After the Rebellion

Black Youth, Social Movement Activism, and the Post-Civil Rights Generation

Sekou M. Franklin

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780814760017
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Bürgerrechte in der Politik

Whathappened to black youth in the post-civil rights generation? What kind ofcauses did they rally around and were they even rallying in the first place? After the Rebellion takes a close lookat a variety of key civil rights groups across the country over the last 40years to provide a broad view of black youth and social movement activism. Based on both research from a diversecollection of archives and interviews with youth activists, advocates, andgrassroots organizers, this book examines popular mobilization among thegeneration of activists – principally black students, youth, and young adults –who came of age after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the VotingRights Act of 1965. Franklin argues that the political environment in the post-CivilRights era, along with constraints on social activism, made it particularlydifficult for young black activists to start and sustain popular mobilizationcampaigns.

Building on casestudies from around the country—including New York, the Carolinas, California,Louisiana, and Baltimore— After theRebellion explores the inner workings and end results of activist groupssuch as the Southern Negro Youth Congress, Student Nonviolent CoordinatingCommittee, the Student Organization for Black Unity, the Free South AfricaCampaign, the New Haven Youth Movement, the Black Student Leadership Network,the Juvenile Justice Reform Movement, and the AFL-CIO’s Union Summer campaign. Franklin demonstrates how youth-basedmovements and intergenerational campaigns have attempted to circumvent modernconstraints, providing insight into how the very inner workings of theseorganizations have and have not been effective in creating change and involvingyouth. A powerful work of both historical and political analysis, After the Rebellion provides a vividexplanation of what happened to the militant impulse of young people since thedemobilization of the civil rights and black power movements – a discussionwith great implications for the study of generational politics, racial andblack politics, and social movements.

PART I

1

Movement Activism and the Post–Civil Rights Generation

The other thing that’s quite important is that all of us [sixties activists] are talking from a context that is utterly and radically and permanently different than today’s context. You cannot underestimate how important it was that no black person in the South could vote, and no college student in America could vote. The two active constituencies did not have the option of working in the system open to them…. Civil disobedience and speaking out were the options open. Today, I suppose to most people civil disobedience seems strange if you haven’t first voted and tried to work within the system. So it’s a hopelessly different context.

—Tom Hayden, SNCC Conference at Trinity College, April 1988

The Peoples’ Community Feeding Program was created in 1994 by a contingent of black students from Hunter College in New York City. Similar to the feeding programs created by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party in the 1960s and 1970s, the initiative tackled malnutrition and hunger, feeding close to two hundred people each month in its Central Brooklyn neighborhood. Supported through in-kind contributions from churches and activists, the program was eventually taken over by activists affiliated with the Black Student Leadership Network (BSLN), a national organization allied with the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), a prominent child advocacy group. The BSLN affiliate, officially called the New York Metro chapter, also was cultivated by the Central Brooklyn Partnership, an economic justice organization that served as an informal gathering place for young activists from the Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, and Fort Greene sections of Brooklyn.

In the early 2000s, the Youth Media Council in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Youth Force in the South Bronx, two activist groups composed of youth of color, initiated a campaign highlighting the misrepresentation of urban youth in the mainstream media. Conducted in collaboration with a national media strategy organization called We Interrupt This Message, the campaign analyzed the news coverage of black and Latino youth by the New York Times and San Francisco Bay Area’s KTVU Channel 2 News. The youth groups found that most of coverage of youth of color unfairly portrayed them as pathological, dysfunctional, and inclined toward criminal behavior.¹ The findings were then disseminated to community organizers and political activists who were mobilizing against racial profiling and zero-tolerance youth policies in their respective jurisdictions.

Another promising campaign, occurring in 2000, involved the mobilization of hundreds of youth of color against Proposition 21 in California. The statewide ballot initiative permitted prosecutors to charge fourteen-year-olds as adults if they were involved in violent crimes. The measure, backed by conservative interest groups, intended to charge young offenders “as adults without a judicial review and made it easier to incarcerate youths with adult inmates.”² It was the latest of several voter initiatives within the previous decade that adversely affected the state’s black and Latino youth, the others being an anti–affirmative action measure and a ballot proposition penalizing illegal immigrants. The measure was opposed by many youth groups and activists in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the campaign experienced some of the largest protests of young people since the 1970s. Though the ballot initiative was approved in March 2000, it was widely rejected in the Bay Area and received its greatest opposition in San Francisco and Alameda Counties, the two areas that experienced the stiffest amount of youth resistance.

