By Erik Loomis, author of Organizing America
Anyone reading this site knows how messed up America is today. Most of us also know something about our organizing past. We know that great leaders of the past created amazing social movements that institutionalized long-lasting change.
But what if we learn the wrong lessons from our activist past? When I talk to my students and teach them about this history, they often find themselves really depressed about the present. The young are supposed to be the ones who think change is going to come, but that has not been my experience as a professor in the last several years. Instead, I find myself giving them pep talks, showing them more details about how people make change, and trying to lead them to understand how they can make the change they want in their own lives.
Too often, we teach our history as one filled with heroes. People like that—from valorizing the so-called Founding Fathers to the rise of superhero culture, there’s something really appealing about the hero in society. People on the left have created their own heroes—Martin Luther King. Rosa Parks. Malcolm X. Harriet Tubman. Cesar Chavez.
But does creating a Mt. Rushmore of Social Change help our students understand how to organize and fight for justice in the present? I don’t think it does. People see the world today and they wonder where our heroes are. Why don’t we have a Martin or Rosa or Malcolm today? My students know plenty about these legends. It does not help them because they don’t know the full story.
The problem with creating heroes is that these were not perfect people. In fact, they screwed up all the time. Campaigns failed. Personal beefs got in the way of organizing. They made tactical errors. They had blind spots in their lives that meant they did not always see how they personally oppressed others. At the same time, for people who are doing the hard work of social change themselves, it’s easy to believe that they themselves need to be perfect people. This contributes to losing sympathy with the complexities of people in our lives and movements, demanding perfection in their positions instead of helping people to grow. In other words, we call them out instead of call them in.
It’s no wonder that these are problems when we don’t learn the right lessons from our organizing history. Organizing is messy. But, examining actual organizers in all their complexity helps provide greater understanding of how movements really developed.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was an amazing young woman who became known as “The Rebel Girl” due to her passionate speeches as a teenager in support of the worker struggle. She rose to become perhaps the Industrial Workers of the World’s most famous organizer in the early 1910s. But she lived a life of struggle of her own. She was kicked out of the IWW after a failed campaign led to some workers being sentenced to prison, became a defender of free speech, and then disappeared from the public for a decade, being dominated by a friend and possible romantic partner. She became a communist later in life, and defended Stalin until the day she died. Flynn was a complicated person. Her fight for justice took her places that do not always align with contemporary left-liberal values. But future activists will almost certainly look at the early twenty-first century left with the same skepticism. What we can take from Flynn’s example is her righteous struggle and deep-seated beliefs that led her to a lifetime of amazing action.
Let’s think about Eugene Debs as well. Today, many of us see Debs as a hero. That’s for good reason. But Debs was also complicated. The early Debs had many positions that would get him canceled today. He was a racist in his early years. In fact. he loved telling racist jokes for much of his life. He tolerated whites-only unionism even during the Pullman strike. He urged his fellow railroad unionists to not support the Great Railroad Strike in 1877 and criticized the anarchists at the Haymarket bombing in 1886 using the same language as the capitalists who wanted them executed. But Debs grew. He realized the error of his ways. He developed new ideas of industrial unionism. He began to urge solidarity between the races and became an anti-racist later in his life. He wasn’t born the great man that many of the left see him as today. He spent a lifetime growing to become that.
Too often today, we demand perfection of our activists and we do not give them a chance to grow. Organizers also need to be organized. Lots of people influenced Debs over his life and made him rethink those positions. Rather than call people out for their regressive positions today, let’s find common ground, call them in, and work with them to create more progressive positions. We might learn a lot from them too, for none of us are anything like a perfect person.
As we seek to organize in our horrible present, remember that we are all flawed humans. When we organize, we build movements that include a diversity of people, from different backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas. Solidarity requires working with and for people who might not think as you do. That was true in the past and it is true in the present.
Telling real stories of the past complicates narratives. It doesn’t lead to simple solutions. But it does help us realize where we are on the path to justice. Only with that future path clear for us, armed with the tools of our real past, can we organize the number of people we will need to fight fascism in the U.S. and globally. We all have a part to play. Reading histories of organizers might not seem like the first step, but without understanding our history, we will be lost when the path gets rocky, as it inevitably will.
