feature: grassroots and intersectionality, the foundations of the new civil rights movement

Following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, last year, a new civil rights movement has been accelerated in the United States; growing bigger by the day and inspiring planned responses across the world – a movement which has been propelled by social media; and which is concerned with more than just race, addressing LGBTQ issues among its “broader agenda”. However with all generations seeking to play a part in this new movement, how should it be led? Unlike the old establishment, there is a new generation of activists who are putting the focus on grassroots activism and intersectionality as they call for change. The Politico explores this in depth in a newly published article; read some extracts below. 

By Alexander Aplerku, AFROPUNK Contributor

The new social-justice grass roots reflects a broader agenda that includes LGBTQ (lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-questioning) issues and immigration reform. The young grass-roots activists I’ve spoken to have a broad suite of concerns: the school-to-prison pipeline, educational inequality, the over-policing of black and Latino communities. In essence, they’re trying to take on deeply entrenched discrimination that is fueled less by showy bigotry than systemic, implicit biases.

The movement’s renewal has exposed a serious generational rift. It is largely a bottom-up movement being led by young unknowns who have rejected, in some cases angrily, the presumption of leadership thrust on them by veteran celebrities like Al Sharpton. While both the younger and older activists both trace their lineage to the civil rights movement, they seem to align themselves with different parts of that family tree. And in several ways, these contemporary tensions are updates of the disagreements that marked the earlier movement.

Sarah Jackson, a professor at Northeastern University whose research focuses on social movements, said the civil rights establishment embraces the “Martin Luther King-Al Sharpton model”—which emphasizes mobilizing people for rallies and speeches and tends to be centered around a charismatic male leader. But the younger activists are instead inclined to what Jackson called the “Fannie Lou Hamer-Ella Baker model”—an approach that embraces a grass roots and in which agency is widely diffused. Indeed, many of the activists name-checked Baker, a lesser-known but enormously influential strategist of the civil rights era. She helped found Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference but became deeply skeptical of the cult of personality that she felt had formed around him. And she vocally disagreed with the notion that power in the movement should be concentrated among a few leaders, who tended to be men with bases of power that lay in the church. “My theory is, strong people don’t need strong leaders,” she said.

James Hayes, an organizer with the Ohio Student Association, said that he didn’t think of this new social justice movement as “leaderless” in the Occupy style. “I think of it as leader-ful,” he said.

At a recent march put together by Sharpton’s National Action Network in Washington, D.C.—meant to protest the recent decisions not to indict the officers in several high-profile police-involved killings and push for changes in the protocol from prosecutors—younger activists from St. Louis County were upset at what they saw as a lineup of older speakers on the podium who were not on the ground marching in Ferguson. So they climbed onto the stage and took the mic. “It should be nothing but young people up here!” a woman named Johnetta Elzie yelled into the microphone. “We started this!” Some people cheered them. Others called for them to get off the stage. After a few minutes, the organizers cut off their mics. (In the crowd, someone held up a neon-green sign making their discontent with the march’s organizers plain: “WE, THE YOUTH, DID NOT ELECT AL SHARPTON OUR SPOKESPERSON. HAVE A SEAT.”)

But for many, the tipping point came in February 2012, when George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. That case, too, churned on Twitter for weeks. When it finally bubbled into the mainstream, it exploded. There were rallies in cities and campuses across the country. In solidarity, people shared photos of themselves in hoodies like the one Martin was wearing when he was killed. The longer Zimmerman went uncharged, the louder the protests became. Obama eventually waded into the conversation, saying at a news conference that if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon. The president’s comments summed up the anxieties that many black parents felt. It also made the story unavoidable, and it effectively polarized the case along party lines.

All this new energy comes, ironically, as the country’s appetite for fighting racial inequality—never all that robust in the best of times—appears to be ebbing. The tent-pole policy victories of the civil rights movement are even now in retrenchment: 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, American schools—especially in the South—are rapidly resegregating; the Voting Rights Act, which turns 50 in 2015, has been effectively gutted; and, despite the passage of the Fair Housing Act, our neighborhoods are as segregated as ever.

By 2014, the new social-justice grass-roots groups had grown more assured and more coordinated, and their activism reflected millennial sensibilities in both substance and execution. Many of the organizations pointedly centered LGBTQ issues and experiences on their agenda—Black Lives Matter, notably, was founded by queer women—and while they didn’t have the resources of the legacy outfits, they could be more nimble. In July, dozens of young activists of color from different organizations launched a collective called Freedom Side, inspired by the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Summer and the young activists who participated in it. The Freedom Side groups lent each other organizational support and boosted the signals for each other’s causes, like ending mass deportations, reining in college costs and protecting voting rights.

“We’ve all been trying to build a network of young-people-of-color organizations,” Hayes said. “The groundwork was already in place.”

the professor from Northeastern, worked with other researchers to map the routes that the hashtags for those stories took on Twitter, via retweets and favorites, to reach the broader public. “What we saw was the first people who hashtagged Mike Brown’s name were young people who lived in Ferguson and who saw his body laying in the street,” Jackson said. “The people driving the Michael Brown story and Ferguson—and this is also true of the Trayvon Martin case—were young and had some connection to the victim. It was young folks from those communities who don’t necessarily tweet about political things or even have many followers.”

* image: http://www.millennialau.org