Effective political strategy requires alternating between open and closed communication spaces
Evidence
Something like a hashtag campaign can certainly be effective for raising awareness of an issue or increasing attendance at an event where no surprises are planned. But for successful targeted maneuvers, there always seems to be a strategic alternating between openness and closure. In Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, description of the planning that led up to the Montgomery bus boycott, he describes meetings of varying sizes, all happening in different rooms of homes, schools, and churches over the course just a few days. These meetings were anywhere from very small (King deliberating with his wife at home) to small (King, E. D. Nixon, and Ralph Abernathy alternating calling each other on the phone) to midsize (a meeting with King, L. Roy Bennett, E. D. Nixon, and a handful of others at a church) to large (Montgomery’s black leaders from different businesses and organizations, at King’s church) to very large (a meeting open to the public, at another church). It was at the smaller meetings that they strategized how to run the larger meetings, collaborating quickly and intensely on ideas that would be put into play in successively wider contexts. And it was at the larger meetings that they strategized how to present their demands to the public at large. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 550
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- SEED: Direct counter-evidence for the reader’s defense of Odell — this shows she is not withdrawing but arguing for strategic closure, using the Montgomery bus boycott as proof.
- SHARE: A concrete organizing-history detail (King’s nested meeting structure) worth sharing with anyone studying protest logistics or community organizing.