IN THE EARLY morning of March 12, 1930, Mohandas Gandhi and a trained cadre of seventy-eight followers from his ashram began a march of more than two hundred miles to the sea. Three and a half weeks later, on April 5, surrounded by a crowd of thousands, Gandhi waded into the edge of the ocean, approached an area on the mud flats where evaporating water left a thick layer of sediment, and scooped up a handful of salt.1
History remembers the Salt March as one of the great episodes of resistance in the past century and as an effort that struck a decisive blow against imperialism. Gandhi’s act defied a law of the British Raj, as the state of foreign rule was commonly known, which mandated that Indians buy salt from the government and prohibited them from collecting their own. Soon, Gandhi’s disobedience inspired much wider resistance, setting off a mass campaign of noncompliance that swept the country and led to more than sixty thousand arrests. In a famous quote published in the Manchester Guardian on May 17, 1930, revered Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore described the campaign’s transformative impact: “Those who live in England, far away from the East, have now got to realize that Europe has completely lost her former prestige in Asia.” For the absentee rulers in London, Tagore argued, it was “a great moral defeat.”2
Yet judging by what Gandhi gained at the bargaining table at the conclusion of the drive, it is possible to form a very different view of the salt satyagraha. Evaluating the 1931 settlement made between Gandhi and Lord Irwin, the Viceroy of India, analysts Peter Ackerman and Christopher Kruegler have contended that “the campaign was a failure” and “a British victory,” and that it would be reasonable to think that Gandhi “gave away the store.” There are many precedents for these conclusions. When the pact with Lord Irwin was first announced, it was a bitter disappointment to insiders within the Indian National Congress, an organization that had been founded in 1885 and had risen to nationwide prominence, with Gandhi taking on significant leadership roles starting in 1920. Congress’s top officials were hardly thrilled with the agreement that Gandhi had brokered with Irwin. Future Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, deeply depressed, wrote that he felt in his heart “a great emptiness as of something precious gone, almost beyond recall.”3
That the Salt March might at once be considered a pivotal advance for the cause of Indian independence and a botched campaign that produced few tangible results seems to be a puzzling contradiction. Even stranger is the fact that such a result is not unique in the world of civil resistance. When Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference concluded their drive in Birmingham, the campaign presented similarly incongruous outcomes: on the one hand, it generated a settlement that fell far short of desegregating the city, disappointing local activists who wanted more than just minor changes at a few downtown stores. At the same time, Birmingham became one of the key drives of the civil rights movement, doing perhaps more than any other campaign to push forward the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964.
This paradox is worthy of examination. One of the biggest differences between momentum-driven organizing and other forms of politics is its approach to evaluating the success of a campaign. From start to finish—in both the way he structured the demands of the Salt March and the way he brought this drive to a close—Gandhi confounded the more conventional political operatives of his era. Yet the movements he led profoundly shook the structures of British imperialism. Many of the guiding principles of his campaigns remain relevant today, offering lessons both useful and unexpected.
With the Salt March, Gandhi showed how momentum-driven movements often use demands in an unorthodox fashion.
All protest actions, campaigns, and demands have both instrumental and symbolic dimensions. Different types of political organizing, however, combine these in different proportions. In transactional politics, demands are primarily instrumental, designed to have a specific and concrete result within the system. In this model, interest groups push for policies or reforms that benefit their members. These demands are carefully chosen based on what might be feasible to achieve, given the confines of the existing political landscape. Once a drive for an instrumental demand is launched, advocates attempt to leverage their group’s power to extract a concession or compromise that meets their needs. If they can deliver for their members, they win.
Even though they function primarily outside the realm of electoral politics, structure-based organizations—such as labor unions and community-based organizations in the lineage of Saul Alinsky—approach demands in a primarily instrumental fashion. Alinsky prided himself on being a political realist. He believed that people were not motivated by abstract values or ideology. “In the world as it is,” he wrote, “man moves primarily because of self-interest.” As author and organizer Rinku Sen explains, Alinsky established a long-standing norm that “Organizing should target winning immediate, concrete changes,” taking on issues that speak to the self-interest of the group of people that is organizing. Ideally, the demands should be neither divisive nor ideologically loaded.4
A famous example of this type of instrumental objective in community organizing is the demand for a stop sign at an intersection identified by neighborhood residents as being dangerous; by winning the stop sign, the community organization both demonstrates its power and makes a small, tangible improvement in people’s lives. But the stop sign is just one option. Alinskyite groups might attempt to win better staffing at local social service offices, an end to discriminatory redlining of a particular neighborhood by banks and insurance companies, or a new bus route to provide reliable transportation in an underserved area. Environmental groups might push for a ban on a specific chemical known to be toxic to wildlife. A union might wage a fight to win a raise for a particular group of employees at a workplace, or to address a scheduling problem.
By eking out modest, pragmatic wins around such issues, these groups get concrete results and bolster their organizational structures. The hope is that, over time, their power will grow and small gains will add up to substantial reforms. Slowly and steadily, social change is achieved.
Momentum-driven mass mobilizations function differently. For activists pursuing a transformational route to change, it is critical to create a narrative about the moral significance of their struggle. Therefore, they must design actions and choose demands that tap into broader principles. In this context, the most important characteristic of a demand is not its potential policy impact or enforceability as a contract provision. Most critical are its symbolic properties—how well a demand serves to dramatize for the public the urgent need to remedy an injustice.
