Two Protests Which Changed the Course of American History: Flint 1936, Birmingham 1963

Two Protests Which Changed the Course of American History:

Flint 1936, Birmingham 1963

by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan

Flint 1936

It’s December of 1936. America is now 7 years into the worst Depression in its history. At its peak over 1/3 of the labor force was unemployed, 1/3 working part time, and millions of people were without food and shelter. People all over the country rose in protest against forced impoverishment. There were hunger marches, strikes, protests against evictions and foreclosures, many of them organized by Socialists and Communists. but change came very slowly. It wasn’t until 1933, after the Franklin Roosevelt was elected president, that the first federal relief dollars came pouring into the states, and slowly began to reach individual families, allowing at least some of them to remain in their homes and apartments. This was soon followed up by programs of work relief, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Public Works Administration, and later the WPA, which created millions of jobs for unemployed Americas, many of them building roads and bridges, creating national parks in rural areas, even creating dams which gave people in poor rural area electricity for the first time in their lives.

On the labor front, though, things were still extremely tense. When the Depression began, only 3 million workers were members of unions, and none of the nation’s largest industries were unionized. The big steel, auto and electronics companies all had been successful in keeping unions out. After FDR passed the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933, unions all over the country began to organize again, a major strike wave broke out in 1934, leading to a significant growth of unions in transportation, particularly trucking and the mining and garment industries, but the nation’s biggest companies General Motors, Ford, US Steel, Westinghouse, General Electric, still refused to accept collective bargaining.

In 1935, John L Lewis of the United Mine Workers left the American Federation of Labor to form a new federation, the Committee for Industrial Organization, aimed at organizing workers in the biggest companies across lines of craft and skill, and FDR and Congress passed the Wagner Labor Relations Act aimed at providing for workplace elections which could confer union recognition, but not one major companies targeted ended up granting union recognition to its workers. The stalemate continued into 1936 even as organizers were sent into the nation’s biggest factories. Executives in those firms held out, hoping the Wagner Act would be declared unconstitutional and that all the tactics that they had used in the pasty to keep workers from organizing--including spies and private police--would continue to be effective.

One of the companies most infamous for use of spies and informers was General Motors. The newly formed United Automobile Workers decided to target GM by organizing its plants across the country, in cities ranging from Cleveland to Detroit to Atlanta, but much of its effort was focused on Flint, a General Motors company town, where the infamous Black Legion, Ku Klux Klan type organization had some influence in the plants. The organizers the UAW sent in first decided to create a secret organization of workers they could trust and then began doing actions in the plant to show workers that they could stop foreman and managers from intimidating workers on the job.

Then, after they built a following with small actions, the workers decided to do something dangerous and dramatic to force General Motors to come to the bargaining table. They seized and barricaded two plants and refused to leave. General Motors tried everything to evict them. They used private guards, they organized vigilante groups, they called on the local police. Nothing could get the workers inside, who had thousands of supporters outside, to leave. They even drove off the Flint police who refused to use guns, and when the police finally used guns against picket outside, it backfired. The occupation went on for several weeks.

General Motors asked the newly elected Democratic governor to send in the national guard, which he did, but he refused to use them to pull the workers out. He, and President Roosevelt, who refused to send in federal troops, thought the country would be better off if GM recognized the union. Then, at the fifth week of the Occupation, the Governor finally told workers in the plants he was going to use the guard to take the workers out. But the workers instead of leaving the plants, decided to up the ante. After half of those occupying the factories signed “Ready to Die” agreements, a phalanx of workers seized yet another factory in the 9 Plant General Motors complex and barricaded that.

The Occupation had now lasted six weeks, shutting General Motors production down almost completely on a national level. Half of the country wanted the workers in the plants taken out and shot; another half supported what they were doing. Finally, just as it looked like there was a bloodbath on the horizon as the National Guard prepared to take the plants, General Motors decided to negotiate with the UAW and give collective bargaining rights to workers in the occupied plants. Within two years, General Motors, the nation’s largest industrial corporation was completely unionized

But that wasn’t all, US. Steel the nation’s second largest corporation, which faced a similar organizing drive from the United Steelworkers Union, decided to voluntarily grant recognition in its plants to the USW rather than go through what General Motors just had. This meant that by the time the US economy started reviving in 1939, the nation’s two largest corporations were unionized, and workers in both of those companies were making far more money than they ever had in their lives, and could walk into factories knowing that foremen and managers would treat them with respect. This resulted, ultimately in those workers becoming bulwarks of a strong consumer economy that emerged right after WWII, and helped make the US a far more equal nation than it had been in the 1920’s.

Birmingham 1963

It is March of 1963. It has been nine years since the landmark Supreme Court decision, Brown V Topeka board of education which had declared the separate but equal doctrine, used to justify racial segregation in the South, unconstitutional. It was seven years since the Montgomery bus boycott, which ended bus segregation in that city, and two years since the student sit-in movement which ended segregation in some downtown business districts and two years since the Freedom Rides which ended segregation in terminals involved in interstate travel.

