Comments Elsewhere

Well, I have trouble disliking the sentiment, but can’t help but think that part of the problem is the same fetishism of the (mostly ineffectual, then as well as now) white counterculture “movement” (you can think of the movement involved as sprawling down on the grass, rather than marching forward…) rather than some of the serious organizing and activism that occurred in flashpoints such as the mid-to-late 1960s.

Rather than learning “new rules” from scratch, I think that today’s organizers might be better served studying some actual history, rather than the television rockumentary form of “the 60s”–like, say, picking up a book and reading about what Black organizers were doing on the ground in Nashville and Montgomery, in towns in the backwoods of Mississippi and Alabama, through SNCC and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and so on. Or what women were doing through New York Radical Women, Jane, etc. You’ll come out with a very different picture of the era and how the people who lived in it won some incredible battles. (Hint: it wasn’t by getting a bunch of people together in one space to be rallied at. A gargantuan march was then, and is still now, at best a tool to be used in the middle of organizing–not the beginning, or the end, and certainly not both.)