When Malcom X and Martin Luther King turned their communications to social media

Maxinquaye

Maxinquaye

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I found this article fascinating.

http://www.wired.com/2015/10/how-bl...to-fight-the-power?mbid=social_cp_twitter_tny
In the 1960s, if you were a civil rights worker stationed in the Deep South and you needed to get some urgent news out to the rest of the world—word of a beating or an activist’s arrest or some brewing state of danger—you would likely head straight for a telephone.

From an office or a phone booth in hostile territory, you would place a call to one of the major national civil rights organizations. But you wouldn’t do it by dialing a standard long-distance number. That would involve speaking first to a switchboard operator—who was bound to be white and who might block your call. Instead you’d dial the number for something called a Wide Area Telephone Service, or WATS, line.

Like an 800 line, you could dial a WATS number from anywhere in the region and the call would patch directly through to the business or organization that paid for the line—in this case, say, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

On the other end of the line, another civil rights worker would be ready to take down your report and all the others pouring in from phones scattered across the South. The terse, action-packed write-ups would then be compiled into mimeographed “WATS reports” mailed out to organization leaders, the media, the Justice Department, lawyers, and other friends of the movement across the country.

In other words, it took a lot of infrastructure to live-tweet what was going on in the streets of the Jim Crow South
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There's often a sneering contempt for users of social media. It is expressed by journalists, pundits, and politicians. Just a week or two ago David Cameron, Britain's Prime Minister, said "Twitter is not Britain". He's quite right in that. But it doesn't need to be. Unlike in the 1960s, people carry WATS with them. They have many, many WATSes.

It's in part what is fueling Bernie Sanders campaign. It was a fundamental feature of Jeremy Corbyn's campaign. And it was a fundamental feature of the Scottish independence referendum campaign. Wherever you look, whether it's Syriza in Greece, the Occupy movement in the noughties, social media is there. Until now, social media has been largely ineffectual, but I'd say that during the last year it has shown its claws.

So, therefore this article is really interesting. Maybe you'll think so too.
 
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nighttimer

nighttimer

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I consider myself a supporter of #BlackLivesMatter, but I found the article problematic. The inspiration provided by King and X to BLM is strong, but the connection it attempted to draw between the two social movements usage of social media was tenuous and brief. There really is no thread that binds an old WATS line with live Tweeting a protest march. The title is far more compelling than how the author romanticizes the old social movements and jock rides it a bit to add legitimacy to the new one.

Not enough has been said about Campaign Zero, not in the media, not here and not in Bijan Stephen's essay. Agree or disagree with its suggestions on how to curb police brutality in America, it at least offers a framework to begin the discussion and advance it beyond "what happened and why did it happen" to "what can be done about it."

That's a conversation we very much need to be having and President Obama cited BLM defending its overarching objective.

WASHINGTON — Defending the Black Lives Matter movement, President Barack Obama said Thursday the protests are giving voice to a problem happening only in African-American communities, adding, “We, as a society, particularly given our history, have to take this seriously.”


Obama said the movement, which sprung up after the deaths of unarmed black men in Florida, Missouri and elsewhere, quickly came to be viewed as being opposed to police and suggesting that other people’s lives don’t matter. Opponents have countered that “all lives matter.”


At the conclusion of a White House forum on criminal justice, Obama said he wanted to make a final point about the nexus of race and the criminal justice system before launching into his defense of the movement.


“I think everybody understands all lives matter,” Obama said. “I think the reason that the organizers used the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ was not because they were suggesting nobody else’s lives matter. Rather, what they were suggesting was there is a specific problem that’s happening in the African-American community that’s not happening in other communities.


“And that is a legitimate issue that we’ve got to address.”
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Naturally, it should be expected the president's remarks will be skewed by his adversaries into propaganda. They will say the president is demonizing the police and ignoring the "hate speech" of BLM protesters such as the "pigs in a blanket/fry 'em like bacon" chant as Bull O'Really has frothed at the mouth over. That insulting chant and the extremism of some BLM supporters should be part of the discussion. Conservatives have a stake too in reducing tension between predominantly White police departments the predominantly communities of color they serve and protect.

Stephen's reflections on how BLM has given him an outlet for his anger and pain may be important to him as a young Black man, but if I had been his editor I would have told him to lose the personal pronouns completely. What matters to him matters far less than getting the reader to think the essay means to them. It's hip to invoke King and X in any article written by a Black writer in a primarily White publication like Wired, but that misses the point that A. Philip Randolph, Fannie Lou Hamer, Stokley Carmichael, or Bayard Rustin may have been more adept in how to utilize the media and the social network of the '60s as well as Martin Luther King and possibly better.

It's cool you found the article fascinating and chose to share it with Absolute Write, Maxinquaye, but for me it comes up a day late and a dollar short in too many ways to share the sentiment.
 
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