What Happens After We March?
How abortion rights activists can learn from the organizing practices of the civil rights movement.
This past weekend supporters of abortion rights rallied in at least one thousand locations around the country, more than twice as many as took place back in May after the leak of the Supreme Court’s eventual decision to overturn Roe v Wade, according to the Crowd Counting Consortium, which tracks news reports of local events. Hundreds of thousands participated, their ranks undoubtedly swelled by many Pride marchers out for annual celebrations of LGBTQ+ rights who are also worried about the conservative court’s direction.
But what happens after people march and protest? Will these people get absorbed into the hard and necessary work to restore and protect the basic human right to control your body’s destiny? If all these folks get is an automated follow-up text message from Mobilize asking them “How was your experience? Good? Bad? I didn’t make it” to add data to some spreadsheet, do we expect them to keep showing up? How do abortion rights organizers organize?
I’ve written here before about the process by which previously inactive or apolitical people become involved in a cause. As Ziad Munson explained in his seminal book The Making of Pro-Life Activists, three things matter. First, a person needs to experience a social connection to a movement organization—a friend or a coworker invites them to come to a rally or a meeting. Second, they have to be at a phase in their lives where they are open to something new. People who are in the midst of many life commitments don’t have time or inclination to make new ones. And third, they have to actually participate in some kind of initial activism and enjoy it enough to want to keep participating.
This is why it’s not enough to march or rally, and even why attendance at protest events may be a poor indicator for a movement’s strength. How did all those people get to those #WeWontGoBack rallies? Were the new people at those events welcomed? And is someone following up to make sure they feel drawn in?
Right now there’s a flurry of activity centered on expanding and insuring access to medication abortions, on the solid theory that it makes more sense to get them to pregnant people in anti-abortion states than have to transport those people to pro-choice states. You can sign this Change.org petition started by my friend Allison Fine which is pushing the FDA to normalize mifepristone, an abortion pill that it currently and needlessly has categorized as a dangerous drug requiring prescription by certified providers. There’s also a lot of post-Dobbs court fights and legislative battles in many states. Those arenas are generally the purview of professional advocates, though obviously people everywhere can donate to abortion funds and projects like PlanC or INeedAnA. That’s not my focus here; it’s what happens to the millions of people who want to change the underlying calculus that led to Dobbs, especially the many who are newly active because of the ruling, which at least a third of American never believed would happen.
One worry I have is that too many progressive activists may drive new people away rather than embrace them because their politics, or frankly, the language they use, isn’t sufficiently enlightened. As Michelle Goldberg writes in today’s New York Times, the anti-abortion movement has trained many of its activists on tactics aimed at engaging young pro-choice people and encouraging their doubts about abortion. She adds, “This is quite different from what I’ve seen in the pro-choice movement, where activists frequently act as if those who don’t agree with them on everything aren’t worth engaging with. (Last week, NARAL tweeted, ‘If your feminism doesn’t understand how anti-trans policies disproportionately impact BIPOC folks, particularly Black trans women and girls, it’s not feminism.’)” In a divided country, activists have to adopt an organizing mindset and focus on the politics of addition, not subtraction.
Beyond that, it’s worth thinking about what happens after we rally. Marches and protests are necessary but not sufficient steps toward building real power. Looking back at some of the great histories of the civil rights movement, like Taylor Branch’s magisterial three-part biography of Martin Luther King, I was reminded of something that happened a lot during that period that doesn’t seem to happen much now. After people marched, and while they were doing even harder things like boycotting local stores or public buses, they met regularly in mass meetings, typically in churches or other community spaces. On a regular, local basis, participants in the civil rights movement saw each other face to face, heard from their leaders, and communed together. The phrase “mass meeting” appears 72 times in the first volume of Branch’s King biography Parting the Waters alone.
A mass meeting is different from a rally or even a speak-out because it is rooted in place. For the civil rights struggle, it was also a place where movement participants got to start building the new society they were demanding. As Elizabeth Ellis Miller, an English professor at Mississippi State University wrote in her 2016 PhD dissertation, “Faithful Genres: Rhetorics of the Civil Rights Mass Meeting,” which I’ve found invaluable for today’s edition of The Connector, “scholars of social movement theory emphasize the significance of spaces where individuals can experience—however temporarily—the changes they seek to create… In the movement for black freedom, the mass meeting was one such space. Within these meetings, Southern African Americans enacted the freedoms they sought outside: they deliberated, adjudicated, and celebrated like the first-class citizens they believed themselves to be.”
