Well you can bump and grind
And it’s good for your mind
Well you can twist and shout
Let it all hang out. . .
But you won’t fool the children of the revolution.
— T. Rex, “Children of the Revolution” (1972)
Shana Thompson arrived on the campus of UNC Charlotte in 2004 with a lot of questions — and not just a little shock. She’d transferred from a community college near the Research Triangle Area and was used to the sort of vibrant, politically conscious student body whose activism often spilled into surrounding cities. Coming to Charlotte, she says, “was a big culture change.”
When Thompson dropped by a UNCC student organization fair, she collected a bunch of forms and pamphlets, but unlike most students she didn’t disappear into the insular comfort of college life. Instead, a Planned Parenthood representative urged her to attend a two-day training session on stirring campus interest in protecting access to birth control and abortion.
Now, more than a year later, Thompson realizes getting the UNCC chapter of Vox: Voices for Planned Parenthood off the ground isn’t going to be easy. Still, she and her membership rolls have at least organized. Even that level of political consciousness puts them in an exclusive minority.
Fewer than 40 percent of people ages 18 to 24 voted in the hotly contested 2000 election, according to Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. Compare that to 1972, just after the voting age was lowered to 18 and men were still being drafted for Vietnam. Turnout then among voters ages 18 to 24 was at an all-time high.
Voting isn’t the only measure of political activity or awareness, of course. But by the old ways of quantifying civic engagement, today’s youth — the people who will carry on political struggles — aren’t tuning in to public life. TV news audiences are shrinking and daily newspaper circulation is down. The Internet’s proliferation of blogs and information-disseminating mutations offers endless opportunities, but not without risk.
The current generation of young people came of age amid an unprecedented era of marketing: An alphabet soup of cable networks, music video channels and electronic gadgetry that offers unlimited competition for attention spans shortened by quick-hit images and trends that have the staying power of fast food. With all due respect to Gil Scott-Heron, if the revolution is not televised, no one will even know it happened. The military already knows this. Just look at its commercials that make war look like a cool new videogame.
Dismal voter turnout alone gives some credence to the oft-heard wail of baby boomers that today’s youth know nothing, nothing, of the activist spirit. In many quarters, it’s gospel that the 60s and early 70s were the pinnacle of progressive American political activism — a peak that could scarcely be reached again.
Honest souls will remember that most people back then really weren’t the picketing and marching sages they’ve been painted as, but that seems beside the point. Why aren’t young people today, those who will be charged with carrying on the social struggles their parents leave behind, more involved in grassroots activism? As images linger of Rosa Parks’s body lying in the Capitol rotunda, many activists are wondering how the old guard can attract young people to continue the good fight.
This is the question Creative Loafing wanted to explore, even from the confines of a city some people consider about as socially conscious as the staff of a typical Talbot’s clothing store. And from a state that competes with South Carolina for the dubious distinction of being the least unionized in the nation.
Our neighbors 150 miles northeast, in the Research Triangle Area, have long overshadowed Charlotte with their level of loud and proud student activism. Students at universities there, particularly UNC Chapel Hill, have had significant successes in organizing, from raising awareness of sweatshops to advocating for action in Darfur. UNC was once heralded by Mother Jones magazine as the birthplace of two important national youth groups: the Student Environmental Action Coalition and the Student Coalition for Action in Literacy Education.
Currently, one of the more active organizations at UNC is Students United for Darfur Awareness Now (SUDAN), a project that grew out of the Jewish campus group North Carolina Hillel. SUDAN has since gone on its own, organizing people who have sent hundreds of petitions and made hundreds of phone calls to media outlets and federal officials. The group has made more than 300 phone calls to the State Department, according to the SUDAN Web site.
“We felt, as the Jewish community, we both had an ethical obligation, like everybody does, to prevent genocide, but (also) a historic obligation because of the Holocaust,” said Or Mars, executive director of NC Hillel. “It quickly became something that was not just for Jewish students but for the entire campus.”
Closer to home, UNCC, like Charlotte in general, has not been widely considered a hotbed of activism. Until recently, UNCC has been tagged a “commuter school,” a designation that isn’t associated with the kind of tight-knit student community that fosters activism. Thompson has found that getting fellow students committed to organizing hasn’t been easy, even considering developments that have made reproductive rights a scaldingly hot-button issue: the recent appointment of John Roberts as US Supreme Court chief justice and the imminent battle over nominee Samuel Alito.
