A Time To Organize

by Anne Braden

I think this is a wonderful time to organize.

I hear people say: “Oh, this is a hard time organize because you’ve got Bush and repression and the PATRIOT Act.” But people are asking questions. Lots of people are very upset with the direction the country is going in, but they don’t have information. The news media are not giving it to them, and sometimes people like us aren’t either.

I’ve been working for a new world for about fifty-five years now—in Louisville and also throughout the South, because I’ve always worked with regional organizations as well as locally. And you do learn a few things over the years. You learn from your mistakes, and you begin to see patterns in how history is made.

Learning from history

In the last few years, I’ve come to understand the importance of knowing some history for our battles today. I’m teaching courses in social justice movement history at two universities—Northern Kentucky University up near Cincinnati, and the University of Louisville. My course started as a history of the civil rights movement in the mid-20^th Century. But it expanded to include the multiple people’s movements that grew out of the civil rights upsurge. And I found I had to go back to the movements of the '30s and '40s, and then to the very origins of this country, because you have to know all that to understand what came later. And I had to go on beyond the 1960s, because the movement never stopped and has not stopped today. When you take this long view, certain patterns become clear.

One of the most important patterns I discovered is that movements for a new society have regularly organized in periods of extreme repression, and in fact did their best organizing in such times. Our movement organized in the '50s, when anti-Communist hysteria gripped the country, and it thus laid the basis for the '60s upsurge. We organized during the massive repression of the Black Liberation movement in the late '60s, and were sometimes able to turn defensive battles into new mass movements for justice, as in the Wilmington Ten case. We organized during the Reagan years, turning the two Jesse Jackson campaigns for president into a vast new grassroots movement, the Rainbow Coalition. And those who came before us organized in the South when it was literally a police state ruled by terror in the '30s. I’m not sure I would have had the courage that the people in our movement, African-American and European-American, demonstrated in those days The police state in the South was not really broken until the movement of the '60s, and that may be the most important achievement of that movement.

We don’t live in a police state today. It could happen, and that is a danger. But right now nobody is going to shoot us for going to a meeting. Nobody can burst into this room and say we can’t be here. We have the right to organize today, a right won by the struggles and sometimes lives of people who went before us.

We must use that right and try to use it effectively.

Real organizing—not reshuffling the organized

We have to organize the unorganized. We can’t just do what too often passes for organizing in our movement—reshuffle the organized. We tend to get together with people who agree with us, and we make some plans and we get a good feeling from being with kindred souls. That has value because we draw strength from each other. But if we want to change things, we have to get out and talk to people who are not in our movement.

I don’t know of any way to do that except the old-fashioned way of knocking on their doors. The art of door-to-door canvassing seems to have been lost for many people. People have become bewitched by computers. Computers are a great invention, and may be helpful in mobilizing people over a wide area. But you aren’t going to get people who aren’t already deeply involved to come to a meeting by sending them an e-mail. Many people don’t yet have a computer, and even if they do, it may not be in their lifestyle to check it regularly.

There is something about the human voice that is magic. If I get an e-mail about a meeting, or a form letter in the mail, I say to myself, “Gee, I should go to that.” But when the day comes I’ll get too busy. But if you call me on the phone and say, “We really need you,” I’ll go. I’ll know you are calling lots of people saying the same thing, but I’ll go. For people who don’t even know us, it’s better if they can see our face at their door.

What should be our priorities?

There are so many life-and-death issues facing us today. Where we choose to concentrate will be different in each community. But another thing I’ve learned from history is that unless we are attacking racism at the same time, we won’t get far on any issue. That’s because racism underlies every other issue—except I prefer to call White supremacy because that states more accurately what we mean, and also we don’t have to get into endless arguments about whether African-Americans can be racist. The country was founded on White supremacy. That’s where the original wealth came from, from slavery and the slave trade. And it was embedded in every structure of society—the courts, governmental structures, everything—that everything would be run by Whites for the benefit of Whites. Thus, today White supremacy is not just some wart on the body politic; it’s woven into the very fabric of our world. One practical effect is that as long as the few who run the country can dump all the problems of society on people of color, which is one aspect of how White supremacy works, they are never going to deal with the problems. One very obvious and graphic example of this today is the struggle against death from toxic pollution. As long as the poisons can be dumped on communities of color, pullulating companies will never change their production processes to restore clean air and water.

