Effective organizing in 1960s Mississippi meant an organizer had to utilize the everyday issues of the community and frame them for the maximum benefit of the community. Staking out some area of consensus was necessary, but an organizer could not create consensus, an organizaer had to find it. Then, if the organizer found it, the question of hot to tap this consensus, how to energize it and use it for mobilization and organization remained. Organizers -- civil rights organizers in the 1960s, math literacy organizers now -- work to flesh out the consensus... It helped that this was a movement; not only were individuals in a particular community challenging themselves and the system, but other communities were as well...
One tool that turned out to be critical in the process of establishing this kind of political literacy was understanding how meetings could mobilize the participants. These meetings were training grounds, allowing participants to develop and emerge as political leaders of their state. These were not credentialed people; they did not have high school diplomas for the most part. They were not members of labor unions, or national church associations. Yet through the process, they became leaders. Meetings had to shift their focus from being places where there was a person or panel of people presiding, delivering information that the rest of the participants listened to and accepted, and become places where people actually engaged the problems that were embedded in various political arenas -- from local precincts in Mississippi all the way to the federal and congressional environs of Washington, D.C. Sharecroppers and young organizers alike used meetings to figure out approaches to solutions, and ways to organize themselves to effect those solutions.
Bob Moses, _Radical Equations_, pp. 85-87.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
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