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martin luther king
No Time to Hide: We Need You!
We offer this comic-strip recalling the revolutionary promise proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. Do not underestimate the power of that promise.
Nov 27, 2024
Yes. We lost. And yes, as Thomas Paine pronounced in late 1776 in The Crisis, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Nonetheless, as we argue here, this is not a time to despair and hide away. For as Paine went on to write in that pamphlet: “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” Words that encouraged Americans to sustain the Revolution and, yes, go on to win battles and ultimately, victory.
We offer this comic-strip recalling the revolutionary promise proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence—and regularly reaffirmed by our greatest leaders—to remind us all that we, native-born and newly-arrived alike, are the children and grandchildren of generations of progressives and radicals who, in the course of almost 250 years, made that promise their own and fought to realize it.
Do not underestimate the power of that promise. And surely, you feel it too.
Consider the testimony of the great self-emancipated black abolitionist Frederick Douglass in his speech in Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? Douglass lambasted the country and his fellow Americans: “There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.” And yet, in the end, even he did not surrender to despair: “Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery... I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age.”
So, yes, we lost. But the struggle continues. And in that spirit, we want you to know that when Martin Luther King, Jr. would find himself growing despondent about the state of America and the forces opposing the civil rights struggle, he would recall Thomas Paine’s revolutionary words from Common Sense: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
In the weeks and months ahead, we plan to create a continuing series of comics reminding us of who we are and what that demands—and, hopefully, encouraging us all to pursue progressive and radical-democratic action.
This is not a time to seek a solitary life, but to act in solidarity.
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Using Momentum to Build a Stronger Movement
Mar 02, 2016
When I taught at a small graduate school, we always looked forward to Saul Alinsky's annual visit. Alinsky was the terror of city hall bosses everywhere, and he told us colorful stories from his organizing experience. Our school was the Martin Luther King School of Social Change. The students could earn an M.A. in Social Change, which, when asked, I would explain stood for "Master's in Agitation."
This was the late 1960s, and most of our students were drawn from front-line communities where the struggles were hot. The students were famously direct and critical, and by the time Alinsky turned up, they would have read his "Rules for Radicals" and be eager to take him on.
"Where's your big picture?" they demanded. "How do all those stop-sign victories on a local level add up to larger institutional change?"
He challenged them right back. "What's your method of leadership development? What does empowerment mean if it's just about drama and a flash in the pan? Do the headlines grabbed by you romantics result in solid organizations that improve people's lives in the workplace or the neighborhoods where they live?"
The two great traditions -- mass protest and community/labor organizing -- continue to argue with each other to this day. In "This Is An Uprising" Mark and Paul Engler argue. Their book describes some of the foremost adversaries, including Alinsky himself and activist-sociologist Frances Fox Piven, and sets out their ideas fairly.
The Englers' book, however, could not have been written in the 1960s when Alinsky took on my students. Brothers Mark and Paul Engler shine much more light than we had available then. They draw ideas from the accelerating use of nonviolent struggle on local and national levels and the research that points out what did and didn't work to produce lasting change that affects people's lives.
Spoiler alert: The Englers propose a craft that makes the best of both traditions -- a craft they call "momentum." They don't pull this off by synthesis. They do it by calling everyone to a higher order of strategizing.
Born teachers, they show rather than tell. They show how momentum can work by sharing vivid glimpses from movements and campaigns as various as the DREAMers, Occupy Wall Street, ACT-UP, the Birmingham civil rights campaign, the Harvard 2001 student sit-in for a liveable wage, the LGBT movement, Tahrir Square and the campaign against Egypt's dictatorship, the overthrow of Serbia's dictator Slobodan Milosevic, and others.
Are we there yet? No, the craft is not yet fully embodied, but the Englers help us to see it emerging through the creativity and daring of activists in many places. They also bring to the conversation analysts like political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephen, sociologist/organizer Bill Moyer, civil resistance studies founder Gene Sharp, and others. (Full disclosure: I'm there, too. Plus, parts of the book first appeared on Waging Nonviolence.) All of this invites the reader to learn "how to combine explosive short-term uprisings with long-term organizing that can make movements more sustainable."
I've rarely seen movements described so intimately at their strategic turning points, supported with the comparative insights of scholars in the field. Reading the gripping stories alone makes the book worthwhile.
Framing our challenge as a skill-set
The Englers intend to help the reader become skillful in several ways: by "staging creative and provocative acts of civil disobedience," "intelligently escalating once a mobilization is underway," and making sure that "short-term cycles of disruption contribute to furthering longer-term goals."
They take the time to deconstruct the two traditions and show how the differences reveal strengths and weaknesses on both their parts. In the light of this book, Alinsky and my students were both right and wrong. Each side needed a creative leap to find ways of retaining their own strengths and borrowing the strengths of the others through a new theory and practice.
The craft does mean letting go of some assumptions held by both sides, and the Englers are frank about that -- again backing themselves up with the movements' own experiences. As I read, I imagined going through the wealth of campaigns in the Global Nonviolent Action Database to see more examples of people practicing aspects of the craft - or not.
An example of a questioned assumption from the mass protest tradition is: Disruption has the inevitable cost of getting backlash not only from the power holders but also the people caught in the middle. I remember surging with others into a center city street at the height of traffic on a Friday afternoon, for example, and shrugging off the cost to the jammed-up drivers who couldn't pick up their kids from school. The book points out that the political cost of disruption to the 99 percent can be offset by tactical choices in which the activists "put more skin in the game" through personal sacrifice. What I get from this is that creativity matters: It's time to drop the mindless reflex of blocking traffic to show we're indignant.
