So now let’s turn to talking about this week’s historical…

Question Answered step-by-step So now let’s turn to talking about this week’s historical… So now let’s turn to talking about this week’s historical perspectives. This week, we’re talking about Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Highlander Center. The Highlander Center is a training center that still exists for popular education and organizing training in rural Tennessee.And many of us know the story of Rosa Parks. We learned in school that she, one day, was just very tired, and her feet hurt. And she didn’t want to sit in the back of the bus or stand in the back of the bus, so she sat down in the front. And we learned that Rosa Parks as an individual was key in igniting a certain wave of the Civil Rights movement.But what we know as community organizers about Rosa Parks is that actually she trained for 10 years before she sat down on the bus. And the boycott had been pre-organized, or the plan for the boycott had been pre-organized by the Montgomery Improvement Association, also, with years of planning and strategizing, like the kind of strategizing we’ll do in this class.The bus company was the target of their organizing campaign, and the boycott was the strategy for pushing a broader civil rights agenda nationwide. So organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference– typically thought to be Martin Luther King’s organization– those organizations were also engaged in developing the strategy for this.So there were actually other organizers, other black women, younger black women, who used the same strategy. Claudette Colvin is one of them. But their stories weren’t elevated because of two things. One, the political moment just wasn’t right. It just wasn’t the time that the media picked up on their work or their refusal to stand in the back of the bus.And also, because their stories weren’t quite as good as Rosa Parks’ stories by hegemonic or normative standards. Because Rosa Parks was older and it was easier to frame her as less of an insurgent character, we see that Rosa Parks’ story gets elevated, while stories of women like Claudette Colvin just don’t make it to the media– so important for us as organizers to understand that movement work, one, doesn’t rely on individuals. It relies on a network of leaders and of mass organizations, like the Montgomery Improvement Association and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and, also, that organizing requires an incredible amount of training and strategizing and actual analysis about the field of play or the field of power that we’re working in.And the Highlander Center was a place where people went to accomplish this. So we can see, there on the slide, the picture of that famous billboard that appeared throughout the South calling Martin Luther King a communist and showing a picture of him at the Highlander Center. So this was a familiar tactic, and we’ll talk about this when we talk about Anne Braden and Ella Baker. A familiar tactic in the 1960s during the Civil Rights movement was to continue to call civil rights organizers communists.So we’ve seen, with the formation of the House Un-American Activities Committee years and before this, that an effective tactic for destabilizing left movements– whether those be around racial identity or class or fight for revolutionary socialism– that a tactic that the US government and the right wing use for destabilizing those movements was red baiting– so to call the organizers communists in a time when the United States is ramping up its program against communism worldwide.And so this happened to people across all kinds of industries– so labor organizers in Hollywood were blacklisted for organizing actors and organizing technical workers on set. The teachers’ unions, other CIO unions, AFL unions purged communists after the House Un-American Activities Committee was formed and started subpoenaing people or having people come before Congress to say that they weren’t communists. So this becomes a familiar tactic for destabilizing left movements is to red bait or call people communist.So we see this billboard up here around the South, where King is identified as a communist in order to discredit him and his work. But what we know about King is that he was actually increasingly radical over his lifetime. He came to embrace democratic socialist politics just before he was assassinated. He started the Poor People’s Campaign.So we hear King, in a speech, actually, written by Vincent Harding– the “Beyond Vietnam” speech. King had come out against the Vietnam War and was increasingly a target of the US government as his politics radicalized and he became more militant. So he’s at the sanitation workers strike in Memphis. So as we’ll talk about, we see the intersection between the Civil Rights movement and the labor movement. And we see King in his “Beyond Vietnam” speech, the most radical speech that we have of King’s– we see him criticize the triple evils of militarism, consumerism, and racism.So when he’s talking about consumerism, he’s talking about capitalism. When he’s talking about militarism, he’s talking about the Vietnam War. And then, of course, when he’s talking about racism, he’s talking about Jim Crow, but the whole manner and spectrum of racist– de jure and de facto racist policies in the United States at the time.So we see King come to embrace this idea that, actually, we have to undo  all of these institutions in society, that we have to fight against white supremacy and patriarchy and capitalism, though King is less radical in his politics around gender. But we see over his lifetime a move towards an analysis that embraced a class analysis.King certainly, probably, wouldn’t have ever called himself a