Last week, I said that Lesson 2 was "Civil disobedience makes spectacles by deliberately making those who are suffering injustice hypervisible to a mass public." But actually, Lesson #2 is better said as "civil disobedience is most effective when it makes spectacles by gathering people who are already being affected by an injustice, and privileging the most "morally innocent" people for the public view".

Welcome back! This week, I am returning to take you on a journey through the history of civil disobedience actions to think through how Defend Our Juries might built a better Lift the Ban campaign to end the proscription of Palestine Action. The first part is available here. In brief, my main critique in Part 1 was that the current publicly available action plan presents a morally irresponsible narrative about civil disobedience. Further, their plans don't seem well-connected to the causal mechanisms that de-list groups as terrorist organisations in the UK, or to getting the UK to officially declare that Israel is committing a genocide. I argued that one lesson we should learn from the examples of Rosa Parks's arrest for defying segregation laws, and Mahatma Gandhi's defiance of the British Raj's salt tax, is that civil disobedience is a politics of spectacle, but spectacles alone don't shift structures of oppression.

Look at the crowds of protestors at previous Lift the Ban actions: - Here is a picture of a random older white man being carried off by the police. What do we know about him and what he has to say about terrorism, Palestine, and why he's putting his freedom on the line? What was he doing before that moved him into action? - Here is a picture of an older white woman being carried off by the police. Why has she got such a serene look on her face? What is she thinking that could move us to act or to join them? What does her serene gaze tell us about why the Terrorism Act shouldn't be going after Palestine Action? - Here is a crowd of mostly white people standing and holding up signs that they support Palestine Action. Why have they done this, and what is their conviction about why the Terrorism Act should not apply when genocide is at stake? - Here is a crowd of mostly white people sitting down and holding up signs that they support Palestine Action. Why are they sitting? What are they contemplating? Why do they support Palestine Action? - Here is a video from Defend Our Juries, narrated by one of their white organisers.

Let's look closely at what the person in the last video in the introductory from Lift the Ban says:

"We're here in Parliament Square, under the Mandela statue, under the Gandhi statue over there. There are over 40 brave, principled, ordinary people taking a serious risk. No one is here because it's fun, they're here risking a 14 year prison sentence because a red line has been crossed in this country. And now, if you go and sit in Parliament Square, with a factual sign, you're gonna be hauled off and risk a 14 year prison sentence. If you can't go down to Parliament Square with a simple, truthful sign, and sit there, democracy is over."

I will come back to this speech later, but first, I want to tell you a story. Actually, it is a series of stories, about Black people in the 1950s in the US, and the debates that were the background justification for Rosa Parks being the spark of the Montgomery bus boycott. The logic of the Lift the Ban mass arrest campaign, where just anyone shows up to risk arrest for supporting a proscribed terrorist group, is that we all "know" that they're not "really" terrorists. This was the same logic at play in the public narrative that Rosa Parks wasn't being "disruptive" when she sat where she wanted, and so it was a violation of her dignity to make her give up her seat. So I think it is illustrative in making clear that civil disobedience as Lift the Ban imagines it is a politics of respectability and "civilized" public behaviour. The Lift the Ban protestors are meant to be sympathetic to a mass public because they are apparently not the "kinds" of people who would be terrorists. They're "good people" who "shouldn't" be treated this way because they're doing the "right thing".

Rosa Parks and the Black Women Who Made the Bus Boycott Possible

The popular narrative that schoolchildren are typically taught is that Rosa Parks was just a Black woman who got fed up with segregation one day. Recall from last week that I discussed the example of Rosa Parks, and how she was chosen to be the figurehead of the boycott that sparked a nationwide movement, and was the centre of one of the court cases that sparked formal desegregation in the US. In actual fact, she was at the time a secretary at the NAACP, one of the organisations that helped organise the Montgomery Bus Boycott from December 5, 1955 to December 20, 1956.

Another of the organisations that organised the boycott was the Women's Political Council (WPC). The WPC was founded by a coalition of Black women university professors at Alabama State College. One of them, Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, published a memoir in 1987 detailing how the Montgomery Bus Boycott came to be such a powerful political force. In it, she discusses why Rosa Parks's arrest was seen as the right moment to announce the start of the boycott later that week, after years of planning and preparing for its launch. Notice how Gibson described Parks in the memoir (page 43):

In the afternoon of Thursday, December 1, a prominent black woman named Mrs. Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to vacate her seat for a white man. Mrs. Parks was a medium-sized, cultured mulatto woman; a civic and religious worker; quiet, unassuming, and pleasant in manner and appearance; dignified and reserved; of high morals and a strong character. She was—and still is, for she lives to tell the story—respected in all black circles. By trade she was a seamstress, adept and competent in her work.