But conversely, because the nation was built on the backs of African-American slaves and they are thus at the base of society, whenever in our history they have organized and moved, the whole society moves. It’s as if the foundation stone of a building shifts and the entire structure shakes. That has happened over and over in our history, and I saw it with my own eyes in the '60s. The movement of that decade was not Martin Luther King; he was a great articulator who gave the country a great vision, but the movement was organized by thousands of unknown people across the South, many of them African-Americans sixteen and seventeen years old.  They laid their lives on the line, and everything in our society was opened up to question. Thus, we soon had those other movements—antiwar, women’s movement (separate Black and White), new labor organizing, civil liberties, lesbian and gay rights, environmental, disability rights movements. All that frightened those who run the society, which explains the massive repression of the Black Liberation movement in the late '60s. No people’s movement is ever totally destroyed, but this one was blunted at a very important moment, when it was aggressively taking on the issue of economic justice, which remains the unfinished business of the '60s revolution today. And ever since, it’s been only when we were also tackling White supremacy that we have made any successes on so-called “other” issues.

Building beachheads for justice

Sometimes, when people realize what a huge problem White supremacy is, they tend to get overwhelmed. In Louisville, I work mainly with the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist Political Repression. Its only program is the struggle against racism—but I think what we’ve learned can apply also to organizations whose primary program is some other issue but which tackles racism at the same time. We don’t sit around talking about White supremacy; we strive to bring people of color and Whites together to take visible action against specific manifestations of racist policies and practices in our community —on our police force, in the courts, the schools, on the job. You get hold of a huge issue like White supremacy by grabbing hold of something specific. We know we have to understand what is happening nationally and globally, but we concentrate on building a beachhead for justice in Louisville. We say we are trying to create an anti-racist majority in our community. We have faith that other groups are doing the same thing elsewhere, because really only as we build these local beachheads across the country will we have a movement strong enough to change national policies.

Some examples of real organizing

There are three examples in Louisville in which people are organizing the unorganized rather than just reshuffling the organized.

One is the struggle to stop violence on the part of some of our police officers. Seven African-American men have been shot and killed by our police in the last five years, plus constant daily harassment incidents. Our folks have been going to door-to-door in both African-American and European-American neighborhoods, asking people to sign postcards to the members of our local legislative body, calling for civilian review and independent investigation of police abuse, so police will no longer presume to investigate themselves. And they are getting a positive response from most people. Out of this, a significant number of people, including many youth, have chosen to join our movement, our demonstrations, and our visits to elected officials.

Another local example: the struggle against toxic pollution from a complex of chemical plants called Rubbertown, which is adjacent to both African-American and working-class European-American areas. We’ve been breathing these poisons for decades, but recently new studies have shown this to be the most polluted area in the Southeast. This has opened up new opportunities to organize. There’s an organization called REACT (Rubbertown Emergency Action), which is a network including many of our groups, and its activists also have been going door-to-door, talking with people who had felt hopeless about taking on huge corporations and who have never been active in any justice movement or community campaign. Out of that a whole set of new grassroots leaders is emerging; they now make up most of the steering committee of REACT, and they are beginning to have a powerful impact on government agencies and also the corporations.

