The Pleasure of Learning from Hong Kong’s Pro-Democracy Activists

Posted on April 30, 2025 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Ming-sho Ho, author of Be Water, explains why he enjoys studying social movements.

Social movements are collective efforts aimed at promoting change in pursuit of a normative vision of how society ought to be organized. Typically initiated by those who are marginalized or underprivileged, their very emergence presents an intellectual puzzle: most people are socialized to accept the status quo, which is often portrayed as reasonable, just, or inevitable. When such movements succeed in mounting effective challenges to authority and even achieving significant impact, the puzzle deepens—how do they overcome their initial disadvantages and outmaneuver more powerful opponents? As such, the study of social movements is inherently an intellectual exercise to understand, explain, and generalize these unexpected happenings.

My new book, Be Water: Collective Improvisation in Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Protests, seeks to address the profound puzzle of how a city-wide and sustained insurgency unfolded and persisted for over a year. Once known for its pride in being an uber-capitalist hub—efficiently facilitating the flow of goods, money, and people—Hong Kong became the site of an intense and prolonged protest movement. In defiance of the looming threat of extradition to mainland Chinese courts, young protesters battled the police with farewell letters in their backpacks, the middle class contributed money and resources, and overseas compatriots built a global diaspora network of support.

The book opens with a once-unimaginable protest spectacle: a human-chain rally involving over 210,000 Hongkongers and stretching more than 50 kilometers across the city on August 23, 2019. Inspired by the Baltic Way exactly 30 years earlier, the Hong Kong Way required extensive collaboration, both online and offline, to realize this peaceful yet resolute act of collective defiance. And yet, no single person or organization could claim authorship of this powerful event. Instead, it was shaped by the decentralized efforts of countless participants: columnists who floated the idea, platform administrators who steered the conversations, illustrators who created inspiring posters and moving images, local volunteers who directed foot traffic, and thousands who simply showed up in response to the call. The result was a dazzling accumulation of small contributions that captivated and inspired audiences around the world.

The Hong Kong Way vividly illustrates the logic of what I call collective improvisation—a peer-produced, strategic response that emerges without prior coordination. When a critical mass of Hongkongers became deeply concerned about their political future and determined to try something new, the result was a powerful resistance campaign that surpassed the capacity of any individual or organizational leadership. At its core, collective improvisation springs from our own agency—an inherently creative, transformative, and history-making force. Yet we rarely experience the collective urgency required to activate this mechanism.

Powerful as it is, collective improvisation is also finite, prone to mistakes, and vulnerable to intensified repression. While innovative forms of protest emerge from the contributions of many, this creativity is also enabled by the diffusion of responsibility—no single individual is held accountable for failure. In a context of maximal participation, unfortunately, misogynistic and other discriminatory remarks also surfaced. My task is to provide a truthful and precise account of this extraordinary movement, and this commitment to intellectual honesty stands as my tribute to the courageous Hongkongers who continue their pursuit of democracy.

Hong Kong’s participants are fully aware that they are making their own history. Their protest actions are often accompanied by aphoristic, sometimes enigmatic sayings—such as “Be Water” and “Brothers climb the mountain, each contributing their effort”—which have become widely used idioms. This book seeks to offer a sociological translation and refinement of the movement’s crowd wisdom, with the hope that the analysis of decentralized mobilization it captures can be applied to explain struggles in other parts of the world. In this sense, social movement scholarship always has something new to learn from street protesters. As they set out to change the world, we uncover new trajectories of social change—a source of intellectual pleasures for scholarly investigation.

Quo Vadis, Hong Kong? As the city is now engulfed by a nightmarish police state, overseas diaspora activists have joined the broader struggle against the People’s Republic of China, alongside Tibetans, Uyghurs, Taiwanese, and Falun Gong practitioners. The final chapter of Hongkongers’ pro-democracy movement has yet to be written. My actionist perspective highlights the indeterminacy of agentic power—a force always capable of triggering unexpected transformation. Yet ultimately, the decision to unlock this immense potential, when the moment is right, rests with the Hongkongers themselves.

Filed under: Asian Studies, civil rights, cultural studies, History, political science, race and ethnicity, sociology, transnational politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

What Workers are Striking For: A View from Detroit

Posted on November 6, 2023 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Michael McCulloch, author of Building a Social Contract, writes about the importance of labor power to create broad-based prosperity.

The 2023 “Summer of Strikes” has continued into the fall, and while the UAW and the Big Three are nearing a deal, Detroit’s casino workers remain on picket lines. Though union membership has declined for decades in the U.S., the Motor City still carries powerful associations as a post-WWII labor stronghold. In September, Joe Biden conjured that historical memory while visiting UAW strikers in suburban Detroit, becoming the first modern American president to take part in a labor protest. “The middle class built the country,” Biden argued, “and unions built the middle class. And that’s a fact. So, let’s keep going.”

