Student
Organizing 

What If They Gave An Empire and Nobody Came? 

By Matt Meyer & Sara Steele 

printer friendly version

With young people blocking traffic on Los Angeles highways in support of their rights as undocumented workers and students traveling south to figure out what they can do in the wake of the Katrina disaster, it seems that there is an emerging student voice in grassroots actvist efforts in almost every part of the country. 

The anti-globalization mobilizations in Seattle left an energized Students Against War group in that town, which chased military recruiters off the campus of Seattle Central Community College three times in 2005. A three-year battle at Georgetown University in Washington, DC over living wages for campus workers culminated in a nine-day hunger strike—with eventual concessions—late in 2005. In the South, the victories of the Coalition of Immokalee workers— Florida-based farm workers protesting against Taco Bell—were greatly aided by a powerful Student/Farmworker Alliance. 

Likewise, the fall 2005 conference of the Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA) in Goshen, Indiana on the theme “In Solidarity: Engaging Empire,” was led by student activists from around the world. Usually a scholarly affair made up largely of progressive professors, PJSA 2005 not only employed student interns from the local Mennonite community and from Nicaragua and the Congo, but also attracted student leaders. With special conversations on academic freedom post-9/11, reports from Iraqi educators, and an evening plenary with Third Wave feminist activist Rebecca Walker, the conference was abuzz with new energy and intensity. Co-sponsored by Plowshares, an Indiana-based peace studies collaborative from Earlham, Goshen, and Manchester Colleges, an open dialogue between the students and professors permeated the gathering. 

Berger reflected on the various mistakes of the WUO, but also emphasized some of the lessons, such as making a priority of struggling against white supremacy and racism. Ayers asserted, “We don’t need to go back nostalgically…. Let’s do concrete analysis of what’s happening now. How do you maintain the strengths of a decentralized movement and also figure out how to organize, how to communicate, how to make concerted action?” 

Berger, along with Kenyon Farrow and Chesa Boudin (son of SDS and WUO political prisoner David Gilbert), is also an editor of Letters from Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out. Letters is a series of open communications written by organizers from ages 10 to 31 addressed to parents, authority figures, older activists, perceived leaders of contemporary movements, and the next generation. 

“Living at this particular moment in history,” writes Tiffany Lethabo King, “I understand more and more how high the stakes are if we let them diminish our humanity.” In “A Letter to Political Prisoners of Racist and Sexist Sexual Politics: To Our Iraqi Sisters at Abu Ghraib,” King links the struggles of young women of color in the U.S. with those across the globe. “There must be room for more than analysis and critique in this movement,” writes Marian Yalini Thambynaygam in her impassioned letter. When Thambynaygam and King and others in Letters set forth their ideas on the new resistance, one wants to support and follow that lead. 

Still the question of whether there is a lead to follow has been raised in several circles. An insightful and persuasive review of the significance of Letters, for example, appears from a young activist in the March issue of Left Turn magazine. Ellen Chenoweth argues that the editors of Letters do not live up to their stated purpose of convincing the reader that there is such a thing as a coherent movement. Suggesting that many Letters writers would not, themselves, articulate their own visions as belonging to a unified force, Chenoweth recommends the book as a “tentative step” toward defining the new conglomeration and generation of social changers. While she understands that “looking at the stories of individual activists is an important project,” she warns that this is not the same as movement building. This critique has been echoed by others who believe that while the efforts of some individuals suggest that there is hope for the renewal of a student movement, there has yet to be enough widespread action among students to point to a genuine upsurge. 

One of the more positive recent developments has been the coming together of African American college students to support the rebuilding of those regions most affected by Hurricane Katrina. West Virginian activist Wesli Spencer was instrumental in creating the Neo Underground Railroad, which helped bring 900 students to Selma, Alabama for an orientation session and history lesson before sending them to assist with reconstruction and legal rights efforts in New Orleans, Mobile, and Biloxi. Katrina on the Ground (KOTG), the coordinating group for the spring initiative, ended up reaching over 50 campuses—well beyond its core base among the traditional Black colleges. KOTG activist Kevin Powell asserted that their efforts were “not just about Katrina…. This is about democracy in this country and we need to bring all these different social justice movements together.” Speaking on “Democracy Now!” with New Orleans-based activist and Left Turn editor Jordan Flaherty, Powell suggested that bridging these movements would be the only way to end the isolation of the left. 

The National Conference on Organized Resistance (NCOR) in Washington, DC, also took place this past spring. Founded by former American University student organizer Nisha Anand, NCOR has blossomed into a huge annual gathering, this year bringing together over 2,000 participants. Left Turn helped to pull together an important panel on the lessons of New Orleans. They also hosted, along with INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, a critical workshop entitled “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded,” examining the pervasive role of nonprofit NGOs and the politics of funding efforts designed to serve as band-aid reforms rather than long-term solutions. Left Turn and SUSTAIN (Stop U.S. Aid to Israel Now) founder Rami ElAmine facilitated a session on the future of support for Palestine, which included organizers from the International Solidarity Movement and from the progressive Jewish community. 