The specific policy proposals and legal mechanisms used to enact change are important. However, most of the decisive negotiations over details come in the latter stages of a movement: transactional deliberations take place once public opinion has shifted and powerholders are scrambling to respond to disruptions that activist mobilizations have created. In the early phases, as mass movements gain steam, the key measure of a demand is its capacity to resonate with the public and arouse broad-based sympathy for a cause. In other words, the symbolic trumps the instrumental.
A good example of how the symbolic dimensions of a campaign can become far more significant than its purely instrumental objectives is the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which began on December 5, 1955. Here, it was the symbolic idea of challenging Jim Crow injustice that captured the national imagination—so much so that the limited instrumental goals outlined at the start of the campaign were almost entirely forgotten.
Today, the boycott is remembered as a campaign based around African American citizens’ iconic refusal to “go to the back of the bus.” But, interestingly, the demands initially presented by civil rights leaders were very modest. The activists proposed a new seating plan that modified but did not eliminate discrimination on buses. The plan mandated that, on any given bus, whites would begin filling the seats from the front to the back, while black riders would take seats from the back to the front, and no one would be asked to give up their seat. Organizers also demanded “a guarantee of courteous treatment” and “employment of Negro bus operators on predominantly Negro routes.” In other words, they proposed a kinder, more polite form of segregation.5
What galvanized the entire African American community in Montgomery—and resonated throughout much of the nation—was not this limited set of negotiating points but rather the larger cry for dignity embodied in the boycott. Gussie Nesbitt, a fifty-three-year-old domestic worker and NAACP member, recalled her reason for refusing to ride the bus to work, despite having to endure a long daily walk as a result: “Before the boycott, we were stuffed in the back of the bus just like cattle,” Nesbitt explained. “I wanted to be one of them that tried to make it better. I didn’t want somebody else to make it better for me. I walked.”6
It was not until the bus boycott had been in force for two months that leaders of the Montgomery Improvement Association, with King as its president, dropped public insistence that “At no time have we raised the race issue in the movement, nor have we directed our aim at segregation laws.” They filed a lawsuit with just such an aim. In the time it took for the case to wind its way through the federal courts, the boycott passed its one-year anniversary, retaining strong community support. By then, obstinate city officials might have wished that they had simply agreed to the original demands submitted by civil rights organizers. In December 1956, the Supreme Court sided with the boycotters, ordering Montgomery officials to desegregate the city’s bus system entirely.7
In the decades since then, a variety of thinkers have suggested that mass movements have good reason to make the symbolic properties of their demands an intentional priority.
Because momentum-driven efforts pursue a more indirect route to creating change, they must be attentive to creating a narrative in which their campaigns are consistently gaining ground and presenting new challenges to those in power. In his 2001 book Doing Democracy, Bill Moyer, a veteran social movement trainer, stresses the importance of “sociodrama actions” that “clearly reveal to the public how the powerholders violate society’s widely held values.” Through well-planned actions—the protests in Birmingham and the creative stunts in Serbia being prime examples—movements engage in a process of “politics as theater.” In Moyer’s words, this drama “creates a public social crisis that transforms a social problem into a critical public issue.”8
The types of narrow proposals that are useful in the behind-the-scenes negotiations of transactional politics are generally not the kinds of demands that inspire effective sociodrama. Commenting on this theme, leading New Left organizer and anti–Vietnam War activist Tom Hayden argues that mass movements are propelled by a specific type of symbolically loaded issue—namely, “moral injuries that compel a moral response.”9
In his book The Long Sixties, Hayden cites several examples, including the right to leaflet for Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement and the desegregation of lunch counters for the civil rights movement. Although these demands had instrumental consequence, they also had dimensions beyond their immediate practicability. “The grievances were not simply the material kind, which could be solved by slight adjustments to the status quo,” Hayden writes. Instead, they posed unique challenges to those in power. “To desegregate one lunch counter would begin a tipping process toward the desegregation of larger institutions; to permit student leafleting would legitimize a student voice in decisions.” The measure of these demands was not merely whether they served the short-term self-interest of the group that was organizing; their importance was that they exhibited a powerful moral draw that allowed movements to gain active supporters and engender public sympathy.
Structure-based organizers pursuing an instrumental demand attempt to communicate with narrowly defined audiences: namely, the group of people they are rallying within their organization and the specific powerbroker who might grant their demand. The call for a stop sign at an intersection—just like the need for a scheduling change in a given workplace—serves as a compelling issue for the limited group of people affected, and it is clearly actionable for those in power. But such demands are often too tightly focused or too technocratic in nature to captivate the public at large.
Transformative movements, seeking to build widespread popular support, must dramatize broader dimensions of their struggle. Sometimes they are willing to take on a symbolically loaded fight, even if it yields little of instrumental value in the short term.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the contrast between symbolic and instrumental demands can create conflict between activists coming from different organizing traditions. Saul Alinsky was suspicious of actions that produced only “moral victories,” and he derided symbolic demonstrations that he viewed as mere public relations stunts. Ed Chambers, who took over as director of Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation, shared his mentor’s suspicion of mass mobilizations. In his book Roots for Radicals, Chambers writes, “The movements of the 1960s and 70s—the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the women’s movement—were vivid, dramatic, and attractive.” Yet, in their commitment to “romantic issues,” Chambers believes, they were too focused on attracting the attention of the media rather than exacting instrumental gains. “Members of these movements often concentrated on symbolic moral victories like placing flowers in the rifle barrels of National Guardsmen, embarrassing a politician for a moment or two, or enraging white racists,” he writes. “They often avoided any reflection about whether or not the moral victories led to any real change.”10
In his time, Gandhi would hear many similar criticisms. Yet the impact of campaigns such as his march to the sea would provide a formidable rebuttal.
