What the Climate Movement Can Learn from the Civil Rights Movements
To Einstein, trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different result defined insanity. By this accounting, most climate activists should be confined to asylums. For decades, we’ve seen the climate movement repeating the same tactics again and again.
They’ll yell at the top of their lungs about the latest, fear-inducing reports. They’ll organize marches around the latest Conference of Parties. They’ll pray that this year global governments will come to an actionable agreements. If governments don’t, activists shame them however they can, expecting better next year. If government do agree, activists hope they’ll actually follow through, which they almost never do.
As they repeat the steps in this dance again and again, it seems as though they’re scared to try anything new. Climate activists act like Dust Bowl farmers as one survivor described them: “We learned slowly, and what didn’t work, you tried harder the next time. You didn’t try something different. You just tried harder, the same thing that didn’t work.” Climate activists need to learn what works. We can’t afford to keep trying the same things that don’t work.
To do that, we need to study history. We need to understand how previous social movements made progress real, so we can replicate those successes and accelerate our own. The climate movement is the move important cause of our generation. Yet it’s clear that those leading the fight haven’t understood what made past efforts so impactful. One movement climate organizers can learn from is the Civil Rights Movement. Civil rights organizations show why we need to provide a clear vision, spread hope not fear or shame, criticize the system, meet people where they’re at, and empower local communities.
Each of these is an urgent lesson the climate movement must learn and take to heart. First and foremost, we must learn how to offer a vision of what we’re working towards. From this vision, everything else follows.
Share a Vision
The power of visioning is evident in the most quoted speech of the Civil Rights Movement: Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a Dream.” The speech is in part powerful for the imagery King evokes with lines like, “Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.” King’s speech draws further strength from his willingness to shine light on the cruel truth and not cloud it with rhetoric. But what made his words ring out with a righteousness that has resounded for generations was his ability to give those gathered a vision of what they were fighting for. He said, “even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.”
“I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.”
Without this definitive dream to fight for, and only an enemy to oppose, I doubt the Civil Rights Movement would have had the same strength or success. If King had used the same forceful, evocative, imagery-heavy language only to tell people all that was wrong, all they had to fear, and why that fear should motivate them to act, then the speech would’ve been nowhere near as stirring and lasting; the chances are, it would’ve faded into oblivion instead of being quoted regularly sixty years later.
King and other civil rights leaders were effective because they gave people something to strive for. Meanwhile, the climate movement seems to offer only descriptions of the disasters they hope to avoid. This is one of the biggest failures of our movement.
When all you talk about is catastrophe, people turn away, close their eyes, and plug their ears. People don’t want to hear about how they’re doomed to suffer. Yet, mayhem is the default messaging of the movement. It’s no wonder people either ignore activists or don’t know how to act beyond spread the same fear that infected them.
If we want people to act, we need to provide a vision of what we can create through climate action while simultaneously avoiding an apocalypse. We need to show how collective action can lead to sovereign, self-sufficient communities; fresh air; sprawling, city-wide parks; clean, affordable energy; more time for leisure; more meaningful forms of employment; and an enhanced quality of life for everyone. If we can give people that vision and connect it to actions they can take in their own neighborhoods, actions that put the power back in the hands of the people, actions that don’t rely on praying to governments no one trusts, then they’ll be more likely to join us.
Instead, the majority of so climate leaders seem stuck instilling fear, guilt, and shame. They seem incapable of offering any actual remedy to these paralyzing emotions beyond appealing to government to finally do something. If we can abandon this failing strategy and shift to elucidating and enacting hopeful visions, we’ll stand a much better chance.
Spread Hope Not Fear
The writers and orators of the Civil Rights Movement didn’t play into people’s fear, guilt, and shame. Black folks had myriad reasons to be fearful. Between extrajudicial killings carried out by the KKK and legal lynchings perpetrated by the police, the 1900s was a terrifying time to be born Black.
Even with these clear and present dangers, legendary orators like Malcolm X didn’t rise to prominence by telling people how scared they should be, how their situation was their fault, or how they out to be ashamed of themselves for living as they do. No. Instead, Malcolm X made it clear that they could defend themselves, that they weren’t responsible for the position they were born into, and that they could control their communities and reinvent themselves. Like King, Malcolm X offered Black communities a hopeful vision.
Throughout the movement, King, X, and others made it abundantly clear that the challenges facing Black America were not their fault. They had no reason to feel ashamed about their Blackness or feel guilty about living in dilapidated neighborhoods nor feel afraid that things would continue this way forever. Civil rights leaders spread the message that it was the system that should feel ashamed, the system that should feel guilty, and the system that should feel afraid. For it was the system that created the conditions, and it was the people who would rise up and change both the system and the conditions.
Blame the System, Not the Individual
The Civil Rights Movement made the system its explicit focus and only condemned the individuals directly responsible for instituting, protecting, and reinforcing racist policies. Although, there were those who condemned White people en masse – including, most famously, Malcolm X while ministering for the Nation of Islam, which would change as he matured and left the Nation – the Civil Rights Movement as a whole put the onus on the system. Contrary to this, climate activists have a horrendous habit of blaming everyday people for the crisis we’re in. Activists just about blame people for existing.
