1000 Marches in 100 Days

In We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For, I wrote about Ella Baker’s rejection of top-down models of leadership and how the famed organizer encouraged a patient, inclusive deliberative process. She embodied what I called a militant egalitarianism. Each voice had value. Every thought warranted recognition and attention.

As SNCC organizer, Mary King, put it: “We had a stern insistence that our conceptualization, our thinking, our framework, should grow from engagement with the people that we were working with rather than from doctrine or any ready-made philosophy.” Or, as Barbara Jones recalled, “There was no room for talking down to anyone. There was never the expressed attitude that a person who was illiterate had something less to offer.”

Baker understood that democracy is more than a body of procedures. It carries with it the radical notion that every person, no matter their station in life, can exercise responsibility. Democracy is an ethical ideal bound up with the idea of self-cultivation and rooted in an abiding faith in the capacities of human beings.

I remember a conversation I had with the late Bob Moses during his year-long stay at Princeton that illustrates this faith. He insisted that the revolutionary work of SNCC resided not only in its efforts to dismantle Jim Crow, but primarily in who they brought into the political process. He told me the story of SNCC field secretaries in a federal courtroom in Greenwood, Mississippi, “packed with black sharecroppers …hushed along its walls, packed onto its benches, and [attending] to the question put by Federal District Judge Clayton: ‘Why is SNCC taking illiterates down to register to vote?’” Those illiterate, black sharecroppers brought to that courthouse and to the ballot box a wealth of experiences that shaped their demands of the state, informed their embrace of democratic ideals, and expanded, if only for a moment, our very understanding of who we take ourselves to be as a nation.

Moses, like Baker, understood that genuine, creative democracy called not only for the pursuit of worthwhile ends, but for the pursuit of ends in ways that enlisted people often pushed to the margins and who lived in the cracks and crevices of our society. Enlisted them not to be led by some “national leader,” but by themselves in solidarity with others.

Democracy requires a richly textured democratic culture close to the ground, where the habits and dispositions necessary for its flourishing are alive in the experiences of ordinary people. Much of American life, especially under economic conditions that value selfishness and greed and a politics captured by oligarchs, frustrates these ends. What is needed – required even – under such conditions are innovative and creative ways of revitalizing local communities and fostering the means and mechanisms by which they can do the hard work on behalf of democracy itself.

Baker’s radical democratic philosophy entailed what I call “networked democratic localism.” The phrase is a bit awkward, but I think it captures an approach to democratic politics that can help us in these perilous times. It shifts the center of gravity of our politics from Washington, D.C. to local communities. For Baker, this shift involved critical, local participation in challenging Jim Crow and the cultivation of democratic dispositions and habits among those who struggled together.

But this view should not be read as conceding the national political terrain to others: the invocation of localism does not deny the relevance of the national scene. Instead, local practices enter a network of local practices elsewhere that, together, has national implications.

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Just as Ella Baker’s NAACP organizing took her all over the South, establishing pathways, connections, and conduits that connected her practice across geographies, a more generalized understanding of democratic localism presumes the circulation of local practices and effects along a network of efforts to address the existential threat to our democracy in light of specific situations.

Collectively, such efforts constituted loosely a national thrust. Separately, the substance of the practice is felt in the orientation close to the ground, in the “readying of the self,” right where you live, to engage in transformative action.

This is why I love Bishop William J. Barber’s and Repairers of the Breach’s call for 1,000 marches in 100 days. The idea is for local people to organize their communities to march to the polls – to use the march as a means of education that can activate the community for more direct action come early voting, in November, and afterwards.

Of course, the aim is to overwhelm the math informing redistricting efforts with a historic turnout of voters. But what’s important, at least for my purposes, is that the approach shifts from the standard practice of organizing a massive march in Washington, D.C., which would require enormous resources, to a focus on the local level, where people in their communities organize together. “Power is in the state, the local governments,” Bishop Barber has said. “We need to march to the polls. What would it look like if we had a thousand different marches during early voting?”

There have been 602 marches so far! With each march belonging to the people (the communities) who organized them. This kind of labor not only will help turn out voters for the upcoming elections. Ideally, it can help set the stage for the hard work of reimagining American democracy that is to come.

Here are a few links, if you are interested in organizing a march in your community.

March Leader Toolkit:
https://breachrepairers.org/march-leader-toolkit/

Register a March:
https://bit.ly/1000MarchesRegistration

Count Your March:
https://bit.ly/GetCounted1000Marches

Join the Nonpartisan Canvassing Effort:
https://bit.ly/NonPartisanCanvassing