It's Time to Build a Mass Movement

by Bruce Dixon; The Black Commentator; July 06, 2005, Via Znet

"Democracy... does not come from the government, from on high, it comes from people getting together and struggling for justice."
- Howard Zinn, Spelman College commencement address, Atlanta, 2005.

Politicians are elected and selected, but mass movements transform societies. Judges uphold, strike down, or invent brand new law, but mass movements drag the courts, laws and officeholders all in their wake. Progressive and even partially successful mass movements can alter the political calculus for decades to come, thus improving the lives of millions. Social Security, the New Deal, and employer-provided medical care didn't come from the pen of FDR. The end of "separate but equal" didn't come from the lips of any judge, and voting rights were not simply granted by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. All these were hard-won outcomes of protracted struggle by progressive mass movements, every one of which operated outside the law and none of which looked to elected officials or the corporate media of those days for blessings or legitimacy. It's time to re-learn those lessons and build a new progressive mass movement in the United States.


Mass movements are against the law

Mass movements exist outside electoral politics, and outside the law, or they don't exist at all. Mass movements are never respecters of law and order. How can they be? A mass movement is an assertion of popular leadership by the people themselves. A mass movement aims to persuade courts, politicians and other actors to tail behind it, not the other way around. Mass movements accomplish this through appeals to shared sets of deep and widely held convictions among the people they aim to mobilize, along with acts or credible threats of sustained and popular civil disobedience.

Not all mass movements are progressive. The legal strategy of "massive resistance" to desegregation on the part of southern whites, in which local governments across the south threw up thickets of lawsuits, evasions and new statutes, closing whole school systems in some areas rather than integrate, was implemented in response to and backed up by the historically credible and ever-present threat of armed, lawless white mobs long accustomed to dishing out violence to their black neighbors and any white allies with impunity. They operated in a context of popular belief in white superiority and black inferiority that was widespread among whites of that region and time. Undeniable proof of the existence of a violent, white supremacist mass movement was broadcast around the world when thousands of local white citizens showed up to trade blows, insults, and gunfire with federal marshals in places like Little Rock, Arkansas in '57 and Oxford, Mississippi in '62.

Likewise, courts and public officials who enforced desegregation orders were under relentless pressure from a civilly disobedient mass movement for equality and justice. 89 leaders of the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott could not have been surprised when they earned conspiracy indictments for their trouble. Tens of thousands of mostly southern, mostly black citizens defied unjust laws and were jailed in the waves of mostly illegal sit-ins, marches, freedom rides and other mostly illegal actions that swept the South for more than a decade. This movement in turn relied on the deep convictions of all African Americans and growing numbers of whites that segregation and white supremacy were evils that had to be fought, regardless of personal costs. For many, those costs were very high. Some are still paying.


Mass movements are politically aggressive

Mass movements are kindled into existence by unique combinations of outraged public opinion in the movement's core constituency, political opportunity, and aggressive leadership. The absence of any of these can prevent a mass movement from materializing. In a January 20, 2005 BC article occasioned by the death of visionary James Foreman, one of the masterminds of the mid-century movement for civil and human rights, which contains many useful insights on the characteristics of mass movements, David Swanson recalled a recent lost opportunity in the wake of the 2000 presidential election: "Various small groups did act, and Rev. Jesse Jackson became a leading spokesman for those objecting to a stolen election. The coalition cobbled together was surprisingly successful in moving Congress Members and Senators to at least give lip service to the matter. The seeds of something may have been sown. But a mass movement was not organized. Civil disobedience was not used."

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