Introduction

Change comes from the top.  No, change comes from the bottom.  Like most either/or disputes, this one offers insights; it can also obscure what is going on “out there” in the world.  In the heat of the moment, in the passion of the times, such debates rage.  Those who are involved in social movements struggle from the bottom to get people in key decision-making positions at the apex of institutional power to make just decisions on policy matters, or to remove them or create new institutions.  

In the mid-1930s, CIO and Mine Workers Union leader John L. Lewis famously boxed President Franklin Roosevelt in by quoting him out of context, and telling millions of industrial workers, “The President wants you to join a union.”   FDR was furious, but he couldn’t repudiate Lewis because to do so would appear anti-union. Lewis used FDR’s popularity with workers to build at the bottom.

It is striking that there is often no mention of SNCC and or the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in Democratic Party celebrations of its civil rights and voting rights legislation of the mid-1960s.  

Almost 60 years ago at the 1964 Democratic Party Convention, the Mississippi civil rights movement forced the Party to adopt civil rights standards for the seating of delegations to the 1968 Convention.  But in a bitterly fought contest, the 1964 delegates refused to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegates or offer a 50/50 split delegation to it and the racist “regulars”.  

Establishment accounts tell how successful the challenge was.  Those who participated had an opposite view.  By 1968, MFDP Black delegates were only one quarter of the delegation to the Party Convention, and all the economic justice legislation it supported was left behind.

When we read histories of those struggles, the situational bias of authors becomes apparent because we have the benefit of various reports from differing perspectives.  That bias depends on whether the story is told from the point of view of those who sit in the halls of power or those who are the beneficiaries, losers, or objects of their decisions. 

From the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee “on the ground” view from the trenches in Mississippi, the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations only acted when they were forced to, generally minimally, and only decisively when The Movement created a crisis both within the Democratic Party at home and for the nation’s foreign policy in the cold war (talking democracy to emerging national liberation movements in the third world while African Americans couldn’t vote in the Deep South).  

In 1963, I sent a news story I wrote from Greenwood, MS to the Ghanaian Times.  It made the paper’s front page and put U.S. representatives there on the defensive.  Shortly thereafter, we were called from SNCC’s national office: “Great work.  The State Department just complained to us about the Greenwood story.”

It is striking that there is often no mention of SNCC and or the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in Democratic Party celebrations of its civil rights and voting rights legislation of the mid-1960s.  

Who Should Vote?

It was the decision by “The Movement” to bring illiterate and semi-literate domestics, day laborers, sharecroppers and tenant farmers to the registrar’s office that led to the elimination of “qualifications” from the Voting Rights Act (though no doubt supported by the Justice Department’s civil rights attorney, John Doar, who is one of the heroic figures of the period). 

As SNCC’s Bob Moses put it at the time, “You can’t deny Blacks an education then use their lack of it as the reason to exclude them from voting.” Martin Luther King, Jr. and the murdered young women at Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church are properly remembered today.

This option, to this day, remains largely unexplored—one that recognizes both race and class as key factors that an organizing effort must take into account.

And if you want to fully understand how history is made, read the two classic “history from below” studies of The Movement—John Dittmer’s Local People:  The Struggle for Civil Rights In Mississippi, and Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, or some of the county and town studies, written by African-American and White writers, or of Unita Blackwell’s story of becoming mayor of Myersville in Issaquena County, or a biography of Fanny Lou Hamer, or of Barbara Ransby’s biography of Ella Baker.

Is Unity Possible Between Blacks and White Working Class People?

There’s an extraordinary story of breaking through White racism at the Laurel, MS Masonite plant in the mid-1960s, and how Masonite used race to divide its workers. In that situation, White former SNCC staffers Jack Minnis and Bob Zellner got Klansmen and Black workers to come together in a united effort. While they failed to defeat Masonite, they demonstrated a possibility for Black-White unity that lasted after the strike’s defeat. This option, to this day, remains largely unexplored—one that recognizes both race and class as key factors that an organizing effort must take into account.

Interestingly, Jones County was a rebel county during the Civil War.  As recounted in a current publication of the Jones County Chamber of Commerce (!):

At the beginning of the war, some Jones County men joined the Confederacy, but others refused until the draft was instituted in 1862. One of those was a farmer named Newt Knight. He refused to fight for a cause he did not believe in, although when he was drafted, he did serve as a hospital orderly.

Knight reached his breaking point when he learned that if a man owned 20 or more slaves, he could avoid military service. Knight, and the other poor farmers from Jones County, felt they were right when they suspected the war was a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” At this point, Knight deserted and went home.