And third, there is the Fairness Campaign, our local organization seeking full legal protections for lesbians and gays. We think it is probably unique in the nation, because it started to work for lesbian and gay rights, and it has become a militant anti-racist group and multi-issue; for example, it plays a leading role in the local work for living wage legislation. I think all this happened because two people who were leaders in organizing Fairness over ten years ago had been active in the anti-racist movement first. They took that commitment with them into this new work and have conveyed new understanding to multitudes of young Whites just coming into activity because of their own oppression. For several years now, Fairness has been going door-to-door doing voter identification—polling people on where they stand on several justice issues and from that work assembling a list of the people to contact later to get the vote out. Now Fairness has pulled together a broad coalition that includes all our groups to increase this work between now and November, scheduling people for varied areas at special times of the day and each week.

The George Wallace legacy

A noted Southern historian, Dan Carter, wrote an article last year, saying that George Wallace really won the election of 1968, because his politics became the politics that now prevails in the country. Before he was shot, Wallace really believed he could be president, and he was building a base in the North. The theme of his message was “Get the government off our backs.” That was code language and everybody knew it. What he meant was that the federal government was giving everything to African-Americans, and Whites were being left out. It was completely phony. The federal government was no burden to average people in Alabama, for example; it had built virtually every hospital in the state. But it was the corporations who wanted to get out from under the federal government because it had placed some small limits on their activities, whereas they had state agencies in their pockets—and all that is still the case. But Wallace’s slogan got into the atmosphere, and now multitudes of people think government itself is bad. We’ve got to take on that myth. We’ve got to help people see that the question is whose interest does the government serve, and how can we take hold of it and make it our own. And we have to give people faith that they can do that.

The “Other America”

Another important lesson I’ve learned from history is that our movements of today have a continuum in the past—and to the future. The regional organization I work with now, the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic & Social Justice (SOC), grew out of an earlier organization I worked with, the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEEF), and SCEF descended from an even earlier group, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, founded in 1938, which was probably seventy years ahead of its time. And I know too that all this relates to even earlier struggles in this country that go back to before the first slave ships arrived, when slaves revolted on the ships, and that down through the years there have always been people who struggled against injustice and oppression and for justice. And they’ve been African-American and European-American; and Latinos, whose struggle also goes back for decades; Native Americans, who were here before any of us; and now new groups of Asians in our region. And I realize I’m part of a long chain that goes back long before I existed and will be here long after I’m gone. I think that knowledge is what gives me the strength to keep going. It creates a community that we all live in. I call it  “the Other America,” and I think all of you here are part of it too.

Election 2004

What do we do this November? I don’t have a magic answer to that. I still brood about the huge nationwide grassroots Rainbow Coalition built during the two Jesse Jackson campaigns. Its collapse—no matter what the cause—was the political tragedy of the 20^th Century. Can it be replicated? Someday, I hope, but certainly not before this fall. I don’t know whether we can survive four more years of Bush, so I’ll no doubt pull the lever for the lesser evil. Ever since I voted for Henry Wallace in 1948, the first year I could vote, I’ve been pulling the levers against someone, except for those two Jackson campaigns. I just hope I live long enough to vote for someone again.

Meantime, I tend to agree with those who are saying we can’t really wait until November; we are in too dire an emergency now. I hope some national broad coalition will call massive actions soon in Washington, demanding that we get out of Iraq and stop the domestic budget cuts that are devastating our people. If they do, we must all drop everything else and go—as we did in the '60s.

Another lesson history teaches us is that in a sense it does not matter who is in the White House. What makes a difference is people organizing and making their voices heard. Franklin Roosevelt was not an agent for real change in the beginning; he responded when people organized massively. John Kennedy, when he was elected, was no crusader for civil rights; he responded to movement in the hinterlands and people in the streets. The same was true of Lyndon Johnson—on civil rights, although not on Vietnam. And remember that when basic policies changed on Vietnam, Nixon was president. We can make a difference—and we must convince other people of that, as we knock on their doors. q

Anne Braden has for decades been engaged in social change movements. Today she works primarily with the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and teaches at two universities. She joined the FOR in 1961. A new biography of Braden, Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and The Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South, by Catherine Fosl, has been published by Palgrave Macmillan. (available from FOR).