Many Minds, One Heart

“SNCC( Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) activities within the broader (civil rights) movement reshaped the republican tradition as it was widely understood in American life. From the colonial period forward, this tradition had depended on the vision of independent yeoman—each with a stake in society—gathering to stand against distant, impersonal, and overbearing institutions. SNCC revised this republican idea of standing up to demand one's natural rights to life, liberty, and property. The struggle to realize democratic social relations was an avenue of public work that was possible only in the company of others. SNCC workers demonstrated the simple proposition that one cannot live a democratic life alone.” -- Wesley C. Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart

A couple of years ago, I visited Atlanta. My first stop was the Martin Luther King memorial in the heart of the city. I have to admit, the memorial and its buildings were not only underwhelming, but seemed to lack the memory of life. The whole thing was very cold and sterile, until I walked to the one corner of the complex, where stands the old red-bricked Ebenezer church.

Walking into the church, memory instantly comes to life. A half century before, in this church and hundreds of others even smaller, in small community rooms, and living rooms spread across the South, one of the great democratic movements in American history was founded and organized. Standing in the small church, one seems instantly connected to and overwhelmed by the astounding accomplishments of the former slave population of this republic, who standing together, nonviolently gained the citizen enfranchisement denied them for a century after emancipation.

This memory revived as I read Wesley Hogan's Many Minds, One Heart. The book is an excellent work of American history concerning the founding and actions of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee(SNCC). SNCC was an important element of the Civil Rights Movement. Across the South, they helped inspire and de-centrally organize direct action campaigns against segregation and for political enfranchisement. Ms Hogan's book is essential history, and most importantly, it is written with a small “d” democratic knowledge and understanding that is sorely lacking from far too much American history.

For us today, Many Minds, One Heart is extremely valuable. It unfolds a story of the thinking and actions of the disenfranchised coming together to demand their natural rights as human beings and their political rights as citizens. “Gathering” Hogan writes, “to stand against distant, impersonal, and overbearing institutions.” This is the challenge we Americans face today. Both voluntarily and through subtle coercion, the majority of Americans have become disenfranchised from any meaningful politics.

It is time for us to “gather against distant, impersonal, and overbearing institutions.” Just as SNCC helped to define and enfranchise a disenfranchised people, so must we. Our republic needs to redefine what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century. We need to rebuild and evolve new practices by which citizens discuss, interact, and implement politics. We need to develop a citizen culture, and most importantly as a society, value the hard work of being a citizen.

SNCC overcame two great barriers. The first was fear. Today, America is an extremely fearful boarding on paranoid society. Much of this flows from our disenfranchisement, from feelings of powerlessness. SNCC met this fear by bringing people together in small groups to discuss the challenges they faced, and showed people they were not alone. Despite overwhelming odds, people could act, persevere, and triumph. The beginning, one of the Freedom Riders stated simply, “I lost my fear.”

The second barrier SNCC confronted was the wide held belief of political impotence. The decadent belief that one person's actions had neither impact nor value. In the apartheid South, whites were enfranchised. Every single day the black community saw and experienced oppressive political power. Today, people are not legally disenfranchised, yet they feel politically impotent. They see and experience the power of our mega-corporations, who control our politics. Political power is felt, but for many, not viscerally understood.

One SNCC member put it, “I once thought politics was what you were for or against—not what you did.” This is a key understanding for changing our present situation. In breaking the barriers of disenfranchisement and fear, we need to bring people together to redefine politics and create a politics not of “for or against,” but a politics of doing. The first and most crucial step, as SNCC understood, is simply to bring people together in small meetings—the Ebenezer church, libraries, living rooms—and begin democratic conversations. We must discuss the issues of our time and how they impact each person in their daily lives. Without the initiation of these small conversations, there can be no political revival. Two things need to come out of these conversations, one is a necessary new political dialog and the other is a will to do.

In these conversations, we must reintroduce a most important aspect missing from our politics, democratic patience. Hogan does an excellent job in describing this most important aspect of democratic culture. Democratic patience is not about waiting ten more years for Jim Crow to end, another five for the vote, or in our time the end of Wall Street dominance of the economy. Democratic patience is the ability to talk about difficult problems with each other, especially with those who we disagree. We can start by developing patience with those who we agree, and begin to engage those who we disagree.

Today, democratic patience is absent from all aspects of our politics. The idiocy calling itself political debate in this country is toxic. We, or our political class, prize zingers not understanding, entertainment not enlightenment. Without healthy political dialog, there can be no healthy politics, and without patience there can be no dialog.

Out of democratic conversation must come democratic action. Once people are engaged they must have something to do. For SNCC it was desegregating diners, buses, and registering to vote. A big question, what constitutes democratic action today? I'll suggest two things; involvement in local government, and energy conservation. People need to engage in local government to begin making necessary changes in their communities. There needs to begin a process of taking power away from DC and the state capitals. This is the only way to fix the corruption—drain the swamp. Energy conservation provides an opportunity for people to become actively involved at home, work, school, and community to kick America's oil addiction.

From democratic conversations and democratic action will come democratic experience, and as historian Lawrence Goodwyn has written, democracy is experiential, it is about doing and learning. As Hogan documents, SNCC was one big experiment and learning experience. She writes, “By pushing the boundaries, movement participants could see more clearly what was at stake...people saw a small number of individuals taking action and were inspired to join them; through the experiences they then shared, the activists and their recruits developed and understanding of what was possible—one that differed considerably from that of most blacks and whites in Mississippi.”

SNCC was disenfranchised people learning how to gain their political will, rights, and responsibilities, and that is necessary for us today. Our contemporary politics knows little about democracy, we are going to have to create, talk, act, learn, and learn some more. The most glaring problem with our present politics is it learns nothing. Revealing one thing, our politics is not democratic, in fact it is oppressively doctrinaire.

Democratic conversations, patience, action and learning were foundational values and practices of SNCC. But the most encompassing value and practice of SNCC was nonviolence. Ms Hogan has done an absolutely wonderful job recording SNCC's philosophy, thought, practices and struggles concerning nonviolence. It is a topic that deserves much greater exploration than I can give in this short piece. I'll put across two thoughts however. First, democracy is nonviolent. Second, a nagging question, can there be secular based nonviolence? I believe the answer to that is yes, and more importantly, our technological evolution makes it imperative for human survival.

Many Minds, One Heart needs to be widely read. I pulled from Ms Hogan's book a couple points that will help us in reviving our politics. We don't need a revolution in America, we need a reformation. Our political economy has become top heavy and eminently corrupt. Our economy is controlled by and for a few massive corporations. Our politics is run by a small unrepresentative professional political class, who do the bidding of these corporations. Technology has massively changed our politics and most of us have voluntarily disengaged from being citizens. We are fed a vapid fear-laden death cult of patriotism, instead of building the life affirming culture of courage and work necessary to being a citizen. Yet we know one thing, as long as it flows somewhere in us, the fount of democracy is eternal, and renewal possible.

Many Minds, One Heart shows the one basic fact of democratic evolution across American history, it moves up from the bottom. We must come together to reclaim, revive and evolve our politics. We must become citizens, and in so doing, we will gain meaning for ourselves. As one SNCC participant stated, “I had never had that much dignity before. It was exhilarating, it was something I had earned—the sense of independence that comes to a free person.”