This book charts the development of social movement activism and popular mobilization among young activists of the post–civil rights generation. The post–civil rights generation describes young people who came of age after the collapse of the civil rights, New Left, and black power movements that occurred from the 1950s to the early 1970s. Andrea Simpson refers to the post–civil rights generation as the “integration generation” because they were the first cohort of young people whose political orientations were shaped by the realities of post–de jure segregation.³ By documenting social movement activism among the post–civil rights generation, this book examines the limitations and opportunities for youth and young adult participation in movement-building initiatives. I am also concerned with explaining the status and participation of black youth and young adults in popular mobilization campaigns and social movement infrastructures, or the diverse organizational processes and networks of activists, advocates, and allies that reinforce movements and social activism.⁴ I focus on mobilization campaigns that targeted regressive measures and public health dilemmas that had particularly damaging consequences on poor and working-poor black communities in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Social movements offer an entry point for engaging students and youth in what Holloway Sparks refers to as a “dissident citizenship,” or a type of civic engagement that encourages marginal groups to challenge the social and political order.⁵ They serve as socializing agents that link disaffected communities with public policy agendas, especially when elected officials and authoritative decision makers neglect their grievances. In a general sense, progressive social movements entail a mix of contentious social justice activism, popular mobilization campaigns, popular education and consciousness-raising activities, grassroots organizing, and legal and institutional pressures. As demonstrated in the youth initiatives discussed at the beginning of the chapter, movement campaigns use a broad array of strategies and tactics, and are led by an assortment of activists, networks, and organizations.

I rely on a loose interpretation of social movements and interchange this concept with popular mobilization campaigns, extra-systemic pressures, resistance movements, movement-building initiatives, and contentious politics.⁶ However, I distinguish between transformational forms of movement-building exercises and contained protest movements. Transformational movements (or mobilization campaigns that have a transformational character) are diffuse and involve high-risk strategies and tactics that have a sustained impact on political culture; their goals are adopted by a diverse group of movement networks; occasionally, they influence the emergence of new mobilizing structures; and at times they disrupt or effect the implementation of public policies. Contained movements or mobilization campaigns, on the other hand, are episodic and discontinuous; they are short-lived, are restricted, and have difficulty shaping public policy and political attitudes, usually because of limited mobilization opportunities or unfavorable conditions external or internal to the movements.⁷ Despite these differences, both forms of movement activism are anchored in social justice frames and attempt to foster leadership among rank-and-file members from aggrieved communities.

A major argument of this book is that there has been an overall shift in the post–civil rights era toward institutional leveraging among progressive movements and mobilizing structures (or what I call movement infrastructures) that typically fuel mobilization campaigns. Institutional leveraging occurs when movement infrastructures channel their energies and resources into established bureaucratic and political institutions in order to safeguard their interests in a hostile political climate or because they seek institutional power.⁸ This leveraging process usually takes place at the expense of buttressing transformational campaigns.

As a result of institutional leveraging and the ascent of the conservative movement, popular mobilization campaigns have been contained in the post–civil rights era, at least compared to the movements of the 1930s and 1960s. Notwithstanding these constraints, the second argument guiding this study is that the post–civil rights generation activists did not completely eschew movement activism. As demonstrated in the movement initiatives discussed at the outset of the chapter, young activists and veteran activists allied with their causes challenged the limitations and boundaries of these constraints, and created opportunities for new groups of young people to participate in mobilization campaigns. They contested the push and pull toward institutional leveraging, and in the process attempted to elevate the social and political status of poor and working-class black youth as an important variable in popular mobilization campaigns. Documenting these movement struggles, their impact on intergenerational relations within progressive movements and advocacy campaigns, and their intersection with black politics and left-oriented multiracial campaigns in the post–civil rights era is the objective of this study.

The principal actor in the book is black youth and young adults, most of whom were under twenty-five years of age during the height of their activist years. Also included in this study are veteran or adult activists and advocates from mobilization campaigns that focused on issues that impacted or depended upon the participation of black youth or students. These campaigns were coordinated by movement infrastructures composed of youth-led organizations, multigenerational organizations, and network-affiliated groups that supported youth organizing. Most of the campaigns took place in community struggles outside the university environs including urban-based organizing initiatives, labor/union and economic justice activities, antihunger campaigns, popular education activities, criminal and juvenile justice reform campaigns, and racial justice initiatives.

