“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
-Frederick Douglass, August 3, 1857, in Canandaigua, NY
65 years ago today, on February 1, 1960, the first student sit-in at lunch counters throughout the segregated South began in downtown Greensboro at a Woolworth’s store. Young people literally put their bodies on the line, and were beaten and jailed for doing so, to demand an end to racist laws and daily practices prohibiting Black people from using public and private facilities solely because of the color of their skin.
This action sparked similar actions throughout the South, the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the emergence of a national mass movement against segregation and racism. Four years later, in 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed in Congress, followed the next year by the Voting Rights Act.
I’m pretty certain that there were very few people before that sit-in who thought that within five years the South’s racist, essentially fascist, way of life going back almost a century could be successfully overcome, legally, although, of course, it took many years and constant struggle for those laws to finally bring about a civil rights revolution. Despite some weakening of those laws over the last decade or so, they are still, legally and culturally, largely in effect.
After two weeks of the Trump Presidency it is clear that he and the MAGA movement have every intention of using their power to roll back not just decades of the gains of the civil rights movement but of all movements defending and advancing human rights, labor rights, women’s rights, democracy and social, economic and environmental justice. This is a tyrannical regime.
Resistance to it there already has been, beginning with the hundreds of thousands of people who demonstrated in over 300 localities on January 18th. It has continued through the work in communities all over the country helping immigrants at risk of deportation learning their rights and getting organized to defend them. It happened this week when 23 states challenged Trump’s effort to prevent the disbursement of literally trillions of dollars allocated by Congress and signed into law by Biden. The American Federation of Government Employees has called for a massive demonstration in DC on February 11th against the Trumpists’ efforts to get rid of professional civil service workers. And there are many other ways that, on issue after issue, our US resistance movement has refused to bend to the would-be dictator.
What about demonstrations and nonviolent direct action? There have been some voices raised to the effect that, under a Trumpist regime, these are not as important, or are risky, compared to under a Democratic regime.
There’s some validity to the critique. Successful organizing involves much more than demonstrative, visible action: one-on-one conversations with community members or co-workers; calls, emails, texts or meetings with those with some power to correct wrongs or advance positive change; legal action; meetings to come to agreement internally within a group or with coalition partners about strategy and tactics; writing and videoing and taking pictures and circulating them as widely as possible; testifying before government bodies to oppose or support a particular policy or decisions; and more.
But absent visible and public actions, as large and/or as creatively risk-taking as possible, victories will be harder to come by. Here’s how I wrote about this in my 21st Century Revolution book:
“No revolution of any kind has happened without the manifestation of people’s anger at oppression or abuse via public marches, demonstrations, strikes (including hunger strikes) and civil disobedience to express their strong feelings and to spread the word to others about their resistance. Oppressed people need to see that there are others who feel the same way and are willing to take action to change things. Elected officials, even those who are supportive, need to appreciate the strength of people’s feelings via seeing it in action. And clearly, the target(s) of the public demonstrations need to see both sizeable numbers of people involved and the urgency and intensity of their feelings.”
In Frederick Douglass’ Canandaigua speech in 1857 he also said something that is not as widely quoted as the “limits of tyrants” quote at the beginning of this article but is just as important:
“People may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppression and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and, if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.”
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