Respectable Protests?
Columbia in (a little) historical perspective
(I’m Henry Snow, and you’re reading Another Way.)
One common theme in centrist/establishment hand-wringing and finger-wagging over the recent campus protests against the genocide in Gaza has been procedural complaints: that protestors are making their “voices heard” in the wrong way, and should resort to respectable polite debate. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria contrasts the “long and soul-searching debates about the issues” he supposedly saw at Yale in the 80s with the “turmoil” of today.
Implicit in criticism like this is the claim that polite debate and respectable protest can reliably work. As it happens, I have a useful case study from current research (presented here with a different angle and different context than you’ll find in the book– this is just based on some of the same material) about another protest movement that we can use to examine this. A seemingly ideal example of respectable activism in fact illustrates how democratic deliberation and progressive change require a diversity of political tactics, including disruptive protest and organizing.
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It’s April 25th, 1973. Agents of the international mining firm AMAX send a warning to the firm’s executives, and a lawyer at white-shoe firm Sullivan and Cromwell, warning of a problem significant enough for the memo to go directly to the firm’s chairman, Ian MacGregor. The problem is “Edgar Lockwood,” a man in fact known to his associates as Reverend Ted Lockwood, who was “affiliated with the various Episcopalian organizations.” Lockwood, the memo warned, had purchased two shares of AMAX stock.
AMAX was one of the largest mining firms in the world, with investments around the world. Why were they so worried about one minister? The reason they were worried in general was his activist work in various political conflicts: AMAX had significant investments in apartheid South Africa, a regime which Lockwood, many Episcopalians, and many concerned citizens around the world hoped to change. Reverend Lockwood worked within the institutions of the church, and he was a political threat because he represented many of America’s Episcopalians more generally.
In some ways his story is that of the mid-century liberal establishment. The reverend grew up in Greenwich, CT and went to Yale. But Lockwood came from a conservative family background, and ultimately became more of a leftist than a liberal. In a later interview he mentions being a member of the “Democratic Socialist Party” that “attempts to be a progressive force within the Democratic Party.” This is probably a reference to the Democratic Socialists of America. It’s beyond the scope of a short essay to examine in full the character of the mid-century liberal Protestant world (let alone much-debated “Cold War liberalism”). Lockwood does offer a view on what was possible within that world, and the character of some of the good that it did.
While a student at Yale, Lockwood wrote an essay he remembered with pride, and as significant, some decades later, about a 19th-century abolitionist named Samuel Gridley Howe. Like Lockwood, Howe was an internationalist: he served as a military surgeon in Greece’s revolution (where despite American and British Christian support for the war as a religious conflict, Howe himself was horrified by atrocities the Greek side committed), later worked to support refugees in Greece, raised money for a Poland’s 1830-1831 failed revolt against Russia, and briefly marched in a procession marking the end of the more successful July Revolution in France. He later became an important abolitionist. During the Civil War era Howe insisted to a white population uneasy about emancipation that Black Americans were ready-and-waiting democratic citizens, rather than unruly subjects in need of delayed and/or cautious liberty– as even some abolitionists argued.
Ted Lockwood’s political development, like Howe’s, involved a progressive expansion of solidarity through new experiences, and a willingness to work with the oppressed rather than simply for them. Following a short career in law, he entered seminary in 1957, then worked in various New England churches. Lockwood travelled with an Episcopal delegation to Montgomery, Alabama to march, along with thousands of others, with Martin Luther King. Decades later, he recalled seeing “white racism right in front of the Capitol.” When he asked someone where he could find some water, he was directed to the sewer. Lockwood later identified this as a key moment in his political development. More generally, in the aforementioned interview he pointed to influential teachers, colleagues, and later progressive fellow travellers as important influences as well.
What’s clear from Lockwood’s organizing journey is the role of community in forming his political consciousness.His subsequent work as an activist put community ties to work for political action. The reverend appears not as a singular leader but one hard-working man among many seeking justice. In the late 1960s, he moved to Washington to pursue political change. In the early 1970s he worked on two campaigns that both directly touched AMAX. The first was the movement for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions for South Africa. Lockwood got involved in this work through efforts to examine the ethics of church investments. This catalyzed another expanding circle of solidarity.
The problem for Lockwood wasn’t only the individual complicity of the church in the evil of apartheid, but the existence of that evil. He became part of an activist push for a shareholder vote demanding General Motors divest from South Africa. This effort brought together the Episcopal Church, Baptists, and the United Auto Workers. While the shareholder vote failed, it began a long road toward eventual divestment in the mid-1980s. Meanwhile, Lockwood collaborated with the Methodist Church against the opening of new copper mines in Puerto Rico by AMAX and another firm, Newmont. The Episcopalians held a public hearing that brought together numerous organizations– including left-wing and pro-independence parties in Puerto Rico. Together they stopped the mine.