The salt satyagraha is a defining example of using escalating, militant, and unarmed confrontation to rally public support and effect change. It is also a case in which the use of symbolic demands, at least initially, provoked ridicule and consternation.
When Gandhi was charged with selecting a target for civil disobedience, he made a preposterous choice. That is, according to the political insiders of the time. It was ridiculous, they thought, to treat the salt law as the lynchpin of the Indian National Congress’s challenge to British rule. Mocking Gandhi’s fixation on salt, the English-language newspaper The Statesman noted, “It is difficult not to laugh, and we imagine that will be the mood of most thinking Indians.”11
In 1930, the instrumentally focused organizers within the Indian National Congress trained their attention on constitutional questions—whether India would gain greater autonomy by winning “dominion status” from the British and what steps toward such an arrangement the Raj might concede. Their preferred demands revolved around these issues. The salt laws were a minor concern at best. It seemed ludicrous that Gandhi would give so much attention to this triviality rather than to critical matters pertaining to when the British would leave.
Gandhi had not made his choice lightly, however. It had emerged from a long study of the principles of mass uprising. At the beginning of his career, Gandhi had been trained as a lawyer, and as a young professional he had been reared in the mind-set of transactional campaigning. As he later explained, “I was a believer in the politics of petitions, deputations, and friendly negotiations.” But, as he immersed himself in experimentation with civil resistance—first in South Africa, and then in India—his orientation changed. Biographer Geoffrey Ashe argues that, in 1930, Gandhi’s choice of salt as a basis for a campaign was “the weirdest and most brilliant political challenge of modern times.”12
It was brilliant because defiance of the salt law was loaded with symbolic significance. “Next to air and water,” Gandhi argued, “salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life.” It was a simple commodity that everyone was compelled to buy and which the government taxed. Since the time of the Mughal Empire, the state’s control over salt was a hated reality. The fact that Indians were not permitted to freely collect salt from natural deposits or to pan for salt from the sea was a clear illustration of how a foreign power was unjustly profiting from the subcontinent’s people and its resources.13
Because the tax affected everyone, the grievance was universally felt. The fact that it most heavily burdened the poor added to its outrage. The price of salt charged by the government, Ashe writes, “had a built-in levy—not large, but enough to cost a laborer with a family up to two weeks wages a year.” It was a textbook moral injury. And people responded swiftly to Gandhi’s drive against it.14
Indeed, those who had ridiculed the campaign soon had reason to stop laughing. In each village through which the satyagrahis marched, they attracted massive crowds—with as many as thirty thousand people gathering to see the pilgrims pray and to hear Gandhi speak of the need for self-rule. As historian Judith Brown writes, Gandhi “grasped intuitively that civil resistance was in many ways an exercise in political theater, where the audience was as important as the actors.” In the procession’s wake, hundreds of Indians who served in local administrative posts for the imperial government resigned their positions.15
After the march reached the sea and disobedience began, the campaign achieved an impressive scale. Throughout the country, huge numbers of dissidents began panning for salt and mining natural deposits. Buying illegal packets of the mineral, even if they were of poor quality, became a badge of honor for millions. The Indian National Congress set up its own salt depot, and groups of organized activists led nonviolent raids on the government saltworks, blocking roads and entrances with their bodies in an attempt to shut down production. News reports of the beatings and hospitalizations that resulted were broadcast throughout the world.
Soon, the defiance expanded to incorporate local grievances and to take on additional acts of noncooperation. Millions joined a boycott of British cloth and liquor, a growing number of village officials resigned their posts, and, in some provinces, farmers refused to pay land taxes. In increasingly varied forms, mass noncompliance took hold throughout a vast territory. Despite arrests, property seizures, and public whippings by British authorities, it continued month after month. Through the summer of 1930, “the Raj was slowly running down,” writes Ashe. “Repressive measures went on and on with no end in sight. . . . But in spite of these, and the censorship and propaganda, there were few signs of a return to cooperation.”16
Sparking such national rebellion was a remarkable feat. Finding issues that could “attract wide support and maintain the cohesion of the movement,” Brown notes, was “no simple task in a country where there were such regional, religious, and socio-economic differences.” And yet, salt fit the bill precisely. Motilal Nehru, revered two-time president of the Indian National Congress and father of the country’s future prime minister, remarked admiringly: “The only wonder is that no one else ever thought of it.”17
If the choice of salt as a demand had been controversial, the manner in which Gandhi concluded the campaign would be equally so—at least when judged by instrumental standards. By early 1931, after some nine months of protest, the campaign had reverberated throughout the country, yet it was also losing momentum. Repression had finally taken a toll: much of Congress’s leadership had been arrested, and tax resisters whose property had been claimed by the government were facing significant financial hardship. Moderate politicians and members of the business community who supported the Indian National Congress appealed to Gandhi for a resolution. Even many militants with the organization concurred that talks were appropriate.18
Accordingly, Gandhi entered into negotiations in February 1931 with Lord Irwin, who, as viceroy, was the highest-ranking British official in India. On March 5, the two announced a pact. On paper, many historians have argued, it was an anticlimax. The key terms of the agreement hardly seemed favorable to the Indian National Congress: in exchange for suspending civil disobedience, protesters being held in jail would be released, their cases would be dropped, and, with some exceptions, the government would lift the repressive security ordinances it had imposed during the satyagraha. Authorities would return fines collected by the government for tax resistance as well as seized property that had not yet been sold to third parties. And activists would be permitted to continue a peaceful boycott of British cloth.
