An Essay on Evidence and Authority

Movements themselves are important sites of knowledge production. They have the potential to illuminate how young people, often under 25 years old, shape the entire nation for the better. Their history is our public patrimony, one that should not be held hostage by bureaucratic restrictions that universities and archives often follow. Public access to creativity and memory, not reserved or made secret, has the potential to open up gatekeeping so that scholars and archivists are not the center of reference for knowledge production. This essay examines topics of extractive versus collaborative scholarship, oral history methodologies, and documentary epistemologies to address two questions: Who gets to tell the story? What counts as historical evidence? These are deceptively simple questions and so vital to knowledge production that this essay at the end of the book addresses them more thoroughly. Such inquiries lead to thornier issues underneath: who gets to establish what does and does not “count” as documentary evidence on freedom movements, and thus what is left in the archive for future generations of civic actors to build on?

Make Room in the Circle

During the 1990s and into the 2000s, three basic barriers prevented undocumented youth from achieving major milestones of independence—acquiring a driver’s license, submitting college applications, and working legally. The circumstances repeated again and again in the accounts of undocumented youth. Elioenai Santos recalled, “Living like that is a real problem. It’s a real blow to your self-esteem, because you always feel like you are somehow less. It’s awful to always feel like you’re inferior. You see your friends driving around, traveling to other countries, while I don’t have money to go to school.” Nor could they keep their families together, as everyone felt constantly threatened by separation. The result since the early 2000s has been a growing, powerful movement among undocumented youth to redefine “who belongs” as a citizen in the United States. This chapter explores how the Immigrant Youth Justice League, Freedom University, Cristina Jimenez and United We Dream, and other undocumented and undocuqueer youth immigrant activists have fought for DACA and the DREAM Act and against deportation and the border wall. They have fundamentally challenged all US citizens to reimagine who belongs within the circle of belonging.

Recruiting the Justice League

Since the mid-1990s, the Ella Baker Center of Oakland has been creating a society based on restorative justice and law enforcement accountability, not the punishment economy. It does what Ella Baker called “spadework”: building youth community organizers who know that a fundamental element of democracy is to spend time and energy developing people at the base as their own leaders—one person at a time, as members of the body politic. Leadership models of Van Jones, Nona Perry, Darris Young and Lanise Frazier are examined.

The Intolerable Price of Self-Respect

The iced tea and Skittles Trayvon Martin carried home when he was murdered by George Zimmerman in February 2012 in suburban Sanford, Florida, represent an undeniable and terrifying truth: if you happen to be Black, the most basic of activities can get you killed in today’s America. In most cases, the killers walk free. Law enforcement and the legal system muster elaborate rationales, and leaders of the major institutions of the culture look the other way. James Baldwin’s observation is as pertinent today as it was when made in 1962: his countrymen, he recognized soberly, “have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know and do not want to know it.” In the end, almost no law enforcement is held accountable for the routine killings happening on the streets of America. Particularly for young Black citizens, this fact is a blunt daily reminder that for far too many in power, Black lives do not matter. The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) and its organizations like the Dream Defenders, BYP100, SONG, and others have put healing and restorative justice at the center of their movement work, as this chapter covers. They try to answer: how can the movement build the best possible futures for Black people? Is abolition the best path? What are others? Through both movement and electoral politics, they seek fresh ways to make government bodies accountable to people at the base.

The Spark of Youth

When it became clear that the civil rights movement had not quite managed to drag segregation behind the barn and shoot it to death, others stepped in and picked up the fight. SONG created some room to move in the vital crawl spaces across the South in the 1990s, modeling intersectional organizing that would come to full bloom in the 2010s. The Ella Baker Center in Oakland has spent the better part of three decades figuring out how to grow successive generations of youth organizers to redirect public monies toward education, not prison. Youth immigrant organizers have taught the nation to value family emancipation and reunification as an essential right. The Movement for Black Lives and youth water protectors at Standing Rock have shined a brilliant spotlight on the mounting reality of government and corporate authoritarianism—surveillance, beating, shooting, warrantless taps, repeat arrests, mass incarceration. All of these organizations have advanced visions for a just and open society, doing so where adult society has dismally failed. In each case, it has been young people, not corporations or established parties or law enforcement, who pushed the nation a step further toward its self-proclaimed ideal of “liberty and justice for all.”

Southerners on New Ground

At its core, Southerners on New Ground (SONG) was formed in the 1990s as both political exploration and call for action. The centuries-old tendency for opponents to use “divide and conquer” kept freedom movements for women, African Americans, LGBT people, workers, and immigrants from banding together. Quite simply, people were losing their rights because they were not showing up for each other’s causes. Other models such as union organizing or community organizing based on evolutions of the Saul Alinsky/IAF template had thrived in building people-power through industrial, religious, and community institutions, rooted in long-standing formal and informal social relationships. But these didn’t work in the South of the 1990s. It was hard to know how to get non-Black gay people to show up to fight for racial justice, or non-gay people to show up to fight against homophobia. In this chapter, SONG organizers set out to do just that. They created an intersectional community organizing model, and used it to fight for racial justice, against homophobia, and for an economy that worked for all at the beginning of a tightening neoliberal regime.

Youth and Women Lead

Diane Nash, Bob Moses, and The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) routed an oppressive system that had existed for nearly a century. In just five years, between 1960 and 1965, young activists—most Black, some not—dismantled large parts of legalized segregation, a system widely known as Jim Crow. They set up voting rights, community organizing, and nonviolent direct action in the very places in which segregation was most deeply rooted—Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia. Ella Baker, possibly the greatest champion of American democratic politics that no one outside of certain circles has ever heard about—was a lodestar for SNCC’s group-centered leadership. Baker resisted the typical mode of individual heroics. Her legacy not only pervades the story of SNCC but also becomes visible in many of the movements that followed the civil rights/Black Power era.

Citizens of a World Not Yet Built

Corporations profiting from incarceration, politicians benefiting from division and hatred, civil servants defending their positions rather than serving the people—these are cancers at the heart of civil society that require pursuit of a kind of “freedom politics” in both electoral politics and community organizing. Young people come to these realities without yet being resigned to the everyday pathologies inherent in the tension between striving for freedom politics and the push for elite control in American life, and they have created new tools over the last sixty years to create equal access for all to our democracy, acting as if they are citizens of a world not yet built. This chapter sums up the tools they have innovated.

Mní Wičoni—Water Is Alive

This chapter traces the story of youth at Standing Rock in 2016. Indigenous youth drew from and innovated within sacred traditions, called themselves water protectors, and developed a media savvy nonviolence that drew tens of thousands of people as well as the world’s attention to Standing Rock in 2016. Their media messaging, digital engagement, and rapid mobilization techniques created crucial blueprints for other movements around the world. They also created an incredibly innovative organization, the International Indigenous Youth Council, (IIYC). Their information sharing made it possible to stall or stop industrial projects that threatened water supplies, arable land, and Indigenous burial grounds in over three hundred communities worldwide, promoting land sovereignty and challenging settler colonialism. Rallying against them were giant multinational energy companies and governments with access to huge teams of technocrats—those trained to harness the law, big data, technical expertise, and traditional political power that wanted to make sure the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) – and many other pipelines and energy technologies across the world – continued to be built. The IIYC challenge to this corporate plutocracy put the world on notice: the next generation will not stand idly by watching the world burnt, cut down, and mined into extinction for the profit of a few.