Before we kick off, do me a quick favor: open another tab and run a Google Image search for ‘civil rights movement.’ What do you see?
You see protesters, right? Marchers, demonstrators, public speakers. You see people walking arm in arm, chanting and singing. You see them being arrested. You see dogs attacking them and fire hoses spraying them. You see Martin Luther King, Jr.
And you didn’t really need the Google Image search to conjure those pictures, did you? My guess is, the array of photos returned by Google’s algorithm is more or less what popped into your head the moment you read the words ‘civil rights movement.’
History loves its heroes. And without a doubt, the most cherished heroes of the civil rights era are the people you see in those images; the folks in the streets. After all, they changed the world. They ended the legal codification of racial discrimination and brought about full civil equality for all (well, most) Americans (even if social equality lagged stubbornly behind).
As heroes go, the middle 20th century offers us some pretty good ones. Dr. King, especially, was one of greatest thinkers and speakers the United States has ever seen. We rightly honor his contributions, and those of his followers. His was the clear *right side of history* and even today, his movement functions as a sort of retroactive moral litmus test; not ‘which side are you on?’ but ‘which side would you have been on?’ Would you have been the guy taking the water jet in the face? Or the guy holding the hose? Would you have carried a sign, or a billy club?
Dr. King, we are eternally reminded, was a highly controversial figure in his time. Today, sure, the man has practically been canonized. But in the mid-60s? It wasn’t just that many hated him - though they certainly did - it was that many more thought he was pushing too hard. Going too far. Being too ‘divisive.’ Yeah, he had a legitimate beef, but what was the point in going around the South - the South, for God’s sake! - antagonizing people like that?
America’s divided reaction to King is one of those facts that most everyone knows, but somehow thinks nobody else knows. The people who will remind you of this are the same people who will remind you that actually, the Vikings beat Columbus to the New World, and actually, Champagne is just the name of the region.
And, predictable as the sunrise, they are the people who will remind you of King’s ‘Letters From A Birmingham Jail’ - in which King decried the worthless caution of white moderates - the moment you criticize a contemporary protest movement. “Oh, you don’t approve of throwing soup on precious works of art? What would you have said to Rosa Parks? You don’t see the point of blocking off roads? I wonder where you would have been standing at Selma…”
The implication, of course, is that you - lame, tone-policing, baby-stepping you - are one of reviled ‘white moderates’ (even if you happen not to be white) that King was complaining about during his incarceration. Or at least, you would have been. And by extension, the implication is that participants in whatever protest is happening this week are the ones on the *right side of history* while you stand in the doorway of progress. This isn’t just some cringe rhetorical device used to stifle debate, this is the result of an honest misunderstanding over how our history was written and, more specifically, over who wrote it.
Because did you notice what pictures didn’t show up in your Google Image search? If it was like mine, you got no LBJ. No Congress. No Supreme Court. No Thurgood Marshall. No smoky, back rooms packed with imperfect lawmakers grinding out the sausage. Their absence ought to be conspicuous. If we consider the true legacy of the civil rights movement - the things that were materially different about the United States after the 50s-60s - what would make our list? Brown v. Board of Education. The Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Voting Rights Act. The Fair Housing Act. These works and deeds fundamentally altered the legal landscape of the United States, and cemented the ideals of the civil rights movement into the American body politic. And a good job they did! Because the legacy of the civil rights era was certainly not that it banished racism, once and for all, from the realm. Why then are we so selective in our glorification of this period? Why are we remembering only half the equation?
This isn’t a complaint about fairness. The problem here is not that Lyndon Baines Johnson doesn’t have enough elementary schools named for him, or that congressional movers and shakers aren’t getting enough credit for their contributions. As far as historical figures to worship go, we could do a lot worse than a martyr like Martin Luther King, Jr. The problem is one of process. Our understanding of this period - particularly for those, like me, who did not live through it - is woefully incomplete. Our education, even our culture, encourages us to focus on only the half of the picture we prefer. And our blindness to the other half has led to a half century of progressives failing and failing again to replicate the successes of their most admired champions.
By provoking the brutality of southern lawmen like Bull Connor, King and his fellow demonstrators shocked northern liberals into viewing the civil rights cause with greater urgency. Had Connor kept his cool - which he managed to do for the first few days of the 1963 Birmingham demonstrations - history might not remember that round of protests at all. It is not incidental that passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act came just over a year later. When enforcement of that act was slow to reform the South, activist (later, Congressman) John Lewis, along with King, employed similar tactics, leading hundreds of demonstrators across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma and into a barrage of gas canisters and swinging clubs. Again, it worked. New life was breathed into the civil rights movement, similar protests erupted across the country, and President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law that same year.