News coverage of Biden’s visit emphasized an exchange that followed his remarks. Asked whether he supported the 40% pay increase the UAW initially sought, the President replied, “Yes. I think they should be able to bargain for that,” which prompted public debate about the appropriateness of such a large raise. Yet to reduce this or any labor negotiation to a number, considered in the abstract, oversimplifies the stakes. A more tangible way to think about the significance of workers’ pay would be to consider the places where the rewards of labor are most intimately experienced: workers’ houses. Detroit has a different historical memory to offer in that regard.

Before the founding of the UAW, the Motor City emerged in the 1910s and 20s as a mass-production innovator and a rising economic powerhouse. Amidst that rapid growth, the city gained a prominent role in the national conversation about work and its rewards. High turnover in city factories, and the threat of strikes, hung over Detroit industrialists’ efforts to build more and better cars and other products. To attract and retain the best workers, despite the difficulty of modern industrial labor, employers—lead by the Ford Motor Company—determined that they needed to offer more.

In 1914, Ford famously doubled the company’s effective wage to five dollars per day, and reduced the work day to eight hours, curbing attrition and causing a general increase in wages city-wide. Yet this raise was not an end in itself—what gave it meaning was a concurrent effort to build modern houses in Detroit. Facing a housing shortage in the 1910s, business leaders, lenders, government agencies, developers, and workers themselves contributed to widespread effort to increase the volume and quality of houses available for workers. It was a flawed project—marred by racial segregation—but it did begin to establish the principle that in modern America, hard work should be respected and well rewarded. This housing transformation, which occurred in Detroit and many other industrial cities, brought increased privacy, indoor bathrooms, and electric lighting to many for the first time.

The story of Detroit’s Model-T Era housing boom can serve as a reminder that the current labor crisis, though often conceived of as a problem of wages, is also a housing problem—a shortage of affordable, aspirational dwellings that work can put within reach.

In the 1910s and 1920s, as today, wages were not enough to secure workers’ gains. Before the rise of industrial unions, and before government programs such as unemployment insurance and social security, workers’ economic gains were continuously at risk. Vulnerable to layoffs, illness or injuries—and lost work that could drain hard-earned savings or even lead to eviction—workers found that the front porches of their newly-built bungalows could be places to sit with gnawing worry about the economic future.

Amid the crisis of the Great Depression, workers in Detroit and elsewhere took to the ballot box and the streets to demand security for their hard-earned gains, and in particular, for their houses. Today, amid a wave of twenty-first century strikes, this history points to the importance, beyond wages in the abstract, of work’s lived rewards, and of the urgent need for policies and contracts that can secure workers houses today and into the future.

Filed under: american studies, economics/business, History, Labor Studies, political science, race and ethnicity, sociology, Urban Studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

What Is Solidarity?

Posted on June 7, 2023 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Alana Lee Glaser, author of Solidarity & Care, writes about how her days as a labor activist informed her new book.

What is solidarity? What do we—as members of a society—owe one another? How might we effectively uphold and institutionalize our mutual obligations? These questions have animated my own activism and scholarship since I was an undergraduate student turned labor activist two decades ago. More recently, these same questions motivated me to write a book for undergraduate students that I hope might inspire them to solidarity action themselves.

During my first year as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I, along with ten or so other students, staged a sit-in in the Chancellor’s historic South Building office on UNC’s central campus to protest the sweatshop labor behind the manufacture of the university’s licensed apparel. Months earlier, on a lark, I had attended a small meeting of anti-sweatshop activists. Over the course of those few months, I had what I now recognize as a full-scale world-view revolution. I entered college with an esteem for volunteerism and letter-writing campaigns (both of which I continue to endorse) and before my first year ended, I was a self-proclaimed labor activist and student radical.  To contextualize, let me add that this all occurred in 1998, before historical hindsight would allow me to place my consciousness within broader anti-neoliberal globalization movements that united “Teamsters and turtles” in Seattle and countless others in global mass demonstrations against the anti-labor, free-trade policies of the World Trade Organization, IMF, and World Bank. Virtually all my subsequent endeavors have built upon the foundational experiences of student-labor solidarity that took place throughout my undergraduate career, leading me to Domestic Workers United, the organization of immigrant women domestic worker activists that is the subject of my book, Solidarity & Care.

Solidarity & Care addresses these questions of solidarity, mutual aide, and activism through an accessible ethnographic description of Domestic Workers United’s decade-long fight to establish workplace protections in New York and the ramifications of this legislation in the ten years since it passed. Historically, U.S. labor laws have excluded care work performed in the home—housekeeping, childcare, and elder care—from labor law protections, leaving the women who work in this highly personalized, low-wage sector vulnerable to wage theft, harassment, abrupt termination, and abuse. In summer 2010, New York State passed the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, the nation’s first-ever legislation granting formal protections to in-home workers.

