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Where Do We Go from Here? - Dr. King and Jane McAlevey [1]

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Date: 2025-01-17

Inauguration Day this year is the same day as the federal holiday commemorating the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. With the ascendency of Donald Trump to the Presidency this week, progressives need to discuss “where we go from here?”

Martin Luther King asked that question in a 1967 address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King told the convention “We must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America?’ And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy . . . [W]hen I say questioning the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.”

The weekend before the inauguration there were People’s Marches in a number of U.S. cities protesting against proposed Trump initiatives. Rallies were held in Washington DC, New York, Newark, Atlanta, San Francisco, San Diego, and Philadelphia. Felicia and I were in Birmingham, Alabama for a wedding so we attend a rally there at the Federal Building, two blocks from Kelly Ingram Park where police and firefighters attack black students trying to desegregate the park in 1963.

But at this juncture, mass rallies are insufficient. Trump and his followers make it clear that liberals and progressives are enemies of the people who should be ignored or punished. Two other strategies may be equally impotent. Civil disobedience mostly annoys the people they inconvenience and doesn’t convince anyone to change their minds. Some Democratic Party elected officials plan to work with Trump on positions they seem to share and to claim credit for the achievements, but as Elon Musk will soon learn, Donald Trump does not share center stage with anyone.

Jane McAlevey, who died of cancer last summer at the age of 59 was one of the most successful union organizers in the United States during the last three decades. Her advice to progressive organizers was always to convince the unconvinced instead of preaching to those who already agree with them.

Key to McAlevey’s approach to building a progressive working-class movement is spending more time in what she called deep organizing and less time in shallow mobilizing. McAlevey was also dismissive of advocacy or lobbying elected officials as a substitute for grassroots organizing. For McAlevey, organizing involves listening to the people you want to reach so you can respond to their concerns, show how they are addressed by progressive action, and recruit them to the movement. Mobilizing is important because it brings together people who agree with you, but McAlevey argued it does not change minds or bring in new people.

McAlevey argued that one of the reasons the labor movement of the 1930s and the African American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s were successful because they established structures people could become part of, unions, churches, and community groups, that sustained struggle over a long term. Mobilizations are temporary and then people go home. Advocacy involves lobbying by so-called experts who are part of the existing system; it ignores the need to build a grass roots movement and organizations and accepts the class power structure, albeit with some modification. McAlevey explained her approach to organizing in “Building the Power to Win,” a video available on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SDcB3Ifqw0&t=21s).

One of McAlevey’s key recommendations for union organizers was that they must convince workers that the union is their organization, the “collective experience of workers in struggle.” She explained that organizers should see worker anger as a positive force for change and not try to defuse it; that organizers had to believe it was possible to defeat the bosses, but they also needed to be honest with workers about the risks they faced as they built unions; that organizers should never underestimate the ability and power of the people they are trying to organize; and that organizers had to communicate excitement, energy, and urgency, but shouldn’t talk too much while doing it. They must make sure the people they want to organize have voice.

McAlevey did not cite Paulo Freire, but her approach is similar to the organizing strategy Freire promoted in Brazil in the 1960s and described in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. For Freire, the key to successful organizing is liberating the voice of the oppressed so they realize their collective power. McAlevey’s focus on developing grassroots organic leaders like the Norma Rae character played by Sally Fields in the 1979 movie Norma Rae is very similar to the approach advocated by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks. Gramsci argued that organic intellectuals from the working class were the crucial connection between grassroot movements and radical political parties, they are the teachers who convey broader ideas about society to workers but also explain the insights and experiences of workers to movement leaders. Successful union organizers in the 1930s studied pre-exiting working-class social groups to identify and target the community’s organic leadership, including the wives of workers. These are the people who sustain worker agency during difficult struggles.

In our society, the poor, the struggling, and the disenfranchised are taught to believe that their predicament is either deserved, the result of other people cheating, or mysterious conspiracies against them. The last two positions are those Donald Trump and rightwing demagogues uses to mobilize their followers.

McAlevey argued that the self-blame of those without leads to acceptance of the legitimacy of a system that promotes inequality and “demobilizes people.” She also believed that rightwing attacks on government and calls for tax cuts are part of a coordinated effort to break unions and leave working people totally subject to the power of the wealthy, but that working people have an underlying belief in class solidarity despite the culture of self-blame and it can be marshaled by progressive organizers to defeat corporate power and rightwing demagogues.

Martin Luther King Jr understand the power and the limitations of mass rallies. With the Montgomery Bus Boycott, church groups, literacy programs, voter registration drives, and the Poor People’s Campaign, King and civil rights workers focused on educating and organizing, connecting leadership with rank-and-file, and building organizations for long-term struggle.

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