How to Build a Powerful People’s Movement ..don’t tell me we can’t do it across America.

[G_j]

http://www.thenation.com/article/180322/how-build-powerful-peoples-movement

How to Build a Powerful People’s Movement
If we can do it in North Carolina, don’t tell me we can’t do it across America.

Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II June 18, 2014 | This article appeared in the July 7-14, 2014 edition of The Nation.

How do we build a people’s movement? We start with vision. Prophetic moral vision seeks to penetrate despair, so that we can believe in and embrace new futures. It does not ask if the vision can be implemented—questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The slaves didn’t get out of slavery by first figuring out how to get out; they got out because they were driven by a vision that said, “Oh freedom over me. / And before I’d be a slave / I’d be buried in my grave / And go home to my Lord and be free.”

If we are going to have a real populist movement in this country, we have to reinstate an imagination that is not driven by pundits but by a larger vision. Most of the time, your greatest vision comes in your darkest night, because it is then, Martin Luther King Jr. said, that you see the stars. Populist movements don’t build when everything is fine. A populist moral vision is a form of dissent that says there’s a better way, there’s a moral way.

I believe we are in the middle of a Third Reconstruction—and that we are facing the reaction to it. The First Reconstruction was built and led by a multiracial Southern fusion movement after the Civil War. It was crushed by the nation’s acceptance of Jim Crow, as codified in the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, and by decades of white terror attacks on black people. The Second Reconstruction can be traced to that glorious day in May, sixty years ago, when nine white men in black robes said no forever to the evil system of Jim Crow in Brown v. Board of Education. For the next fourteen years, young and old, rich and poor, white, black and brown risked their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to repair the breach in God’s human race. In 1968, with the murder of King, the destruction of the organizational infrastructure of the Southern freedom movement and a clever propaganda campaign based on racist appeals to white voters, “Southern Strategy” extremists began what has become nearly a half-century effort to dismantle the gains of the Second Reconstruction.

Now we’ve begun a Third Reconstruction, a movement signaled by the 2008 election of Barack Obama and the emergence of a new majority electorate. His campaign used some of the elements of fusion politics that were used in the 1800s and 1960s. In North Carolina, we had a movement that had already reformed the voting laws before Obama was on the ballot—an interracial, intergenerational, anti-poverty, pro-labor, fusion movement that was challenging even Democrats to be more committed to a moral vision.

When Obama won the state, he revealed the potential of a new fusion majority, one that directly challenges the right’s Southern Strategy. And that scares the daylights out of them. In both the First and Second Reconstructions, it took the right a while to mount an effective reaction. With Obama’s election, the right said “Hell, no!” even before the man was inaugurated.

..more..

[lovemydog]

1. Fusions are forming in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina,

Texas & other places. They will eventually turn those states blue. People have had it with divisive politics like the republican southern strategy that divided people by race.

We all have much more in common with our brothers and sisters on the left regardless of ethnicity or gender or sexual orientation than with those on the right who seek to 'divide and conquer.'

For the right wing, those old paradigms won't work much longer. These states will turn blue because both people of color and many working whites are realizing they have a huge stake in uniting to throw of the yoke of false trickle down economics and warmongering. Together we can accomplish great things.

If and when coalitions form and we get out the vote in every local, state and federal election, we will nominate and often elect populist leftist representatives who truly represent us and challenge and eventually, break the hegemonic oligarchy that has increased in power since World War II. We've got to get out the vote. United we stand. Divided we fall.

[G_j]

2. very well said

this grass roots approach could greatly contribute to the future of this country.

[LisaLynne]

3. Thanks for posting this article.

It's hard to see sometimes because of things like what I feel is the backlash against any sort of progress which can be very disheartening, but even though it's sort of against my nature to be optimistic (hee hee), I do think we can change things. I think it's totally possible.

[hfojvt]

4. so the people's movement is black?

And the slaves freed themselves?

"The slaves didn’t get out of slavery by first figuring out how to get out; they got out because they were driven by a vision ..."

It would be nice if the paragraphs posted talked about the NOW and the how instead of just talking about the past.

As for NC, I will believe it when some of their NINE or ten Republican Congresspeople are booted out of office.

[Starry Messenger]

5. He gave a version of this in a speech at Netroots.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/07/24/1316230/-I-m-glad-I-didn-t-miss-it

So powerful. I'd heard he was cool, but in the last month I've watched a few of his speeches and I'm a devoted fan now.