Sure, she hasn’t had trouble attracting a membership of 50 or 60 students, if in name only. But getting real involvement? “It has been hard to get active membership,” said Thompson, a junior majoring in religious studies and minoring in women’s studies. Only a small cadre of volunteers — usually students already active in other leftist causes — can be counted on to help on World AIDS Day or urge students to sign petitions advocating comprehensive sex education over the no-condoms/abstinence-only curriculum pushed on most teens.
Still, progressive student action persists locally, if in smaller doses than at some campuses. PRIDE, or People Recognizing Individual Diversity and Equality, organizes Coming Out Day and other events to help gays, lesbians and transgendered people on and off campus, according to the group’s president Stephanie Koch. Despite problems with poster vandalism (“It’s such a frequent offense we don’t even pay attention to it anymore,” Koch said), PRIDE is one of the most active groups on campus. The group last year protested a show at Amos’ Southend by Capleton, the reggae singer who’s been criticized for his anti-gay lyrics.
Another active group is the Black Student Union, which puts on many consciousness-raising activities and community events, president Jennifer Rivers said. The group hosts a Halloween carnival for poor, inner-city kids, and also brings those children to see what college is like. The Union urges people to register to vote and helps them learn about party affiliations. “Not every person in our organization is a Democrat, contrary to common belief,” Rivers said.
Silky Shah, a youth organizer based in Austin, TX, said she doesn’t believe students are less involved today than they were decades ago. She tries to connect with students while they’re still in high school and recently has done a lot of “counter recruitment” — giving students information about Iraq in hopes they will reconsider joining the military. “Students were definitely interested. They were like, ‘We were thinking about going into the Army, but now we’re not,'” said Shah, 24, who works with Grassroots Leadership. Ironically, the advocacy group is actually based in Charlotte but also has offices in several other Southern states. Still, Shah admitted she “lives in this bubble” surrounded by friends who are activist-oriented, and lives in a town, like Chapel Hill, that’s a blue-tinged refuge in an über red-state.
Undoubtedly, young people contend with a social landscape far different from the one organizers encountered decades ago. The separate-and-unequal legal code that defined life for millions of blacks has been dismantled. But watching the unfolding Katrina disaster on TV, it seemed that all had not been overcome. What to do today, though, isn’t quite so clear.
As Washington Post columnist Donna Britt recently wrote of the early Civil Rights era, “Challenging Jim Crow was risky but simple. Racism’s soul-stealing effects made life simply unlivable for millions. That the nation’s greatest social movement would dismantle it was inevitable.
“Today’s obscenities seem smaller, more complex,” she continued. “They seem less urgent, however life-or-death their consequences.”
Monica Simpson, a Charlotte-based organizer with Grassroots Leadership, said it’s much easier for young people today to avoid the pressing issues their parents faced. “Our parents went through the whole Civil Rights movement,” she said. “They had no choice but to talk about it, because they were living through it.”
Also, the Vietnam War was much different than the current conflict, said Mars of NC Hillel. “Those issues seemed to touch on their lives more because there was a draft in place, and all those things converged to really form a cauldron,” he said. “I don’t think the same thing is happening now.”
Simpson at times seemed cynical about the current activist environment. “This generation today, they feel like there’s not anything for them to fight for,” said the 26-year-old. “They associate the word organizing with people carrying signs or marching around a building or doing a sit-in. A lot of people feel, ‘Well, I’m OK. I have a job. I can go to school. I don’t have to worry about segregation anymore. That’s gone.”
She partly blames musical and cultural influences that encourage materialism above all else. “It’s like this hip-hop culture where everything is centered around music and fashion and all this. People have just kind of lost that whole ‘organizing state-of-mind.’ The faces that they see with it are their mothers or their fathers or people with Birkenstocks,” Simpson said.
Citing Sean “Diddy” Combs’s “Vote or Die” campaign, Simpson said celebrity-driven get-out-the-vote efforts don’t do much to foster change. “After the election, where did we go back to? [Celebrities] got on the bandwagon because it was a way for them to be in the media,” Simpson said. “Even though they were organizing and making a good thing happen because they were really pushing people to go out and vote, I’m sorry, it was all about them making more money. After you finish, you’re still not doing anything else in the community.
“I’m not saying you have to become the next Martin Luther King,” she added, “but what do you continue to do to help your community? You gonna sell another album about you and the girls?”
