Hamburgers

Winning a campus victory is nothing more than a hamburger.

"More Than a Hamburger" went a speech by Ella Baker at the founding conference of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. The organization went on to lead the most radical, militant and successful non-violent protests to break the back of the Jim Crow south, but in April of 1960 the participants at this conference were rookies, fresh with the pride of victory. They had started doing sit-ins only three months before, and the wave of spontaneous protest had spread across the south. Now they assembled at the first conference many had ever been to, and had to decide what to do. Baker desperately wanted the students to see their recent victories as a wedge to pry open much broader and more difficult problems for Blacks.

In the hind-sight of history, we often forget that great things have auspicious, even uncertain beginnings. The chance that these students would succeed in creating a strong and dynamic organization with enough independence to actually be radical was not good. Older civil rights activists schemed about how to co opt the students. The students themselves didn't have a focus or a direction. Julian Bond remembered, "to our mind, lunch-counter segregation was the greatest evil facing black people in the country."

Young people in SNCC saw two kinds of goals. First was the final goal of equality and freedom. Equal protection under the law, safety from discrimination and intimidation, respect, opportunity, etc. I can only speculate that even the students who had recently desegregated their lunch-counters didn't imagine all these things as immediate goals, or even ones they would see in their life-times, but I bet for the first time in their lives they were considering these to be possible. Nonetheless, the end goals were fairly established, barring somewhat fringe debates over returning to Africa or specific retaliations against whites.

The second goal that most of these students saw clearly was desegregation. They had seen the problem, they had a ready made goal (to be able to sit in some place) and they had shown bravery in reaching that goal. Unfortunately, they were quickly realizing desegregated lunch counters were only a little bit closer to an end of racism than before.

The climate movement is stuffed full of "hamburger" actions. We've heard the list of personal actions time and time again. If you're reading this, you already have the good lights, your probably a vegetarian and you don't go joyriding in your 4x4 truck. There is another kind of hamburger out there. Campus Climate Challenge victories, signatures on the President Climate Commitment and clean energy purchasing fees are also just lunch-counters. Very important, but definitely not intermediate goals.

There is a huge disconnect between the big, giant problem of climate change, and the tiny solutions we offer to individuals or small groups. Of course we need small actions to hook people into taking bigger ones. Whether its switching to a high-fuel economy car or getting a group together to lobby your administration, these are still just steps that get more involved and invested experienced so we can take on bigger things.

The other reason we're afraid of intermediate goals is their complexity. Intermediate goals require collaboration with other organizations. They require us to trust groups that we haven't worked with before, and they require us to ask much harder questions about strategy - what will be most effective? Does a march do more for the climate than signing up 10,000 customers for clean energy?

I applaud efforts in several states to establish action-oriented state networks. I am fascinated by where some schools have gone after achieving a significant victory - expanding the activism and vitality out into the community like in MaCalister and Middlebury. But I feel that this is a key time for our movement because we do need to shift from primarily working with student groups on campuses to engaging a much broader and more diverse society, but doing so in a way that brings more focus on ambitious but achievable goals.

We're moving beyond hamburgers. They're important, we're earned them, but don't kid yourself for a moment into thinking that was the easy part...or the tipping point.

Sources: I've Got the Light of Freedom, Charles Payne

Note: This essay is the second in a six part exploration into campus organizing. The study will focus on applying organizing theory and experience to the day-to-day challenges of building the youth climate movement at Williams College, in Berkshire County and in the state of Massachusetts.