Solidarity & Care chronicles the laboring lives and activist endeavors of immigrant women care workers across New York’s five boroughs, as they manage the implications of the new law in their workplaces, transnational communities, and political organizations. The introduction of the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights hasn’t attenuated many of the issues with which childcare providers, housecleaners, and home health aides contend on a regular basis—frequent termination, employer inconsideration, long hours, dismally low pay, mistreatment, and lack of control over their own labor. Solidarity & Care describes how care work positions exemplify increasing worker insecurity across industries—wrought by neoliberal economic policy and employer efforts to reduce wages and eliminate worker benefits through overseas outsourcing where possible and through casualization, deskilling, and fragmentation here in the United States. In this way, the book invites undergraduate students, many already working in low waged labor sectors themselves, to contextualize their own labor and to consider their experiences and interests in common with domestic workers.

By foregrounding the activist successes and setbacks of primarily Caribbean, Latina, and African women care workers, Solidarity & Care showcases how intersectional labor organizing and solidarity can effectively protect workers in this and other industries. It centers the voices and experiences of immigrant women workers through their oral histories, vibrant accounts of their roles in protest actions, and their own analyses of the overlapping oppressions they face as women of color, immigrants, and low-wage workers in New York City. Just as I was drawn to understand the historic and political circumstances during which I protested sweatshops by “sitting-in” as a an undergraduate, my hope is that Solidarity & Care will be an approachable invitation to undergraduates, and even the broader public, to reflect on their own political-economic position and to stand in solidarity with immigrant women workers, like the members of Domestic Workers United, and workers across the U.S. labor movement.

Filed under: american studies, civil rights, Disability Studies, economics/business, ethics, gender studies, health, History, immigration, Labor Studies, Latin American studies, latinos, law & criminology, political science, race and ethnicity, racism, sociology, Urban Studies, women's studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Books that honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Posted on January 13, 2021 by gkramer

This week, in North Philly Notes, in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, we focus our attention on our books, new and old, that speak to a dedication to civil rights and human struggles.

The Civil Rights Lobby: The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Second Reconstruction, by Shamira Gelbman, investigates how minority group, labor, religious, and other organizations worked together to lobby for civil rights reform during the 1950s and ’60s. Shamira Gelbman explains how the diversity of this interest group coalition both hindered and enabled lobbyists to generate broad-based support for reforms that often seemed risky to legislators. They coordinated their efforts by identifying common ground among member organizations, developing coalitional positions on substantive and strategic questions, and exhorting organizations to mobilize professional and grassroots lobbying resources accordingly. The result was to “speak with one booming voice” to ultimately help secure the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Black Identity Viewed from a Barber’s Chair: Nigrescence and Eudaimonia, by William E. Cross, Jr., revisits his ground-breaking model on Black identity awakening known as Nigrescence. Cross connects W. E. B. DuBois’s concept of double consciousness to an analysis of how Black identity is performed in everyday life, and traces the origins of the deficit perspective on Black culture to scholarship, dating back to the 1930s. He follows with a critique showing such deficit and Black self-hatred tropes were always based on extremely weak evidence. His book sets out to disrupt and agitate as Cross attempts to more accurately capture the humanity of Black people that has been overlooked in previous research.


Philadelphia Freedoms: Black American Trauma, Memory, and Culture after King, by Michael Awkward captures the disputes over the meanings of racial politics and black identity during the post-King era in the City of Brotherly Love. Looking closely at four cultural moments, he shows how racial trauma and his native city’s history have been entwined. Awkward introduces each of these moments with poignant personal memories of the decade in focus, chronicling the representation of African American freedom and oppression from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion by Bettye Collier-Thomas, is a groundbreaking book that provides a remarkable account of the religious faith, social and political activism, and the extraordinary resilience of Black women during the centuries of American growth and change. As co-creators of churches, women were a central factor in their development and as Collier-Thomas skillfully shows, Black church women created national organizations to fight for civil rights and combat discrimination.


God Is Change: Religious Practices and Ideologies in the Works of Octavia Butler, edited by Aparajita Nanda and Shelby L. Crosby (forthcoming in June) examines Octavia Butler’s religious imagination and its potential for healing and liberation. In her work, Butler explored, critiqued, and created religious ideology. But religion, for Butler, need not be a restricting force. The editors of and contributors to God Is Change heighten our appreciation for the range and depth of Butler’s thinking about spirituality and religion, as well as how Butler’s work—especially her Parable and Xenogenesis series—offers resources for healing and community building.

The African American Jeremiad: Appeals for Justice in America, by David Howard-Pitney, shows that Black leaders have employed the jeremiad, a verbal tradition of protest and social prophecy, in a way that is specifically African American. David Howard-Pitney examines the jeremiads of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. DuBois, Mary McLeod Bethune, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, as well as more contemporary figures such as Jesse Jackson and Alan Keyes. This revised and expanded edition demonstrates that the African American jeremiad is still vibrant, serving as a barometer of faith in America’s perfectibility and hope for social justice.

