<HTML><FONT FACE=arial,helvetica><FONT SIZE=3>Apropos of our earlier discussions --
<BR>
<BR>Effective organizing in 1960s Mississippi meant an organizer had to utilize
<BR>the everyday issues of the community and frame them for the maximum benefit
<BR>of the community. Staking out some area of consensus was necessary, but an
<BR>organizer could not create consensus, an organizaer had to find it. Then, if
<BR>the organizer found it, the question of hot to tap this consensus, how to
<BR>energize it and use it for mobilization and organization remained. Organizers
<BR>-- civil rights organizers in the 1960s, math literacy organizers now -- work
<BR>to flesh out the consensus... It helped that this was a movement; not only
<BR>were individuals in a particular community challenging themselves and the
<BR>system, but other communities were as well...
<BR>
<BR>One tool that turned out to be critical in the process of establishing this
<BR>kind of political literacy was understanding how meetings could mobilize the
<BR>participants. These meetings were training grounds, allowing participants to
<BR>develop and emerge as political leaders of their state. These were not
<BR>credentialed people; they did not have high school diplomas for the most
<BR>part. They were not members of labor unions, or national church associations.
<BR>Yet through the process, they became leaders. Meetings had to shift their
<BR>focus from being places where there was a person or panel of people
<BR>presiding, delivering information that the rest of the participants listened
<BR>to and accepted, and become places where people actually engaged the problems
<BR>that were embedded in various political arenas -- from local precincts in
<BR>Mississippi all the way to the federal and congressional environs of
<BR>Washington, D.C. Sharecroppers and young organizers alike used meetings to
<BR>figure out approaches to solutions, and ways to organize themselves to effect
<BR>those solutions.
<BR>
<BR>Bob Moses, _Radical Equations_, pp. 85-87.
<BR>
<BR>Leo Casey
<BR>United Federation of Teachers
<BR>260 Park Avenue South
<BR>New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
<BR>
<BR>Power concedes nothing without a demand.
<BR>It never has, and it never will.
<BR>If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
<BR>Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who
<BR>want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and
<BR>lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
<BR><P ALIGN=CENTER>-- Frederick Douglass --
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