Political organizing succeeds through a ladder of increasingly open meetings

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

• XREF: Documents the concrete, pre-Twitter mechanics of the organized action Odell insists she is arguing for, directly answering the ‘is she just recommending do-nothing withdrawal?’ misreading. — connects to: The activist roll call is deliberately open and invitational — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 417
• SEED: An essay angle contrasting open hashtag campaigns’ awareness-raising function with closed-door strategic organizing as the actual lever of change.