank on are often plagued with instances of sexual and physical abuse against immigrants who do not have access to legitimate legal recourse due to their status.

Peter Cervantes-Gautshi, (check out his highly censored story, Wall Street and Our Campaign to Decriminalize Immigrants), who was present at the Portland action, stated that “we wanted to show Wells Fargo that this movement is growing and that more and more people are becoming aware of their involvement in using tax dollars to put people in cages. They need to instead invest in creating good jobs for people.”

A delegation of demonstrators also entered the Wells Fargo building in order to inform the manager that failure of the bank to divest its shares from corporations that promote severe incarceration practices and policy will result in a substantial amount of customers closing their accounts. The manager was not present and the delegation was shuffled off to someone who, according to Cervantes, “had little authority and was less than helpful.” The demonstration outside remained lively and spirited as drivers honked in support and pedestrians gave their “thumbs-up” of approval.

Meanwhile in Kansas, Sunflower Community Action (SCA) held a Popular Education Assembly designed to educate the public on the connections between the new wave of anti-immigrant laws, the private prisons that lobby for them, and the bank that provided the investments to make it all possible: Wells Fargo. SCA is calling on Wichita to join people across the country in divesting from, and refusing to do business with Wells Fargo.

The protests are part and parcel of a series of nationwide demonstrations implemented by an impressive network of community organizations who have decided to heed the call for a national month of action. Through educational workshops, nonviolent direct action and concrete strategies for demanding shareholder divestment, the campaign intends to raise public awareness regarding the intricate and nefarious relationship between big business (aka Wall Street) and government within the rubric of the prison-industrial complex.

Previous actions have taken place in cities such as San Francisco, Minnesota and Denver, with more planned next week, including Wichita’s Zombie Crawl later today, where members of Sunflower Community Action, in solidarity with the OccupyWitchita movement, will present a theatrical memoir entitled, “Investments of Mass Destruction.”

These events have been particularly effective in tying together the multitude of seemingly disparate demands (the proverbial “laundry list”) that have come out of the Occupy movement. Organizers and spokespersons have proven adept at demonstrating and highlighting the fact that corporate-government collusion is the root cause of innumerable consequences of misery, inequality and poverty.

I see this campaign as one of the more effective and substantial movements to be explicitly aligned with the “Occupy” sentiment in that its primary participants and organizers are speaking directly to the reality of the most downtrodden and impoverished segment of the 99 percent, particularly the constituent members of our nation’s disenfranchised communities of color.

Yet the campaign also does not ignore the systematic targeting, dehumanization, humiliation and torture of those who aren’t even counted amongst the “official” 99 percent, namely the undocumented, whose only “crime” more often than not is earning an honest living through the provision of essential services that the “documented” covet and demand.  Yes, you can tell a lot about a person and a nation based on how they treat the “least amongst us.”

At the core, this divestment campaign isn’t about papers (no, not even the green ones); it is about dignity and unity. For what good is paper if it can purchase and/or confer the ‘legal’ right to kill, steal, exploit and imprison the innocent and hard-working with impunity? Our solidarity is, and now must prove to be, mightier than the dollar. Divest from corruption. Occupy Everything. Together as one.