Meanwhile, the right was working to undermine solidarity and preserve white minority rule where it remained in Africa. An earlier AMAX memo mentions– favorably– National Review (the conservative magazine) publisher William Rusher, anti-Communist activist Max Yergan, and their “American African Affairs Association,” a pro-white-rule lobby. The AAAA, Ian MacGregor was informed by his assistant’s assistant, Winifred Armstrong, was funded by South Africa and Portugal (then an authoritarian dictatorship which still held onto Angola as a colony). Yergan headed the “American Committee for aid to the Katanga Freedom Fighters,” which supported the breakaway state of Katanga in recently independent Congo. Katanga was backed by mining firms unwilling to let go of their power even as colonial rule receded, and in 1961, Katangan planes probably assassinated UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld for his support of African independence movements. All of these actors were part of an international nexus of apartheid collaborators, ranging from colonial powers like Portugal to neoliberal ideologues like economist Wilhelm Röpke to magazine publishers like Rusher.
This international nexus lost, in the end. It was slow going. Liberals restored US government sanctions on Rhodesia following the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, but South Africa was in a stronger position than that politically. To summarize briefly and probably with significant risk of overgeneralization: in the 1980s, an anti-apartheid movement that stretched from illegal ground-level protests all the way to congressional legislation began to gain ground. GM pulled out of South Africa in 1986, and in the same year Congress passed sanctions on the nation. Increasingly isolated internationally and facing continued resistance internally, South Africa soon capitulated: in 1990, its ruling government released Nelson Mandela and negotiated with the African National Congress.
Now, Lockwood’s work might seem to be within the boundary of respectability– hearings, shareholder votes, public outcry. It is worth noting though that much of it actually is illegal now. Numerous American states punish businesses that choose to boycott Israel or its flagrantly illegal settlements in the West Bank. Respectability’s boundaries on protest are always a moving target, and so are laws. Anti-boycott laws, like police repression on college campuses, use the power of the state against its own citizens. Still, it might be possible based on a surface-level reading of Lockwood’s work and the anti-apartheid movement to oppose anti-boycott laws but still insist protests should remain respectable and legal.
But even more importantly, apartheid did not fall because of elite persuasion and respectable protest alone. If political change only required a nice reverend to go to Washington and hold some meetings, I imagine a number of things would be quite different– and South Africa would have changed, or at least major businesses would have divested, years earlier. Rev. Lockwood himself did not occupy buildings like students at Columbia have today, and did in 1985 over apartheid– perhaps because this was not really his proper role as a minister from Connecticut. He was perfectly comfortable collaborating with those who did this and more though. When he arrived in South Africa, all he knew of the “liberation people” of the African National Congress was that they were “alleged to be communists.” That and he must have known they broke the law– since he worked with those who supported their families while they were in jail. This did not stop him from considering them political allies.
Apartheid fell because of the resistance of these and other South Africans themselves– resistance that was hardly polite and respectable. Protests that ultimately led to increasing American economic and political pressure on South Africa were also illegal and disruptive, going well beyond meetings and flyers. The exact causal role of protests in any instance is difficult to untangle (especially in a post I am getting out briskly given current events, as my own limited discursive contribution)– requiring as it does an implicit comparison with a counterfactual world in which no disruptive protests occurred– but what we can say is that mass protest was a significant part of the movement to end apartheid. It is difficult to imagine American divestment and sanctions without that pressure here, and impossible to conceive of South African liberation without South Africa’s liberation movement. The expanding solidarity that characterized Lockwood’s activism was also the reason it could succeed.
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Campus protests against the genocide in Gaza have generated an avalanche of takes by the commentariat, ranging from stale to ludicrous. Fareed Zakaria recently offered one of the classic pundit moves in the article I quoted earlier, a shallow misreading of events based on an equally shallow reading of one of the few books the comment class has or at least pretends to have read (Robert Putnam’s 2000 Bowling Alone in this case). He claims that part of a decaying society in which community bonds are failing, campuses have “weakened as actual communities” in which people can debate issues politely– as he claims was the case when he was at Yale in the 1980s.
This is wrong in two ways. First, it’s an inaccurate description of Yale in the 1980s. Zakaria himself briefly mentions tents being constructed in front of the president’s office, but he says little of the broader movement this was part of. In spring 1986, hundreds of protestors at Yale were arrested for anti-apartheid actions. Zakaria graduated in 1986– assuming he was on the typical schedule and went to his commencement, he would have seen fellow students with “DIVEST” on the backs of their gowns. Second, then and now, campus protests are an instance of community, not its absence.
Perhaps Zakaria’s downplayed the protests in his memory because he was on the losing side– in 1985 he represented the anti-divestment side in a debate between two clubs at Yale. (Details on the matter in a 1985 article in Yale’s newspaper suggest this was a debate that actually reflected participants’ views, not merely a competitive exhibition match, though I cannot be sure). Zakaria “won” the debate: among the attendees, his numerically superior supporters in the Yale Political Union club voted on party lines against the opposing Yale Debate Association. But he lost the political conflict that followed. Yale did, eventually, divest– thanks in part to protestors who didn’t merely settle for debate club antics. This is an effective enough metaphor for what Zakaria calls for now: keeping protests within establishment boundaries, where things like club partisanship can determine their outcome, rather than actually fighting for our values.
From AMAX in the 1970s to Israel’s government today, the powerful are happy for the rest of us to step back and speak politely. Establishment calls to actually do so in the name of polite debate risk turning politics into a one-sided conflict, in which repressive forces wield economic and state power while their opponents may only wield words, and only in approved forums. Reverend Lockwood’s organizing work might seem like exactly the kind of activity respectable liberals could support. But it only worked as part of a broader coalition of protest, one Lockwood embraced instead of shying away from. We should all do the same today.