Organic and Strategic Change in the Climate Movement, Part Three: The Birmingham Children’s Crusade
Olympian Fields of Action Series Post #9.3
This is the third and final post in the Subseries introducing Organic & Strategic Change (click for first and second posts), which is the fifth of the characteristics/imperatives/goals of the Climate Movement. For the Climate Movement to lead, we must be Organic & Strategic enough.
As I said in the first post in this Subseries:
Organic change flows out of kairotic time, which is always rooted in specific places and the people present in those places and the freedom they have to seize the moment and find a way to work together to give birth to something that hadn’t existed before.
As such, organic change is rooted in people, place, and time — the combination of which must be activated by freedom and fulfilled through creativity, two of our Movement Values.
With this rootedness in people, place, and time comes another factor driving the creation of organic change — the unique challenges of our time.
When such challenges overcome and overwhelm the tried-and-true approaches of the past we must become creative — if in freedom we are allowed to do so and allow ourselves to be so. And some of the most fertile ground for meeting new challenges and transforming the failures of the tried-and-true into victories comes from organic change.
Gwendolyn and Meatball Lead the Way
In many cases organic change arises out of need, even desperation. An excellent example is what was known then as “The Children’s Crusade,” which became the turning point in the Civil Rights campaign in Birmingham in 1963, and which, in turn, led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This law, according to the US Senate’s website, “remains one of the most significant legislative achievements in American history.” It is the cornerstone of civil rights in the US.
But none of this was in the cards in the spring of 1963 when the Birmingham campaign led by Dr. King was on the verge of defeat. Dr. King came to Birmingham to revive the Civil Rights Movement, which was stalled. Failure in Birmingham could have put the Movement back years. And yet that’s exactly what they were facing.
Dr. King was arrested on Good Friday, April 12, 1963. But the non-violent campaign tactic borrowed from Gandhi, to fill the jails and exceed the capacity to deal with protesters, wasn’t happening because too few adults were willing, afraid not only of jail but of losing their jobs as a consequence.
As the adults were failing, into this moment came a new idea — use children and teenagers to fill up the jails. Use children to face the violence of Police Commissioner Bull Connor and his forces.
At first Dr. King and others in senior leadership opposed the idea. But those championing the Children’s Crusade kept making plans, recruiting popular girls to attract the boys, coaching volunteers on how to respond non-violently and preparing them to face Bull Connor. Eventually Dr. King supported the idea.
When the time came one 14 year old 7th grader, Gwendolyn Sanders, after a signal from a young man nicknamed “Meatball” (aka William Dothan), led the students out of class to join the protests.
So I was in my sewing class, and I looked out the window and I saw Meatball, William Douthan, and then I started spreading the word it was time to go. And the students started coming, and the word had spreaded throughout the school.
Over 970 students were arrested the first day, some as young as eight years old. Adding to the 600 adults already incarcerated, this greatly exceeded the jail’s capacity of 900. By the end nearly 2,000 were arrested.1
Janice Woke Up With Her Mind On Freedom
One of those participating was Janice Wesley (later Kelsey), who had just turned 16. Decades later she wrote a memoir I Woke Up With My Mind On Freedom, which she
“dedicated to memory of my mother, Mrs. Katye Ruth Williams Wesley, whose life of service and sacrifice instilled in me the courage to stand up for what was right.”
On the morning of the march she recounted how her mother, who taught Sunday School, warned her:
“Janice, I’m sending you to school. Don’t you go anywhere and get yourself in any trouble. I don’t have any money to get you out.” To which I responded, “Yes ma’am.”… I did not lie to my mother … I was going to school. I just wasn’t going to stay in school.
As she was marching she was ordered by one of Bull Connor’s forces to stop.
“I was not accustomed to disobeying adults and had never done so in my young life. What’s more, I had never had a confrontation with a White man before. This White man was wearing a gun and had a stick in his hand. … As the officer waited, someone started singing ‘We Are Not Afraid’ and it resonated throughout the crowd. That song gave me the courage I needed to remain in the line. …
“We had covered some things in our mass meetings about being prepared and how to protect ourselves, but I am not sure we were ready for the police and firemen responses that included dogs and fire hoses that thrust young protesters down city streets like the tumbleweed seen in cowboy movies. …
I had one girlfriend who said some of her hair was sheared off her head by the force of the water. People had blouses torn and reported that their skin was bruised and cut from the force of the water. They talked about trying to get away from the police and all the mayhem.”2
Years later her brother told her he got arrested just to find out if she was ok and ease their mother’s mind:
“He saw all my mother’s anguish about my being in jail. He said she was going on about ‘Oh Lord, my baby is in jail and I don’t know what I am going to do with my baby in jail.’”
