Models of Peacemaking Organizers

We can learn how to keep the Civil Rights Movement going  - by looking at what the field organizers in the 1960s taught each other.  Looking at a visionary document created by Bob Moses during a SNCC staff meeting in 23 April 1965, we can see common mistakes that activist organizers today often make - and how to avoid them. Moses was talking with his staff after white supremacists murdered and terrorized activists (and bystanders) in the Freedom Summer of 1964. In voluntary social organizations committed to grassroots democracy, it is understandable that there is pressure to maintain a hierarchy when it seems decentralization is chaotic.

However, we need to consider the lessons learned: Moses, and his mentor Ella Baker, insisted that a movement would be better off to avoid the appeal of simply following an all powerful leader and to allow a local group to determine their own goals and standards. Here are a series of images created (and slightly revised) from the pictures that Moses drew in 1965 for his staff:

Reply below to express your feelings about this vision of what a grassroots, civil rights organizer should remember.  How would you answer Moses' question: "How can we bring this about?"

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This post was written to honor all the great field organizers of the violent 1960s. Bob Parris Moses, 23 April 1965, Staff Meeting Minutes (Mary King Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison) – revised by Randolph Hollingsworth from Wesley C. Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), figure on p. 248

Comments

[Susmita Barua]

Instead of focusing on one charismatic leader, organizer or organization to bring people and organizations at various levels together may be we need to focus on a shared vision and value-based approach that fosters dialogue and participation across diverse groups and people who speak from their experience and wants to be part of the solution.

The gradual process of consensus building, refinement of focus and action platforms needs to evolve over time from feedbacks received. That's my two cents.