Forum Post: OWS vs. '55 Montgomery Bus Boycott - a lesson from history
Posted 12 years ago on Nov. 17, 2011, 12:43 p.m. EST by OWSvoice
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Compare the OWS movement with a very successful historical movement - the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott. Although it started spontaneously, it quickly developed two critical things - recognized leadership (first Robinson, then King), and clear and more importantly, coherent demands (a new bus seating policy). OWS has neither, and refuses to try to develop them. As a result, several problems have arisen.
First, with no coherent demands, they have no objective standard of success. This means that even if good does happen coincidentally with the OWS protest, they will not be able to legitimately claim that a goal was achieved. Contrast this with the Boycott - when the court ruled bus segregation was unconstitutional, this was close enough to (better than, actually) the goals of the MIA that they could claim victory. The other obvious side of this is that it placed an end in sight for participants. They would endure hardship, as OWS protesters do, but only temporarily; once their objective was complete they could go back to riding the bus. With no set objective to accomplish, OWS protesters have no end in sight to their protest, or more reasonably, no reason to protest at all.
The Boycott settled on objectives almost immediately. For OWS, this late in the game, coming up with coherent demands will be much more difficult. Protesters have showed up from all different backgrounds, feeling welcome by a general sense of dissatisfaction, but in reality having many different reasons for dissatisfaction and therefore many different (and conflicting) personal objectives. Getting a coherent set of demands out of this crowd will not be easy.
This is compounded and perpetuated by the lack of leadership. So long as OWS lacks leadership, they will have trouble formulating objectives. So long as they cannot agree on objectives, they will have great difficulty appointing leadership. Also, until they acquire both, they will be unable to negotiate - a key ability of the Boycott, and of any movement that sets out to accomplish something. They will also struggle to act in concert, weakening the effectiveness of the action that they do manage to take. The Boycott succeeded because their leadership reinforced their primary action - staying off the buses.
For these reasons, I predict (if unchanged) that the OWS movement will fizzle in the next couple of months. It is primarily fueled by a combination of media attention and nebulous dissatisfaction right now, so it will certainly not outlast the coming election cycle (when media attention will certainly turn elsewhere) unless these two facets are added to the movement.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albany_movement (a protest in 1961)
"The mistake I made there was to protest against segregation generally rather than against a single and distinct facet of it. Our protest was so vague that we got nothing, and the people were left very depressed and in despair. It would have been much better to have concentrated upon integrating the buses or the lunch counters. One victory of this kind would have been symbolic, would have galvanized support and boosted morale ... When we planned our strategy for Birmingham months later, we spent many hours assessing Albany and trying to learn from its errors. Our appraisals not only helped to make our subsequent tactics more effective, but revealed that Albany was far from an unqualified failure."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
So maybe OWS needs a certain fuzziness until people decide on exactly what they want and how to get it?