However, the pact deferred discussion of questions about independence to future talks, with the British making no commitments to loosen their grip on power. (Gandhi would attend a Round Table Conference in London later in 1931 to continue negotiations, but this meeting made little headway.) The government refused to conduct an inquiry into police action during the protest campaign, which had been a firm demand of Congress activists. Finally, and perhaps most shockingly, the Salt Act itself would remain law, with the concession that the poor in coastal areas would be allowed to produce salt in limited quantities for their own use.19
Some of the politicians closest to Gandhi felt dismayed by the terms of the agreement, and a variety of historians have joined in their assessment that the campaign failed to reach its goals. In retrospect, it is certainly legitimate to argue about whether Gandhi gave away too much in negotiations. At the same time, to view the settlement merely in instrumental terms is to miss its most important achievements.
If not by short-term, incremental gains, how does a campaign that employs symbolic demands or tactics measure its success?
For momentum-driven mass mobilizations, there are two essential metrics by which to judge progress. Because the long-term goal of a transformative movement is to shift public opinion on an issue, the first measure is whether a given campaign has won more popular support for a movement’s overall cause. The second measure is whether a campaign builds the capacity of the movement to escalate further. If a drive allows activists to fight another day from a position of greater strength—with more members, superior resources, enhanced legitimacy and an expanded tactical arsenal—organizers can make a convincing case that they have succeeded, regardless of whether the campaign has yet made significant progress in closed-door bargaining sessions.
Throughout his time as a movement leader, Gandhi stressed the importance of being willing to compromise on nonessentials. As political scientist Joan Bondurant observed in her perceptive early study of the principles of satyagraha, one of Gandhi’s political tenets was the “reduction of demands to a minimum consistent with the truth.” The pact with Irwin, Gandhi believed, gave him such a minimum, allowing the movement to end the campaign in a dignified fashion and to prepare for future struggle. For Gandhi, the viceroy’s agreement to allow for exceptions to the salt law, even if they were limited, represented a critical triumph of principle. Moreover, he had forced the British to negotiate as equals—a vital precedent that would be extended into subsequent talks over independence.20
In their own fashion, many of Gandhi’s adversaries agreed on the significance of these concessions, seeing the pact as a misstep of lasting consequence for imperial powers. As Ashe writes, the British officialdom in Delhi “ever afterwards . . . groaned over Irwin’s move as the fatal blunder from which the Raj never recovered.” In a now-infamous speech, Winston Churchill, a leading defender of the British Empire, proclaimed that it was “alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi . . . striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace . . . to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.”21
The move, he elsewhere claimed, had allowed Gandhi—a man he saw as a “fanatic” and a “fakir”—to step out of prison and emerge on the scene “a triumphant victor.”22
While Indian National Congress insiders had conflicted views about the campaign’s outcome, the broad public was far less equivocal. Subhas Chandra Bose, one of the radicals in Gandhi’s organization who was skeptical of the pact with Irwin, had to revise his view when he took in the reaction in the countryside. As Ashe recounts, when Bose traveled with Gandhi from Bombay to Delhi, he “saw ovations such as he had never witnessed before.” Bose recognized the vindication. “The Mahatma had judged correctly,” Ashe continues. “By all the rules of politics he had been checked. But in the people’s eyes, the plain fact that the Englishman had been brought to negotiate instead of giving orders outweighed any number of details.”23
In his influential 1950 biography of Gandhi, still widely read today, Louis Fischer provides a most dramatic appraisal of the Salt March’s legacy: “India was now free,” he writes. “Technically, legally, nothing had changed. India was still a British colony.” And yet, after the salt satyagraha, “it was inevitable that Britain should some day refuse to rule India and that India should some day refuse to be ruled.”24
Subsequent historians have sought to provide more nuanced accounts of Gandhi’s contribution to Indian independence, distancing themselves from a first generation of hagiographic biographies that uncritically held up Gandhi as the “father of a nation.” Writing in 2009, Judith Brown cites a variety of social and economic pressures that contributed to Britain’s departure from India, particularly the geopolitical shifts that accompanied the Second World War. Nevertheless, she acknowledges that drives such as the Salt March were critical, playing central roles in building the Indian National Congress’s organization and popular legitimacy. Although mass protests alone did not expel the imperialists, they profoundly altered the political landscape. Civil resistance, Brown writes, “was a crucial part of the environment in which the British had to make decisions about when and how to leave India.”25
In the case of Birmingham, the settlement reached by King and other organizers with downtown merchants was hardly more impressive than Gandhi’s agreement with Lord Irwin. The victory they claimed was a largely symbolic one, but it was no less powerful because of it.
