At 21, Tay Anderson, saw his star rise as the youngest African American ever elected to public office in Colorado and as a leader of the protests in Denver following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. But, taking the helm of a large social movement often has its costs; during the protests, he was tear gassed, shot with rubber bullets, and the flood of threats from racists and other agitators forced him to start wearing a bullet-proof vest.
“If you are here for agitation, to throw things at the police, or burn our city down, don’t come,” Anderson told protestors. “We’re here for peace. African Americans are not asking for special treatment. We’re asking to be treated as human beings.”
Anderson—who spent some time in the foster system, was raised by a single mother, and was homeless at times during high school—has won two elections as a board member for the Denver Public Schools. He says his work as a legislative aide, a high school restorative justice coordinator, a protest organizer, and as student body president during his junior and senior years at Manuel High School honed his leadership skills. But, it was his desire to “eliminate the school-to-prison pipeline” and seeing Denver police tear gas high school students that propelled him to the forefront of the Black Lives Matter protests in Denver to stop police brutality nationwide.
Tay Anderson, Secretary, Board of Education, Denver Public Schools.
“I never thought I’d be in that situation,” Anderson says of being hit with rubber bullets and being tear gassed. “It’s traumatic. I wanted to be there to make sure the kids were safe. I was handing out masks and asking them to make sure they got tested for the virus.”
Morgan C. Matthews is a PhD candidate in the sociology department at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and has written on social relations in legislative institutions and on gender and racial inequalities in politics. She says people mistakenly believe the social movement Black Lives Matter (BLM) “came out of nowhere.” She says one of the projects she has been working on as a research assistant with Pam Oliver is tracking Black protests from 1994–2010.
“Protests are often portrayed as violent, but people are frustrated and angry that change isn’t happening,” Matthews says. “A lot of these inequalities are long-standing. Social change takes a long time, a lot of labor.”
The Sociological Review Foundation defines social movements as networks of informal interactions between a plurality of individuals, groups, and/or organizations engaged in political or cultural conflicts on the basis of shared collective identities.
Social movements rarely happen overnight. Rosa Parks had been active in the civil rights movement for many years before she became famous for being arrested on December 1, 1955, after refusing to surrender her seat on a segregated bus to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama. The Black community launched a year-long bus boycott to protest her arrest. The boycott which crippled the finances of the city’s transit system ended when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation on public transit systems is unconstitutional.
“American history has always been punctuated by social movements and they are still the motor of history even though they always get less than they want,” says David S. Meyer, professor of sociology, political science, and urban planning at the University of California at Irvine. He has studied social movements and social change extensively. “Social movements allow grievances to be expressed without toppling the system.”
Matthews says it is important for social movements to move beyond the protest and help place people who understand, for example, police brutality or women’s inequality in decision-making positions on campaigns and in institutions. It is vital to move people who are sympathetic and knowledgeable to different causes into gatekeeping positions in large institutions “because institutions are the problem,” Matthews explains “They are slow to accept change and they want status quo. A lot of the bottleneck is at the institutional level. It can be tough to serve in these institutions because you are serving in a system that is hostile to you.”
Morgan C. Matthews, PhD candidate, Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin, Madison.
In 1990, Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, was mocked around the world for its policy that all sexual interactions must be consensual. A feminist movement at the school pushed for the policy. Fast–forward to 2020; most schools have adopted a similar policy. Another example of activism that eventually became policy but faced a lot of hostility was the gay marriage movement. Supporters were diligent and persistent on focusing their efforts on policy change and public opinion. Between 1998 and 2012, conservatives put gay marriage on the state ballots 32 times to ensure conservative voters would come out to vote. Each time, marriage equality was voted down, but on June 26, 2015, the U .S. Supreme Court struck down all state bans on same-sex marriage, legalized it in all 50 states, and required states to honor out-of-state same-sex marriage licenses in the case Obergefell v. Hodges.
“Now, gay marriage is almost universally accepted,” Meyer says. “There is still discrimination, but there is progress.”
“Every overnight success takes a decade of work,” suggests Meyer, citing how gun control activists had been working for years on the issue, but that it wasn’t until February 14, 2018, when a mass shooter killed 17 young people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that the gun control activists made true progress. Meyer says the organization and the work done by the gun control activists years earlier helped propel “skilled and charming” students from the school to national attention on the issue. “It doesn’t happen without a lot of organizing beforehand.”
One of the keys to building a lasting movement that brings social change is building alliances. For example, the suffragists in the 1800s and early 1900s aligned with abolitionists to secure the vote for women. The key is to maintain that unity once the movement makes progress in policy change and public opinion change. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy speaks to the progress that can be made if social movements can maintain unity among their members. Only about 23 percent of the U.S. population supported King when he led the civil rights movement and yet, today, he has a monument on the National Mall in his memory and a national holiday. Meyer suggests the election of Donald Trump, Jr. is another example of groups with different goals joining forces for a unified goal.
“There was a lot of frustration and anxiety with Trump,” says Meyer, editor of the 2018 book, The Resistance: The Dawn of the Anti-Trump Opposition Movement. “Trump was the unifier. He provided a centerpiece for all of those anxieties. A lot of the people who organized didn’t agree on a lot of things, but they knew they had a common enemy.”