Yet despite these landmark events, the vast majority of the South remained segregated. Hospitals, parks, swimming pools, restaurants, theaters, department stores, gas stations, factories and offices buildings, in both the private and public sector, all kept whites and blacks totally separate, in the process subjecting Black Southerners to almost daily humiliation. President Kennedy, preoccupied with foreign policy issues, refused to put the prestige of his office behind Civil Rights legislation that would compel the South to end these practices. Lobbying and legislation couldn’t move him. Even a year long protest in Albany Georgia, where there were thousands of arrests, but no violence, could not prompt federal intervention.

Dr Martin Luther King, the most important leader of the non-violent protest movement was getting desperate. He saw the gains that Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam were making among frustrated blacks and feared that his entire movement could be disrupted unless he could force federal action to end segregation. So he decided on a gamble every bit as desperate as occupying the flint factories. He decided to lead a movement to desegregate the downtown business district of Birmingham Alabama, where the local sheriff, Eugene Bull Connor, would be almost certain to try to repress any protests with such extreme violence that it would create an international scandal. King moved to Birmingham and started mobilizing that city’s Black churches He persuaded hundreds of well dressed peaceful marchers to go into downtown Birmingham where they would enter Department stores and restaurants and demand to be served. Bull Connor, as expected, arrested them in enormous numbers, filling the jails, but avoiding for the most part, flamboyant acts of brutality for which he was known.

The movement dragged on for a month, with thousands of arrests, but no visible results. People in the Black community were getting tired and discouraged. King had trouble getting enough people to march downtown to sustain the momentum of the movement. Finally, he decided on a truly desperate strategy. In the face of several local criticism, he organized thousands of Black high school and junior high schools students to march with him downtown. This so enraged Sheriff Connor that he decided to unleash police dogs and hoses on the youthful demonstrators, creating scenes of brutality sent around the world. Not only did this enrage people around the globe, it so enraged people in  Birmingham's black community that they started throwing rocks and bottles at police in the city’s Black neighborhoods.

This unrest finally forced the Kennedy administration into action. The President not only sent his brother Robert, who was US Attorney General, to Birmingham, to negotiate an end to segregation in that city’s downtown business district, he decided to make a nationally televised address putting his full support behind the goals of the Civil Rights movement and announcing that he would submit an omnibus Civil Rights Bill to congress that would put the full weight of the Federal Government’s power behind ending segregation, a bill that ultimately passed, after President Kennedy’s death, in 1964.

These two examples show how protest movements that involved grave risk, that broke the law, and that used extremely controversial and disruptive practices, helped organize America’s workers and significantly raise their standard of living and bring an end to legal segregation in the American South.

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Mark Naisonis a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project(BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

What If We Occupied Language?

Dread Scott and Kyle Goen

What If We Occupied Language?

by H. Samy Alim | New York Times | The Stone

When I flew out from the San Francisco airport last October, we crossed above the ports that Occupy Oakland helped shut down, and arrived in Germany to be met by traffic caused by Occupy Berlin protestors. But the movement has not only transformed public space, it has transformed the public discourse as well.

Occupy.

It is now nearly impossible to hear the word and not think of the Occupy movement.

Even as distinguished an expert as the lexicographer and columnist Ben Zimmer admitted as much this week: “occupy, ” he said, is the odds-on favorite to be chosen as the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year.

It has already succeeded in shifting the terms of the debate, taking phrases like “debt-ceiling” and “budget crisis” out of the limelight and putting terms like “inequality” and “greed” squarely in the center. This discursive shift has made it more difficult for Washington to obscure the spurious reasons for the financial meltdown and the unequal outcomes it has exposed and further produced.

To most, the irony of a progressive social movement using the term “occupy” to reshape how Americans think about issues of democracy and equality has been clear. After all, it is generally nations, armies and police who occupy, usually by force. And in this, the United States has been a leader. The American government is just now after nine years ending its overt occupation of Iraq, is still entrenched in Afghanistan and is maintaining troops on the ground in dozens of countries worldwide. All this is not to obscure the fact that the United States as we know it came into being by way of an occupation —  a gradual and devastatingly violent one that all but extinguished entire Native American populations across thousands of miles of land

Yet in a very short time, this movement has dramatically changed how we think about occupation. In early September, “occupy” signaled on-going military incursions. Now it signifies progressive political protest. It’s no longer primarily about force of military power; instead it signifies standing up to injustice, inequality and abuse of power. It’s no longer about simply occupying a space; it’s about transforming that space.

In this sense, Occupy Wall Street has occupied language, has made “occupy” its own. And, importantly, people from diverse ethnicities, cultures and languages have participated in this linguistic occupation — it is distinct from the history of forcible occupation in that it is built to accommodate all, not just the most powerful or violent.