On May 3, 1963, after a month of protests, the young activists who took to the streets as part of the Birmingham movement’s “Children’s Crusade” were met with police dogs and fire hoses, and the scenes of violence made national and international headlines. The following week the conflict only escalated further. More than a thousand protesters were arrested on May 7, and many others were blasted with the hoses. Bull Connor was not dismayed by the violence. When he learned that one of those slammed by a high-pressure stream of water was Birmingham’s most prominent local civil rights leader—the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, then forty-one years old—Connor remarked, “I waited a week to see Shuttlesworth get hit with a hose. I’m sorry I missed it.”26
Local merchants were not so smug. They were keenly aware that the surge of negative media attention was damaging the city’s reputation and that the movement’s boycott was cutting into their profits. In short, they were ready to settle. When influential city elders began getting personal calls from Kennedy administration officials such as Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, they began siding with the merchants and supported a truce.27
The pressure generated by the campaign was working. However, after days of intense negotiations, the concessions made by white leaders were relatively minimal. The final settlement between civil rights activists and white Birmingham officials, announced on May 10, outlined only modest changes. Indeed, each of the provisions in the agreement seemed to have a catch. Yes, fitting rooms at some downtown stores would be desegregated, but this had been considered a relatively painless and uncontroversial concession from the start. The city would begin a process to desegregate lunch counters, and it would order that the “Whites Only” signs on restrooms and water fountains be taken down, but it was not clear how these directives would be enforced. Storeowners agreed that they would hire “at least one sales person or cashier” who was black, but a conservative interpretation of this provision held that only one black employee in the entire city would have to be hired, as opposed to one African American employee in every store, as organizers had intended. Public facilities, such as city parks, would be left unchanged.
Needless to say, these terms represented far less than the total desegregation of the city. Given all of the effort and sacrifice—thousands of arrests, scores of hospitalizations, nationwide outreach, and a nearly complete unsettling of normal daily life in the city—the gains seemed almost inconsequential in comparison.
This fact was not lost on the movement’s opponents, the media, or even some of the SCLC’s own supporters. Sidney Smyer, a powerful businessman and high-profile white negotiator, stated shortly after the agreement that “King won little or nothing.” Assessments in the media reinforced this idea. The day after the May 10 announcement of the accord, the New York Times reported, “The settlement terms fell far short of those sought originally by Dr. King and other Negro leaders.” The remainder of the Times article pointed out the various limitations of the deal, including the fact that Birmingham city officials showed little willingness to promptly implement what narrow accords negotiators on both sides had managed to sort out. Time magazine hit an equally skeptical note when it called the settlement “a fragile truce based on pallid promises.”28
Some activists who had put their personal well-being on the line were outraged by the limited reach of the accord. Fred Shuttlesworth, recovering in his hospital room, was notably nonplussed with the agreement; in advance of announcing the deal, King and Abernathy were left scrambling, in the words of author and journalist Diane McWhorter, “to stanch the leaking rumors of his unhappiness with the peace terms.”29
Although Shuttlesworth had solid ground to be unhappy, in time he would change his view. Critics of the settlement were correct in pointing out that, evaluated using instrumental standards, the deal did not make much headway. In terms of what it would take to eliminate racial divisions in Birmingham, the concessions that movement negotiators accepted could charitably be described as a first step toward ending Jim Crow. Yet they were loaded with symbolism, and they allowed the organizers to negotiate a victory at a time when further protest would have been difficult to sustain. The outcomes of the organization’s efforts proved profound. As Garrow argues, the “SCLC had succeeded in bringing the civil rights struggle to the forefront of the national consciousness. This success far outweighed the narrower question of whether the settlement provided for speedy enough desegregation of Birmingham’s stores or an acceptable number of black sales clerks.”30
Just a month after the movement and city merchants came to a settlement, President John F. Kennedy gave a major televised address announcing that he would put forward federal civil rights legislation. “The events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased cries for equality,” he explained, “that no city or state or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them.” For the civil rights organizers watching, it was a remarkable scene. “No American president had ever made such an unequivocal speech in support of the rights of African-Americans,” Andrew Young observed.31
In a famous turn of phrase, Shuttlesworth would later argue that “but for Birmingham” what was signed by President Johnson as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would not have come into existence. Over the past several decades, this maxim has become widely accepted. Although significant instrumental gains were not an immediate result of the activists’ campaign, it turned out they were not far off. The civil rights movement’s drive in Birmingham did much to propel the passage of legislation at the national level. Within just a few years, as a result of federal action, the city’s Jim Crow apparatus was dismantled in a manner speedier and more sweeping than SCLC organizers could have dared to dream when they first met at Dorchester.
As Gandhi had done some three decades earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. accepted a settlement that had limited instrumental value but that allowed the movement to claim a symbolic win and to emerge in a position of strength. King’s victory in 1963 was not a final one, nor was Gandhi’s in 1931. But its importance very quickly became clear. By the time of the Selma campaign in 1964, Garrow writes, “Birmingham had shown that even small tangible gains could represent extraordinary symbolic victories, even if those people closest to the struggle could not appreciate it at the time.”32
Adam Fairclough adds, “Birmingham, and the protests that immediately followed it, transformed the political climate so that civil rights legislation became feasible; before, it had been impossible.”33
The use of symbolically loaded demands and the acceptance of settlements that adhere to the Gandhian rule of the “minimum consistent with the truth” are not hard-and-fast tenets in momentum-driven organizing. Instead, they represent some of the approaches that activists have taken in addressing a broader issue: what might be called “framing the victory.”