Healing Our Divided Society: Investing in America Fifty Years after the Kerner Report, edited by Fred Harris and Alan Curtis examines inequality in America. The 1968 Kerner Commission concluded that America was heading toward “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” In Healing Our Divided Society, Fred Harris, the last surviving member of the Kerner Commission, along with Eisenhower Foundation CEO Alan Curtis, re-examine fifty years later the work still necessary towards the goals set forth in The Kerner Report. Reflecting on America’s urban climate today, this new report sets forth evidence-based policies concerning employment, education, housing, neighborhood development, and criminal justice based on what has been proven to work—and not work.

Who Will Speak for America? edited by Stephanie Feldman and Nathaniel Popkin, collects passionate and justifiably angry voices providing a literary response to today’s political crisis. Inspired by and drawing from the work of writers who participated in nationwide Writers Resist events in January 2017, this volume provides a collection of poems, stories, essays, and cartoons that wrestle with the meaning of America and American identity. Who Will Speak for America? inspires readers by emphasizing the power of patience, organizing, resilience and community. These moving works advance the conversation the American colonists began, and that generations of activists, in their efforts to perfect our union, have elevated and amplified.

Filed under: african american studies, american studies, civil rights, cultural studies, Education, ethics, gender studies, History, literature, Mass Media and Communications, Philadelphia, political science, race and ethnicity, racism, sociology, Urban Studies, women's studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Crossing the bridge with John Lewis

Posted on August 26, 2020 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, José E. Velázquez, coeditor of the forthcoming Revolution around the Corner, remembers the late John Lewis. 

On July 17, 2020, we mourned one of America’s greatest heroes, “the conscience of the nation,” civil rights leader and Congressman, John Lewis. His well-deserved six-day memorial services included being the first African-American to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C. The entire country relived that fateful Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965 where civil rights marchers gathered to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama to the state capital in Montgomery, in a campaign for the right to vote.

It has been 55 years since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and some may have forgotten how under the mantle of “states rights,” local governments repressed the right to vote of African-American men granted by the 15th Amendment to the Constitution (1870), and to African American women by the 19th amendment (1920). After the “Compromise of 1877,” southern Confederates who lost the Civil War ended “Black Reconstruction,” “took back the South,” and regained political power. Under the U.S. federal system, the administration of elections is a power reserved by state governments, who subsequently instituted a system of American apartheid and Jim Crow laws aimed at limiting African American voting rights. These included outlandish literacy tests to register to vote, poll taxes, and outright physical repression. In what became known as “grandfather clauses,” poor and uneducated whites were exempted if their descendants voted before 1867.

This was the reality during what became one of the most important non-violent civil disobedience battles of the civil rights movement: the Selma to Montgomery march. The strategy of massive, non-violent civil disobedience sought to rally forces against a superior power, by awakening the conscience of the nation, and forcing the Federal Government to intervene against the repressive forces of state governments. It

also aimed at overcoming real fears in the African American communities, produced by decades of subjugation, to confront the system head on. This is exactly what happened on that Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965 when Alabama State Police blocked marchers from crossing the Pettus Bridge, attacking them with horses, tear gas, and billy clubs as the protestors knelt in prayer. John Lewis, at the time a leader of the Student Non- Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), at the front of the march had his skull fractured and his life almost extinguished. Despite being severely injured, he returned to lead the other attempts to march.

With the advent of television, the entire world saw this vicious attack on marchers who were only asking for the right to vote, shaking the conscience of the nation. In the process, after a second attempted march on March 9th, halted by a temporary court injunction, a white minister, James Reeb, was killed that night by a Ku Klux Klan mob, adding to the country’s indignation. On March 21, 1965, under pressure President Lyndon B. Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard to protect the marchers in their third attempt. Hundreds of people came from throughout the nation to join the march, this time with National Guard protection. The close to 8,000 marchers crossed the bridge and arrived at the Alabama State Capital on March 25th, their numbers swelling to over 25,000.

Revolution Around the Corner_smOn August 6, 1965, the Voting Rights Act was passed, allowing for federal intervention to protect the constitutional right to vote, and beginning the dismantling of Jim Crow laws, literacy tests, poll taxes, and other regulations which made registering and voting nearly impossible for African-Americans. Just as the 1964 Civil Rights Act began the end of de jure segregation and expanded the rights of women, and other people of color, including Puerto Ricans, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 did the same throughout the country. For decades, Puerto Ricans and other Latinos, confronted English literacy tests and physical confrontations aimed at limiting their right to vote. The 1965 act was subsequently amended to include protections for non-English speaking voters. In 1970, in Newark, NJ when the Black and Puerto Rican Convention aimed to elect the city’s first African-American mayor, they were met with armed white resistance, necessitating the intervention of federal observers mandated by the Voting Rights Act.

For me the spirit of John Lewis was personal. After the assassination of Malcolm X in February 21, 1965, my first political experience at 13 years old was as a member of the SNCC Black Youth Congress, organized in El Barrio (Spanish Harlem). A

group of young African-Americans and Puerto Ricans met at the East River Projects, in a study group led by SNCC leaders, Fred Meely and Phil Hutchinson. SNCC was considered to be the radical wing of the civil rights movement, and one its leaders, Stokely Carmichael became the voice of a new “Black Power” movement. I must confess that at the time, maybe not being from the South, or because of youth and legitimate anger, our group did not look favorably at the strategy of non-violence. But historical time has demonstrated the power of massive non-violent civil disobedience to bring down even the most powerful governments or empires. I am proud, like Sammy Davis, Jr., Roberto Clemente, José Ferrer Canales, Gilberto Gerena Valentín, and many other Puerto Ricans, to have walked hand-in-hand with this movement.

