ACTIVISTS’ TECHNIQUES

STICKING AROUND WITHOUT GETTING STUCK

Somebody has said that half of activism is showing up. True enough. But then much of the other half is sticking around. A glaring strategic difference between conservative and progressive movements is longevity.

Conservatives stick around. Look at how long it took from the earliest days of the religious right (Reagan) until Trump’s fanatical fascism. Progressives get upset about something, have a demonstration, and then disappear. But unless progressivism can glow, and keep the home fires of change warm, it will be outplayed every time by conservatism that knows how to play the long game.

Pop-up groups and flash demonstrations are important. They do the essential things that short-order activism can do. Then, they dissolve until the next new configuration arises. A lot of activism reacts, as it should, to current events and flares up into public victories for the time being.

Organizational longevity is crucial to a healthy activist community. People newly arrived in a region, or newly awakened to an issue, want to know with whom they can join forces. They may turn first to the immediately like-minded, the way a lobbyist against fracking will reach out naturally to a carbon-capper or animal-rights advocate. Co-operation need not stop there, though. An activist alliance may go on to wider friendships with quite different citizen groups concerned about, say, income inequality or the global footprint of the Pentagon.

Mutual support of this lateral kind can and will arise spontaneously across the board of progressive activism. But it needn’t be left to chance.

Emergent activist groups can take advantage of older groups that have been around for a while. Activists that have stayed the course for years tend to know the local lay of the land. They know where the angels and skeletons are in institutional history and what wheels have been invented once or twice already.

How do you get there? Longevity in activist groups is promoted by the thoughtful articulation of principles that create institutional sustainability. An organization that lasts will have persistence built into its mission (statement), will provide (via bylaws or other means) for smooth succession in a working leadership that it recognizes must change over time. Such an organization will on a regular basis consider where it is coming from and where it is going – always including,an exit strategy for shutting up shop and handing off to its heirs – with a view to such changes in tactics as will let the mission, not just the organization, prosper.

In Charlottesville as well as throughout the US, we see a dwindling in progressive organizations. Groups that remained active through the Trump regime have become inactive.
That is exactly what the right wing wants.

Author: Chip Tucker is an English professor at UVA. He has been active in Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice since its founding in the 1980’s. A devoted Quaker, he was one of the last conscientious objectors drafted into civilian alternative service by the US government.

TEN WAYS TO STAGE AN INEFFECTIVE DEMONSTRATION

IGNORE THE MEDIA

You must ensure that the media broadcasts your interpretation of your action. To do this, they have to know what is happening and why. Media is under time pressures, so make their job as simple as possible. Have a press release prepared to give to the media before and after the action. The media can change the public’s perception of your actions. It may be the only way for the public to know that your perspective exists. Get as much media coverage as you can. Durable”household words” result from the frequency of press appearances.

RESTRICT PARTICIPATION IN YOUR ACTIONS

The press is the target of your action and they are most interested in large groups that are demanding change. The smaller the group, the less the coverage. So don’t exclude potential participants. Your success will be based upon assembling the largest, non-violent group possible. Theatrical events, such as die-ins, will attract some media attention, but they do not indicate the support of a mass movement.

FAIL TO PLAN YOUR PUBLIC ACTIONS

When actions are announced at the last minute they will fail to attract the largest possible crowd. They are emotional events, not strategic events.

GET BORING SPEAKERS AND FORGET ABOUT THE MUSIC

The aim of public actions is to draw the largest crowd possible. If the speakers are boring and the action is a silent affair with non-emotional speakers, the masses will not be interested. In these actions, it is the medium that counts the most, not the message.

CRITICIZE THE METHODS OF OTHER ORGANIZATIONS

Unique organizations are born for distinct techniques. Fights between organizations are exactly what the opposition wants. They want you to divert your energy from combating the common foe to fighting with similar organizations. We all need each other and need to be sufficiently open-minded to recognize the value of differing techniques At a book-signing in Charlottesville, Christian Picciolini, the former supremacist leader, expressed that a primary strategy of the supremacists is to splinter the activist organizations.

FAIL TO BROADCAST THE PURPOSE OF YOUR ACTIONS

Signs, banners, etc. must accompany any action. Whether it is a mini-march of 25 or a major rally of thousands, there must be an abundance of visible signage. This is true for any event. Even if you are doing voter registration training, there must be signs on the wall. If the media does attend, their photos will make your point much more strongly than a bunch of people standing around a table.