For those who don't know, "mulatto" is an old fashioned term for "mixed race person" or "light skinned". She was also slim, quiet, and "pleasant in manner and appearance". In other words, Rosa Parks looked like a "respectable" Black woman to the white public and Black moderates and conservatives too. Further, Gibson describes Parks's behaviour during the arrest as "soft-spoken" and that she "maintained decorum and poise". In response, news of her arrest "traveled like wildfire into every black home. Telephones jangled; people congregated on street corners and in homes and talked". People were outraged that once again, a Black person had been arrested for refusing to give up her seat.

But why had previous arrests of Black people who refused to give up their seat not been enough to spark the boycott and garner national attention?

In August of 1950 Thomas Edwards Brooks, a veteran of the US Army, was shot in the back while running away and killed by a Montgomery police officer responding to his refusal to pay the double fare the bus driver demanded of him (20 cents, as opposed to the normal fare of a dime). Why not him? According to Robinson (page 21 of the memoir) "[m]any black Montgomerians felt that Brooks was intoxicated and had gotten 'out of his place' with the white bus driver. Others wondered if any man, drunk or sober, had to be killed because of one dime, one bus fare. Each had his own thoughts on the matter, but kept on riding the bus". There were other Black people too who were arrested, and didn't spark the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Claudette Colvin was arrested and fined in March 1955 for refusing to give up her seat to a white man. But she was an unmarried and pregnant 15 year old Black girl at the time. In Robinson's memoir (on page 37), Claudette Colvin was described as "an 'A' student, quiet, wall-mannered, neat, clean, intelligent, pretty, and deeply religious". So why not her? Well, as Rosa Parks later said about Colvin's teen pregnancy at the time, "If the white press got ahold of that information, they would have [had] a field day. They'd call her a bad girl, and her case wouldn't have a chance." At the time, Montgomery Black residents talked about a boycott in response to Colvin's arrest, but, according to Robinson, the organisers "wanted to be certain the entire city was behind them, and opinions differed where Claudette was concerned...The time for action was not now. Not everybody was ready." In other words, not everybody was ready to rally around a pregnant Black teenager as a moral cause.

One final historical incident also clues us in on the question of "Why 1955? Why then?". The summer of 1955 was also the summer that 14-year-old Emmett Till was brutally beaten to death in Mississippi by a white lynch mob after a white woman, Carolyn Brant, falsely claimed to the owner of the grocery store they were both at that Till had made a sexual advance at her while she was shopping. (In Bryant's posthumously released memoir, she admitted that she'd invented the claim of sexual advances out of thin air.) Believing Carolyn's claim at the time, the owner of the store, Roy Donham, and Roy's brother J.W. Milam kidnapped and beat Till to death, and then threw his body into the Tallahatchie River. His murderers were found not guilty a few months later, by an all-white jury.

Till's mother, Mamie Till Bradley, famously insisted on an open casket funeral, so people could see what had been done to her baby. Crowds of more than 50,000 people gathered by the hundreds on September 3, 1955 to pay their respects to the Till family. According to Smithsonian Magazine, "The body, which was so disfigured that he was only identifiable by the initials on a ring on his finger, was viewed by thousands of people and photographed and published in newspapers and magazines." The image is available on the Wikipedia page about Till's murder. I can only imagine how Black people around the country felt seeing it in print for the first time. How Black parents looked at their children, and came to grips with the reality that the only difference between the babies in their home and Mamie Till's was happenstance. Then, the next day, they all had to let their kids leave the house to go to school, or work, or worship halls, and they had to carry on too, because their children lived and needed to be fed, housed, and loved all the same.

As James Baldwin would write 7 years later in his letter to his nephew on James Jr.'s 15 birthday, "For here you were, Big James, named for me—you were a big baby, I was not—here you were: to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world." We love one another knowing all the while that we are mortally vulnerable to one another's hatred, to the very forces of nature, and to the ticking of our own hearts. I like to think Mamie Till's insistence on the open casket was one last act of love, one final scream of agency at Roy Donham, and J.W. Milam, and Carolyn Bryant to say, "You may have gotten away with it in courts, but I will make sure the whole world knows nothing you do can remain in the dark".

If you've seen the HBO show "Lovecraft Country" you've seen a fictionalised depiction of how Till's murder shook not just Black Americans, but white Americans too. Lovecraft Country also had an accurate depiction of the reality that many white people at the time said things like, "Well Roy and J.W. were just defending Carolyn's honour". Segregationists argued that segregation would have protected Till because he wouldn't have been in a white woman's presence for the accusation to happen in the first place. The fiction of that episode is that the local Klan members had magical powers to put curses on Black people who cross them. The historical facts of people's willingness to narrate Till as a nuisance who got what was coming to him was not fiction.

