Spreading the Minnesota Way

By Harry Boyte, Director, Center for Democracy and Citizenship

This Martin Luther King Day weekend I’ve been thinking about the “Montgomery Way” and “The Minnesota Way.”

The beginning of the freedom movement, which later shaped me as a college student in the 1960s, was the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) on January 10-11, 1957, in Atlanta, Georgia. SCLC was created to spread “the Montgomery way” across the south. It communicated lessons of the famous bus boycott, begun when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat for a white man on December 5, 1955, in Montgomery. The bus boycott was an enormous successful nonviolent movement of black people and their allies to desegregate city buses that stunned the nation and the world. SCLC spread not only organizing lessons about boycotts but also a “Crusade for Citizenship,” launched by Ella Baker, first executive director, in 20 communities across the South. The Crusade for Citizenship communicated democratic hope, the idea that battlers for racial justice, growing in numbers, were not alone but rather part of a rising tide. A freedom movement was about to break on the nation’s consciousness that would change the course of history.

There are lessons that can ground a similar “We the People” movement today. One way to describe it is “Spreading the Minnesota Way.”

On January 24 in partnership with the congressionally mandated National Conference on Citizenship and the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship, our Center for Democracy and Citizenship is publishing A Tale of Two Cities. The report compares the “civic health” — levels of civic engagement — in the Twin Cities and Miami Florida. The Twin Cities is the most civically engaged community in the nation, Miami is the least, according to composite of a number of indicators (voting levels, volunteering, charitable giving, involvement in community problem solving, participation in public meetings, campaigns, and also informal measures like talking to neighbors and having dinner with families). Civic health is correlated with social benefits such as economic well-being, income equality, and individual health and happiness.

The report is an opportunity to analyze reasons for the Twin Cities success. I believe that there are three elements, present everywhere but especially developed in the Twin Cities.

• Civic agency. Most simply, people here believe that change is possible and that they can make it –  that everyday citizens, not superheroes or famous celebrities, can develop the capacities for public work across differences to tackle tough problems and shape the world around us.
• Civic educators. In the Twin Cities, the detachment from community life of many institutions – families, schools, congregations, businesses, nonprofits – that is widespread visible in America generally has also taken place. But many buck the trend. There is still an unusual degree of institutional engagement with communities in ways which educate for citizenship. In some cases civic dimensions of institutions are being revitalized.
• We the People government. The Twin Cities also embody many continuing examples of political leadership, government agencies, and civil servants who make government the partner, instrument and meeting ground of citizens – neither savior providing “customer services,” nor the problem.

These elements add up to a “culture of civic empowerment.” And just as in the civil rights movement when a widespread desire for change warred with a deep pessimism about whether segregation could be ended, a culture of civic empowerment can spread. In fact this week’s civic outpouring in Tucson, Arizona where citizens have shown the world that the community is much bigger than the violent shootings can also be seen as stirrings of a new movement of civic empowerment.

In this movement everyday citizens are the foundational agents of making change.  What do these have in common?

Democratic hope.

 

Updated MLK Day Guide

By Cecilia M. Orphan, National Manager, American Democracy Project

In 1994 Congress passed the Martin Luther King (MLK) Jr. Holiday and Service Act designating the King Holiday as a national day of volunteer service. Instead of a day off from work or school, Congress asked Americans of all backgrounds and ages to celebrate Dr. King’s legacy by turning community concerns into citizen action.  The motto for the day is, “A Day On, Not a Day Off.” In 2007, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) in partnership with the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) created a collection of resources for planning an MLK Day for colleges and universities. We have updated the original MLK Day Guide. This year’s MLK Day is on Monday, January 17, 2011.

This guide is packed full of tips for funding, project organization, volunteer management, and much more. The campus case studies section has been updated with examples from the 2009 MLK Day. Additionally, this MLK Day guide includes a blog post from Harry Boyte about how campuses might incorporate Civic Agency/We the People ideas into their celebrations.

To download the 2010 MLK Day Guide, please visit this website.

 

 

Martin Luther King Day: Renewing a Spirit of Empowerment

I asked Harry to write about how AASCU campuses might use MLK Day as a launching point for “We the People” activities. Below is his description of how this might be done. Please watch for the release of the updated MLK Day Guide. I will send it out next week.

Harry writes an update to this blog post about the similarities between the Freedom Movement and the We the People movement. Read it here. –  Cecilia M. Orphan

By Harry C. Boyte, Center for Democracy and Citizenship

I am writing from South Africa after two days of remarkable conversation with students, staff, and faculty at the University of the Free State in Blomfontein. I was impressed yet again with the similarity between the spirit of empowerment that infused the freedom movement against apartheid in South Africa  and the same spirit in freedom movement which shaped me as a college student in the 1960s at Duke University.

Parallels extend to the present. The “We the People” movement for citizenship and citizen empowerment has parallels here in South Africa. “Students have a very strong desire to become effective agents of change,” said Moses, a student leader in the University of the Free State. Alan Boesak, a legendary religious leader during the anti-apartheid years now meets regularly with students at the University of the Free State. He echoed Moses’ thought. “I have not had such conversations with students about the need to make change the 1980s.”

With these conversation fresh on my mind, I’ve been thinking about how Martin Luther King Day might be more than a commemoration of past history or occasions for service projects. How can it become a time for laying groundwork for movement building that reclaims democracy as the work of the people?

Here are four possible activities in the vein of “We the People” movement building for Martin Luther King Day:

• Use the day to hold discussions, reading groups, forums, and debates on the deep and often overlooked themes of organizing for empowerment that infused the freedom movement, themes that are as fresh and relevant today as in the 1960s. Sources include Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” – note especially the conclusion, where King argues that the movement is calling the whole nation back to “the great wells of democracy dug deep” at the nation’s founding – what do you think he meant? Also Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom (which describes the distinction between “mobilizing” and “organizing” in the movement); and Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Struggle (which tells the story of the remarkable Ella Baker, who went south with the charge to help create a sense of overall movement out of scattered islands of discontent).
• Hold a debate on “populism.”  In a conversation I had as a young college student with Dr. King in St. Augustine in 1964, told me he was a “populist,” by which he meant something very different than the way the term is used today to describe figures like Sarah Palin or disgruntled protestors like the Tea Party. King meant the movements for democratic change that stretched from the black and white farmers coalitions of the 1880s through the farmer and labor movements of the 1930s to the freedom movement of the sixties. The debate: what is populism?
• Martin Luther King and the freedom movement held a view of government very different than the “pro” and “anti” government politics of today. Government was a complicated but essential resource for the movement, that need to be challenged but also that required effective partnership building work. Sometimes politicians and government workers deeply disappointed us in the movement, when they turned a blind eye to brutality; sometimes (as with the case of Hubert Humphrey or elements of the Justice Department) they were partners who exposed injustices and worked with us to pass historic civic rights legislation. But the idea of “We the People” government was alive and well, and the civil rights movement inspired a generation of public policies called “maximum feasible participation,” in which citizens participated extensively in the design and implement of government programs. Find examples of “We the People” government still alive in your community, or discuss how they might be created between young people and government agencies.
• Public Achievement, the youth empowerment and organizing initiative which several ADP campuses have adopted, descends from the citizenship schools of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Explore the possibilities of Public Achievement as a living “citizenship school” in the tradition of the freedom movement for your campus. For more information about Public Achievement, visit this website.

For an updated version of the ADP/NASPA MLK Day Guide, please visit this website.

Question: What are you planning to do to celebrate MLK Day?