Simpson, who organized a group for gay and lesbian students while studying at Johnson C. Smith University, hopes to counter local apathy with a new Grassroots Leadership project based on the Kwanzaa principal of cooperative economics. The Ujamma project — not to be confused with UJAMMA, Inc., an unrelated local group that prepares families for home ownership — hopes to encourage African-Americans ages 18 to 35 to take on philanthropic roles and becomes stewards of existing community organizations. “We need to have that next wave of people — specifically, in this case, African-Americans — to kind of continue that drive and continue our history.”
There again, Simpson will encounter the problems faced by organizers everywhere. How do you attract people? It’s always been a concern for activists, but young people today especially have so much competing for their attention — innumerable entertainment activities, barrages of advertising images and other factors that compound the difficulty of juggling interests and schedules. “Whatever you can do, you do to get folks involved,” said Shah.
It’s important to tap high school-age kids, Shah said, because that’s the best time to get young people interested. Once they’re involved, it’s important to give people responsibilities so they’re invested in a cause. Workshops and other consciousness-raising events attract people, she said, and help organizers build relationships that start before teenagers graduate. “Building relationships is the one way you can kind of get past that race, sexuality, gender and age dynamic,” Shah said.
There’s no secret way to stir interest. Shah was drawn to activism after being raised in a vegetarian family and discovering animal-rights causes. Many folks get involved through something that pops up in their surroundings — say, a particularly interesting teacher or professor. And popular music can play a role, too.
Sometimes organizing is learned at home. Rivers, the Black Student Union president at UNCC, said her parents both were involved in protests, and they encouraged her. “I had always wanted to be more active in the black community,” said Rivers, a junior English major. “I’ve always been somewhat of a dreamer. My parents knew that, and they said that people who dream big can change things.”
Convincing people that issues actually affect them is another hurdle. PRIDE’s Koch said her organization’s drive for new members is somewhat hampered because some gay students are still closeted. Even those who are out aren’t always ready to take a public stand. Getting straight people involved requires convincing them that the issue is important even if it doesn’t directly affect them. “One of the main tactics our group uses is letting people know that, while the issue may not affect them, it may affect people that they love,” she said.
Activism has seen some major upticks in recent years. Large-scale protests at political conventions, World Trade Organization talks and antiwar protests belie the notion that today’s younger generation doesn’t care. In September, tens of thousands, many of them young, converged on Washington, DC, to protest the Iraq War. “After Bush was elected, there was all this momentum,” Shah said. “After September 11, there was still a lot of momentum over that. But with Bush winning (re-election), the war starting, Katrina and what’s going on with the Supreme Court, I definitely feel there’s a sense of burnout.”
Of course, simply because people aren’t taking to the streets every day doesn’t mean they’re not organizing. Workers at Grassroots Leadership, the Charlotte outfit that’s known far and wide but gets little attention in its hometown, say it’s inaccurate to think activism as being solely public protest. Most organizing is behind the scenes, unglamorous, even grunt work that makes incremental improvements.
“There are issues on every block in every city,” said Pam Pompey, who directs Grassroots’ fund-raising efforts. “A multitude of nonprofit organizations in this country is out there. The numbers would just blow you away.”
Alfreda Barringer, Grassroots’ second in command, said many people organizing today don’t even have a name for it. She, for instance, didn’t know she was organizing years ago when she was helping fellow African-American staff and faculty at UNCC unite. People, she said, “are just saying, ‘We need to do something. Somebody ought to do something about that.'” And they’re doing it.
Grassroots Leadership founder and executive director Si Kahn points to efforts to overhaul Social Security as an example of a motivator. President Bush entered office in 2001 committed to changing the New Deal program by putting more of Americans’ retirement funds in private accounts. But nothing’s changed because people, particularly the indomitable elderly voting bloc, barraged elected officials with complaints. “Representatives and senators went to Bush, and they said, ‘You’re killing us. We’re not going to get re-elected,'” Kahn said. “That’s organizing.”
Mars, whose organization led nascent UNC efforts to protest genocide in Darfur, said that approach may be instructive for younger activists. “You can’t compare this decade with the 1960s,” he said. “In a lot of ways, students are using different strategies that are more effective for the time that we live in. Perhaps a more strategic, work-within-the-system approach is more appropriate now.”
This article appears in Nov 16-22, 2005.