What is the legacy of John Lewis as the nation today honors those who were considered radicals in the past? John Lewis, the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, who was constantly arrested and beaten as he led protest movements, talked about starting “good trouble” and exercising the right to vote until his last days. Yet today many do not exercise this simple effort, preferring not to vote, while allowing a wealthy minority to run the country.

Today, the Voting Rights Act is endangered, as certain provisions require reauthorization, and some state governments have renewed their attempt to repress voting rights. In Puerto Rico, the process to register to vote is still much more difficult than in many other jurisdictions. Those who took the streets in the summer of 2019 in Puerto Rico, may find their activism betrayed if they don’t register to vote, and vote for real change. The same holds true to those who have joined the massive Black Lives Matter protests in the streets of the United States. In November 2020, we face one of the most important and decisive elections in our lifetime. What would John Lewis say? Make “good trouble,” and vote out those who reject his legacy.

Filed under: african american studies, american studies, civil rights, Education, ethics, History, Labor Studies, Latin American studies, latinos, Mass Media and Communications, philosophy, political science, race and ethnicity, racism, sociology | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Discovering How Student Activism Matters

Posted on January 29, 2020 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Matthew Williams, author of Strategizing against Sweatshops, writes about what he learned by studying college students engaged in strategically innovative activism to help sweatshop workers across the world.

When I began working on the research for my new book, Strategizing against Sweatshops, if you had asked me, I’m sure that I would have said student activism is important. But I suspect I would have been somewhat vague about the specifics of why and how it is important. In interviewing members of United Students Against Sweatshops, a college student group that is one of three oStrategizing against Sweatshops_smrganizations that I focus on, I gained a much better understanding of how and why student activism matters. Student activists’ position on college campuses puts them in a place where they are more opportunities for success as a social movement than many other movements have. And this gives student activists a chance to break new ground in changing social norms and structures in the wider society, using college campuses as beachheads of progressive change.

If you’ve ever engaged in social justice activism, you know that it is often thankless work. It’s not simply that people outside the social justice community often look at the value of what you do with some degree of skepticism, but that you must be in it for the long haul to see the results of your actions—and those results are often unclear. When political and business leaders make reforms that movements have sought, they rarely give credit to movements for influencing them. The chain of cause and effect is not always clear. Certainly, it’s rare that any particular action your group takes, no matter how dramatic, can be clearly connected with causing some particular policy change.

Student activists face some of these same frustrations. But things do change somewhat when working on the scale of a college campus. The somewhat enclosed, clearly defined boundaries and small scale of a college campus create opportunities that don’t exist elsewhere. Compared to officials in positions of government and large businesses, college administrators are relatively accessible to students. Student activists can reasonably expect to get meetings with top-level campus officials. Even if a college president has an antagonistic view of what student activists are doing, the norms of college life are such that they are expected to tolerate such activism and give the students doing it some hearing. This is particularly striking given that colleges are much less democratic than government bodies. Even for faculty, principles of shared governance have significantly eroded and college administrations have increasingly limited accountability to faculty. There are generally no democratic mechanisms on college campuses for students to keep administrators in check. And yet the small scale and norms of the college campus make it possible for student activists to directly engage with high level administrators.

Student activists have other advantages as well. Doing the sort of movement-building necessary to successfully pressure administrators to change policy (and not simply meet with students) is relatively easy within the contained arena of a college campus. Though economic pressures mean this is less true than it once was, students still have a larger amount of biographical availability—free time to engage in activism—than older people who must hold down full time jobs and may have family obligations. The existence of student newspapers and the ease of organizing an educational event such as hosting a speaker or panel makes getting out the word about one’s cause relatively easy. The density of social networks on campus—in dorms, in student groups, among informal friendship circles, etc.—makes it relatively easy to recruit people.

Finally, the small scale of the college campus makes it relatively easy to exercise leverage over those in power and see concrete results from one’s action. A number of USAS members I interviewed told me stories of sit-ins, hunger strikes, or simply a series of escalating protest actions resulting in administrators making major concessions to them.

None of this is to say that successful student activism is easy—it still requires a lot of dedication and hard work. It is simply an easier arena in which to engage in social activism that many other contexts social justice activists find themselves in.

