A Lecture on Movement Building

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has made it clear: "This ain't Yo Mama's Civil Rights Movement!!!" In the words of my friend Donna Rogers, "That is the one thing they got right." To many, the BLM movement is "fragmented," "splintered," and "unorganized," and it's obvious that Hillary Clinton feels the same. What began as an attempt to confront Clinton during her closed campaign event quickly turned into a lecture on movement building. 

As Julius Jones eloquently droned on about the plight of Blacks in America, a history that Clinton is well aware of, at the end of the day, his pressing question was: "What in your heart has changed that will change the direction of this country?" The fact that Clinton didn't directly answer the question actually answers the question: NOTHING! However, Clinton did provide some excellent advice, as she pointed to successful movements, past and present. "...The people behind that consciousness raising and advocacy, they had a plan ready to go...you're going to have to come together as a movement and say, 'Here's what we want done about it...'" This is exactly why the BLM movement is not "Yo mama's civil rights movement." Those who led the Civil Rights and other notable movements had a plan, a platform, and demands, some of which were met.

Coincidentally, BLM has a list of demands (?): 

    We will seek justice for [Mike] Brown’s family by petitioning for the immediate arrest of officer Darren Wilson and the dismissal of county prosecutor Robert McCullough. Groups that are part of the local Hands Up Don’t Shoot Coalition have already called for Wilson’s swift arrest, and some BLM riders also canvassed McCullough’s neighborhood as a way of raising the public’s awareness of the case.

·         We will help develop a network of organizations and advocates to form a national policy specifically aimed at redressing the systemic pattern of anti-black law enforcement violence in the US. The Justice Department’s new investigation into St Louis-area police departments is a good start, but it’s not enough. Our ride was endorsed by a few dozen local, regional and national organizations across the country – like the National Organization for Women (Now) and Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation – who, while maintaining different missions, have demonstrated unprecedented solidarity in response to anti-black police violence. We hope to encourage more organizations to endorse and participate in a network with a renewed purpose of conceptualizing policy recommendations.

·         We will also demand, through the network, that the federal government discontinue its supply of military weaponry and equipment to local law enforcement. And though Congress seems to finally be considering measures in this regard, it remains essential to monitor the demilitarization processes and the corporate sectors that financially benefit from the sale of military tools to police.

·         We will call on the office of US attorney general Eric Holder to release the names of all officers involved in killing black people within the last five years, both while on patrol and in custody, so they can be brought to justice – if they haven’t already.

·         And we will advocate for a decrease in law-enforcement spending at the local, state and federal levels and a reinvestment of that budgeted money into the black communities most devastated by poverty in order to create jobs, housing and schools. This money should be redirected to those federal departments charged with providing employment, housing and educational services.

After reading the demands, my thought was, "Go on with yo bad self, but now that I know what you plan to do, what are your demands?" Language is a strange thing. One word can make a difference. Thus, when a group of people demand something, they use the phrase "WE WANT": "want" being the operative word, and a word that Clinton, herself, used when instructing the group on movement building: "...come together as a movement and say, 'Here's what we want done about it.'" 

Can you imagine Huey P. Newton asking a politician, "What in your heart has changed…?" Never! Huey probably would have asked, "We want to know your plans for undoing the damage done by the Violent Crime Control Act of 1995, which your husband, Bill Clinton, enacted?" Direct and to the point! The Black Panthers had a plan, a platform, a program, and demands within a year of being formed:

October 1966
Black Panther Party
Platform and Program
What We Want
What We Believe

1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black community. We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.

2. We want full employment for our people.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black community.

We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over fifty million Black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.

4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our Black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.

5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in present-day society.

We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.

6. We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.

We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.

7. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of Black people.

We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The second amendment to the constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self-defense.

8. We want freedom for all Black men held in federal state, county and city prisons and jails.

We believe that all Black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.

9. We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black communities, as defined by the constitution of the United States.

We believe that the courts should follow the United States constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The Fourteenth Amendment of the US constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the Black community from which the Black defendant came. We have been and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the “average reasoning man” of the Black community.

10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the Black colony in which only Black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate, for the purpose of determining the will of Black people as to their national destiny.

The Panthers made their demands clear. They initiated the free breakfast program, taught self-defense to local residents, held weekly meetings to teach and keep the community informed, which is important to any movement that plans on longevity. How dare a movement ask for favors without outlining what they intend to do to help their condition. This is something else that is absent from the BLM movement: a program to help lift Blacks out of their situation. Building programs is also important to any movement that plans on longevity. 

Yeah, I miss my "mama's civil rights movement." It was organized, it had a clear plan, a platform, programs, and demands. Many say that the BLM movement is still young, and that is true, but Huey and Bobby Seale had their act together within a year of being formed, and the two were about the same age as those in the BLM movement, so that's no excuse for poor planning.  

In closing, the BLM movement can learn a lot from my mama's civil rights movement because it's not as though BLM has started anything new. However, that would require them to actually look at movements that have worked and follow their templates. For sure, it's not enough to wrestle mics from middle-aged men or stand and be lectured to; there has to be more. BLM would do well to work towards building a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic movement, but their actions have turned some possible advocates off, but it's not too late to win them back. Again, I will turn to Ms. Rogers, Start by seeking assistance from those with experience in movement building. “Jesse Jackson's door is always open; Tom Burell is a great strategist, and Vernon Jordan is a behind the scenes king maker. Rather than reinventing the wheel, go to the source of knowledge and stop embarrassing yourselves." Although the Panthers had a good program, their movement was infiltrated and thwarted because it was not multi-cultural or multi-ethnic, but my mama’s civil rights movement was, which is what made it successful.