The more we hear calls for the urgency of climate justice like that of Bill McKibben’s July Rolling Stone article, the more we confront a strategic dilemma: Where shall we put our energy, on the local or national level?
The U.S. presidential campaign going on now is a daily reminder of the vacuum on the national stage. The candidates think it wise to downplay climate change as an issue even though the actions (and non-actions) of the person in the Oval Office have large consequences. Obama, for example, has reportedly saved 70 Appalachian mountains from mountaintop removal coal mining — earning ferocious hatred from Big Coal as a result. But he doesn’t see the pragmatism in talking about it.
The national vacuum cries out for attention. We who prioritize local action, however, are wary. Many of us have encountered smoke-and-mirrors tactics at a national level that fail to build the mass base needed for major impact.
The easy answer is to say, “Both national and local levels need attention.” It’s much harder, however, to solve the practical problems of strategy and structure that make local and national levels work well together, and it’s too late in the game for each of us simply to do our bit and hope that it all adds up. We need to go beyond addition to multiplication. We need a synergistic outcome from local and national work — and international as well, but that’s another column.
The good news is that activists in the past have faced the need for such synergy, and one solution they invented might work for us. But first we need a bit of historical context really to recognize what they accomplished.
From boycotts and sit-ins to a national movement
In the 1950s, civil rights activists faced a bleak situation. The anti-Communist crusade had scared most progressives into caution or inaction altogether. Black labor leader A. Philip Randolph and black radical pacifist Bayard Rustin were confident that mass nonviolent direct action could fuel massive change, but few agreed with them. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the largest civil rights organization in terms of credibility, resources and mass membership was cold to direct action, preferring lobbying and court litigation.
As Randolph and Rustin saw it, the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 was the breakthrough, and they’d thought so much about strategy already that they were ready to move. Rustin was released by the War Resisters League to go to Montgomery to help out and coach the inexperienced Martin Luther King Jr. Following the victory in Montgomery, people in other Southern cities mounted other local actions — mainly bus boycotts and sit-ins.
I knew Bayard Rustin, and one of his favorite expressions was “in motion”; now that Southern localities were in motion, supported by fundraising among Northern allies by Bayard, Ella Baker and others, Randolph and Rustin wanted to get the national level working to see what synergies they could generate.
The four tests
They came up with a series of three national marches on Washington that were carefully calibrated to: (a) get normally competitive groups working together (because unity is itself energy-creating), (b) focus on a civil rights issue where the federal government could do something even though it didn’t want to, (c) provide opportunities for ever-greater outreach to potential allies, and (d) give local activists the experience of larger numbers and the inspiration to go home feeling empowered.
In the buttoned-down society of the 1950s — someone called Americans of the day “God’s frozen people” — these marches were edgy. Today’s marches are rarely worthwhile because they are decidedly un-edgy rituals, to the point of driving some radicals who recognize their pointlessness to destructive and counterproductive behavior.
But back then in 1957 the prospect of thousands of black people on a Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington filled President Dwight Eisenhower with alarm. As it turned out, Bayard organized the march so skillfully that all four tests were realized — plus the bonus that King, through his oratory, transitioned from a local leader to a national one.
The 1958 and 1959 Youth Marches for Integrated Schools were reportedly the largest youth protests in Washington’s history. The two events met all four tests so successfully that the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins derailed his organization’s planned follow-up lest his own strategy interfere with the strategy behind the marches. Young activists went back to their homes and campuses to dream and plan direct action.
On January 24, 1960, A. Philip Randolph issued “A Call for Immediate Mass Action” at a huge meeting at Carnegie Hall in New York. Eight days later, on February 1, four black students sat at a Greensboro, North Carolina, segregated lunch counter and asked for a cup of coffee. A wave of sit-ins spread across the South, followed shortly by Freedom Rides and mass action in dozens of locations.
Context matters hugely in tactical choices. The 1950s national-level actions, it turned out, were edgy enough to inspire people to do edgy local actions.
With the country swarming with local civil rights campaigns, and white resistance growing rapidly and violently, Randolph and Rustin saw the opportunity to return to the national level. President John Kennedy thought this was a dreadful idea and recommended that federal workers stay home on August 28, 1963, the day of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Presidents did not like masses of black people marching on Washington.
