Generational Schism, Fannie Lou Hamer, and the Future of Protest

little member

the word say this little tongue can
make big trouble. i use simple words:
free, land, free, medicne. they push back
with big words: marxist, social, exprmnt. Just
one little woman talkn, will raise cain.
never met karl marx, but i know
a good idea when i hear one.

—Treasure Shields Redmond (2015:33)

Figure 1.

(facing page) In this 17 September 1965 file photo, Fannie Lou Hamer of Ruleville, Mississippi, speaks to Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party sympathizers outside the Capitol in Washington after the House of Representatives rejected the party's legal challenge to the seating of the Mississippi Congressional delegation, on the grounds that black Mississippians were prevented from voting in the 1964 election. (Photo by AP Photo/William J. Smith, File)

A

These were not the conditions I had agreed to. On 10 November 2016, a couple dozen graduate students and a few faculty and staff gathered in a small conference room in the basement of a campus building. Along with poet, scholar, and educator Treasure Shields Redmond, I had been invited to reflect on "The Future of Protest"— presumably, given my research on training, performance, and protest during the civil rights movement, by looking to the past. Implicit in the prompt issued months earlier was a circumstance that had not come to pass: what would be the future of Black Lives Matter and affiliated social justice movements during a Hillary Clinton presidency? I faced the room—as I had faced my students earlier that day and the day before—conscious of the generation gap between us. These were not the conditions that we had agreed to.

By November 2016, "not your grandfather's civil rights movement" had become a shorthand description of Black Lives Matter, deployed as both praise by the movement's supporters, and as criticism by its detractors. Pointing to the decentralized organizational structure of BLM, new tactics enabled by social media, and a focus on police brutality and mass incarceration, "not your grandfather's civil rights movement" also suggests young people's fatigue with the ways that nonviolence—often simplistically understood—has been upheld as the only acceptable model for dissent.¹ Ta-Nehisi Coates eloquently expresses this ethos in Between the World and Me: "it seemed that the month [of February] could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera" (2015:32).

But can the generational model—even expressed as generational schism—invite anything other than reproduction or its refusal?² Is there another way?

B

Somewhere along the way, we lost the mothers. The first public utterance of this generational schism between Black Lives Matter and the civil rights movement is traceable to the St. Louis rapper Tef Poe (Kareem Jackson), who exclaimed "this ain't your daddy's civil rights movement!" at a gathering of young people, community leaders, and civil rights elders in St. Louis in October 2014, just two months after the murder of Mike Brown and the massive demonstrations that followed (superbrotha 2014). Glen Ford proclaimed "this ain't your grandfather's civil rights movement" in a blog post in November 2015; Jelani Cobb picked up the phrase in his profile of movement leaders in The New Yorker a few months later (Ford 2015; Cobb 2016).

Focusing on "daddies" and "grandfathers" allows Tef Poe, Ford, Cobb, and others to highlight the leadership of young women at the forefront of today's struggle—and to draw a contrast with the patriarchal leadership that characterized the civil rights movement. But while there is no doubt that the most visible leaders of the mid-century struggle were men, the contributions of women—from those in leadership roles to those who made sandwiches—have been chronicled in detail in recent years (Holsaert, et al. 2012; McGuire 2011; Ransby 2003). Decades before the Mothers of the Movement (those contemporary mothers of young men and women killed by police) were what Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) member Charles Sherrod called "the mamas" of the civil rights struggle: "the 'mamas...