The truth is that, for all social movements, judgments about whether or not a campaign is winning can be somewhat subjective. In a sports contest, a buzzer goes off and a final score is posted; similarly, in an electoral race, a final vote count comes in after the polls close, allowing the winning candidate to claim victory. But for movements pushing forward an issue, the results of ongoing efforts are usually much murkier. What looks like a defeat in the short run may be judged a triumph by history, or vice versa. Often, victory is in the eye of the beholder.
Political insiders, the general public, and social movement participants all have different ways of determining whether a movement is succeeding. And, many times, their metrics can contradict one another.
For insiders functioning within a transactional framework, victory comes when a final legislative deal is brokered or a settlement is signed. The instrumental gains embodied in such agreements serve as clear evidence of what has been achieved. On its face, this looks simple. And yet, the picture is hardly as clear as it might seem. The kinds of compromises produced by transactional politics are never wholly satisfying. There are always caveats and limitations. Almost inevitably, an individual concession, reform, or piece of legislation is only a fragment of what a movement truly wanted to accomplish at the outset. Was the fragment won in an individual campaign worth all of the resources, time, and effort spent? Or should it be regarded as a disappointment? These questions do not have clear-cut answers. They must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
For the general public, a totally different set of criteria determine the success or failure of an activist campaign. Often, perceptions of victory depend on how the media portrays a movement. Positive press coverage of a given protest mobilization or political settlement can create the sense that a movement is triumphant and rising. Meanwhile, press coverage that casts these same events in a skeptical or disparaging light can create a very different impression, fostering the sentiment that a movement is sputtering out and has accomplished little.
Movement participants themselves may judge their progress based on yet another set of standards: whether a demonstration feels empowering; whether the campaign is drawing in new people and creating fresh energy; or whether a given settlement lives up to their earlier expectations, which were subjective to begin with.
If transactional insiders, the public, and protest participants all look at victory in different ways, how do different organizing traditions manage these varying perspectives?
Within structure-based organizing, the challenges of framing the victory are addressed through one-on-one organizing and strong internal communication. A union or community group will work closely with its leadership committees to make sure that there is agreement within the organization about what constitutes an acceptable resolution to their demands. Sometimes this can be a contentious process: internal membership votes about whether to accept or reject a proposed union contract, for example, can be hotly contested. But if the organization can achieve consensus among those within its institutional structure, then it can move on, claiming the instrumental settlement as a win. What the public thinks, or what established powerbrokers make of the deal, matters little.
Momentum-driven organizers—who are trying to channel the power of disruptive mass protest—face a very different situation. For mass movements, conveying a sense of forward progress is essential. In politics, everybody likes to be on the winning team. Campaign consultants are fond of citing the aphorism: “When you lose, everything you do is wrong. When you win, everything you do is right.” Mass mobilizations gain momentum when they are perceived as being winners and doing things right. To build their movement’s capacity and continue winning over public opinion, organizers within this tradition must be able to communicate, both to the movement’s own members and to the public at large, that they are successfully moving toward their goals.
The use of symbolic demands and symbolic victories is a first way to achieve these aims, but there are other approaches as well. Serbian activists employed a second method, one that did not depend on concessions from their opponents.
Otpor placed a great emphasis on demonstrating to the public that it had a winning record. The country’s repressive political context made this a must. Showing signs of progress was essential if the group was going to illustrate that Milosevic was not invincible and that resistance could prevail. And yet, unlike the country’s traditional political parties, Otpor was not attempting to wrestle minor legislative victories or other incremental compromises from the regime. Absent these transactional gains, the movement needed a different way of exhibiting its ongoing success.
Otpor came up with a novel approach: campaigners themselves publicly laid out their standards for what would constitute a win, and then they loudly trumpeted it when they met these objectives, using the publicity to generate momentum. For example, activists might announce a goal of launching ten new chapters. Whether it took weeks or months to accomplish this, they could then make a major show of having met their goal once it happened. Or Otpor might announce the objective of holding simultaneous protests in at least a dozen different cities on a national day of action. Because they set this target themselves, they could be confident that it was attainable. And once it was attained, they again made certain that everybody knew about it. With each completed goal reported in the alternative media or in the movement’s own communications, the fear barrier became that much weaker.
The activists referred to the art of publicizing their victories as “doing post-production,” and they considered it a core part of their methodology. “Everything you do should be capitalized,” one Otpor activist explained to author William Dobson. “First of all, proclaim the victory. Second, be sure that potential members and supporters know about it. You need a victory every week, even small victories. If you are on the defensive, you lose.”34
A key element of this approach was that activists stayed in the driver’s seat. “Claiming victory is an event that you produce on your own,” Ivan Marovic argues. “You don’t wait for someone to grant you victory or somebody to concede. You have to claim it.”35
If Otpor members had structured their public relations around making a demand of the regime and allowing the media to judge their success or failure based on the government’s response, they would have put themselves at the mercy of their opponents, setting themselves up for failure. “Your adversaries are rarely going to grant full acceptance of your demands,” says Marovic. If people’s attention is focused on the messy back-and-forth of negotiations, naysayers can always find grounds for complaint and movement supporters rarely emerge inspired. Otpor’s method allowed them to avoid that. For publicity purposes, Otpor sought to accentuate when the movement made a show of strength and to let insiders worry about muddling through the aftermath.
