By Paul VanDeCarr

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CASE STUDY 1
The Role of the Leader: Martin Luther King, Jr.
Call and Response in the Civil Rights Campaign

CASE STUDY 2
Institution Building and the Christian Right 
How Much of a Foundation Do We Need?

CASE STUDY 3
Militant Tactics of ACT UP and Operation Rescue:
(How Far) Should One Cross the Line?

CASE STUDY 4
Social Media and the Obama Campaign:
How Do We Use Media as an Organizing Tool?

CASE STUDY 5
Marriage Equality: The Personal Is Political
Multimedia Meets the Neighbors

INTRODUCTION
Social movements have long used mass communications to advance their causes. Media technologies have evolved dramatically: from hand-printed broadsides to mass-produced pamphlets; from simple posters to gigantic billboards; from radio and television to internet; from VHS tapes to streamingvideo; from mass meetings to social media. But however much the media technology may have changed, the fundamental questions of communications strategy remain: how to communicate to and with people in order to rally support for a cause? Auburn Media has undertaken a study of various aspects of communications strategy, as seen through the example of different social movements.

Leadership. Leaders help articulate the basic ideas that a movement communicates. A leader envisions the future, writes books, does public speaking, and inspires others to act. In this way, leadership and communications are closely interrelated functions. Here, we look at the relationship of leader and movement in the Civil Rights Movement. The question arises: Do we need leaders, and how do we cultivate them?

Institutions. Institutions—publishing houses, think tanks, radio and TV stations, and more—help ensure the long-term success of a movement’s communications. In this case, we look at how the Christian Right of the late 20th century inherited and expanded an institutional infrastructure that transcends election seasons. This case poses the question: Does institution-building strengthen a movement, or make it calcify?

Tactics. Shocking graphics and militant tactics may help some groups communicate about their cause. Here, we look at the tactics, successes, and failures of ACT UP and Operation Rescue, two organizations that were founded in response to what they saw as emergencies. Some say these groups mobilized activists, while others say they alienated moderates. The question comes up: How valuable is shock value nowadays?

Media. Social media has emerged as a key tool for keeping in touch with friends, finding a job, and now, organizing a political campaign. The Obama campaign used social media to enable supporters to communicate with each other and elect their candidate. This strategy was consistent with the campaign’s populist message that “we are the change we seek.” A key question is: How can we most effectively use social media for a cause?

Each one of these campaigns and movements made moral, ethical, or sometimes outwardly religious claims—about God-given rights, violations of scripture, sin and “blood guilt,” and religiously inspired principles of justice. The lessons of these campaigns and movements suggest that communications is not just about crafting the “perfect” message that will magically persuade even the staunchest opponents to convert. Nor is it something one does only at the end of an organizing effort, such as issuing a press release about a rally the day beforehand. Instead, communications is itself a kind of organizing. It’s an ongoing and grassroots effort to communicate with people of all sorts to enlist, persuade, inform, envision, rally, and, finally, effect change. We hope this study will be useful in the efforts of the many committed activists fighting for the full equality of all people, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people.

CASE STUDY 1
The Role of the Leader: Martin Luther King, Jr.
Call and Response in the Civil Rights Campaign 
Civil rights activist Ella Baker (interviews here and here) famously said, “The movement made Martin rather than Martin making the movement.” (Garrow, 625) Her remark has proved to be an enduring question for grassroots movements. Speaking on the same topic, historian Lerone Bennett “acknowledges that no leader can ‘create an event the time is not prepared for,’ but he contends that great leaders apprehend ‘what the times require,’ and thus act in the face of great opposition to change the times.” (Dyson, 296) Leader and movement act in a complex dialectic. Perhaps it was King’s very ability to be shaped by the movement—to listen, to respond, to be changed by others—that allowed him to shape the movement. King himself, speaking in the spring of 1963, said, “A movement is led as much by the idea that symbolizes it. The role of the leader is to guide and give direction and philosophical under-building to the movement and this is what I have tried to do in this struggle.” (Phillips, 312) In this regard, King’s leadership in the Civil Rights Movement had much to do with communications. He helped articulate the ideas that symbolized the movement. He theorized, wrote books, addressed rallies, spoke to the press, and empowered others to join the movement and communicate in turn. For these reasons, leadership and communications are closely interrelated functions. Here, we explore the dialectical nature of King’s leadership: he was called and shaped by others, notably young activists, even as he called upon and shaped them.

