Abstract
When many of us think about social movements, we think of the Civil Rights movement, the women’s movement, and the gay rights movement, each of which changed the world. However, in the past fifty years or so, we have forgotten that Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, Gloria Steinem, Andrew Young, Betty Freidan, Harvey Milk, Bella Abzug, and John Lewis were once young adults walking into the fray of transformational social change, as evidenced by some of our surprise at Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter demonstrations. As we recollect and even reminisce about each of these movements, we marvel at the structural transfigurations in the United States, as racial integration swipes against inequality. Yet only recently have scholars begun to pen commentaries of and about the post-civil rights era or a post-civil rights generation. Sekou Franklin’s After the Rebellion: Black Youth, Social Movement Activism, and the Post-Civil Rights Generation discusses the era and its generation by examining what happened to the children’s children.
In nine historically filled chapters on blackyouth activism, Franklin documents the saga of black youth social movements starting with the rarely discussed Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), through the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), to today, via “dissident citizenship”—activism that entices and persuades marginal citizens to challenge the social and political order. Like the heroes and she-roes from our recent past, these youthful citizens work within and across their communities as change agents. Franklin examines over forty activist alliances in his search to understand transformational movements.
This book assesses the challenges that accompany jump-starting, sustaining, and possibly continuing activists’ efforts given changes in the political landscape and limitations on popular mobilization. Thus, the reader is taken through these young people’s islands of change as Franklin suggests that the organizations and infrastructures he investigates offer exceptional insight into youth-based social activism. Methodologically, he builds a representative sample detailing these coalitions’ interests (e.g., youth-led, multigenerational, and network-affiliated), while also discussing cross-case analyses across time and intermovement comparisons of strategies, leadership patterns, and infrastructure. Additionally, he examines extra-campus initiatives and policy issues, which are geographically diffuse and, in some instances, seek to develop nationally federated organizations.
Franklin expresses his concern for young African American activists regarding policy issues that disproportionately impact them, like hunger, health care, education, and employment. He defines and outlines bridge-builders as persons who generate opportunities for beginners to take part in movements, while distinguishing these activists from Belinda Robnett’s “bridge leaders.” With this concept, he discusses creative strategies employed by these individuals, emphasizing that bridge-builders are not fringe personalities in movements but are highly valued resources for supporting movement campaigns beyond their embryonic stages.
For Franklin, creative organizing is the deliberate use of framing devices to design a structure for movement leaders to present a belief system and/or set of answers centering on conditions and policies that petition distressed communities’ youth to be socially active. He stresses that activists must make use of the local resources of preexisting organizations, networks, and institutions and describes positionality as a creative organizing strategy that movement bridge-builders should use to create opportunities for young people’s participation in mobilization campaigns by intentionally alerting youth, allies, movement donors, and veteran activists with movement infrastructures about the harmful effects of regressive policies on disaffected black youth.
Measuring the consequences and outcomes of creative organizing strategies, Franklin notes that bridge-builders use framing to develop narratives that explain a particular problem that has relevance to marginalized groups. He finds that it is hard to determine when black youth initially became involved in transformational movements. Historian John Lovell suggests that youth joined movements in the mid-nineteenth century and that individuals between the ages of ten and thirty were heavily involved in slave revolts. Franklin advances this idea for readers and highlights how the Scottsboro case became a consciousness-raising event for black youth, making them acutely politically aware of the horrors of racial segregation; twenty years later the Emmett Till case quickened these young people’s participation in social and political activism. Organizations such as Baltimore, Maryland’s City-wide Young People’s Forum (CWYPF), a multiclass youth group combatting unemployment and racial segregation, and Ella Baker and George Schuyler’s Young Negro Cooperative League formed in response to the economic crisis of the Depression.
In revisiting his theme to conclude the book, Franklin suggests that today’s youth activism’s high-risk initiatives are rambling and episodic. Contemporary activism by black youth has suffered from containment, has been short-lived and low-risk, and has had problems with moving beyond a particular locale or infrastructure. In the face of thesedifficulties, adult allies have expanded the opportunity structure of movement activism through bridge-builders, advocates, and grassroots organizers using innovative campaigns to propel movements. Still, youth bridge-building and activism is perceived as one-directional, dismissing the fact that this youth activism possesses a bidirectional character that propels or coordinates adult activities. Franklin argues that the demise of systematic and/or continuing inequalities will require revitalization of transformational energy for social movements. More important, he suggests that black youth will require bridge-builders to address four dilemmas that have confounded social movements since the protest cycle of the 1960s: (1) the mobilization of long-term, sustainable grassroots resources; (2) privileging some grassroots activists/advocates’ institutional leveraging practices over high-risk strategies; (3) the dexterity of movement bridge-builders and local activists’ ability to take advantage of favorable political contexts; and (4) the advancement of creative organizing tactics to mobilize non-collegiate black youth and young adults residing in poor communities.
Franklin’s discussion of institutional leveraging and elite mobilization, the second dilemma, is the by-product of political incorporation but is the most compelling of these issues. Grassroots activists are attracted to the practices of such groups in this post-civil rights era. Yet institutional leveraging, coupled with youth containment, has been influenced by black middle-class leadership.That is, they argue for elite top-down mobilization of distressed communities rather than mobilization from the bottom up, which makes demands on the political system, keeping them out of the process.
Acknowledging that there is a world beyond the campus, the author notes the importance of having non-college affiliated persons join movement ranks. He argues that transformational movements must draw upon the energies of marginalized youth and young adults isolated from colleges and universities.
This book is delightful to read and displays how much work needs to be done as well as how much work has been done. Most important, it displays African American males in their quest for social change, something almost always missed when discussing them.