Generations of Struggle: St. Louis from Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter

The following excerpt is taken from a panel discussion at Harvard University on December 3, 2015 organized by The Charles Warren Center with support from the Hiphop Archive and Research Institute. Moderated by Professor Elizabeth Hinton, panelists Percy Green II, Robin D. G. Kelley, Tef Poe, George Lipsitz, and Jamala Rogers examine the achievements and challenges of more than five decades of black activism in St. Louis, Missouri. The full transcript of this conversation will appear in the Spring issue of Kalfou, a journal of the Center for Black Studies Research at UC Santa Barbara. http://www.research.ucsb.edu/cbs/publications/kalfou/

Elizabeth Hinton:

History tells us that it takes, and that it will take, generations of striving, organizing, and mobilizing to fight for the kind of world that we want to see. And these distinct generational approaches play out in all of your work within the black liberation movement. Percy you’ve been engaged in various social movements for over half a century: from CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) in the 1960s, to the formation of ACTION and landmark Supreme Court Cases challenging discriminatory hiring practices in the 1970s. That’s two generations of activism. And both you and Jamala were at the forefront of struggles in the 1980s and 1990s, which is a period that has largely vanished from our understanding of the Civil Rights Movement. Somehow in the popular and political imagination, when we talk about the Black Lives Matter movement today, we somehow go from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Black Lives Matter as if nothing happened in between. But your work in the Black United Front, the Organization for Black Struggle, and the Black Radical Congress proves otherwise. Yet, this generation of organizing remains kind of absent or vanished from our dominant narratives. In many ways, the struggles of the 1980s and 1990s resemble far more closely the conditions that current activists are confronting than what SNCC and the Black Panthers did.

Robin and George, you both represent generations of historians engaged in bringing the series of black freedom struggles and new histories to light while at the same time engaging and directly participating in many of these struggles yourselves. Then Tef, you represent the current generation—my generation—and perhaps the generation of many students in the audience. With Hands Up United you’re consciously drawing influence from previous strategies to implement measures like the Books and Breakfast programs in Ferguson and elsewhere. You’re providing young people with critical skills and resources, essentially inspiring a generation of future activists to engage in these kinds of local struggles.

Untitled.

Digital C Print. © 2014 Jen Everett.

One of Hands Up United’s slogans is “This ain’t your Mama’s Civil Rights Movement,” which literally invokes generations of struggle, and which is also indicative of some of the questions that we want to explore today. What makes the movement today different? What are some of the failures of the Civil Rights Movement that you and other activists in the current generation want to correct? What are some of the issues that you and others have encountered with cross-generational and cross-class organizing? And on a broader level for all of you, what have we learned from the triumphs and the shortcomings of the previous generations, specifically in the case of St. Louis but also how the history of these local struggles unfolds in communities confronting similar conditions elsewhere? What do generations of struggle tell us? What does the past reveal about some of the misguided actions we’re making in the present?

Percy Green II:

First and foremost, the movement, as I see it, is a process and you’ll have ups and downs. You will also have periods of confusion, and the confusion will work itself out to some degree. And the best way that I can describe the movement is like Mother Nature. We all know that rain only comes from a cloud in the sky. You never see rain falling from a clear blue sky...