Not just that, civil rights mass meetings resembled community worship services. As Miller notes, they began with songs, moved to Scripture, included a main address by a leader or two and testimonies by local people, and concluded with songs. As Representative John Lewis later put it, “The mass meetings were the church, and for some who had grown disillusioned with Christian otherworldliness, they were better than the church.” Here’s an example of Ralph Abernathy speaking at a 1963 mass meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, after dogs and hoses had been loosed on civil rights marchers, including many children, reporting on how the movement was succeeding, filling up the city’s jails and gaining the attention of top federal officials like “Bobby” and “Jack”. Abernathy combines exhortation and humor in equal measure, updating the local movement on practical matters while also addressing the crowd’s fears and receiving its affirmations in a constant back-and-forth dialogue of “uh hums” and “amens.” Miller writes, “through their regular singing, praying, and testifying, everyday people became civil rights activists: they constituted themselves as a Christian, nonviolent collective who responded to oppression and violence with a hymn or freedom song, a bowed head or bended knee, or a personal story about the meaning and sacredness of their experience as African American people in the struggle for civil rights and racial justice.”
The mass meeting was also a powerful way to attract and absorb new activists. Miller cites historian Charles Payne, who wrote in his book I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, “Mixtures of the sacred and the profane, the mass meeting could be a very powerful social ritual. They attracted people to the movement and then helped them develop a sense of involvement and solidarity. By ritually acting out new definitions of their individual and collective selves, people helped make those selves become real. Informed and challenged by the speakers, pumped up by the singing and the laughing and the sense of community, many of those who only meant to go once out of curiosity left that first meeting thinking they might comes once more, just to see.”
Miller describes how the movement used mass meetings for different phases of a campaign, with a “beginning meeting” in a town or city focused on “generating collective identity first and foremost,” where a movement organizer assessed local strengths and began elevating local leaders. “Middle meetings” sought to “direct participants toward participation in specific protests or to rejuvenate spirits when an organization encountered a setback or a difficulty” and “victory meetings sought to commemorate achievements and set a new agenda.”
Here's the program for the mass meeting celebrating the victory of the student-led sit-in movement in Nashville, Tennessee in 1960, as reconstructed by Miller. She writes, “The celebratory event, called “Students’ Night,” functioned through songs, Scripture, testimonies, prayers, and exhortation working together to celebrate everyone’s effort, keep the group unified, and create new goals for the next phase of their efforts. Each of the testimonies, for example, praised the students for their work and sought to generate enthusiasm from the crowd about the future of the Nashville movement.”
To take just a little dip into this organizing history is to also recognize what a banquet of engagement the civil rights movement set forth, and how paltry our own table of offerings. Below is a slide from a fundraising and strategy deck put out by one of the best and hardest working pro-abortion groups, #VoteProChoice. (Full disclosure, its cofounder and CEO Heidi Sieck, is my former colleague and friend from Civic Hall days.) VoteProChoice is focused on organizing to win the legislative power needed to defend abortion rights across the country. As you can see, compared to other well-known groups like Planned Parenthood, EMILY’s List and NARAL, VoteProChoice not only coaches, endorses and backs pro-choice candidates, it also produces detailed voter guides to empower voters and emphasizes down-ballot candidates in red and purple states. (The partner landscape analysis isn’t perfect—it should note that Run for Something also focuses on down-ballot candidates, for example.)
VoteProChoice emphasizes the value of its voter guides, citing research from the Analyst Institute showing that their salience particularly in down-ballot races. It’s aiming to target 3 million voters in 18 states with voter guides in 2022 (at a projected cost of $18 million); what’s entirely unclear is how those guides are supposed to get and stick in voters’ hands. Right now my mail box is filling up with those annoying 8.5 x 11 color glossy mailers from state and local candidates and independent organizations trying to sway my vote in today’s New York state primary; those things go in the garbage faster than fermenting fruit in my fridge.
Look at what’s not on the landscape: grass-roots community organizing. None of the name brand pro-choice groups do that. VoteProChoice’s voter strategy, which it is doing in partnership with the Movement Cooperative, Open Progress, the New Conversation Initiative, Democratic Attorney Generals Association, COBALT Colorado and Movement Labs, is an “accelerated deep canvassing process” that in 2020 involved texting 5 million voters in 20 states. The group claims it “Deep ID’d 236,000 at $5.50/ID,” reducing the cost of deep canvassing from ~$300 to ~$30/contact.” An initial analysis of the impact of this work claims that it increased turnout of newly registered, low-propensity, mid-partisan pro-choice women by 20%. OK, I get that this is a fundraising deck so it has to emphasize metrics like cost-per-voter. But we’re kidding ourselves if we think this is what will move the putative majority in favor of abortion rights into the kind of sustained activity that it will take to defeat the religious right.
One final comment. The pro-choice side may not do mass meetings, but the other side does. Sunday in churches across America priests and pastors celebrated the Supreme Court’s ruling. Here’s a thread of examples from megachurches across north Texas. In Fort Worth, Landon Schott, the lead pastor of Mercy Culture church said, "Hey, pretty exciting. Miracles took place. Roe v Wade was overturned." The congregation cheered. He added, "Now June will no longer be Pride month. June is life month." Pastor J.D. Greear of the Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina featured the decision in his sermon and reminded his flock that their work wasn’t done, noting that in their state abortion remained legal. “We believe that the best way to do this is to make sure that every woman has the support she needs to face the challenges of pregnancy,” he posted online. “Whether that is through health care, supportive government resources, employment, housing, or (most of all) a supportive gospel community, we believe it is essential to support mothers being mothers. There is no single ministry that can do all of this. It takes a coordinated effort to address these broken areas in our society. Here’s what that means: As a church, it’s time for us to step up. This has never been primarily about policy change. It’s about saying—with our words and with our lives—'We’re here to protect life, like Jesus did, and lay down our lives for others. Now is the time to be the church.’”
