Beyond the pandemic, social unrest defined 2020. It started on the very first day of the year in Hong Kong, where protesters filled the streets in opposition to China’s proposed extradition law. Throughout the year — across the U.S. and around the world —protesters filled the streets to call for racial justice, challenge Big Tech, oppose COVID-19 lockdowns and fight for democracy.
But to consider protests the whole story would be missing the point. “It’s easy to focus on the sudden, dramatic moments of activism,” says anthropology associate professor Ana Aparicio. “However, sometimes activism isn’t overt or in big public spaces.”
Aldon Morris examines social movements, civil rights and social inequality.
From boycotts and marches to teaching and community building, social movements are multifaceted, organized activities that can bring people together to change the world.
Aparicio and her Northwestern colleagues have studied social movements past and present, across contexts and continents, and their work shows what makes a movement powerful and effective. It takes organization, infrastructure, partnership and, ultimately, passionate activists to sustain a movement.
“The regular people are really the engine,” says sociology professor Aldon Morris. “Ordinary people can do extraordinary things in the context of social movements.”
ORGANIZING FOR CHANGE
Morris has dedicated his life and career to social movements. The Leon Forrest Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern has been arrested while protesting South African apartheid, risked his academic career by opposing segregation in higher education and helped labor unions organize across the United States.
Illustration by Anthony Russo
“Movements do not arise spontaneously,” he explains. “The oppressed must organize the movement, must provide it with leadership, must provide it with resources. That’s what gives power to a movement.”
This was true of the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, which was “funded largely by the Black community. The leadership, the strategy and the genius of the movement came from the Black community,” says Morris, author of the 1984 book The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change.
A clear infrastructure is also key to sustaining any movement beyond its genesis, says Kellogg School of Management professor Brayden King, who studies how social movements influence corporations and legislative policymaking. He says infrastructure enables a movement to “ride waves of relevance in the media and in broader public culture. And there’s always a core group of people working to seize upon the next opportunity.”
Brayden King explores how social movements influence corporations.
A sustained movement may depend on what Morris calls “indigenous resources.” In the civil rights era, he explains, Black churches and already-established Black-led organizations were willing to invest in and support the activists.
“That was extremely sustainable because churches aren’t going anywhere,” says King, the Max McGraw Chair of Management and the Environment and a professor of management and organizations. “I’m not saying that all activists need churches to sustain them, but you need some kind of infrastructure that is enduring to ensure the movement doesn’t wither away as soon as it faces a challenge.”
Even with a sound infrastructure, a movement can lose momentum due to the limits of public attention. King cites the recent protests in Hong Kong as an example.
“The protesters were trying to create enough of a scene to get the international community to put pressure on China to change its relationship with Hong Kong,” King says. “And in some ways it was working: The protests were creating negative media attention for China and causing China’s allies to distance themselves from the country. But then COVID happened.”
The issues in Hong Kong were eclipsed — but far from eliminated — when the public’s attention shifted to the pandemic.
King’s research shows that concurrent movements can compete with each other, diluting their potential impact. “Well-meaning and in many ways ideologically aligned social movements can cancel each other out,” he says, “because they’re all fighting for a very limited amount of attention.”
Reader Responses
When you profiled all the student movements at Northwestern, how could you have left out the role of NU students in the 1980s anti-apartheid movement? The protesters built a major shanty town on campus to show the living conditions of South African workers, and they boycotted and picketed the 1981 Ford Foundation/Northwestern–sponsored campus conference that sought to diminish the power of the divestment from South Africa movement, and they pushed for Northwestern’s divestment. Some Northwestern faculty and staff supported students in these efforts. In my opinion it was major to leave all of that out.
—Cheryl Johnson-Odim '78 PhD, Evanston, via Northwestern Magazine
As always, I love your publications: insightful, well-researched and well-written.
However, I believe someone ought to have read — or reread — the professional publications of the late Dr. Leland Griffin, professor of communication studies, on movements. He was the first communication scholar to study movements. One of his last publications dealt with Lee Harvey Oswald and movements. Fascinating stuff.
I had had many courses with him. He was on my doctoral committee in the early 1970s and taught at Northwestern for about 40 years.
—John Kares Smith Oswego, N.Y., via Northwestern Magazine
Thank you, Cheryl. Indeed! How and why was the anti-apartheid work left off?
—Jean Allman '79, St. Louis, via Northwestern Magazine
Despite the social movements of the last half century, the work of female scholars continues to be devalued in both blatant and subtle ways. When turning to this article, my eyes were first drawn to the photographs of four individuals (two male and two female) and to the captions under the photos. The verbs "examine" and "explore" were used to describe the men's contributions, while the women were noted to "study." That language left me wondering whether the women were students or faculty members. One might also argue that the verbs chosen for the captions under the men's photos suggest more active or rigorous scholarly inquiry than does the verb appearing under the women's photos. On reading the article, I learned that the women were faculty members. I also discovered that the men pictured held full professorships, while the women did not. There may certainly be valid reasons for the difference in rank among these particular individuals. Nevertheless, the difference is a reminder of the gender disparity that still applies to faculty in higher education.
So how DO people make change? We choose our words thoughtfully, because language matters. We act with purpose to recognize the value of equity, diversity and inclusion. We set an example.
—Avis Gibons '78, Mount Prospect, Ill. , via Northwestern Magazine
I wonder why you strategically failed to mention Northwestern Community Not Cops, who is organizing to get Northwestern to divest from Black Death and invest in Black life. You cannot pretend to “admire” organizers but not acknowledge them by name. The Bursar’s takeover demands STILL have not been met. Why haven’t you named Fossil Free Northwestern, who has been fighting to get the University to divest from the fossil fuel industry and invest in life-affirming resources? Or Students Organizing for Labor Rights, fighting to protect service workers from the incredible violence this school shows them. Stop sanitizing and co-opting radical organizing on campus!
—Keala Uchôa Chicago, via Northwestern Magazine
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