Knight banded together with other deserters and formed a renegade army which was based in the Leaf River Swamp. Their hideout, known as the Devil’s Den, was called home for over 100 Confederate deserters. They came out of the swamp to visit their families, work their farms and according to the stories, conduct raids on trains headed to and from Mobile. The men devised elaborate methods of communication and signals to alert them to impending danger.

History From The Bottom

Most of today’s celebrations of the civil rights movement give us history, “from the top.” Sixty years later, we should appreciate how Justice Department lawyers worked to defend and advance civil rights, and how LBJ twisted arms in the Senate and House to get votes. But 60 years later we should also be able to acknowledge their inadequacies, and the necessity of the demand for change created by The Movement as a lubricant for the engine of change. If we ignore pressure from below, we fail to understand these points:

While it may be true that the Kennedy Administration was interested in early, dramatic, and successful civil rights results, it is also true that the Kennedy Administration was overwhelmingly concerned with getting The Movement off the streets, out of the headlines, and in a position where it was manageable by…the Administration.

To acknowledge the FBI’s role in the film Mississippi Burning while ignoring the fact that the FBI systematically sought to undermine the civil rights movement is a gross distortion of history, that Bureau Director J. Edgar Hoover used his immense power to infiltrate and disrupt civil rights organizations, and that some FBI Agents leaked information to southern racists who tried to use it to destroy civil rights organizations and, in some cases, to murder civil rights leaders, organizers and activists. Hoover was hostile to The Movement, and sought to undermine it with every tool at his disposal.   

The Movement successfully challenged the very notion of “qualifications,” when it opposed literacy requirements for voter registration applicants. The Johnson Administration ultimately agreed with this challenge, but not initially and not without fighting it.   

The Same Perspective Fits Today

The change from the bottom/from the top question remains today. Nothing better illustrates the synthesis required to get beyond unproductive argument than the Teamster Union internal election of a new president and the union’s victory without a strike at UPS. A key role was played by Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), which supported James Hoffa, Jr’s challenger Sean O’Brien, supported the union’s UPS negotiating package, and held and continues to hold the leadership’s feet to the fire.  

Because the word “responsible” has come to have such onerous implications, I hesitate to use it here. But it is the right word.

TDU sees itself responsible for reforming the Teamsters Union and, more broadly, organized labor. That responsibility extends beyond any specific election or contract fight. Each election and contract is understood as an opportunity to both win in the here-and-now and build for the future. What I call “radical patience” is required; that’s the stance of the long-distance runner. We should by now recognize that our fight is a long-haul one, with gains and losses likely along the way.  

Keeping our eyes on the prize of social and political transformation requires what Saul Alinsky called “integrated schizophrenia”—a pragmatic, “lesser-of-two evils” understanding of current battles based on the historic experience that deep loses and setbacks don’t move our agenda forward, combined with a critique of the myth of American democracy and a vision of what a real democracy of freedom, equality, justice, community, solidarity, and continuing participation in real decision making by all people would look like. 

Keeping our eyes on the stars and our feet on the ground requires yet another dimension of that schizophrenia.  We must not only look at single battles or campaigns from the perspective of what is to be won, but also through a lens that asks, “What are we building?”  

History Is From The Bottom and The Top

As we both celebrate past victories and watch with frustration and anger as some of them are swept away in a new anti-Reconstruction period, we should remind ourselves of what Black Abolitionist Frederick Douglass said,

“This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong, which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.”

Frederick Douglass, “If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress” (1857

Sixty years ago, when President Lyndon Johnson concluded a speech for the Voting Rights Act with “And we shall overcome,” I was outraged. So were all my SNCC friends.  

I think I, and they, were wrong. We won a major victory: our movement’s slogan was now part of official national discourse. But being part of the national discourse is only half the battle. The other is keeping it part of that discourse and extending it so that the words become a continuing reality. Indeed, when we lost at the top—the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenges to the 1964 Democratic Party convention, and to seating Mississippi’s congressional delegation to the House of Representatives at the beginning of 1965—SNCC, already frail, began to unravel. Defeats do not build mass movements or organizations.

As another Abolitionist said,

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few…The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten. The living sap of today outgrows the dead rind of yesterday. The hand entrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continued oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot; only by (uninterrupted) agitation can a people be sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.” Speech by Wendell Phillips, January 28, 1852 to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.

Speech by Wendell Phillips, January 28, 1852 to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.

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