Another key to a successful social movement is the ability of a social movement to interact with mainstream politics. Most social movements begin because of some policy provocation like the killing of George Floyd. Anderson, who some BLM marchers in Denver criticized for coordinating with police, says he had the contacts and wanted to use them to ensure protestors were safe.
“When it is something unpopular, there is a lot of risk and it’s scary,” Meyer says. He adds that often people, like Anderson, who participate in social movements make the transition to mainstream politics. Successful social movements always have an institutional element and there is a connection between the grassroots base and the institutional political organizations. Usually, during election years, the numbers of protests decrease because time, money, and attention are focused on political campaigns and elections..
“You have to stay engaged with mainstream politics,” Meyer says. “And you have to keep people engaged, lobbying, signing petitions, etc. It’s hard.”
Anderson used his large social media following to gather participants for the protests in Denver and used his time working on the movement to push for an end to an agreement between the schools and the Denver Police Department to provide school resource officers. Instead, Anderson was lobbying for replacing the officers with nurses and counselors who would prioritize restorative practices.
“I have 18,000 Twitter followers and more than 6,000 each on Facebook and Instagram,” he says. “If those 18,000 followers each reach out to 100 people, and those people reach out to another 100 people, you can reach a lot of people.”
But while social media can help broaden support for social movements, it also can make it difficult for organizers to maintain a certain image.
“Everything happens faster now because of social media,” says Meyer, adding that before social media, it was easier for social movement leaders to cultivate certain images and keep certain aspects of their work or their lives secret. For example, he says Bayard Rustin, a key advisor who taught Martin Luther King, Jr. tactics on civil disobedience and non-violent resistance, was largely kept off the public radar because he was an openly gay man. For organizers of the Women’s March, social media played a big role in very public stories about infighting amongst the women on inclusion and other issues.
“There are always going to be vicious fights with allies on what to push, what not to push,” Meyer says. “It’s the politics of coalition building.”
Even though it took more than 70 years of women actively pushing to secure the vote for women, as they got closer to success, U.S. suffragists became divided on how to succeed. Alice Paul pushed for a more public and aggressive approach, holding lawmakers accountable for not allowing women to vote. She staged a huge parade the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration and male spectators jeered at, taunted, and roughed up the suffragists. The spectacle of police failing to protect prominent women in the parade and the headlines that followed helped Paul make politicians aware suffrage was still an issue. Paul also pushed for daily protesting in front of the White House, which was unheard of at the time. Carrie Chapman Catt, another suffragist, disagreed with Paul’s tactics and she wanted “to woo Wilson to the women’s cause, not enrage him, Congress, or the public by confrontational tactics,” wrote author Doris Stevens in her book Jailed For Freedom: American Women Win the Vote. Catt disavowed Paul.
Since the days of the suffragist movement, the women’s movement has rolled through moments of flourishing and through moments of being on life support. But, all of that early work that the suffragists did has had an impact into this century. In the last 30 years, the Democratic Party has actively courted women as political candidates and two leading organizations, Emerge and Emily’s List, have trained women how to run for office as Democrats.. There have been large numbers of Democratic women serving in political leadership positions, but the numbers among GOP women “have flat-lined,” Matthews says.
“There are not the same type of organizations and resources for helping women Republicans,” Matthews says. “The GOP recruits women candidates as ticket fillers in races where they don’t have a chance of winning. Clearly, the GOP has had success with white, male candidates because 60 percent of the legislatures across the country are controlled by the GOP. That doesn’t seem to be changing any time soon. They don’t have a lot of motivation to change that strategy.”
Matthews says a two political party system like the one in the United States does not provide enough opportunities for women, particularly when one party dominates and it seems hostile to women’s issues. Even though suffragists operated outside of the party system to secure the vote for women, focusing their efforts on lobbying both state legislatures and Congress, the progress for women in politics has been uneven..
“The GOP doesn’t seem to see supporting women as a way to gain favor in elections,” Matthews says. “A polarized two-party system has shaped inequalities in representation in dramatic ways.”
Good social movement organizers are persistent and they know how to balance working with their grassroots organizations and with political institutions. It can be difficult to track the impact social movements have on society because often, the impact shows up in many small policies and actions taken by institutions. For example, Meyer says the women’s movement and the MeToo movement made it possible that NBC can’t have a host with a button under his desk like Matt Lauer did (so he could lock women in his office without leaving his desk) and companies across the country require employees to take sexual harassment training regularly. Further, without years of work by BLM, the woman in Central Park who became angered in Spring 2020 and called police on a Black man after he asked her to leash her dog would not likely have been fired.
Robin DiAngelo, author of the book White Fragility: Why it’s so Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, said in an interview on June 7, 2020, with CNN, she is cautiously optimistic that the BLM protests in June will have a long-term impact and start to bring about true change because the mainstream media is using the term “systemic racism” often and there have been increased discussions on reparations for descendants of enslaved Africans, including in Democratic presidential debates.
“There are huge breakthroughs,” DiAngelo said. “But, it needs to be sustained and I’m a little worried about what happens when the cameras go away. I’m devastated that this is the price it took: watching one more, not just one, but one more Black man murdered in the most callous and public way. That’s what it took.”