They blame their parents for voting in politicians that enacted anti-climate laws, even though their parents did as voters do: follow the lead set by political parties and the media that determine the issues worthy of attention. It’s not exactly our parents’ faults that Reaganomics stifled climate action in the name of the free market.
Activists blame consumers for their choices as though they created the multinational corporations and international trade agreements that established a global marketplace that ships products around the world in the name of efficiency and economy.
Activists blame people for driving anywhere and everywhere as though drivers themselves designed car-centered cities instead of walkable neighborhoods and fed generations the idea of an American Dream featuring a house in the suburbs with an emerald-green lawn and a two-car garage.
Instead of indiscriminately attacking everyday people like the activists who deflated the tires of London drivers, activists and organizers would do better to focus their energies on strategies for systemic change. While individual actions may make a small difference, the biggest shift will come from comprehensive, structural change. This requires creating new systems that promote ecological living and convincing people to adopt them by showing how these systems not only address climate change but solve the other problems too.
Meet People Where They’re At
To accomplish this change, we need involve people in the process of inventing these institutions by meeting them where they’re at. This is the approach that Bayard Rustin took in the Civil Rights Movement, and it’s how the labor movement approached its 20th-century organizing. Conversing with people to understand their problems and ideating solutions together is essential to a successful movement. If people aren’t bought in early, they’re more likely to end up opposed in the end. People want their voices heard. They don’t want to feel that something is forced on them even if it benefits them.
The trick is to get people involved in the process as early as possible. It’s not enough to hold forums and town halls and expect people to come. You need to go to them. Attend their community meetings. Visit their block parties. Volunteer at their events. Do whatever you can to get involved with them, so you have every opportunity to understand their problems and offer them opportunities to get involved.
Keep in mind: Meeting people where they’re at doesn’t just mean their physical location. You need to come to terms with them mentally and emotionally as well. This is often the harder part because you have to adjust expectations and shift strategies. If the person you’re speaking with has bigger concerns than climate change, it doesn’t do any good to tell them why climate change should be their top priority. You need to listen, hear their concerns, and offer your climate solutions within the context of what they’re most worried about. Systemic climate action effectively encompasses every aspect of society. Find the overlap. This is how you’ll win people over and get the supporters you need to make the necessary changes.
This is also how you help people get involved where they are and discover all they can do to reinvent their community and, by extension, remake the world. This kind of work is what made the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) one of the most effective organizations of the civil rights era.
Empower Communities to Change Their Conditions
SNCC (pronounced snick) had a unique approach to organizing. While King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference would go into towns, organize marches, coordinate other demonstrations, hang around for a few days, and then leave, SNCC got embedded in communities. Every Summer they’d send out volunteer organizers into communities across the South.
Their volunteer’s first goal was to build trust with the community. This meant attending church, talking to people on the street, and generally getting involved in whatever way made the most sense. Once there was trust and mutual understanding, the volunteer would seek to educate and organize the community. The goal: Help them develop the infrastructure to carry out the work of mobilizing people for marches, sit-ins, voter registration drives, and other demonstrations on their own. SNCC’s goal wasn’t to do all the legwork. They wanted to give people the tools they needed to do the work themselves. The most famous instance of this was the Freedom Summer of 1964, which, among other things, birthed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the party that would run Fannie Lou Hamer for Congress.
Unfortunately, the climate movement lacks any organization with the vision and dedication of SNCC. Sunrise, 350, Extinction Rebellion, and others have done a lot of important work that has raised awareness, accelerated government action, and driven fossil fuel divestments, but I’m not aware of a single organization like SNCC that helps communities to effect a green reconstruction of their neighborhoods on their own terms.
Every community has the potential to establish community solar projects, electric vehicle car shares, neighborhood food cooperatives supported by climate victory gardens, and other efforts that would constitute comprehensive, systems-level climate action. Yet there isn’t a single organization aimed at helping communities to enact those efforts in a cohesive way. The closest was EcoDistricts which stuttered and faltered before getting absorbed by the Partnership for Southern Equity.
The biggest challenge they faced was what I spoke to above: Not meeting people where they were at. Instead of devising a model that allowed them to send organizers into communities, teach their protocol, and adjust expectations to fit community needs, EcoDistricts wanted communities to come to them. Moreover, they expected communities to pay for the protocol, the trainings, and the certifications. All of which were strict and rigid and unable to adjust to the needs and realities of frontline communities who didn’t have the technical expertise EcoDistricts expected.
Filling the Gaps
There are big gaps that need to be filled in the climate movement. To fill these gaps and accelerate action, climate activists don’t need to invent brand new strategies and tactics from thin air. They need to study historic social movements, learn from their success and failures, and adapt what worked best to our moment.
If we don’t heed the lessons past generations have to offer, then we don’t stand a chance of rising to the occasion. On the other hand, if we integrate the learnings from centuries of struggle for social change, we can create the most impactful movement the world has ever seen.
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