The activists sometimes summed up the approach with a crafty aphorism: “declare victory and run.”
Perhaps the best example of this method concerned Otpor’s relations with the country’s perpetually bickering political parties. As one of its key objectives, the movement had announced the goal of uniting these forces behind a single opposition candidate. In the last year of Milosevic’s rule, a coalition known as the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, or DOS, formed, bringing the opposition parties into a single network. This was an important step forward; theoretically, it meant that they had agreed to work together. But getting them to actually unite behind a sole candidate for the presidential elections was a far more difficult task.
At an April DOS rally in Belgrade, Otpor forced the issue. Onstage with the opposition party leaders, activist Vlada Pavlov pulled out a flag with the movement’s iconic fist. He then demanded that each politician, in turn, hold the flag and affirm that they would support a single challenger to Milosevic. Put on the spot, none of the party leaders wanted to be the first to break publicly with the movement, whose influence was steadily growing. One by one, the prospective candidates took the vow, some enthusiastically, and some with the look of having swallowed a mouthful of sour milk.36
Otpor used the occasion to announce that its objective of unifying the opposition had been achieved, and they publicized this as a major victory. With this breakthrough, they had eliminated a major obstacle that had prevented people from challenging Milosevic in the past.
In reality, from an instrumental perspective, the only thing that Otpor had won from the political parties was a very vague and somewhat unofficial pledge of unity. The actual process of sorting out what that pledge would mean took several more months of intensive back-room negotiations. It was not until the middle of July, long after the rally, that the formal terms of cooperation for a unified electoral drive had been determined. “It took three months after we claimed victory for the campaign to really bear fruit,” says Marovic.37
But Otpor’s leaders were not interested in waiting for the instrumental end game to play out. They recognized that, although the precise terms of a unity agreement were of great interest to each of the local party chiefs, the public would have been entirely indifferent to the minutiae of the negotiations. The key breakthrough had occurred in April, and activists wanted to make sure that everyone knew about it. For their mission of building popular support against the regime, the principle of unity was the most important thing.
By celebrating the affirmation of that principle, not only was the movement able to add to its winning record but its activists could move on to other tasks while the instrumental details were settled. For them, the best course was clear: declare victory and run.
Gandhi and King accepted limited, instrumental settlements, and then highlighted their symbolic importance. Otpor took a second tack. It did not wait for its opponents to respond. Instead, the young organizers announced their own campaign objectives, and then declared victory when they were met.
A third approach to framing the victory happens at a different level—namely, that of individual protest actions. Whether activists like it or not, the media will often judge the success of a protest based on whether events unfold as organizers intended. If activists advertise that they will produce mass arrests, press reporters will evaluate their success based on whether a significant number of people are actually taken into custody. If organizers claim they will prevent a store from doing business for a day, the media will focus on whether storeowners are able to sell anything during that time. If campaigners vow that they will go twenty-one days without food to protest budget cuts, reporters will judge their success based on whether or not the hunger strike actually lasts the full three weeks.38
Never mind that the true point of any of these protests might be to raise public awareness or advance a wider goal. The plan for the demonstration—what is known as the “action scenario”—itself becomes the center of the narrative.
There are countless examples of this dynamic. In 1995, conveners of the Million Man March, led by controversial Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, attempted to create the largest rally ever in Washington, DC, by bringing African American men to the nation’s capital. When the march actually took place, on October 16 of that year, the National Park Service estimated attendance at 400,000, and the low count led to a widespread feeling that the march had failed. The Park Service estimate outraged event organizers. Because the march had promised a million people in its very name, the debate about numbers became the dominant standard by which the event was evaluated. Discussion about whether the mobilization had constructive impact in unifying civil rights groups or focusing national attention on the problems facing black men was largely eclipsed.39
In the case of Occupy Wall Street, the mobilization’s premise demanded that activists hold public space. Therefore, the idea of “occupation” became decisive—for both participants and outside observers. As long as protest encampments remained intact in places such as Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, the movement was succeeding in its stated goal. But once police evicted the camps, the feeling that the movement had been defeated quickly spread.
This phenomenon cannot be entirely controlled by social movement participants. But organizers who are cognizant of it can sometimes manipulate things to their advantage. Although they were known for a different approach—basing victories on self-determined campaign objectives—Otpor sometimes used individual action scenarios to demonstrate success as well. At one point, as their movement was gaining steam, Belgrade activists announced that they would undertake an audacious feat: blockading one of the area’s major international highways in defiance of the regime. They subsequently did so and sent the photographic evidence to the media, which reported their bold accomplishment.
What the activists conveniently neglected to mention was that they carried out their protest at a time of the day when traffic was at a lull, and relatively few vehicles were affected. Moreover, their blockade held for all of fifteen minutes—long enough to take some decent photos, but not so long that the cops had time to bust the participants. These details did not prove to be a problem. The activists had indeed blocked the highway, just as they had promised, and they could mark another win in their ledger. Although the triumph they claimed fell far short of the final goal of ousting Milosevic, it effectively inspired greater defiance.40
A movement need not be so roguish about how it claims its successes. But, if it fails to pay attention to how it sets the stage for the story of a protest, it can easily lose control of its dramatic production. Organizers risk allowing the media to define the effectiveness of its protests for them and jeopardizing their ability to generate momentum for the future.
