In response, will activism translate into concrete results the way it once did? Surely, a new generation of organizers now rising with a resolve and passion not seen in years, having broadened the civil rights project into a human rights one, will develop new strategies. Surely, they will discover or invent new means of stopping what threatens to be a contraction of democracy. Surely, with the power of social media -- a veritable television station in the hands of every citizen -- they will find their own ways of ensuring that oppression can't dodge the spotlight. Already, the bottom-up strategy championed by SNCC has found new fluency in the ascendance of hyper-democratic Internet organizing and the raw eloquence of #BlackLivesMatter.
Does reform still demand powerful allies, and if so, who might they be? A few centrist Republicans, courageous career attorneys in the Justice Department, billionaire Silicon Valley CEOs committed to pluralism, a mass of determined young people running for office?
As organizers have discovered more than once since the early days of the republic, new levers lie waiting somewhere deep in the grand clockwork of our democracy. The only question is: Where?
Jon Else worked on the SNCC staff in 1964 and 1965 He was series producer and cinematographer for Eyes on the Prize , has produced and directed many award-winning documentaries, including The Day After Trinity and Cadillac Desert . A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, he is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. His new book is True South: Henry Hampton and "Eyes on the Prize," the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement.
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Copyright 2017 Jon Else
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