ENGAGE IN VIOLENT/DESTRUCTIVE BEHAVIOR

This often is exactly what the opposition wants. It provides them the opportunity to cast themselves as the innocent victims. Violence allows deflection of attention from the real problem. The public will associate your movement with violence as opposed to the reasons for your protest.

RE-INVENT THE WHEEL

It is far more efficient to learn from the experiences and historically proven techniques of predecessors. Read the works of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Howard Zinn, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X, Stokely Carmichael and Mahatma Gandhi and others. Learn from their experiences and observations.

Due to their oddity, traditional communication techniques can be very attention-getting. Lawn signs, flyers, posters — anything that attracts attention works.

Author: Richard Lord has been an activist since the Civil Rights Movement. He has continued to scream through until today. He was a student leader in the anti-war movement at Boston University, where he worked closely with Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. Currently he is focusing upon white supremacy.

GROWING YOUR EMAIL LIST

Building a local email list as an organizing strategy begins where all the most effective organizing does – in relationship. For the Charlottesville Area Justice Coalition, I began by making a list in a spreadsheet of all the contacts I could think of that were 1) people I knew and 2) people I thought might be interested in connecting over local justice work.

We formed a small steering committee to oversee these efforts and spent two months simply growing an email list as we prepared for our first Zoom meeting for the Coalition in 2023.

We set a date for the first meeting and started spreading the word individually. Each person we met, we added to the email list. We then contacted many organizations who were also doing similar work and emailed or called them, explaining our goal and adding them to the list.

By the time we got to our first meeting, we had momentum and interest, which grew even more when we decided to have the group engage a low-threshold organizing campaign – advocating to our local jail to make phone calls free. We thought this was an issue that many individuals could support, and we’d worked hard to grow the list so that it included community groups, system actors, and local politicians – from abolitionists to strong system-supporters.

We wrote a petition and created a Google Form for people to sign, asked those on the Coalition list to send the petition around, and quickly got over 100 signatures. We then added those individuals to the list. We’ve now had twice-monthly meetings for over a year and continue to work to grow our list and engage it, most often by sending out a bi-weekly resources list as one way to meet a need (gathering justice-related resources and events). The email list continues to grow!

Author: Sam Heath is a narrative strategist with Equal Justice USA, a national nonprofit working to end the death penalty and promote restorative justice and community safety. He was a high school history teacher for ten years before this role.

FINDING COMMON GROUND

During early voting, I spent a number of afternoons as a volunteer poll observer, a democrat working to be sure that every eligible voter was able to cast a ballot. One afternoon, I was joined by a republican observer. We had pleasant conversation while noticing that many voters were arriving with mail-in ballots.

From there, our conversation turned to the common problems we have had with mail delivery over the past several years, much due to a shortage of mail carriers. I wondered aloud why more immigrants were not applying, as mail carriers are reasonably well compensated and receive good benefits. My observing counterpart responded curtly, “They don’t want to work because then they have to pay taxes. Instead, they just take handouts from the government.”

I didn’t have time for an argument, so I simply responded, “I think that’s not true.” Then I quickly turned my attention to a voter who was having trouble getting her ballot. The rest of the day I wondered how that conversation might have gone, had I been able to challenge her premise.

First, I acknowledged to myself that this person gets her information from a narrow, quite probably singular, source. Then, I mined my internal database for facts that countered her perception. Then, I imagined myself presenting her with that information in a somewhat deferential matter. assenting that there may be a few for whom her assumption is true. And then, inviting her to partner to engage in further conversation about the issue beneath the problem, and together seek a solution.

You can have these conversations without mentioning the name of a single politician. It is tempting and way too easy to blame the system, or allow our visceral feelings about a particular politician to collapse our vision, but that will not move us forward to building a community of compassion and respect. All I want is for us to work a little harder to find common ground, to work together towards just solutions to some of our most difficult problems.

Author: The Rev. Dr. Jan Rivero is a retired United Methodist clergy woman who has served churches and campus ministries in North Carolina and Virginia. Since retiring she has been involved in activities aimed at protecting our democracy, as well as writing her memoir and three children’s picture books.

The above centers around public actions. Future versions will center around lobbying, letter-writing, etc.

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