Movement politics has always depended on formal study groups that trained collective attention.

Evidence

But there is another kind of school that influences our work, and we find it in the long history of movement politics. Think of New York’s Workers University, founded by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union in the 1920s. Here, union leaders studied the arts of public speaking and parliamentary procedure, with basic literacy classes offered for the humbler rank-and-file. Or consider the study groups founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale at Merritt Junior College in the 1960s. Or, on the opposite side of the country, the carefully coordinated groups of students who trained themselves for nonviolence at sit-ins at diner counters in Greensboro, North Carolina, and across the South. The history of activism is closely interwoven with the history of study—of learning to think and question and move together, and thereby to make the world new again, and more livable, and more just. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 293

Categorization

• SEED: A usable essay angle: building a concrete genealogy of ‘attention training’ inside radical movements (Workers University, Panthers, SNCC) as the organizational backbone of dissent.