With the exception of the historical overview of black youth activism in the 1930s and 1940s examined in the second chapter, I focus specifically on the period spanning from the mid-1960s to the mid-2000s. This period saw the demobilization of the civil rights, black power, and New Left movements; the conservative movement’s growing influence as exhibited with the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush and the Republican Party’s takeover of Congress subsequent to the 1994 midterm elections; the capture of the Democratic Party by its moderate/conservative wing as demonstrated with the Democratic Leadership Council’s growing power in the late 1980s; the retrenchment of New Deal social welfare programs; the shift from an industrial to a service economy; and the emergence of the youth vote as a result of the passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment in 1971.

The Problem of Generations: Youth as
a Social and Political Variable

Youth-based activism was an important part of progressive social movements throughout much of the twentieth century. Historian Charles Payne refers to activists from the SNCC, one of the most influential youth formations in the twentieth century, as the “shock troops” of the civil rights movement. This was because of their unique brand of courage, strategic and tactical innovation, and willingness to organize in racially hostile communities that frightened many veteran activists.⁹ SNCC activists contributed a tremendous amount of time, energy, and personal commitment, or what Jo Freeman refers to as “people resources,” to the civil rights movement.¹⁰ Their efforts debunked the argument by some political observers such as Mancur Olson that individuals join collective action initiatives to maximize selective or monetary incentives.¹¹ Dennis Chong further argues that rather than selective incentives, participation in civil rights initiatives was propelled by social pressures, friendship, reputational enhancement, the viability of movement success, and social acceptance.¹² Indigenous resources such as communication infrastructures and long-standing civic groups also prepared young activists for high-risk activism in the civil rights movement.¹³ Youth participation in the civil rights, black power, and New Left movements of the 1960s, as well as the labor-left movements of the 1930s, truly involved great personal risk that far outweighed any selective rewards that might be obtained from participating in these initiatives.

Despite the contributions of young activists to social movements, it is important to discuss the conceptual and empirical shortcomings of situating youth, or what Karl Mannheim and others called “political generations,”¹⁴ at the forefront of social and political analyses. I am cautious about concluding that post–civil rights “youth” by virtue of their age and because of adultism, or the subordination of youth, should be positioned at the forefront of popular mobilization campaigns. Still, some activists and intellectuals insist that youth are best prepared to lead movement campaigns or participate in high-risk initiatives because of their age and social location, and because they have fewer family and personal commitments.¹⁵

While recognizing the significance of generational resistance and consciousness, situating youth as the vanguard of social change initiatives can actually detach them from comprehensive community struggles.¹⁶ It advances what O’Donoghue, Kirshner, and McLaughlin call an “overly romantic notion of youth involvement” in mobilization campaigns,¹⁷ because it assumes that a younger cohort of activists is destined to be more progressive or supportive of social justice claims than older ones. Karl Mannheim warned political observers against associating age with political radicalism. He said, “Nothing is more false than the usual assumption uncritically shared by students of generations, that the young generation is ‘progressive’ and the older generational eo ipso conservative.”¹⁸ His commentary is particularly relevant for analyses of the post–civil rights generation. The idea that youth should be the vanguard of modern resistance movements has been discussed at virtually every political and activist conference and in electoral organizing initiatives that claim to advance progressive causes. This narrative has been reinforced by popular culture, especially hip-hop culture, which claims to represent the sentiments of disillusioned ghetto youth. Yet there is little evidence that post–civil rights youth are more progressive in their political orientations compared to adult activists of the sixties generation. Survey data and research reveal that younger blacks have actually been more conservative than older ones on some policy issues.¹⁹

In addition, the narrative fails to appreciate that regardless of how altruistic youth activists may be in asserting a generational consciousness, it is difficult and perhaps impossible for them to win significant political victories without marrying their concerns to public agendas and movement infrastructures that emerge out of broader mobilization campaigns. Because racial and class inequities are exacerbated by policies that cannot be resolved solely by young people themselves, student and youth activists must interact, form coalitions, and organize with veteran activists w...