We asked Professor Clayborne Carson, a specialist on the Civil Rights Movement, to address the connections between current social protest movements and other nonviolent movements of the 20th century.
Professor Carson has been on the faculty at Stanford since 1974. He is the author of In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s and Malcolm X: The FBI File, and co-editor of Eyes on the Prize, a guide to the 1987 PBS television series about the American Civil Rights Movement.
Is there a connection among major protest movements in the last century?
There's certainly a progression. You have the rise of basically labor movements, class-based movements in Europe and, to a lesser degree, in the United States. Many of the ideas and the tactics come out of those earlier movements. For example, the sit-down movement during the labor strikes of the 1930s is kind of a precursor of the sit-in during the Civil Rights Movement. "We Shall Overcome" was a labor song during the 1940s. By the 1960s it had become a civil rights song. So what you have is this progression, and I think the Black freedom struggle of the '50s and '60s was the last major time when all of the energy was really focused on a particular cause. Just like in the labor movement, it was basically class. By the '60s it was basically the race issue.
Since that time, a lot of the tactics have remained the same. But it's used for a variety of different objectives and part of the problem that young people today face is how to recapture that sense of community, how to bring together the social justice issues into something that is strong enough to have social impact.
How have the goals changed for social justice movements over the years?
Well, any movement is searching for a target. The strongest movements earlier in the 20th century were the class-based issues. But we're not going to go back to those days. I think that many people wish we would go back to the French Revolution, where you had basically one side saying, "We're for the people and we're against the elite." Once you start bringing in issues of race and gender, what is the elite, what is the subordinate group? How do you define that? Some people are going to understand issues in broad societal terms. Other people are going to look at it in much narrower terms. The movement would be stronger if all of them had a common way of defining what social justice means. But that's an ideal goal. It's not going to happen immediately.
How important is strong leadership?
I think that one of the things leadership does in a movement is provide a leader. Like Martin Luther King, I think one of his strengths was his ability to understand the interconnections between particular issues. If you look at some of his later speeches when he talks about the triple evils of war and militarism and imperialism in the world, and racism, and seeing that these are related issues, that's what leadership in a social struggle really means -- the ability to speak to a broad audience and say, "Yes, even though you might be interested in one aspect of social justice, if you understand what I'm trying to explain, you would understand that this is connected in very fundamental ways with other aspects of social justice and that if once you begin to understand that, we can build a stronger movement."
Why hasn't a clear leader emerged in the anti-globalization protests?
I think that part of that is a reflection of the fragmentation of activism. I think there are people who have that sort of wisdom. But it's easier to gain an understanding of the tactics of struggle as opposed to the social justice goals. Tactics you can learn in a weekend workshop. You can get together and learn how to sit in, how to disrupt, how to create the crisis -- you know, all of the classic things of the nonviolent tradition. What's harder is to have a vision for what you want to accomplish and how you want to sustain that struggle, because the most difficult question any movement faces is how to select achievable goals. If you select something that's so far in the future that it's not going to be achieved in the lifetime of any one participant, people are going to quickly get disillusioned.
Is nonviolent protest still a successful technique for social change?
It's important for organizers and mobilizers to point out to people that their actions do have an impact. And sometimes we're not satisfied with that impact. We're not satisfied when the WTO says, "Okay, we'll try to bring in more input from dissident voices, dissenting voices." You know, yeah, that doesn't necessarily mean that the world has been changed in some dramatic and fundamental way. But it does mean that maybe there might be one less sweatshop someplace. There might be one step in the process of bettering the condition of workers throughout the world, you know. And those should not be taken lightly. [Like] when we talk about the Black freedom struggle, having civil rights reforms that allow Black people to use restaurants and go into movie theaters on an equal basis. Well, that didn't bring about a fundamental change. There are still a lot of poor Black people out there who can't afford to go to movie theaters. But we shouldn't underestimate the importance of that change and what was brought about through the mobilization of large numbers of people.
Is violence inevitable in social justice movements?
I think that movements in the 20th century have always had a variety of people. You don't have, in very many movements, the kind of discipline that it takes to engage in the kind of classical nonviolence where everyone has gone through training and everyone has committed to the same tactics. The more the movement becomes massive, the more likely you are to have factions who don't agree over tactics. And I think that that's inevitable. So I think that that's the inevitable aspect of what happens when a small disciplined group of people, say, like the students involved in the sit-ins in 1960, became a mass movement like in Birmingham in 1963.
Sometimes you have factions who don't accept the nonviolent discipline. I think any person who tries to organize and mobilize that understands that, tries to deal with it in various ways, and sometimes even uses that. Most nonviolent movements, at some level, understand that. They are saying, "We are here to disrupt. And we hope that you respond to the crisis that we have created. But one of the things that you should think about is that if you don't respond, there might be something worse in store. And we're trying to offer the non-violent option." But not everyone accepts that.
Do you see the possibility of this new movement becoming something successful?
The consequence of the 1960s is that it opened up the idea of freedom and the possibilities of social change to so many different groups who might not have felt those possibilities before the great example of the African-American freedom struggle. Many other groups have done the same thing. But now having taken those tactics, they've fragmented, taken them in lots of different directions. And I think the task for the current century is: How do we bring them back together in some way?
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Professor Clayborne Carson, Civil Rights Movement specialist
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