We asked a number of contributors to share their reactions to a post by activist and author Michelle Alexander that we published earlier this month in the aftermath of the police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Here is a response from political organizer Marshall Ganz, a senior lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. You can view all other responses by clicking on the “Building a New America” tag.
Sixty years ago, the African-American bus riders in Montgomery, Alabama, recognized that they could turn their dependency on the bus to get to work into the bus company’s dependency on them for bus fare if they used a resource they had — their feet — to walk to work instead of getting on the bus. But it only worked when they all acted together.
There’s a lesson here about power that could be of value for participants in Black Lives Matter, the Dreamers and supporters of Bernie Sanders’ economic justice campaign, all movements that are welcome, long overdue and promisingly rooted in the moral outrage of a rising generation.
[For more of this story, written by Marshall Ganz, go to http://billmoyers.com/story/ne...n-build-lessons-old/]
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