Fire hoses, attack dogs, white men with guns and clubs — in the midst of this mayhem was an ordinary yet extraordinary young teenage girl who never disobeyed, except to put her life on the line and fight for freedom with her friends.
No Organic Change, No Strategic Change
Curvy and messy, organic change arises not from a strategic plan, but from the creativity and courage of the group’s members responding in real time to changing circumstances.
Without the new tactic of including children and youth in non-violent civil disobedience the Birmingham campaign could have easily become a failure.
No Children’s Crusade — no 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Something like it could have passed later. We’ll never know. But that it passed in 1964 is because of the success of Birmingham, which was saved from failure and catapulted into history by courageous children and teenagers literally embodying organic change.
No Strategic Change, No Organic Change
But these children didn’t spontaneously walk out of school and head downtown to face Bull Connor and attack dogs and fire hoses. Weeks of training preceded their participation. Their actions were a part of a strategy the Civil Rights Movement had been implementing for years, and they practiced Gandhian tactics that had been around for decades.
This was a movement that was dynamic enough, in that they combined the tried-and-true, discipline, freedom, and creativity to create a synthesis of organic-and-strategic change.
The Birmingham campaign had both local and national goals. As one of the senior leaders, Wyatt Tee Walker explained, “If we mounted a strong nonviolent movement, the opposition would surely do something to attract the media, and in turn induce national sympathy and attention to the everyday segregated circumstance of a person living in the Deep South.”
They wanted to put pressure on the Kennedy Administration to do something substantive sooner rather than later — and it worked. Kennedy had planned to introduce civil rights legislation in a theoretical second term. The courageous black children of Birmingham had other ideas.
It was the combination of organic-and-strategic change that led to success and passage of one of America’s greatest pieces of legislation.
Where You Fit In
So today you have a chance to make history, to put your values to the test and join something bigger than yourself, to become a part of the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world, to wake up with your mind on climate freedom.
If you are a creative free spirit, we need you. But your creativity must be in service of the goals of the group and the Climate Movement as we join together to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything. This is our vision, purpose, and Major Goal, and doing things to achieve these three is what it means to be strategic.
If you are of the strategic planning bent, we need you, too. But we need you to be open and patient with the creative free spirit types. You can’t be so locked into your plans that you don’t allow room for creativity, or for something like the Birmingham Children’s Crusade if the moment calls for it.
If you don’t feel like you are a creative free spirit or someone with a strategic bent, we also need you. We need you to participate in the creation of the strategies and tactics your group or groups are involved in, bringing forward your gifts, abilities, values, and personality.
But we also need you to bring all of this to bear on creating organic change. We need you to see each moment and the place where you are with your fellow Climate Action Athletes and everything they bring as a gift, a chance to produce outcomes never seen before, but ones that strive to be strategic — in other words, organic change that achieves your group’s particular goals and contributes to our Movement’s vision, purpose, and Major Goal.
Maybe your gifts are ones that don’t call attention to themselves, such as emotional stability and a steady hand at keeping the group together and moving forward, combined with wisdom to affirm and shape ideas by others into achievable strategic outcomes. Or maybe your gift is in seeing that the group has whatever it needs to be successful in combining organic and strategic change — a meeting space with the right number of chairs, coffee and other light refreshments, a Zoom account that works, and helping members get Signal accounts for secure communication.
Whatever your gifts, we have a place for you and we need you.
Looking Back From The Future
When Dr. King was incarcerated in April 1963, writing his now-classic Letter From Birmingham Jail which he began on scraps of paper given him by the janitor, the campaign was teetering. They just had a failed effort in Albany, Georgia, and now failure was once again staring them in the face in Birmingham.
The idea of children coming to the rescue was in no one’s mind.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Nobel Peace Prize that same year — victories no one could yet see or even dream.
There will come a time in our future, once we have achieved our vision, when, we will look back and be glad we worked hard on all our Fields of Action to combine passion, freedom, creativity, and strategic thinking. We will recognize that without a strategic plan, and without the course corrections we made in light of new thinking, changed circumstances, and the organic nature of movements, without the new ideas and fresh passion from people who never imagined themselves in a movement, we wouldn’t have accomplished what we did.
On all of our Fields of Action, with numbers too big and broad and active to be suppressed, missed, or ignored, we will have stopped the bad stuff, set wrong right, and made things better, especially for the vulnerable and today’s children and subsequent generations. We will have made the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful as we made our future come faster.
We have a dream today. Join us!
If you are new here, check out our Intro Series and other posts like this one that are a part of our Olympian Fields of Action Series. If you like this post, please “like,” comment, and share. And thanks for all you’re doing.
Janice Kelsey, I Woke Up With My Mind On Freedom, (2017) p. 25. See also Wikipedia, Birmingham Campaign.
Kelsey, pp. 1, 2, 25, 27.