The San Francisco-based Catalyst Project, an antiracist political education center that grew out of the Challenging White Supremacy workshops, was also instrumental in making NCOR 2006 a success. Founded a few years ago, Catalyst is a self-conscious collaboration of white activists, mostly under 30, who assert that antiracism is “a catalyst for personal development, building successful movements and fundamental social change.” Influenced and inspired by the work of Institute for MultiRacial Justice founder and author Elizabeth “Betita” Martinez, the Catalyst Project has led hundreds of training sessions. 

In an ambitious attempt to transform raised consciousness at NCOR into strategic action, the Catalyst project held workshops on base building, collective organizing, and antiracism. They stressed the need for more serious organization building in itself, proclaiming that “good ideas are not enough”: we need strong and effective groups planning for liberation.  

In a formal co-sponsorship with the War Resisters League (WRL), Catalyst core trainer and WRL leader Clare Bayard moderated a popular talk on “Throwing Down Against Empire: Military Veterans Speak Out on Political Strategies to End War.” With a multigenerational panel of Vietnamand Gulf-era former soldiers, as well as counter-recruitment activists, Catalyst highlighted perhaps the single issue most worrying young, socially conscious people today. “The most important aspect of the panel,” said WRL youth organizer Steve Theberge, “was the connection that the panelists drew between building resistance within the military and the larger antiwar movement. If we are to succeed, the youth movement against the war has to be made up of both of these constituencies and I think that this panel was a step in that direction.” 

Another step in that direction was the Not Your Soldier counter-recruitment campaign, directed at Black, Latino, and working-class white youth. Spearheaded by the 2006 summer tour of the radical hip-hop group the Coup, Not Your Soldier set up organizing camps to educate and train young people on alternatives to the military. When Coup co-leader Boots Riley exhorts people to “pick a bigger weapon” (the title of the group’s latest CD), he’s primarily urging that folks broaden their political horizon and their understandings of the system’s interconnected ills. Armed with the WRL’s new DMZ magazine—a guide by and for youth on taking one’s school back from the military—some of the constituency connections Theberge spoke of continued to be made. The Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) recounted recruitment lies that they had personally (and recently) encountered. 

Brenes and her colleagues recounted the efforts that brought out well over one million people in her city. “There were hundreds of young people taking to the freeways,” Brenes remarked, just “weeks before there were millions in the streets.” Under the leadership of United Students, tens of thousands left their junior high and high schools, demanding that their school be declared a safe zone for all immigrants and that educational opportunities be extended for all, under the banner “Education, Not Deportation.” Linking youth affected by the prison-industrial complex, the military-industrial complex, and the erosion of human rights, Brenes articulated a strategy for infrastructure building and cross-community coalitions through Southern Californians for Youth (SCFY). SCFY brings together Mexican, African American, and South Asian youth—youth in school, at work, and locked up—all in “an intentional basis to build power for social justice.” 

In the Northwest, socialist and WRL activist Thomas Good was instrumental in imagining another opportunity for student organizers that references past struggles. Inspired by a Connecticut-based high school student, Good and others have reconstituted SDS. 

The summer of 2006 also saw significant strategy retreats, one of which was initiated out of a series of informal discussions held around the burgeoning National Youth and Student Peace Coalition. That retreat, like the Coalition, successfully brought together student organizers, young Iraq War veterans, and youth activists from WRL and other assorted groups. Attempting to build alliances between military and “civilian” resisters, the retreat showed that serious, cross-cultural coalition building could be done, with youth at the fore. These links were made clear when groups like IVAW sponsored marches to the south under the banner “Every bomb dropped on Iraq explodes over New Orleans.” When Latino cadets in Los Angeles publicly resigned from their JROTC posts to protest the deployment of U.S. reservists on the U.S.-Mexican border, the potential of such alliances also became evident.  

An even more ambitious effort is the web-based Future 5000, a network with over 500 youth and student-led groups in all 50 states. With the goal of “supporting the evolution of the youth social justice movement by creating a one-stop shop,” the largest online network of progressive youth organizations ever put together is broadly based in the politics of “peace, freedom, and justice.” It is not clear, though, whether this huge network will be able to pull together the diverse strands of youth mobilization into a single movement. 

Yet it does seem certain that the 2006 protests on a broad range of issues and utilizing a broad range of tactics—from vigils in support of the progressive initiatives in Venezuela to hunger strikes for lasting peace in Darfur—have helped to break some of the pessimism felt by activists over the prolonged policies of the Bush regime. 

It seems that young people throughout the U.S. are forcefully raising the call: What if the U.S. gave an empire and nobody came? The potency of the next wave of progressive campaigns will be proven by its own originality and by the ability to learn from and overcome some of the setbacks of earlier generations. 

Perhaps the best possibility of this period is, indeed, taking steps towards building basic space for coalitions and perhaps all the positive effects of decentralized organization must give way just a bit to the positive force that can be gained by a central strategic focus aimed against an already stretched imperial agenda. In any case, the best thing for older activists and organizations at this time is to stop mythologizing the past or missing out on the work of the present: to be supportive, to listen carefully, and to get ready. The future is almost upon us.