Marxist, but we see that surrounding King is a group of theorists and activists who absolutely have democratic socialist politics and believe that mass organization of the working class, of internally of labor is really going to be the only way that we can shift these institutions in society. So King takes up, just before his death, the Poor People’s Campaign.It goes unfinished, though in recent years organizers like Reverend Barber in North Carolina have tried to reignite the energy of the Poor People’s Campaign. But before King dies, he sees the Poor People’s Campaign as a way in which he would organize poor and working class people, and the existing infrastructure of the Civil Rights Movement would move towards the support of labor struggles and towards bringing people together, not just on the basis of race, but on the basis of class.So our other piece of history this week is about two other civil rights activists– two Southern women, Anne Braden, from Kentucky, and Ella Baker, originally from North Carolina, though she lived all over the country. Ella Baker was a black woman who grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, and attended Shaw High School and University in Raleigh, North Carolina. And Anne Braden grew up in Alabama and became a reporter for a local paper and then eventually a civil rights activist after marrying her husband Carl Braden in Kentucky and in the Southeast.So both women believed in the power of ordinary working class people and poor people as leaders. So this is something we see from women in the Civil Rights Movement, often thought of as sort of a foil to Dr. King. Their stories are typically less publicized. But both Ella Baker and Anne Braden, while King organized middle class black people, college educated black folks, Anne Braden and Ella Baker organized working class or poor black people and white people in the US South.Ella Baker, particularly, wrote a good bit about her strategy and her idea of how we should makw type of organizing. And Ella’s theorizing and organizing work has come to inform a lot of Black Lives Matter organizing today and a lot of feminist-centered, black feminist-centered organizing work now around racial injustice.So Ella would say that “strong people don’t need strong leaders.” She said “instead of the leader as a person who is supposed to be a magic man, you can develop individuals who are bound together by a concept that benefited the large number of individuals and provided the opportunity for them to grow into being responsible for carrying out a program.” So Ella Baker was key in developing internal democracy in civil rights organization– so embodying this ideology.Again, we can think of her as a foil to King, who was what we would call a charismatic leader. And this is sort of a controversial idea within community organizing, is this idea of, do we need charismatic leaders, people who are good speakers, people who have a magnetism, who bring people to the work because people like being around them? Or do we need what Adrienne Maree Brown is talking about or what today organizers might call a “leaderful organization,” where leadership is shared by a variety of people and we have a democratic or even potentially decentralized organization, where different groups of people take up different work within the organization and are tasked with making decisions about that work.So Ella Baker really embodied this philosophy of internal democracy and potentially even decentralization. So the organization that Ella Baker became a key organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. So the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee kicked off the lunch counter strikes and the lunch counter sit-ins, starting with four North Carolina A&T students in Greensboro, North Carolina, and spreading to Kansas and Kentucky, to Alabama and across the South. Students went in and sat-in in drugstores and lunch counters across the country protesting segregation of those private businesses and ultimately won in places across the South the illegality of ordinances segregating private spaces– or won concessions from the bosses.So bosses would say we’re no longer going to have segregated counters. So Ella Baker helped to advise the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and to support their development. SNCC was arguably the most democratic of the organizations within the Civil Rights Movement infrastructure.And then Anne Braden– Anne Braden was indicted on charges of sedition for buying a house for a black family, she and her husband Carl. The home was dynamited by white vigilantes during the Civil Rights Movement. She was indicted because she was causing unrest by having bought the home and having incited this white violence, even though, obviously, the white vigilantes were the people causing unrest.But so both women were red baited– Anne Braden charged with sedition, a much, far more severe charge than was necessary. Ella Baker also trained at the Highlander Center– and also, called a communist. Ella Baker had an interesting history, too. When we think about feminism in this period and we think about the role of women in the Civil Rights Movement, Ella was never foregrounded as a speaker or as a leader. She was always an organizer.She worked for a variety of organizations. At one point, she was the secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She was an organizer for the NAACP. She lived in Harlem. She lived in Alabama. She was often traveling around and often in, what we would call, like a secondary role in civil rights organizations.How does this version of the civil rights movement differ from what you were taught in school about it?   Social Science Sociology SWGS 6005 Share QuestionEmailCopy link Comments (0)