To work, a protest has to be aimed at something. Or someone. It must have an audience, and a clear call to action. You chain yourself to a tree to prevent loggers from chopping it down. Good! This makes sense. It may work or it may not, but whatever the outcome, you have done something coherent. You have made your stand before the right villain and you have sent a clear message.
You glue yourself to the wall of an art museum after defacing a beloved painting in order to…what? Express that you don’t like oil drilling? That you’re worried about the climate? That you want to save the orangutans? The trouble here is that it is not obvious how vandalizing a several-hundred-year-old work of art brings us closer to those aims. Who is this for? Of what are they meant to be persuaded? It seems to me that the true message of such protests is nothing to do with the climate, or with fossil fuels, but rather that you are very committed to your cause. All your demonstration has really demonstrated is your righteousness and heroism.
And hey, that’s perfectly consistent with our limited understanding of social progress and its history. If we owe the achievements of the civil rights movement exclusively to the marchers, who wouldn’t want to join their ranks? What other options even are there for participating in the great struggles of the age? When the audience (apathetic moderates and liberals) and the target (Congress) of the civil rights era demonstrations are written out of the story, young do-gooders can be forgiven for misunderstanding the manner in which activist energy was converted into real, lasting change.
It is both wonderful and hilarious to consider how many real world applications exist for South Park’s Underpants Gnomes and their instructive approach to commerce. For those who need a refresher, the Underpants Gnomes, whose mission was to pilfer undergarments in search of financial reward, had a *foolproof* business model that consisted of three, important steps:
Collect underpants
?
Profit
It is this philosophical paradigm that seems to inform much of contemporary, left-wing activism. To make the glove fit a bit more snugly, we might adjust it to:
Protest
?
Progress!
This essay has focused on the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, but it might have highlighted other examples. Given his high place in history, a casual student could get the impression that the British left India exclusively because Mohandas Gandhi used nonviolent resistance to see them off. Obviously, no story of Indian independence would be complete without Gandhi, but this narrative leaves out some important puzzle pieces (like Britain’s post-war economic condition) and it obscures countless other freedom fighters whose names did not benefit from the posthumous elevation that Gandhi’s received.
In South Africa, Nelson Mandela is appropriately credited with bringing an end to the foul practice of apartheid. Though without the precarious balancing act performed by his messier, white negotiating partner, F.W. de Klerk (a figure not completely dissimilar to Lyndon Johnson, incidentally) the transition to majority rule might instead have plunged the country into a brutal civil war.
The takeaway from all this should not be that protest is unimportant. Just that our fondness for performative demonstration can sometimes confuse us as to the true catalysts for social progress. Of course, social media has only exacerbated this problem by luring activists away from the tricky enterprises of compromise and persuasion with the false currency of engagement. Mostly though, this remains an educational problem. We like the narrative of the powerless seizing power for themselves much more than we like the narrative of the powerful choosing to loosen their grip. Because of this, we tend to tell these stories in only one way, and from only one side. This may be understandable, but it is incredibly unhelpful, as social change is impossible without both components.
So we’re left with these great, showy protests that end up going nowhere, because no clear direction was ever specified. Protest isn’t a means to an end. It is the end. Folks show up, collect their credit for having made a stand, and they return home convinced that they’ve done something. But this is like staring at a pile of logs and simply willing it to catch fire, all because nobody bothered to tell you about a flint.
I’ve avoided getting specific about contemporary social movements here because God, take your pick. Remember when Occupy Wall Street led to better financial regulation? Remember when the Women’s March deposed Donald Trump? Remember when Black Lives Matter secured police and criminal justice reform? Yeah…I don’t either.
The modern left has a hopper full of excuses for their failure to achieve anything. They’re “raising awareness.” They’re “starting a conversation.” They’re “speaking out.” And they’re mostly comfortable with this bumper-bowling approach to politics because (and this is a scab worthy of more picking than we have time for just now) most of the lefty activist set are privileged college kids whose lives won’t be materially affected either way. They’ll happily LARP as rabble-rousers for a few years, maybe even bag a not-career-threatening arrest, before pulling a Jerry Rubin and leaving the picket line to go trade stocks.
The right (mostly) doesn’t have this problem. Conservative activists have done an excellent job of scaring the crap out of their legislators, winning for themselves a caucus that does what it’s bloody told. And they focus far more intently than the left on judicial appointments; a worthwhile endeavor, since more policy magic happens on the bench than is supposed to. The constituency for elected Republicans is the Republican base. The constituency for elected Democrats is a chattering class of Beltway insiders; not so much the people who watch Morning Joe as the people who appear on it. This will remain the case so long as left-wing decision makers (such as they exist) remain undisrupted, unthreatened, and uninterested by left-wing activism.
So to those making up their placards for the next big march, some serious questions: what are you doing? Why are you doing it? What measurable outcome do you want to see? And how will you know when it has been achieved? If you can’t easily answer those questions in clear, concrete terms, a plea: get serious or stay home.