In 1999, protests in Seattle against ministerial meetings of the World Trade Organization exploded into headlines when they accomplished what a key activist slogan promised to do: namely, “Shut It Down.” Blockades of people linked arms or chained themselves together with lockboxes, clogging entrances to the convention center and preventing trade delegates from attending the opening session of the talks. In response, police filled the streets with tear gas, officials such as US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright remained sequestered in their hotel rooms, and the opening session was canceled. Although the trade meetings resumed on subsequent days, the protest was hailed as a sensational success.
The same scenario backfired a few months later, however. When a similar blockade was attempted in April 2000 outside the meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC, the rallying cry of “shut it down” became a liability. In that case, police successfully opened up gaps in the activists’ lines. Because the meetings’ attendees were able to slip through, many deemed the actions a failure. This despite the fact that the A16 protests, as they were known, drew unprecedented attention to criticisms of World Bank and IMF policy—and that, in time, the wider global justice movement helped produce victories worth billions of dollars around issues such as debt cancelation for countries in the Global South. These wider impacts remained peripheral. The theatrical logic of the action demanded that the blockade keep out the meeting’s delegates, and when it did not, a perception of defeat spread widely. Movement participants themselves absorbed much of the media’s negativity, and, in the aftermath of the protest, many felt demoralized. Organizers working against the international financial institutions persevered, but they did not receive the same boost in energy and enthusiasm they might have otherwise.
In momentum-driven organizing, the challenge of framing the victory is twofold. First, for the public, the movement must create dramas in which resistance efforts can emerge triumphant at times when instrumental results have not yet been clearly established. Second, within the movement, participants must understand the theory of change so that they are resilient in the face of fickle press coverage. They should feel confident that if the movement is swaying popular opinion and it has emerged with a stronger core of supporters as a result of its actions, their efforts are progressing—regardless of whether reporters present them that way.
It rarely is the case that the demands of a campaign are purely symbolic or purely instrumental—and the same is true of the resolutions negotiated at the end of the movement. Symbolic and instrumental elements are intimately intertwined. But to understand how different organizing models work, it is necessary to recognize the differing emphasis they place on these elements. Structure-based organizers derive benefits from a focus on the instrumental: they are able to achieve concrete gains for their members in the short term, and they isolate themselves from the whims of the news media. However, they also give something up: the ability to rally widespread support for their cause and to force the kind of broad changes that are enabled by major shifts in public opinion.
Momentum-driven organizing necessarily places a greater focus on the symbolic. In their mass mobilizations, activists in this tradition need not abandon a push for concrete gains entirely. But instead of measuring their results only by incremental wins at the bargaining table, they use other metrics as well: movement in opinion polls, growing numbers of active participants, the ability to generate resources through grassroots channels, and the responsiveness of different pillars of support to their mobilizations. Organizers of civil resistance cannot be content with empty declarations of victory or with merely “speaking truth to power.” They must be hard headed in assessing their progress in winning over advocates and sympathizers from outside their immediate networks, always guarding against tendencies to become insular “voices in the wilderness.”
Many of the most effective practitioners of strategic nonviolence have intuitively appreciated these dynamics. They have been gifted in creating symbolically resonant shows of resistance and establishing a winning record in the popular consciousness. Serbian activists Danijela Nenadic and Nenad Belcevic write, “Otpor was skillful at getting media attention, framing the issues, and keeping their movement in the public eye.” The organizers attracted media attention with actions that “were mostly provocative and designed to raise public consciousness, making people aware of the need to change the regime and mobilizing them to join the struggle.”41
In doing this, Serbian activists followed in the footsteps of past masters. As historian Adam Fairclough argues, Martin Luther King Jr. “maintained to the end of his life that it was far more important to dramatize the broader issues and generate the pressure for change than to draft precise or specific legislation. The exact manner in which the federal government responded to the problem of discrimination did not greatly concern SCLC. What mattered was that its response should be determined, vigorous, and thorough. The administration responded to pressure, King reasoned, not proposals.”42
Likewise, Judith Brown writes, “For Gandhi, carefully staged and managed campaigns were as much about creating and manipulating images of moral resistance as about crafting strategies which . . . put pressure on the particular opponent in question.” In Gandhi’s national satyagraha campaigns “there was often no direct and immediate link between non-violent civil resistance and a desired outcome, so in a strict sense they could be considered as ‘failures.’” And yet, “These campaigns gathered a greater range of active participation and more passive support than had any previous political movement in India.” From this, much more so than Gandhi’s personal meetings with Irwin, the Raj never recovered.43
Of course, for every protest like the Salt March that bursts into popular consciousness and becomes an internationally renowned phenomenon, there are hundreds of others that die out without ever being noticed. What do the explosive ones most frequently have in common? Mainstream political operatives believe they are those backed with the most resources and the strongest organizational coalitions. Strategic nonviolence suggests something else altogether: that even small and unknown groups can capture the public spotlight, provided they are willing to take the right risks.