For Rustin and Randolph, though, the timing was especially good for their third strategic objective — to push more allies to step up — and this march drew a significant turnout from the largely white labor movement. The 1963 March on Washington thus widened the crack in racism sufficiently enough that federal action was taken that same year through the Birmingham, Alabama, campaign.
To impact Washington, go to Birmingham?
When President John Kennedy refused Martin Luther King, Jr.’s request that he take action for civil rights, King joined the Southern Christian Leadership Council affiliate in Birmingham, led by Fred Shuttlesworth, to escalate the struggle there. The result was globally televised images of white police and dogs and water hoses terrorizing black nonviolent demonstrators. Four young children were killed when a black church was bombed. The industrial city of Birmingham was, to use Rustin’s phrase, in a state of social dislocation.
In the midst of crisis, Kennedy reportedly worked the phones with key industrial leaders and won agreement that a civil rights bill was needed. Lyndon Johnson managed the bill. The result was meaningful systemic intervention by the federal government: the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The daring 1963 local campaign that forced this national change showed the synergistic potential of working both levels at once. This kind of leverage was repeated two years later, when the Selma, Alabama, campaign catalyzed the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
The choice to bring the conflict to a boil locally rather than in Washington, D.C., as the later Mayday anti-Vietnam war protests did, was highly strategic. The violence the protesters encountered in Birmingham and Selma had a much bigger impact in energizing allies and heightening the pressure on Washington than repression in the nation’s capitol would have. It was also hugely important that behind the scenes of the local campaigns, organizers were building a base for making the strategy work on a national level.
Rustin, along with Ella Baker and others, built the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to an infrastructure for local-national synergy. Beginning as a grouping of ministers around King, then nurtured by the Prayer Pilgrimage and local programs, the organization developed some strong local chapters that led campaigns on their own. James Lawson, who coached the students who created the iconic Nashville, Tennessee, sit-in campaign, was sent there by the SCLC.
The SCLC developed a kind of power grid, one in which local campaigns that heated up and needed more resources could tap regional and national energy: seasoned organizers, money, additional volunteers to join direct action, King’s charisma and a network of allies. We can learn from that.
Toward a nonviolent power grid for eco-justice
The time has come for the eco-justice movement to create a power grid connecting national resources with local nonviolent campaigns. The Rainforest Action Network and others have experimented in this direction. Tar sands and mountaintop removal coal mining are two of many issues that lend themselves to further development on both national and local levels.
The opportunity now is for organizers to channel the wisdom and daringness of Rustin and Randolph, to create national actions that meet the four tests, and grow an infrastructure that enables local campaigns to have national consequences.
The end of Peter Rugh’s exciting article last week at Waging Nonviolence about the growing direct action against fossil fuels underlines the importance of strategizing a la Randolph and Rustin. Anti-fracking activist Sam Rubin poignantly describes what none of us want; he’s worried that he’ll be “just some guy in a bubble who only cares about my little issue.”
His way of avoiding that isolation is to see himself as part of the global anti-capitalist struggle. Unfortunately, I don’t think that helps us much in this country, at this moment in history.
What I learn from Rustin and Randolph is that there might be a more effective way to see oneself as part of a broader movement — which is, well, to broaden it. Direct action, especially when it gives itself an ideological brand like “anti-capitalist,” broadens movements in only rare political moments. I don’t believe this is one of them.
What most often broadens movements is organizing. Organizers learn to speak the language of those they are connecting with — in our case, people who are ambivalent in their analysis and vision but are daily becoming clearer about their interests. Saying “anti-capitalist” won’t move them. Instead, build vehicles that bring together the radicals and those with direct anger and concern, and create events to seed the next wave of local direct actions. When they’re all in one place, they’ll lose any sense of isolation and futility that we may feel.
That’s the lesson of what worked in the civil rights movement: direct action that was always related to organizing. One without the other can’t build the power we need.