The Call: The Montgomery Bus Boycott
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to leadership reluctantly. It was 1955, and Rosa Parks had been arrested in Montgomery, Alabama for refusing to yield her seat on a public bus to a white patron, as was required by the city’s segregation laws. It would become one of the iconic moments in the Civil Rights Movement, and was also a point of decision for King, then a 26-year-old pastor who’d relocated to Montgomery only 15 months before. A local activist called asking for his support, and King said he’d think about it. He was busy with a newborn baby girl, and with his many responsibilities as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. (Garrow, 17) At a meeting that night, King was nominated as president of the newly-formed Montgomery Improvement Association, and he accepted, saying, “Well, if you think I can render some service, I will.” As King later wrote, “It was the beginning of a movement, … and the people of Montgomery asked me to serve them as a spokesman, and as the president of the new organization … that came into being to lead the boycott. I couldn’t say no.” (King’s speech to the first MIA mass meeting is here.) (Garrow, 57)

It was not the only call he would get. Once the boycott got fully underway, King received phone calls, sometimes as many as 40 a day, threatening his life, and that of his wife and newborn child. (Garrow, 57) After one such call, King went to his kitchen, made some coffee, and as he recalled years later, “with my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward.” (Garrow 56) Then, sometime around midnight, yet another caller told him, “Nigger, we are tired of you and your mess now. And if you aren’t out of this town in three days, we’re going to blow your brains out, and blow up your house.” (Garrow, 57-58) He was deeply shaken, and sat in his kitchen, where he prayed out loud. “I said, ‘Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. I think I’m right. I think the cause that we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now. I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage. And I can’t let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak.’ … And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, ‘Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world.’ … I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on.” King reported, “Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared.” (Garrow, 58) Three days later, his house was bombed, though no one was hurt. (Garrow, 59) King had been called to leadership by members of his community, and he drew on the strength that God and his community gave him to serve as a leader—though not the only one—through the 382 days of the bus boycott. On December 18, 1956 the city buses had full and integrated service. (Garrow, 82)

Student Power: The Sit-Ins and Freedom Rides
King would continue to be called—and challenged—throughout his career, not least of all by students and other young people. Four black students at North Carolina AT&T College sat down at a segregated Greensboro lunch counter in February 1960. They were not served. Within weeks, such protests had spread to other North Carolina cities, and then to Virginia, and later to other southeastern states, all of the sit-ins led by students. One activist called King to ask for his support; in addressing students that month, King said, “What is new in your fight is the fact that it was initiated, fed, and sustained by students.” (Garrow, 129) At an April 1960 meeting, student activists formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), with headquarters in Atlanta, and with King serving in an advisory role. (Garrow, 133)

SNCC activists were a key part of another major civil rights initiative. In May of 1961, The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sponsored the first “Freedom Ride,” in which Black and white activists rode via bus from Washington, DC to New Orleans to “challenge … every form of segregation” that passengers faced. (Garrow, 154) After the first two buses were attacked and riders were beaten, the remaining Freedom Riders flew to New Orleans to end their trip. But two young riders rallied SNCC activists to take another ride from Nashville to Birmingham. That ride was attacked by a mob in Montgomery. (Garrow, 156-157) Together, these rides—and the press attention they drew, thanks to the strategic “crises” that were created—were essential in successfully pressuring the Interstate Commerce Commission to issue an order desegregating all interstate transportation facilities, effective November 1, 1961. (Garrow, 167)

“The student movement had … thrust King to new prominence as the principal symbol of the southern movement,” writes David J. Garrow. (Garrow, 171) King’s fame rankled SNCC activists who felt they had done the bulk of the work to effect change; further, they felt that King’s SCLC was taking more credit than was due in its lucrative direct-mail fundraising appeals to Northerners. The student leaders successfully pressured King’s SCLC to give SNCC a larger share of funds raised. (Garrow, 166-167) Here again, the relationship of King to student activists was give-and-take, if sometimes unequal. King brought a strong moral voice and national attention to students’ efforts. And they challenged him to provide financial and institutional support for what they saw as the real grassroots work that had to be done.

Grassroots Protests: The Albany Movement
With the ICC order in place, student activists led the way again, this time to Albany, Georgia. It was in Albany, a segregated and relatively quiet town of 60,000 where SNCC field secretaries Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagon came to open a field office in October 1961. SNCC organizers developed relationships with everyday residents and community leaders alike. On the day the ICC order was to take effect, they led a sit-in at a bus station to test the station’s compliance with the law. After the protest, SNCC, the NAACP, and other groups formed the Albany Movement. More arrests followed at other protests, which only ignited more mass meetings, rallies, and demonstrations. (Carson, 56-59) Again, King was called upon, this time by adult Albany Movement leader William Anderson, who sent a telegram saying, “WE URGE YOU TO COME AND JOIN THE ALBANY MOVEMENT.” In Anderson’s view, the Albany Movement did not have the resources necessary to sustain a long effort, and they needed the outside support—not to mention the media attention and excitement—that King would bring.

King responded to their call, and they responded to his: “Don’t stop now. Keep moving. Don’t get weary. We will wear them down with our capacity to suffer,” King told the largest-yet Albany Movement gathering, on December 15. (Carson, 60) When negotiations broke down the next day, King led a march to City Hall, and was arrested along with over 250 other demonstrators. City officials refused to desegregate the bus service, prompting a Black boycott in the first part of 1962. SNCC tried direct action to revive the movement, but received little attention for it. (Carson, 60) It was only King’s reappearance in town that spring that re-energized the movement, but he left soon after.