Not only that, these churches are often closely tied to one of the 2,700 “pregnancy centers” around the country that provide medical services along with parenting and prenatal education programs aimed at steering people away from seeking abortions, plus other helpful services like testing for sexually transmitted diseases, after-abortion support, and free baby items like diapers, car seats and clothing. These centers helped nearly a million clients in 2019, according to a report from the Lozier Institute. Planned Parenthood outsizes the pregnancy center field by a factor of ten, but unless I’m mistaken, few churches or community organizations have the kind of organic relationship to its centers that pregnancy centers have with pro-life churches.
I’m not anything close to an expert on American Christianity, but I’m betting that the Dobbs decision isn’t going to lead to a decline of political activism by the religious right, but rather a surge. When Israel won the Six Day War, many religious Jews there interpreted the country’s “miraculous” victory, especially its capture of the Old City of Jerusalem, as a sign from God that the “redemption” of the land was to enter a new phase. The settler movement began as a fringe phenomenon, but steadily grew in power thanks to its organizing model of “creating facts on the ground” that were proto-communities. Now some of those settlements are full-blown cities. The Dobbs “miracle,” which was actually a product of decades of political, legal and community organizing, is going to turbo-charge the religious right even more.
—Related: A week after the 2016 election, organizers in Rhode Island tied to the Working Families Party called an emergency mass meeting “to gather and talk and make a plan for the fight ahead.” A thousand people attended. Jonathan Smucker, a progressive organizer based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and the director of an organizing group called Beyond the Choir, wrote an email spreading the word. He explained:
Why emergency community meetings?
We feel shaken to our core and we want to come together with others to affirm shared values of tolerance, social and economic justice, and love for each other.
This truly is an emergency. Resilient communities come together in emergencies to help each other and to make plans.
Millions of Americans are feeling desperate to find ways to get involved in fighting against a dangerous far-right agenda — and to work to build an America that works for all of us.
What comes out of the meetings? Well, we don't know exactly. We don't think it would work to be too prescriptive about launching into this or that specific campaign. This is a movement moment. Campaigns are always important, but right now is also a time to on-board a lot of new people, provide an experience where they can commit together to the fight ahead, and set larger forces in motion. At the local level — but scaled nationally — we want to support communities in meeting together and planning together, considering a list of options, from protecting vulnerable people in their area, to opposing Trump's unbelievable appointments, to organizing walkouts and protests or for the inauguration. If we get a lot of ad hoc volunteer-driven local groups/coalitions going right now, that could give us substantially more capacity—people power—for the fights ahead.
Minus Trump’s name, it sure seems like we’re in a similar moment. But this time around, can we not turn ourselves into gig workers for the political-industrial complex?
Odds and Ends
—Issie Lapowsky reports for Protocol on the DNC’s new Geographic Address Dataset, a repository of 260 million addresses, which its tech team “painstakingly compiled by combining nearly a dozen sources — from the voter file to Postal Service data to records from private vendors. That includes 25 million new addresses that were never before included in the DNC’s records. The team affixed nearly all of the 260 million records with census block data, giving Democratic campaigns a new window into demographic information on hundreds of millions of homes, as well as geocodes, which tell campaigns the actual latitude and longitude of where hard-to-find homes exist on a map.”
—Here's a fascinating piece from the Philadelphia-based Movement Alliance Project’s cofounders Hannah Sassaman and Bryan Mercer on how they navigated an intense internal process of self-examination after the summer of 2020, when the group decided to take a four-month hiatus from external work to rethink and reorganize. They write, “Just stopping our work felt almost impossible; we’d never seen another organization truly do it and had never done it ourselves for more than a week. It felt like we were abandoning our communities and our partners. But we couldn’t ignore the glaring reality: being in the middle of every fight helped us feel and seem useful, but it did not build power.”
—Facebook and Instagram are moving quickly to delete posts offering abortion pills to women who may not be able to get them, the AP reports. On Monday, an AP reporter tested how the company would respond to a similar post on Facebook, writing: "If you send me your address, I will mail you abortion pills." The post was removed within one minute. The AP says the Facebook account was immediately put on a "warning" status for the post, because it violated its standards on "guns, animals and other regulated goods." Yet, when the AP reporter made the same exact post but swapped out the words "abortion pills" for "a gun," the post remained untouched. A post with the same exact offer to mail "weed" was also left up and not considered a violation.
End Times
This is holding up pretty well. Thompson-Cheney in ‘24!