Affirming Democracy, Gathering Resistance

Today is the anniversary of two important moments in the history of US activism for a more democratic union: the 1963 March on Washington and the arrest in 1917 of ten suffragists who were picketing outside the White House.

Here is today’s Library of Congress entry on these events.

One thing that the Women’s Suffrage protests and the March on Washington had in common was a years-long road of action, planning, theorizing, discourse and movement-internal politicking leading up to the iconic moments and beyond. These roads were not always pretty and often involved a narrowing of the ambitions of the movement. The Women’s Suffrage Movement was notably exclusive of Black women. The Civil Rights Movement, which began as an effort to comprehensively reorder American society in more democratic directions – economically, politically, and spiritually, as well as legally –became increasingly focused on civil rights per se, such that even now we tend to forget that the 1963 march was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. (This article by Robin D.G. Kelley in The Boston Review gives an interesting account of the backstory of the March in this regard.) There is no action without compromise, but we do ourselves a disservice when we lose sight of broader historical goals and of the full array of conditions that were driving those goals.

In comparison to our current situation, these two movements also have in common that they were directed against a society and a government that were established and that at least in principle adhered to a set of democratic ideals of freedom, equality, and justice for all – while, clearly, also unfairly and brutally oppressing many members of that society. Dr. King’s idea of a “promissory note,” while perhaps contributing to a narrowing of the movement’s original vision, does seem to have resonated with a segment of the white majority, and it did pithily capture a contemporary reality.

Our situation is different. We are faced at this moment not with challenging a democratic-in-principle society to once again expand its understanding of what freedom, equality and justice mean. We are faced with resisting that society’s abandonment of those democratic ideals and its slide into cruelty, injustice, stupidity and cowardice. Some of this slide is a “know-nothing” backlash precisely against the efforts to expand our democracy (Black Lives Matter, marriage equality, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, honest accounting of American history). Resistance must succeed. And it must lead ultimately to an expansion of democracy, not a return to the recent status quo. It is an opportunity.