King brought attention to Albany, but in such a way that frustrated student activists. As Michael Eric Dyson writes, “What angered many SNCC organizers is that when King held a press conference after being released from jail, he excluded SNCC from the proceedings, a move that further alienated them from his leadership and created even more resentment of King’s camera-hogging strategy of social change. As one SNCC organizer, Cordell Reagon, put it, ‘I don’t think that anybody appreciates going to jail, getting their balls busted day in and day out, and then you don’t even get to speak on it.’” (Dyson, 297)

Frustrating as it may have been, SNCC’s ultimate concern was not so much to get on camera. SNCC activist Julian Bond said that when his group left an area, it left “a community movement with local leadership, not a new branch of SNCC.” (Carson, 62) For the student organization, this stood in contrast to SCLC, which seemed to gobble up resources and press attention, but failed to foster grassroots leadership at the local level. “SNCC’s organizing efforts suggested a framework for understanding the black struggle of the 1960s not as an operation initiated and directed by leaders such as Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, but as a mass movement that produced its own leaders and ideas,” writes Clayborne Carson. (Carson, 4)

King’s Vision: Writings and Speeches
Even as King was criticized and challenged (and, as Ella Baker might say, “made”) by SNCC and the rest of the movement, he in turn made it, and articulated a vision that drew legions of activists to the cause. Many of his writings and speeches had to do with visions and dreams. His April 1963 “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” referred to the American Dream in responding to clergymen who had called his course of action in that city “unwise and untimely.” In a May 1963 speech in Birmingham, he saw young activists as doing work for all America that would benefit their own and future generations. King’s vision was of course most famously exemplified by his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, DC, witnessed in person by some 250,000 people, and seen by millions more on television. He said: “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day, even in the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!”

Other speeches would also cast forward into the future. In a 1965 speech to protestors in Selma, Alabama seeking voting rights, King asked rhetorically how long it would take for justice to arrive, and his stirring refrain was “How long? Not long” (Full speech here.) And in his 1967 address to the SCLC convention, he asked “Where do we go from here?” and provided an eloquent vision to answer his own question. And even in his famous final speech, on April 3, 1968 in Memphis, the night before he was killed, King said, “I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”

The visions that King articulated served the movement. As Clayborne Carson says in an interview, there are pros and cons of having a charismatic leader like King. “Before and after Martin Luther King comes to town, you have local leaders [who may not be so charismatic], but if the people in that town really want to see MLK, and they’re really disappointed when he goes, then you have that sense of deflation afterwards. The local people have to pick up the pieces. It was fine when he was there, but there’s that tendency to say that it’s essential that he’s there. But when he leaves, people feel let down.” On the other hand, Carson says of a later SNCC leader, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), “when he’d go out organizing in Mississippi, people would ask him, ‘are you one of Dr. King’s men?’ And he would say, ‘yes, ma’am, I am.’ MLK wasn’t going to come knocking on their door, but Stokely Carmichael, here I am. That’s the way many SNCC workers looked at it. They could come behind the charismatic leader and take the energy [he] created and turn it into real organizing.” It wasn’t just King’s energy, but his vision, that they were turning into organizing.

Making Everyday Leaders
Ella Baker, who remarked that “the movement made Martin,” elaborated on this point: “I have always thought what is needed is the development of people who are interested not in being leaders as much as in developing leadership in others.” (Dyson, 298) Sociologist Charles Payne says that, by focusing on national leaders instead of the daily work (and workers) of social change, we do a disservice. Speaking of King’s work in Montgomery, he writes: “Finding Dr. King to take the leadership of the movement was fortuitous, but the local activists had put themselves in a position to be lucky through lifetimes of purposeful planning and striving…. Taking the high drama of the mid-fifties and early sixties out of the longer historical context implicitly overvalues those dramatic moments and undervalues the more mundane activities that make them possible—the network-building, the grooming of another generation of leadership, the sheer persistence…. The popular conception of Montgomery—a tired woman refused to give up her seat and a prophet rose up to lead the grateful masses—is a good story but useless history.” (Dyson, 300) Good history, rather than good story, might inspire other people to take action, as SNCC activist Diane Nash reflects: “If people think that it was Martin Luther King’s movement, then today they—young people—are more likely to say, ‘gosh, I wish we had a Martin Luther King here today to lead us.’ … If people knew how that movement started, then the question they would ask themselves is, ‘What can I do?’” (Garrow, 625)

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carson, Clayborne. (1995) In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s.
Dyson, Michael Eric. (2001) I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.
Garrow, David J. (1987) Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Phillips, Donald T. (1999) Martin Luther King, Jr. on Leadership: Inspiration and Wisdom for Challenging Times.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
Who are examples of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender leaders today, and how do they use the media?
Is there such a thing as leadership development—or can leaders only be “trained” by doing?
What conditions allow for leaders to emerge?
How does King the man differ from King the legend—and what does his legend do to inspire activism or to dampen it?