There are important material circumstances explaining why Brooks, Colvin, and the countless other egregious examples of police and state violence did not spark the boycott of course. It takes time to build the political will to pull off a city-wide boycott, yes. But also making tens of thousands of flyers, and prominent newspaper ads announcing such a thing costs money. The WPC, had been founded in 1949, and they'd spent years successfully campaigning for meetings with the Montgomery Bus Line leadership about desegregating the bus system. The executives, and even the white mayor, were perfectly polite to them. However, according to Robinson's memoir, the most they ever did was issue a directive to bus drivers to be more polite when telling Black bus riders to move. The WPC also spent the previous 6 years trying other strategies for protecting Black bus riders, which didn't work, but trying multiple tactics is part of the process. So at least part of the reason was that there was not yet a big enough group of people available to advertise the boycott, coordinate how people would get to work without public transportation, and convince people that there was enough support and resources between neighbours and community members to make it happen.

I'm not saying that people didn't get outraged enough about Brooks's murder, or Till's murder, or Colvin's mistreatment to start the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The desire for political action by Black people in 1955 was as strong as it was ever going to be. All of the previous arrests and indignities Black bus riders suffered in Montgomery, and around the United States, were important to getting people ready to boycott. All of the hypervisible violence and public grief against Black people were important to getting people ready to act. So the need for a mass movement was "in the air" so to speak; it wasn't just that people heard about Parks and got mad enough to walk to work for over a year. But as one of her lawyers E.D. Nixon was quoted in the New York Times in his obituary saying, "This is the case. We can boycott the bus lines with this and at the same time go to the Supreme Court." Nixon was sure that Parks could actually win both the legal and the public battle because she was light skinned, church going, married, employed, and all the other things that would make bigots hard pressed to dismiss her. And, importantly, her indignity was directly and incontrovertibly connected to the boycott of the bus lines.

Analysis

This was the hardest essay in this series for me to write, because I had to figure out how to critique the methods of this protest without making it seem like I'm saying that random that white people shouldn't be moved by genocide to go to a protest. What I am saying though, is that random white people are not the right public figures for this kind of protest with these kinds of aims. What does holding up a sign at Parliament Square have to do with the Filton 24? Like I've said, over and over again, I don't think it has much to do with them at all. I think it is a public cry of grief, and not even a particularly effective one at that.

Beloved, let me hold your hand when I say this: this protest makes no sense and relies on the false sense of security that white people feel when they look at the police and think they couldn't possibly be seriously harmed by the state. And given that 700 people have been arrested and only about 100 people charged, the vast majority of them are in fact going free.

I think the conclusion we should draw from these historical examples is that public voyeurism is key to civil disobedience, but our most famous historical examples show us that it matters, a lot, who is being put on display. Not just anyone can reliably garner the kind of public sympathy that drives the moral outrage which shifts public opinion. You've encountered this fact before, every time you've heard of a Black person being killed by the police in the United States. The newspapers are quick to run headlines like "Trayvon Martin was no angel" and "George Floyd being killed by the police doesn't make him a saint" and "Breonna Taylor had bad taste in men". There is no one who is good enough or innocent enough to avoid reactionary impulses to excuse the actions of the police or the state at the drop of a hat. But you can be strategic about how you choose who forms the face of your campaign, and how they present themselves to the media.

Emmett Till's murder outraged people, but it didn't connect to the segregation of public transportation. Gandhi's Salt March involved the ordinary Indian poor and working class people who were targeted by the British Raj's salt tax defiantly making their own salt from sea water and quarries to circumvent the tax. They were already subject to that taxation when the March started. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was sparked by Rosa Parks's arrest because all the people involved were already subject to segregation laws on the buses they were able to stop riding. Respectability politics is a tricky move to make, but it can be made. The examples of Parks, and Gandhi, and all the other civil disobedience campaigns that I didn't mention here specifically show us, I think, that civil disobedience is most effective when it makes spectacles by gathering people who are already being affected by an injustice, and privileging the most "morally innocent" people for the public view. They must be well connected to the direct issue at hand, and make clear what the problem is in a way that the public has little objection to.