USAS was able to use these circumstances to help sweatshop workers on the other side of the world unionize and otherwise improve their conditions. They were able to do this because so many colleges and universities have licensing agreements with major apparel firms like Nike and Champion, where the companies are allowed to produce clothing with the school’s name and logo on it and the school gets a cut of the resulting profits. Apparel companies value these deals because it gives them access to a captive audience for marketing and they believe they can use this to build lifetime brand loyalty. This gave student activists potential leverage over these companies. USAS pushed administrators to put in place pro-labor rights code of conduct for their licensees and to require the companies to allow inspections by the Worker Rights Consortium, an independent monitoring organization, to verify compliance—and they have pushed colleges to threaten to suspend or cancel their licensing agreements when licensees are found to be violating the codes of conduct.. This has forced companies like Nike and Champion to address problems when they are caught red-handed using sweatshop labor.

USAS is not unique in being able to use the small scale of the college campus to exert wider influence. Our society’s slowly changing attitudes towards sexual harassment, assault and what qualifies as consent have been significantly influenced by activism on college campuses, whose small scale allowed student activists to more easily challenge sexist norms there. And those changes in norms have slowly radiated outward from college campuses. During the 1980s, students were at the forefront of the movement to impose sanctions on apartheid South Africa by pushing college administrators to divest from companies doing business in South Africa. A parallel movement is now pushing colleges to divest from the fossil fuel industry, an industry that must be dismantled to protect our planet’s fragile ecosystem and climate.

Student activism matters both because it is easier to engage in successful activism on college campuses and because victories on college campuses can have important effects on the wider world.

Filed under: american studies, civil rights, economics/business, Education, ethics, Labor Studies, political science, sociology, transnational politics, Urban Studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

On the anniversary of the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950

Posted on September 23, 2019 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Masumi Izumi, author of The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law, writes about the McCarran Internal Security Act, which was enacted on September 23, 1950. 

Four years ago in late September, I spoke to a small attentive crowd and many indifferent passersby in a street protest held at one of the busiest intersections in the city of Kyoto. We were protesting the passage of the national security related bills that were steamrolled the day before. The overwhelming majority of constitutional scholars considered that the bills violated the nation’s pacifist constitution because they allowed the government to send its Self Defense Force troops abroad to take part in military actions unrelated to the defense of the territory of Japan. Tens of thousands of citizens gathered in protest in major cities. Thousands surrounded the Diet building every evening. I took part in a rally in Tokyo, joined a couple of demonstrations in Osaka, and walked with my daughter in several marches in Kyoto.

Over many years as a historian, I had interviewed Asian North American grassroots social activists. I wrote papers about political and cultural activism in the postwar Japanese American and Canadian communities. But I was not an activist myself. On that day at the protest rally, I asked the crowd and the passersby: “After the 9/11 attack, the U.S. government passed the Patriot Act and told people that everyone needed to be under surveillance because terrorists might be hiding among them. Then the U.S. government attacked Iraq on an accusation that later turned out to be a lie. Today, the Japanese government is telling us that we are threatened by our neighboring countries, that we need to remilitarize, and that we need to give up our liberties because excessive freedom jeopardizes our nation. But isn’t it our freedom that protects us, because it is our inalienable human rights that hold our government accountable?”

Since the return of a conservative cabinet led by an ultra-nationalistic Liberal Democratic Party prime minister in 2012, I have found myself living under a reactionary regime that imposed a series of repressive legislations. The LDP-Komei Party coalition passed the Specially Designated Secrets Act in 2013, steamrolled the National Security Acts in 2015, and made “conspiracy to commit a crime” a criminal offense in 2017. When the Security Acts passed, it felt as if the protective shield for our land and our people – our pacifist constitution – lost its effect.

Rise and Fall of America's Concentration Camp Law_sm_borderIt was around this time that I restarted my effort to publish the book based on my Ph.D dissertation. In The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law: Civil Liberties Debates from the Internment to McCarthyism and the Radical 1960s, I chronicle the passage and repeal of the Emergency Detention Act, or Title II of the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950 (hereafter Title II). I elucidate how Japanese American wartime mass incarceration provided a legal precedent for this law. Through discourse analyses, I show how Japanese Americans were discursively placed outside the constitutional protection of civil liberties. The analyses requires a revision in historical interpretations of Japanese American incarceration that it was not only important as an example of mass incarceration of a racial minority but it also was a sinister legal precedent for preventive detention of individuals considered potentially dangerous for national security. I do not mean that Japanese Americans posed threat to national security. In reality they did not. But the Executive Order 9066 granted the military a sweeping power to designate any part of the U.S. to be a defense zone from which it could exclude anybody in the name of national security. This expanded the government’s war power, and it led, in the Cold War period, to the authorization of the government to detain any person whom the government considered might engage in acts of espionage or sabotage. The book also depicts how a Japanese American grassroots movement to repeal Title II, or the “concentration camp law,” led Americans to reflect on their nation’s past and present racism and political oppressions in a critical light in the late 1960s.

When I wrote my dissertation, I meant to write about the past in a foreign country. Now, as I see my book come out in print, I am engaged in an actual struggle to halt the governmental efforts to undermine civil liberties and human rights in my country. I am also witnessing intense protests in the United States against immigrant detention, and I see global movements arising against neo-liberal economic policies and calling for actions to stop the climate change. If I had a choice, I would rather be a historian chronicling activisms in the past, because it feels much safer to study what happened in hindsight. I realize how scary it is to be active when we do not know the consequences of our actions or inactions. But perhaps only through our own struggles, we can understand the fears and hopes experienced by the past activists whom we write about.

