The organizing behind the organizing
Dear Friends,
With my book launch just a week away, I have been doing a lot of thinking about the lessons from the protest movement of the 1960s and our current challenges. I am grateful for the attention the book is beginning to receive, from an interview with DrT on her CaseMaker show, to commentary about the book in Micah Sifry’s newsletter.
Micah’s comments brought me back to November 1965, when I helped organize the second major antiwar march on Washington, D.C.—25,000 to 30,000 people protesting a war that was only just beginning to enter the nation’s consciousness. But the march didn’t just happen. There was a lot of real-world organizing that had to happen, and even organizing behind the organizing: The conversations in dorm rooms. The leaflets. The debates. The slow, persistent work of building trust, shifting perspective, and growing a movement one person at a time. Here’s an excerpt about that work from my memoir (Pre-order now on Bookshop or on Amazon!):
“Each time we marched, there was a reaction against us that opened room for discussion and debate. Each march, each bus ride to DC, each demonstration, forced students to choose -- would they stay silent or would they act? Once you pinned on an antiwar button, once you passed out a leaflet, once you boarded the bus to DC, once you marched, you were committed and part of a new community of activists. Each time a student said to me, ‘I think you are wrong to protest,’ I had the chance to make the case against this wrong war, to plant a seed of doubt, share facts, and offer an alternative framework.
In the long run, real world events would prove decisive in building the opposition as the war was brought into living rooms through television in a way that no other war had been. But our organizing, educating, and constantly engaging with the young was required to create the room for dissent and build an organized antiwar movement....It is easy to write about the demonstrations, the marches, the confrontations. They were dramatic and essential, however they were only possible because of long hours of outreach, discussion, connecting. It was the mundane work of reaching out to students that occupied me and the other SDS organizers and that made it possible for people to join the march, get on the bus, join the movement. Demonstrations not immediately followed by engagement, education, and organizing would do little to build the movement....No one was changed in a single discussion. It took time and persistence. SDS distributed mimeographed leaflets in all the dorms once a week discussing the latest developments. SDS members talked, distributed newsletters, and talked more. Over and over again, we returned to the question of how we could manage to live a moral life in the face of mass consumer culture, racism, stifling consensus in support of the corporate liberal state, and, above all else, an immoral war.”
This book isn’t just a memoir—it’s a lesson in how change really happens. I hope you get a chance to read it.
In solidarity,
Michael Ansara and the whole Hard Work of Hope Team
