I’ve just submitted the draft of my piece about the Jena 6 that is a substantial extension and revision of the blog post I wrote a couple of years ago. It will need a 20% cut before publication and responses of editors and reviewers may lead me to rethink my arguments more, but I thought I’d post here two parts of the conclusions in the current draft in case they are helpful for reflections or for obtaining commentary. This is an extract from the larger draft conclusion which will doubtless be revised.
Movement Narratives
The narrative that “bloggers built the movement” had an appeal as centering grassroots people who could form a decentralized resistance to injustice. Bloggers embraced the narrative. But that narrative came from the activists and journalists who were noticing how bloggers were helping to amplify the messages they were sending out. It was less appealing to construct a narrative about advocacy journalism being amplified by bloggers. And the evidence seems to be that getting people to Jena happened through traditional grassroots organizations and networks.
We think there is an even more powerful narrative about movement building to be gained from looking at the whole picture and the ways in which people connected across places and across forms of action. Someone in Jena notified the people in the Juvenile Justice Project, who sent the word out through activist networks and activated Alan Bean and his Friends of Justice. Jena people reached out to the NAACP and engaged in local collective action that drew in outside support from the ACLU and other regional activists. When that outside support was not enough, the activists reached out again to journalists and to more activists. Local attempts to organize around the NAACP did not seem to succeed at much locally, but they drew in the national NAACP whose support mattered for signaling the national importance of an issue. The visible presence of someone from Louisiana NAN facilitated the connection between Mychal Bell’s family and Al Sharpton. Al Sharpton’s involvement drew both mainstream and Black news media attention. The network of Louisiana activists and journalists formed after hurricane Katrina led to communicating the message through progressive networks, which were the channel that connected in the Millions More Movement and the Nation of Islam. Millions More and Nation of Islam reached out to Black colleges and universities and started organizing support groups. The Louisiana network also was the conduit to James Rucker and ColorOfChange.org, which led to email blasts that greatly increased the communication. Those email blasts plus the involvement of Al Sharpton and other prominent Black “celebrity” activists alerted Black radio hosts to the case and spread the message further. Once the message was spreading, it was spreading out through multiple channels: radio, social media, Black newspapers. It was spreading word of mouth through presentations at churches and in fraternal and social organizations. It was these on-the-ground place-based organizations that had the capacity to charter buses and assemble people for a protest.
This movement narrative says that what matters for movement building are networks of communication and solidarity that allow movement messages and resistance to spread through a population in many different ways, so that the movement message becomes endemic to a community. It needs different kinds of people engaging in different kinds of actions, some of them attracting media attention, some of them working on legal issues, some working on organizing. This movement narrative also says that people who do not agree with each other politically, who disagree about strategy, who think others are opportunists or misguided or just really annoying attention-seekers, who believe that others are hurting the movement by their actions—all these diverse people can under some circumstances have enough sense of solidarity and unity in the face of a common challenge to come together collectively and have a common effect.
This movement narrative of course does not resolve all the problems of getting down to business and specific policies and matters of governance. But it does say the focus should not be on the “best” strategy for any one group, but on the questions of the network and solidarity and organizational structures of a whole population or subpopulation. This movement narrative also signals the critical importance of having diverse channels of communication that are allied enough with a movement that the messages can get through. This narrative says that the challenges going forward involve building diverse multi-faceted connections and communication channels that are not controlled by mega-corporations or billionaires. And to building and maintaining place-based social relationships and groups.
Historical Significance
The full picture shows that the Jena protest built on traditional channels of organizing alongside new communication channels. Although the mainstream media focused as usual on Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, a very wide array of Black organizations endorsed the march and showed up in Jena or in solidary events around the country. The organizational diversity mirrored the support for the 2005 Millions More Movement and the energy and political diversity was reminiscent of the 1995 Million Man March. Buses were filled and sent to Jena primarily through traditional grassroots organizations including churches, Black colleges and student groups, and a diverse array of Black groups. In addition to the big-name civil rights leaders and groups, supporters included Black businessmen, motorcycle clubs, churches, unions, and media outlets, more radical groups including the New Black Panther Party and the Malcolm X Grassroots Association, and the Nation of Islam. Radio was not a “new” medium, having been important since the 1930s, but was a crucial communication channel: Black radio hosts publicized the case and the rally and broadcast their shows from Jena. Regional organizing also was crucial. Those who showed up in Jena were disproportionately from Louisiana and Texas, and often organized through networks built in response to hurricane Katrina.
At the same time, it was undeniable that the participants were disproportionately young. Both young and old participants saw the emergence of a new generation into the movement.
Despite all the grassroots energy, and the flurry of follow-up rallies around the country, the mobilization around the Jena 6 dissipated almost as quickly as it had built. Looking back, we might say that the Jena 6 was the last big protest march built around the traditional Black solidarity coalition even as it may have been the opening moment for the new generation of Black organizing that later led to the Black Lives Movement. It really does seem to mark the end of one era and the beginning of another.
What happened next was the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama and the election of the first Black president. Although there are no studies that examine the question directly, there are scholarly speculations that the youthful energy around the Jena 6 mobilization found its next expression in the Obama campaign. The path from 2008 to the BLM protests beginning in 2014 goes through the disillusionment with the Obama presidency, the Occupy movement of 2011, and the publicity and protests around the Trayvon Martin killing in 2012 and the not guilty verdict of George Zimmerman in 2013, Although nobody called the new wave of Black protests a “civil rights movement,” Al Sharpton did get it right in 2007 when he said that the next round of the Black movement was going to be focused on the criminal justice system. The people who were aged 18 in 2007 were 25 in 2014, when the BLM protests erupted. The new generation was taking over the movement. How that happened must be the subject of a different research project, but the Jena protest does seem to mark the end of one era and the beginning of the next.