As Geoff Nunberg, the long-time chair of the usage panel for American Heritage Dictionary, and others have explained, the earliest usage of occupy in English that was linked to protest can be traced to English media descriptions of Italian demonstrations in the 1920s, in which workers “occupied” factories until their demands were met. This is a far cry from some of its earlier meanings. In fact, The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that “occupy” once meant “to have sexual intercourse with.” One could imagine what a phrase like “Occupy Wall Street” might have meant back then.

In October, Zimmer, who is also the chair of the American Dialect Society’s New Word Committee, noted on NPR’s “On the Media” that the meaning of occupy has changed  dramatically since its arrival into the English language in the 14th century. “It’s almost always been used as a transitive verb,” Zimmer said. “That’s a verb that takes an object, so you occupy a place or a space. But then it became used as a rallying cry, without an object, just to mean to take part in what are now called the Occupy protests. It’s being used as a modifier — Occupy protest, Occupy movement. So it’s this very flexible word now that’s filling many grammatical slots in the language.”

What if we transformed the meaning of occupy yet again? Specifically, what if we thought of Occupy Language as more than the language of the Occupy movement, and began to think about it as a movement in and of itself? What kinds of issues would Occupy Language address? What would taking language back from its self-appointed “masters” look like?  We might start by looking at these questions from the perspective of race and discrimination, and answer with how to foster fairness and equality in that realm.

Occupy Language might draw inspiration from both the way that the Occupy movement has reshaped definitions of “occupy,” which teaches us that we give words meaning and that discourses are not immutable, and from the way indigenous movements have contested its use, which teaches us to be ever-mindful about how language both empowers and oppresses, unifies and isolates.

For starters, Occupy Language might first look inward. In a recent interview, Julian Padilla of the People of Color Working Group pushed the Occupy movement to examine its linguistic choices:

To occupy means to hold space, and I think a group of anti-capitalists holding space on Wall Street is powerful, but I do wish the NYC movement would change its name to “‘decolonise Wall Street”’ to take into account history, indigenous critiques, people of colour and imperialism… Occupying space is not inherently bad, it’s all about who and how and why. When  white colonizers occupy land, they don’t just sleep there over night, they steal and destroy. When indigenous people occupied Alcatraz Island it was (an act of) protest.

This linguistic change can remind Americans that a majority of the 99 percent has benefited from the occupation of native territories.

Occupy Language might also support the campaign to stop the media from using the word “illegal” to refer to “undocumented” immigrants. From the campaign’s perspective, only inanimate objects and actions are labeled illegal in English; therefore the use of “illegals” to refer to human beings is dehumanizing. The New York Times style book currently asks writers to avoid terms like “illegal alien” and “undocumented,” but says nothing about “illegals.” Yet The Times’ standards editor, Philip B. Corbett, did recently weigh in on this, saying that the term “illegals” has an “unnecessarily pejorative tone” and that “it’s wise to steer clear.”

Pejorative, discriminatory language can have real life consequences. In this case, activists worry about the coincidence of the rise in the use of the term “illegals” and the spike in hate crimes against all Latinos. As difficult as it might be to prove causation here, the National Institute for Latino Policy reports that the F.B.I.’s annual Hate Crime Statistics show that Latinos comprised two thirds of the victims of ethnically motivated hate crimes in 2010. When someone is repeatedly described as something, language has quietly paved the way for violent action.

But Occupy Language should concern itself with more than just the words we use; it should also work towards eliminating language-based racism and discrimination. In the legal system, CNN recently reported that the U.S. Justice Department alleges that Arizona’s infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio, among other offenses, has discriminated against “Latino inmates with limited English by punishing them and denying critical services.” In education, as linguistic anthropologist Ana Celia Zentella notes, hostility towards those who speak “English with an accent” (Asians, Latinos, and African Americans) continues to be a problem. In housing, The National Fair Housing Alliance has long recognized “accents” as playing a significant role in housing discrimination. On the job market, language-based discrimination intersects with issues of race, ethnicity, class and national origin to make it more difficult for well-qualified applicants with an “accent” to receive equal opportunities.

In the face of such widespread language-based discrimination, Occupy Language can be a critical, progressive linguistic movement that exposes how language is used as a means of social, political and economic control. By occupying language, we can expose how educational, political, and social institutions use language to further marginalize oppressed groups; resist colonizing language practices that elevate certain languages over others; resist attempts to define people with terms rooted in negative stereotypes; and begin to reshape the public discourse about our communities, and about the central role of language in racism and discrimination.

As the global Occupy movement has shown, words can move entire nations of people — even the world — to action. Occupy Language, as a movement, should speak to the power of language to transform how we think about the past, how we act in the present, and how we envision the future.

The illustrations for this post are part of a collection of Occupy movement posters at the site Occuprint .

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H. Samy Alim directs the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Language (CREAL) at Stanford University. His forthcoming book, Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S., written with Geneva Smitherman, examines the racial politics of the Obama presidency through a linguistic lens.