Another dubious assumption from the mass protest tradition is that sheer numbers win the day. I remember during the anti-Vietnam War movement, there were repeated marches down New York's 5th Avenue. The organizers rejoiced each time the number grew, but the Englers point out -- based on what works in getting change -- drama often trumps numbers. I contrast the "numbers obsession" with Alice Paul's choice to leave the woman suffrage organization's mass marches and start a campaign with smaller numbers and more significant drama -- and then win.
When analyzing what they call "the whirlwind," the Englers clearly describe a movement moment: "The defining attribute of a moment of the whirlwind is that it involves a dramatic public event or series of events that set off a flurry of activity and that this activity quickly spreads beyond the institutional control of any one organization. It inspires a rash of decentralized action, drawing in people previously unconnected to established movement groups."
We can see why mass protests worry some leaders of community organizations and unions - the loss of control. What those leaders miss is the opportunity for organizing that a whirlwind gives. The Englers recall Mine Workers union leader John L. Lewis' use of a whirlwind in the 1930s to organize more unions (membership organizations) and build the Congress of Industrial Organizations into a cohesive national force that gravely worried the 1 percent.
Some Occupy Wall Street leaders saw that kind of opportunity in the Occupy whirlwind, but as we know, the prevailing culture of Occupy prevented building a mass movement. Now I wonder if Occupy's resisters of growth might have been willing to play a bigger game if they had known about the craft of momentum-driven organizing.
In any case, now there's a new marker for us to go by in the Englers' book, and new reason for hope for effective outcomes of our work.
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Albert Woodfox, the Last of the Angola Three, Is Finally Free
Feb 26, 2016
Albert Woodfox turned 69 years old on Friday. He also was released from prison that day after serving 43 years in solitary confinement, more time than anyone in U.S. history. "Quite a birthday gift," Woodfox told us during the "Democracy Now!" news hour in his first televised interview after gaining his freedom. Woodfox is a living testament to the resilience of the human spirit when subjected to the cruel and unusual punishment of solitary. His case also serves as a stark reminder of the injustice that pervades the American criminal justice system.
Woodfox was in his early 20s when he was imprisoned for armed robbery in 1971. He was sent to the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola, a sprawling prison complex with 5,000 prisoners located in rural Louisiana on the site of a former slave plantation. It gets its name, "Angola," from the country of origin of many slaves.
Conditions in Angola in 1971 were so violent and appalling that Woodfox, along with another prisoner, Herman Wallace, formed one of the first prison chapters of the Black Panther Party. In 1972, Woodfox and Wallace were charged with the murder of prison guard Brent Miller. No physical evidence linked the men to the crime. A bloody fingerprint at the murder scene, which matched neither Wallace's nor Woodfox's, was ignored by authorities. Robert King, another prisoner who joined their Black Panther chapter, was charged with a separate crime in the prison. The three were sent to solitary confinement, where they remained for decades, always maintaining they were innocent of the charges.
Albert Woodfox recalled those early days of organizing inside of Angola when we spoke with him just days after his release: "The saddest thing in the world is to see a human spirit crushed. And that's basically what happened with these young kids coming to Angola. And we decided that if we truly believed in what we were trying to do, it was worth taking whatever measures necessary to try to stop this."
Even back then, the Angola 3, as they became known, were well aware of the potential impacts of solitary confinement. Woodfox recalled during our interview, "When we were first put in CCR [closed cell restriction] in '72, myself, Herman Wallace, and Robert King, we knew that if we had any chance of maintaining our sanity and not allowing the prison system to break us, that we had to keep our focus on society and not become institutionalized." When I asked Woodfox what he read in prison, he told me, "History books, books on Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin."
A movement grew, globally, to free the Angola 3, with Amnesty International and other organizations calling for their release. Documentaries were made about the case. In one, the widow of Brent Miller joined the call, saying in 2010, "These men, I mean, if they did not do this--and I believe that they didn't--they have been living a nightmare for 36 years."
Two major impediments to their freedom were prison warden Burl Cain and Louisiana Attorney General James "Buddy" Caldwell. Cain was the key decision-maker in keeping the men in solitary. In a 2008 deposition in Woodfox's case, Cain admitted, "I still know that he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism." And while Woodfox's case was overturned on three separate occasions, with a federal judge ordering his release, Attorney General Caldwell insisted on repeatedly retrying the case. Cain resigned in December, facing state ethics violations and a criminal probe for business dealings during his reign as the longest-serving warden in Angola's history. Caldwell lost re-election to fellow Republican Jeff Landry, who allowed Woodfox to leave prison on the condition that he plead "no contest" to manslaughter.
Woodfox squinted into the camera as he spoke on "Democracy Now!." The years of confinement in a six by nine foot cell had damaged his vision. He is proud of his activism. "We've put this solitary-confinement issue before American people, before the people of the world, and it just started building," he said. "It got to the point where it wasn't just about the Angola 3, but it was about solitary confinement."
Robert King was released in 2001, his conviction overturned after serving 29 years in solitary confinement. Herman Wallace was freed in 2013, only after a federal judge threatened to jail Cain if he refused to release him. Wallace died one day later of liver cancer. On Monday, we asked Albert Woodfox about his plans: "I've been locked up so long in a prison within a prison. So, for me, it's just about learning how to live as a free person," he told us. "I'm just trying to learn how to be free."
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