Filed under: american studies, civil rights, cultural studies, ethics, History, immigration, political science, race and ethnicity, racism, sociology, transnational politics, Urban Studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Celebrating the Olympics and Black History Month

Posted on February 14, 2018 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, we pay tribute to both the Olympics and Black History Month by reposting our Q&A with Tommie Smith for his book Silent Gesture.

Q: Congratulations on your book. Why did you wait almost 40 years to tell your story?
A: My life wasn’t ready to be told in story until there was a closure with my athletic, teaching, and coaching career. The time I needed to devote to such an adventure was too great. You have to begin somewhere to be great. The race began in 1968 and now it is time to tell the journey of “how did I get to this race, and where did I go when it was over?”

Q: You say you “never regretted” your actions on the victory stand, “and never will”—that it was, as you write—”something I felt I had no choice in doing.” Did you think at the time that your protest would become one of the most famous protests in sports history?
A: I do not feel remorseful about the act on the victory stand as it was an act of “faith.” Because I believe in “hope” for our changing society, the evidence of non-equality had to be challenged. At the time, my “visual” on the victory stand was not thought of as a portrait to be classified as a picture of history, but as a cry for freedom.

Q: Do you think that such a protest could take place now?
A: Making the same gesture now is defeat; let us repeat the cry with sounds of understanding and deliverance.
Layout 1

“This is a book about principle, commitment, belief; and consequences. And the consequences of consequences. Tommie Smith says his gesture was done in the name of human rights, and in these pages, he offers himself up, in the fullest-the complexity, the scars, the pain, and the affirmation of his own humanity. Should there ever be an appointed time, would that I might show half the commitment and courage. Bravissimo!”
—Delroy Lindo

Q: Can you briefly describe the Olympic Project for Human Rights and discuss your participation in it?
A: The Olympic Project for Human Rights was a non-violent platform used in the athletic arena as a cry for freedom. It originated on the San Jose State University campus in 1967. I was one athlete who chose to involve myself for the human rights issues.

Q: You and your family received death threats and hate mail before and after Mexico City. Were you prepared for this? How did you handle living in fear?
A: My family received hate mail and death threats which altered our daily routine, but we had to continue to remain calm and socially aware. There are still some [people] who do not change and there are some who have made progress.

Q: You have been “forever linked” with John Carlos (Bronze medal winner at the 1968 Mexico City games) on and off since the Olympics. How has your relationship with him been over the years since your “silent gesture”?
A: I had not known John Carlos until my senior year in college, in 1967. Since then, my response to John has been a respectful acquaintance.

Q: You talk about how San Jose State welcomed you back and dedicated a statue to you and John Carlos. How have attitudes towards you—and your actions—changed over time?
A: When I returned to the San Jose State University for the statue dedication, attitudes were fresh, warm and respectful. The student body and administration was knowledgeable and unafraid in their quest to identify pioneers from the past and ideally, former students such as John Carlos and me.

Q: You have worked as a track & field coach and talk about your coaches in Silent Gesture. Do you have any particular mentors and coaches that influenced you?
A: There are two coaches in my past that I will forever remember because of their knowledge and their social attitude. They were positive “in the time of need.” Lloyd C. “Bud” Winter, my college coach and Bill Walsh, my professional football area coach with the Cincinnati Bengals.

Q: Silent Gesture dispels the rumors that you were a member of the Black Panthers. Your book also clears the record that the Mexico City Olympic Committee did not take for your medals back, or throw you out of the Olympic Village. Can you discuss these rumors?
A: Tommie Smith has never been a Black Panther. I am still in possession of my gold medal—I won the race fair and square, and so the medal is mine. I stayed in the Olympic Village until the race was over, and I returned the next day to get my belongings. As I was leaving, the press was everywhere, so kicking me out of the Olympic Village was a “helpful exit.”

Q: I understand at one point in time you were interested in selling your medals. Is that true? Why did you consider this?
A: I will answer a question with a question…Can you find a Humanitarian donor for $500,000?

Q: You are a hero to many for your actions—who were your heroes?
A: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a man who had a Dream of Freedom and Equality, and my father, Richard Smith, who taught me pain is obvious, but how you react is not.

Q:  What do you think yo ur legacy will be?
A: I want to leave a legacy that says, “Tommie Smith was a Man who also had a Dream and a Vision and his Standing was not in vain.”

 

Filed under: african american studies, american studies, civil rights, History, Mass Media and Communications, political science, race and ethnicity, racism, sociology, sports, Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Celebrating the life and times of the extraordinary Octavius Catto, and the first civil rights movement in America

Posted on September 20, 2017 by gkramer

This week, in North Philly Notes, we honor Octavius Valentine Catto, the subject of Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin’s majestic biography, Tasting Freedom. Catto is being honored with a statue that will be unveiled on the apron of Philadelphia’s City Hall on September 26 at 11:00 am. 