The September action, with 1,000 people expecting to show up, has been announced by DoJ as a go. They will move forward. I think a much more effective image would be to hold up signs with the slogan "Free the Filton 24" and have their images and names of the political prisoners on them. Then, at the very least, there is public understanding of who is being harmed by the state's laws, and there is a direct connection to the problem at hand. Think about all the historical examples you've seen of Angela Davis holding her head up high on protest signs. "Free the Filton 24" names the direct people being harmed by the state, and doesn't rely as much on easily-defeated narratives of innocence. We all know Angela Davis really was a member of the Communist Party of the United States, and it really was her guns that were used by Jonathan Jackson to try to free his brother from jail. But the "Free Angela Davis" campaign wasn't about whether she was guilty or innocent, it was about whether or not the government should incarcerate her for her free speech. And she was the one being arrested already. Many of the Filton 24 have been sitting in jail for over a year. Why are we trying to get them out through a convoluted plan to throw a bureaucratic system into disarray by jacking up arrest numbers, when we can just focus on a more direct campaign of support their court cases and proving their innocence in the face of Terrorism Laws?

Think back to the speech I quoted at the start from the Lift the Ban protest organiser who said that "And now, if you go and sit in Parliament Square, with a factual sign, you're gonna be hauled off and risk a 14 year prison sentence." What are we supposed to feel at hearing these words? I think what I'm supposed to feel is that brave crowds of mostly white people are standing up for the Filton 24, and for Palestinian sovereignty, because they refused to stay home while their state murdered innocent civilians. But what about this protest communicates that? Their signs say "I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action". Is that a "factual statement" or is that a statement of your opinion about the state of the world? I guess it's "truthful" in the sense that it is a true statement that the protestors oppose genocide and support Palestine Action.

Out of the hundreds of protestors, apparently only 100 or so have been charged, according to the Daily Mail (I know, I know, the Daily Mail sucks, but it was the most recent numbers I could find, ok?!) So presumably, they absolutely can sit in Parliament Square and hold their signs, except for a small fraction of them. Why did those people get charged, and others didn't? Why are we now focusing on getting more people arrested, instead of focusing on the cases of the Filton 24, and the supportive protestors who have been charged? Why wasn't democracy over when the Terrorism Act was first passed? Why wasn't democracy over when Brexit was passed? Why is this the red line???

What I am trying to argue in giving a good faith analysis of the discussion of Rosa Parks's public image is show what is at stake in civil disobedience. If we're going to play the respectability politics of civil disobedience, let's do it strategically and try to maximise our chances of winning. The historical examples above, over whether or not Brooks was a drunk, or if Claudette Colvin was actually so much of a slut she would reflect badly on the Black people as a whole, or what, if anything, Emmett Till said to Carolyn Bryant, were about trying to figure out if the figurehead of the campaign was "good enough" to both capture public attention, and survive public scrutiny of their behaviour. To put it simply: people want to root for an underdog, but not everyone looks like the "right kind" of underdog for mass movements to succeed at anything other than drumming up news articles.

This means that civil disobedience isn't effective when just anyone represents the struggle underneath the protest. The public needs to see a person or group of people who are sympathetic to their existing moral intuitions and political imaginations, who they see as "wrongly" targeted by an otherwise just legal system that is being applied incorrectly to a particular group who doesn't deserve it. I think narrating the Filton 24 as political prisoners of the UK government's overactive terrorism anxieties in the protest is potentially more efficacious than getting random people arrested.

The goal of these protests is to get so many people arrested and prosecuted that it makes the Terrorism Act impossible to enforce. But increasing the number of arrests and prosecutions under the Terrorism Act point blank doesn't make it impossible to enforce- it encourages the government to increase its policing budget to meet the rising demand for arrests of people who are very easily presented to the public's existing moral imagination as undeserving of leniency. People are simply throwing themselves into the maw of the state, without any bigger strategy to protect them other than hoping they're "innocent enough" to get away with it.

I don't endorse these respectability politics. Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist organisation not because they are or aren't "really" terrorists, but because the corporate assets the group sabotaged, which profits off of colonialism abroad, and justifies colonialism domestically, are more important to politicians and law makers than the human lives exterminated by Israel's apartheid regime. My research into civil disobedience has convinced me that it's actually really dangerous to pursue when it is not connected to a material campaign action beyond the PR campaign. Otherwise, you're just pursuing a campaign that relies entirely on justifying the existing social, legal, and moral order as being fundamentally correct, and insisting that some people are simply too innocent to be treated like criminals by the state.

I feel so dirty writing this. It feels like a manipulative way to think about activism, and maybe even a condescending way to think about the average person on the street. But as I said in Part 1, romanticizing civil disobedience isn't just naïve, it's dangerous. It's dangerous to put your freedom on the line without a robust understanding of your chances of winning. And understanding how the politics of respectability play into civil disobedience allows us to see arguments about who is or isn't the "right" face of a civil disobedience campaign as themselves a matter of strategy, rather than an ends in themselves.