We need to start THE DAY the election is over. We have the 350 people doing a tour of cities and maybe this is useful to broaden the movement and synthasize {?} different parts of the climate change/environmental mmessage, first. And then a mass demonstration, in Washington I guess.
Because of the following, I remain optimistic.
One issue I see as a problem is the Zinn effect. Right or wrong his ‘People’s History…’ book has given many people distorted views of our history, as in, how Zinn shaped what he wrote. The good historian does not shape history to produce an outcome they want, that’s called propaganda, and is as bad as those dripping patriotic history books.
Related so, is on the ‘History as a Weapon’ site. Slamming on Madison’s Federalist #10, where the conclusion drawn is nonsense. It’s an opinion not substantiated from the facts of what Madison wrote. It’s based on a false notion of then, to what’s wanted today.
In general, too many opinions are based on using today’s standards on past events. It’s as though those back then overwhelmingly and knowingly rejected today’s standards. This is the Violence I see, hear, and face from some people. It’s unacceptable for not only conversation, but for necessary understanding in knowing who we are. Any common foundation is rejected without reason.
And, this rejection of our past is self-defeating Violence by Repression.
This is where class labels can not apply. Events are events. Two people describing the same event bring different answers, and will agree, after the event, to reduce their common view to fewer facts. This is a crime in recording history. The historian then may pick and choose, or emphasize certain events, and then after describing the events, draws subtle remarks and conclusions. That process distorts what happened. In a way, the scientific method must be used to test the historian’s work.
I bring these to everyone’s attention, because history is what the struggle is about. It’s not economic. It’s not governmental. It’s not societal. If anything, it’s all of them combined. Those starting from a flawed foundation are those I’m struggling against also.
People will do what they want, no matter where they come from, or are going, if they can. Switching the fountains of propaganda is the best that can be done. Majorities and minorities alike are self-centered corruption. They both seek to harm the other, and instill their brand of repression too.
The two-party system America has, is an example of this method in action. People are conned into seeking control of the machine, with each group lusting for the day they can abuse the other side. Revenge and retribution reign here, torture lives on; it’s the modern way of a people lost, fragmented, and absent a moral compass.
Without a clear sense of clear history, Americans will flounder and flop, wallowing in the mud of their own low tide.
Reason and experience tell me I’m mistaken in seeking those who work for all people, because there are too few. But, my hope fails to die.
Out of respect for our comment policy, please try to keep comments focused and relevant to the above post.
Vision keeps me within your bounds, thank you for supporting me. If this site allowed editing, then I would alter several of my posts. If this site is only for others to pontificate, then it has less value than I seek, and less value to others. If we don’t have a common history, we aren’t a common people.
George talked about history, has referenced another web site before, so I wrote what I wrote. I didn’t post what I had written when I saw George’s post elsewhere.
I’m not to old not to learn. But, I’m not young enough not to see my end coming. Time is a factor which we can not buy and sell – time is invaluable. Saying change requires decades or lifetimes is not only unacceptable, it’s unnecessary. George references Peter Rugh’s article, and what does the picture have at the top?
Respecting George’s lifetime of work, I’m glad he is thinking in larger terms. Now is the time for great change, and need not be viewed as taking decades. Many Americans are in frameworks not of their choosing and which they don’t realize either.
The “eco-justice movement” is a fragment of what I see, but I suppose these fragments need forming too, before they get fused into the required larger ones. But, will the “eco-justice movement” be concerned for the other movements when they get formed? Building piece-meal is a start, but without the larger picture in view for all to see and contemplate, I know these groups will most likely not ever consider joining each other.
The “eco-justice movement” will most likely despise other groups who don’t fit into their narrow thinking. So, if these narrow groups get formed apart from the larger picture, there will be no cohesion later. Maybe this is all others can see, a nation of fragments or just fragments with no nation. Each little group inbreeding in their thoughts.
I do not see our presence on this planet as giving up and returning to being beasts in the wilderness. This is how I view some current groups’ desires. Turning back the clock is conservative dogma. Stopping the clock is worse. But, the clock can’t be stopped, so on we shall go, but with more sense and concern.