A video interview with the authors of Tasting Freedom

 

A Q&A with the authors of Tasting Freedom

Q: Octavius Catto was a pioneer of the Civil Rights movement in the Civil War era. Where did you hear about him, why is he so little known, and what prompted you to write his life and times?
A: Murray discovered him in 1993 while doing research for a book he was writing on the history of South Philadelphia. Dan heard a historian talking on the radio about black life in the city in the 19th century and discussing Catto. Catto is little known because he died so young, before he had a chance to become prominent on the national scene. We both thought his life was extraordinary.

Q: How and where did you do your research? What surprises did you discover?
A: We did our research in Pennsylvania, New York, Washington D.C., South Carolina and New Jersey in churches, college reading rooms, and the Library of Congress. We scoured diaries, letters, newspapers, census records, box scores and song sheets in an effort that took more than seven years. We didn’t realize until more than a year into the work that there was a civil rights movement in the 19th century.

Q: Tasting Freedom provides an extensive history of the Civil War era and how African Americans faced racism on the baseball field, on streetcars, as voters, in the military etc. How did Catto and his “band of brothers” combat this discrimination?
A: He and his contemporaries in the North needed to fight for many rights that whites took for granted. Their weapons were their organizing skills to mold public opinion and educate whites, exemplary public behavior, bravery on the Civil War battlefield and physical courage in the face of threats and bodily harm to integrate the streetcars.

Q: Catto taught at the Institute for Colored Youth. He was very instrumental in educating free slaves and helping them get established. His famous speech at a graduation begins, “There Must Come a Change!” It started as a history of the school and ended with a call for equal rights. It had an immediate impact and was reprinted and circulated widely. How far-reaching was his speech?
A: The Institute for Colored Youth sent more teachers South to teach freed slaves and their children than any other school in the nation. It’s clear that I.C.Y. students were listening to Catto.

Q: Catto’s story intersects with historical figures such as the “feminist”/abolitionist Lucretia Mott, and famous orators like Frederick Douglass, with whom he shared stages. How did Catto establish himself in Philadelphia society and make the social/political connections he did?
A: Catto was a prominent educator who ran the boys school at the Institute for Colored Youth, the best school for black youth in the city, and arguably the best school for youth of any color. That elevated him to an important role in the community. He was a charismatic speaker who was the son of a well-known clergyman. Active in civil rights activities in his 20s, he fought the same battles that Douglass and Mott were fighting. And he was a rising Republican leader in the black community.

Tasting Freedom_AD(12-16-09) finalQ: Tasting Freedom has a terrific chapter about baseball and Catto’s experiences with the Pythians. Unable to integrate baseball, interracial matches were played unofficially with Catto’s team playing in the first game between white and black clubs. Did he have the respect of whites, or did he have a negative reputation?
A: The Philadelphia Athletics, the top white team in the city in the 1860s, permitted the Pythians to play on the Athletics’ field and were supporters of Catto’s effort to compete against white teams. It was not uncommon to see white ballplayers in the stands watching Pythian games.

Q: The chapter on the battle for streetcars shows Catto’s strength as an agitator. He tried to change laws. What do you think he could have accomplished had his life not been cut short?
A: That’s the question we wish we could answer. But we’ll try: We believe he would run for public office locally and won, and then would have sought higher office in the state. We also believe he might have received an appointment by the President to represent the United States overseas in a diplomatic position. And we think he may have left Philadelphia at some point to run his own school, perhaps in the South.

Q: You provide detailed descriptions of Catto’s enemies and the reaction to his death and its aftermath. How great was the riot that occurred?
A: Catto was shot to death in an 1871 election-day riot in Philadelphia that was one of the worst days of violence that the city had ever seen. We described the riot in the book as “five blocks in one direction and three in the other.” Scores of black men were shot and beaten and an untold number were scared away from the polls.

Q: You end Tasting Freedom with an epilogue on Catto’s legacy. How do you measure Catto’s contribution to history?
A: Influence is difficult to measure. We know that W.E.B. Du Bois knew about Catto because he wrote about him in “The Philadelphia Negro.” And we know that black leaders in the early 20th century read Du Bois. So it makes sense to say that Catto’s life was known to the black men and women who began the NAACP and who led the Harlem Renaissance. We also know students that Catto taught became civil rights leaders in the South and went on to teach black students across the nation.

Q: So what are two white guys doing writing about African American history?
A: We are newspaper guys and what we care about our good stories. The story of Catto’s life is a great story that no one has ever told. Even more important is the story of the civil rights movement in the 19th century, which has been little told. We thought that putting the two together would be a great yarn.

Filed under: african american studies, american studies, civil rights, cultural studies, Education, ethics, History, law & criminology, Mass Media and Communications, Philadelphia, political science, race and ethnicity, racism, Religion, sociology, Urban Studies, women's studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started