On the other end of things, it's also hard to do further historical research after high school (or college, if you went). I do not share that "if only everyone were better studied in my subject, the world would be a better place!" view a lot of academics have. Yes, it'd be great if people went out of their way to delve into history to gain a better understanding of it. It'd also be great if people went out of their way to become well-versed in economics, nutrition, sociology, psychology, physics, cars, urban planning, software engineering, journalism, astronomy... I think you get the point. There's simply too many worthwhile fields of knowledge for anyone to arrogantly say people are awful for not choosing to look more into your area of expertise. We can only learn so much.
So, with all that being said, it's understandable that society as a whole doesn't have a great grasp of history, but it's still a bummer. There is perhaps no better example of this bummer than the civil rights movement. There's a lot of misconceptions about that time period, from the watered-down memory of Martin Luther King Jr to the erasure of the economic component of the civil rights movement to the implication that the movement sorta just died off after the federal legislation of 1964 and 1965. What I wanna focus on here, however, in honor of Martin Luther King Jr Day, is how one particular aspect of the civil rights movement that we often don't think about can be used to give us hope for the future.
I'm talking about its timeline.
I promise my post will be less convoluted than this mess of a timeline.
When we think of the civil rights era, we think of everything starting with the 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision and Rosa Parks bus boycott in 1955, and we think of it ending with the 1964/1965 legislation that Lyndon B Johnson signed into law. The fact of the matter, though, is that Brown v Board of Education came about after decades of hard organizing work from a variety of individuals and organizations, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and the NAACP. Civil rights activism in general existed well before the 1950s, and it was that very foundation that made what we usually consider the civil rights era possible. The hard work, mistakes, disagreements, and coalition-building of earlier times is what made the movement's 1954-1965 hallmark achievements possible.
Basically, the civil rights era wasn't a neatly contained, isolated, perfectly organized and executed time of activism with a clearly defined beginning and end. No era of change ever is. Rather, it was a time of people organizing, in all their imperfections, to imperfectly build a movement that took incredible amounts of effort, consistency, compromise, debate, diversity of tactics, and finding of common ground to eventually start gaining momentum. The less effective movements of earlier times taught lessons to those who cared about equality and justice, who kept going forward after each setback to continue building a movement for a better tomorrow.
So why should this give anyone hope about today, or the future?
The earliest activism of the 2010s most people remember today is Occupy Wallstreet, which came about after people started to feel the ripples of the Great Recession. While the movement did a great job of bringing attention to income inequality and corporate money in politics, many rightfully criticized its lack of focus. Many (though not all) of the Occupy protests around the United States and other parts of the world involved vaguely protesting those issues without any clearly defined platform of tangible ways to tackle those issues.
"We personally believe the best approach would be countless sit-ups and a lack of shirts."
The same has been said of Black Lives Matter, today's biggest movement, though to a lesser extent. Coming about as a result of George "Human Garbage" Zimmerman being acquitted after killing Trayvon Martin, Black Lives Matter has been at the forefront of fighting violence against black people and police brutality, in the latter case even when the victims of police brutality are white. Black Lives Matter actually has come up with a platform, and there are people doing some important work around those issues. But, as a whole, most Black Lives Matter actions are in reaction to specific deaths of black folks to hold their murderers accountable (which is also super important), rather than being organized around specific, structural, widespread change.
A lot of people have therefore written off the possibility of real change in the near future. It's an understandable impulse considering how social movements for change have been on the defensive for the last few years, not to mention how exhausting politics have become under the avalanche of bullshit that is the Trump administration.
Historically speaking, however, that impulse could not be further from the truth.
Taking everything discussed above about the civil rights movement to heart, it's important to reiterate how gradually the civil rights movement happened. It did not come overnight. Important change never does. It didn't even come in a decade. Nor was everyone in agreement about goals and strategies: different groups each came up with their own. As mentioned above, only years of hard work brought these different groups together to form coalitions and create more organized, focused platforms.
In other words, the idea that the flaws of today's movements doom them to failure is simply not true. Like people, movements must be allowed to make mistakes and grow. What we saw with Occupy was the burgeoning steps of a new generation of activist ready to fight the good fight. We're seeing a more sophisticated one now with Black Lives Matter, among other current movements. Whatever issues there are in these movements today, they have time to keep building, improving, focusing.
"Can we fix [the issues inherent in any young social movement]?" "Yes we can!"
That being said, we can't just nod and think "ahh, good point, I guess things will work out!" We have to make them work out. As Martin Luther King Jr put it: "change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle." We can't think of change as resulting from some sort of inevitable force that just sorta happens; we have to fight for it. I have confidence we can.
It's not baseless optimism I'm going off of, either (contrary to what this post implies, I generally err on the side of pessimism). I remember before the Great Recession, one of the biggest criticisms of my generation was that we didn't care at all about politics. Then we started discussing issues revolving around racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia; we voted for Obama in 2008/2012 and Bernie in the 2016 primaries, among other politicians, showing our willingness to vote if we felt a candidate truly represented our interests; we have organized and shown up to demonstrate for causes important to us, even if not in quite the numbers we need (yet). We are now dismissively called 'social justice warriors' by the same people who complained about our lack of political involvement a decade ago.
On a more personal note, when I was getting my MA in History at SDSU, I worked my second to last semester as a teaching assistant. The professor I worked for, who has been teaching for the last couple decades, warned us TAs ahead of time that issues like the labor struggles and anti-lynching crusades of the late 1800s was something that lost the attention a lot of students. "Just try your best to get through it until we get to World War 1 & 2," he advised us.
When I went over those in the discussion sections I led, however, my students were incredibly engaged.
They still seemed pretty unreceptive to my proposal to use the Necronomicon to revive Ida B Wells
and help her run for president for some reason, though. Kids these days, right?
As much as I'd love to pretend it was because I was an amazing TA, the truth of the matter is that students in their late teens and early twenties came of age in a vastly different world than I did, despite me being only slightly older than them. I'm twenty eight. I was eleven when 9/11 took place. To say that event had an impact on myself and people my age or older is an understatement. Those currently in their teens and early twenties, however, came of age during the Great Recession. In talking to them, that event defined their life experiences and subsequent worldview. It's their 9/11.
Combine that with the fact that social media has given marginalized people the chance to share their stories, have dialogue, and organize in an unprecedented way, and you can see why so many young people are gaining an understanding of social justice issues. Black Lives Matter began as a hashtag, after all. It started there and became a movement thanks to the excellent work of many black organizers, including the three black women who founded it. Same with the Me Too movement that took off last year.
Now, I'm not saying that whatever movement comes about will fix all of society's ills. The civil rights movement didn't, the labor movements of the 1930s didn't, the Progressive movement of the beginning of the 1900s didn't. There will probably never be a movement that results in a perfect society, and if there is, I doubt it's coming in our lifetime. Nor am I saying all young people are gonna be great, human rights-oriented agents of change. There are apolitical people, as well as bigots and assholes, in every generation. We're no different.
What I am saying is that we can't lose hope for things to get better. There's plenty of evidence that we have what it takes, as well as evidence that we're starting to understand this fact. It's on us to decide if we will do something with it.
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