I’m one who has broad concerns. The overall concern is for humanity to continue on with advances in technology, but wisely done, with more checks on the future ramifications of that technology. It is technology which greatly marks us as a species. Few other species employ technology. It’s what we do the best and the worst, but it must continue the wiser.
we can treat the oil industry like an oppressive regime, and take some strategic advice gene sharp’s guide “from dictatorship to democracy”:
“When one wants to bring down a dictatorship most effectively and with the least cost then one has four immediate tasks:
Strengthen the oppressed population themselves in their determination, self-confidence, and resistance skills.
Strengthen the independent social groups and institutions of the oppressed people.
Create a powerful internal resistance force
Develop a wise grand strategic plan for liberation and implement it skillfully.”
Additionally, Dr. Dharp recommends that we discover the sources of the oppressors’ strengths and destabilize them. At the same time, we must identify weakness and concentrate our attacks on “Achilles heels”.
Sharp suggests that, “Liberation from dictatorships ultimately depends on the people’s ability to liberate themselves.”
(above excerpted from my article in truthout: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/10656-breaking-up-with-big-oil-a-complicated-relationship
Thanks, Alyce! These points all certainly seem relevant. I’m especially interested in where the Achilles’ heels are for the industry. Several of the ones people have been going after lately: pipeline construction sites, institutional investment portfolios, the White House. What could really make these companies hurt?
I’ve also heard Sharp say on several occasions that there are many lessons still to be learned about resisting corporate oppressors that are for the next generation of scholars and activists to discover — that wasn’t the focus of his work.
Actually, there are few better examples of Achilles Heels than the one described in this piece that just came out about the Walmart strikers:
http://dev2.wagingnonviolence.org/2012/10/how-workers-are-using-globalization-against-walmart/
George, Nathan, and Alyce –
Fighting the pipeline is a ‘not in my backyard’ action. It’s like the War of Drugs. It’s very worthwhile, but they’ll put it elsewhere if you’re successful.
But, what else could be a better solution? Or, how else can you “sell” your concerns to others? And, “What is an alternate way than the need for the oil?”
This fight is about the oil which causes excessive levels of CO2 which is trapping more heat in our atmosphere. It’s also about the harm done in building the pipeline itself.
But, what if the pipeline were to bring water for growing food? Would there be an objection? If, so, it might be from how the food is grown and what is grown? Maybe this new food will go to the hungry people around the world. Then what are the concerns?
We feed the hungry people. But what will they do or want once they are fed? One argument is they will have more children, thus increasing the population. Then what?
Somewhere along any solution thread for these “problems” we encounter the what then. This oil problem is also a population problem even if Americans cut their consumption to 1/10th of the current. The freed up oil will be snapped up elsewhere, then what? You’ll still have it being used, so the CO2 issue is a false issue in the case of our reduction in consumption, but a great concern nonetheless.
The ways which were developed before are inadequate for this new global situation we face. Yes, Sharp did not write about corporate power specifically, and the Activist methods are too narrow for global scope considerations. Both can be used with success today.
Oil is a food source for the world’s technology. Find a new source.
Some think we won’t have generations available to decide what we do.
LOS POLÍTICOS SOLAMENTE HABLAN Y DEFIENDEN LOS INTERESES DEL SIONISMO INTERNACIONAL
Please remove the above comment. It is neither constructive nor relevant, nor well substantiated; worse, it expresses a racist (specifically, anti-Semitic) point of view.
Two questions for Mr. Lakey …
1. Were the “four tests” roughly agreed upon objectives, or were they precisely defined and documented? In other words, are they part of the historical record?
2. Any thoughts about what national-level tactic might pass the four tests today?
The “four tests” came out of my knowing one of the two (Bayard Rustin) somewhat, watching their work and choices, and my concluding that these were highly important criteria for them.
I don’t have proposals at the moment, being well aware that my eco-justice organizing has been on a local/regional level rather than national and not knowing the national players as well as I’d like. My motivation for writing the column is wanting 350.org, Rainforest Action Network, Greenpeace and other national-level actors to channel that kind of direct action movement-building strategic creativity that Rustin and Randolph exhibited, because we who work on a more local level could be enormously more effective if the national level folks were to do that.
George