From a Thousand Struggles. Cutting Across Boundaries. It Takes All:
Lessons from transformational social movements for today.
With this post we intend to share some of our thinking about the lessons we have learned from social movements with the aim that these lessons will spark a discusion about how to turn education reform into a movement for educational justice.
Great visions can’t be realized without self-organizing from the bottom up. The broadest-based, most enduring, and most successful transformational movements build from the multitude at the grassroots. Movements organized from the bottom up are closest to the social ills they wish to address, so their perspective is critical. While they may or may not be supported by elements in government or the nonprofit community, grassroots movements derive their strength from their immersion in, or proximity to, communities dealing with these real-life problems. Who can more honestly speak to issues of poor health or education or unjust laws than those who are suffering and fighting against these conditions?
Well-structured organizing is based on the ability of ordinary people to participate in history-changing movements. Fannie Lou Hamer—a poor African American woman sharecropper—helped create the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in order to confront the all-white delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. By speaking courageously and authentically for people who had too long been excluded and invisible in American electoral politics, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described Hamer’s impact this way: “It is in these saints in ordinary walks of life that the true spirit of democracy finds its most profound and abiding expression.
Although successful movements are built on participation by people with different backgrounds and actions taken in many arenas, elite strategies to effect change—through elections, the courts or media—while important, are not sufficient. For instance, the lunch counter sit-ins in the late 1950s to integrate America’s everyday institutions was a movement that anyone, with nonviolence training, could join. This bottom-up campaign slowly enabled public opinion to conclude that racial segregation was morally repugnant and should be legally wrong.
Movements need the grassroots and grass tops to take on not only entrenched political power but also the power of capitalist culture. The experience of Cotacachi, Ecuador, is emblematic. Their participatory democracy begins with the premise that the purpose of the government is to fulfill the desires and goals of the people, which are expressed in an annual meeting. Operating through the Assembly, a loosely knit collection of grass-roots organizations, the people set annual goals and objectives for the municipal government, and then monitor the activities of government to insure that their goals are carried out. The Occupy movement's General Assembly is similarly modeled.
Movements are also more successful when they “scale across” boundaries and other traditional dividing lines of age, place, class, race, sex or nationality. Transformational activists are inspired and able to learn from their elders and peers, those with differing backgrounds and expertise, across oceans and issues to see the big picture. Successful transformational movements cross boundaries to link to related movements and broaden their own reach and relevance. Even when the relationship between issues or movements may seem tangential it is essential to find the common ground and purposes that can enhance both efforts.
This inclusiveness helps build a movement’s critical mass and sustainability. A big-tent movement brings together people from all types of backgrounds, with differing perspectives, but a common vision of social justice. It is more important to cast a big net than to insist on ideological or doctrinal purity. Independent social movements need to be built by far-reaching and “durable coalitions,” according to Deepak Bhargava, director of the Campaign for Community Change and founder of Generation Change, which recruits and trains young community organizers. He rightly decries the tendency of “individuals and organizations with similarly progressive goals [to] often dilute their power by working alone or even working at cross-purposes.”
African American historian Vincent Harding has suggested that the black freedom struggle has been like a “river”—a movement that has flowed in many directions with many ripple effects, from abolitionism to the voting rights and civil rights movements. He speaks of “its long continuous movement, flowing like a river, sometimes powerful, tumultuous, and roiling with life; at other times meandering and turgid, covered with the ice and snow of seemingly endless winters, all too often streaked and running with blood.”
Likewise, movements can productively influence one another. The long struggle for racial justice partly inspired the women’s suffrage and later feminist movements. Similarly, anti-poverty and anti-war movements have drawn from this “river,” carving change throughout modern American history.
Like the path that non-violence and civil disobedience took from Thoreau to Gandhi to Rosa Parks and King, transformational movements are nurtured from seeds planted across time and place. Successive movements learn from and adapt prior efforts and ideas to make them work in their time and for their issues.
However, it is not just about building strength through alliances. Rather, it is critical to draw upon the wisdom and perspectives, experiences and techniques of many individuals and groups from many different settings and times. We must ask: How can we learn from other successful movements and models in other communities and countries? How can we join forces with groups struggling around other social issues such as healthcare, the environment, and hunger? Please join us in this conversation.