Protests Won't Cut It

The Forgotten Art of Direct Action

A photo I took at a protest against mass deportations in February.

Americans are flooding the streets and packing town halls at a scale not seen in years. They’re angry about illegal arrests by ICE, essential government programs being destroyed, the increasing control of an unelected billionaire over our nation, and the many other abuses of the Trump administration.

When we feel like we have to protest, our first thought is to join a march or hold signs on a street corner. However, if we want to sustain and target this energy to create real change, one of the best things we can do is learn the forgotten art of direct action.

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Direct action has featured in the proudest parts of American history. From suffragists in the 1910’s and auto workers in the 1930’s to Black Americans in the 1960’s and disability rights activists in the 1980’s, direct action has long been one of the only ways for Americans to challenge those in power and win. It has also defeated colonial superpowers and brought down authoritarian regimes around the world.

Here’s the problem. Although schools teach us about the achievements of Alice Paul, Gandhi, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., they do not teach us how to design and carry out campaigns like theirs. Most of us would have no idea what to do if we were the ones trying to win women’s suffrage, kick the British out of India, or defeat Jim Crow. Now, more than ever, that has to change.

If you can, you should read George Lakey’s exceptional book How We Win: A Guide to Nonviolent Direct Action Campaigning. To make Lakey’s ideas more accessible, I have laid out some of the most important ones below.

What is a Direct Action Campaign?

A direct action campaign is a way for groups of regular people to create change. It uses tangible things like people’s bodies, voices, and money to force government institutions, corporations, or other powerful players to do what’s right. Direct action campaigns have three key ingredients, each of which I’ll discuss below:

1. A specific demand

2. A specific target

3. A series of escalating actions

Before We Begin: Assembling a Group

Every successful direct action campaign in history has been planned and executed by groups of people, which means you can’t go it alone. Start by gathering a group of people that you share some concerns with, like neighbors, coworkers, parents at your child’s school, or students at your university. The more people with diverse identities and perspectives you can include, the stronger you will be together.

Once you are planning your direct action campaign, it’s important to engage everyone in the process, whether brainstorming, choosing between ideas, or executing actions. This will make the members of your group more committed to your cause and help them discover new skills and become leaders. Lakey suggests ways of splitting into smaller “action groups” for tasks like planning a specific action.

Your campaign won’t win unless your group is a well-functioning team. That means you have to rehearse your actions beforehand, do debriefs to learn for the future, watch out for harmful group dynamics, avoid burnout, and develop leaders. All of this is covered in depth in How We Win.

A Specific Demand

It’s not hard to list major problems in our country: expensive housing, a cruel healthcare system, gun violence, mass incarceration, racism, etc. Though you and your group will set out to address a major problem (or multiple), it is useless to demand that someone simply “stop climate change” or “stop gun violence.” Instead, you need to figure out a specific change that works towards addressing that large-scale problem. For example, your demand could be for the local utility company to invest in buying more renewable energy, or for your state’s legislature to pass a stricter background check law. As you can see, the demand is closely related to the target, so make sure you read the next section.

Often, you can copy demands from a campaign somewhere else. For example, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which used the demand of desegregating public transit to pursue the goal of racial equality, was modeled on a previous boycott in Baton Rouge. Because of this dynamic, direct action campaigns can blossom in waves. In the past, students at one university demanding their college merchandise not be produced in sweatshops have inspired students at other universities to demand the same. Citizens of one country toppling their authoritarian leader have inspired neighbors in nearby regimes. According to Lakey, when multiple campaigns pursue demands relating to the same major issue, they form a movement.

A Specific Target

Your target should be the person or people that can give you what you want. For example, if you are demanding fair pay from an employer, your target will be the company’s owner or board of directors. If you are demanding better social programs, like universal healthcare, your target will be decision makers in the state or federal government—the Legislature and the Governor, or Congress and the President.

Sometimes, there are multiple targets to choose from. For example, if you are demanding better working conditions at a company which contracts with your local government, the City Council may be as good a target as the corporation’s board of directors. In situations like these, you should look at where you have the most leverage and what that leverage looks like.

Lakey illustrates this with an example from Martin Luther King Jr.’s failed campaign in Albany, Georgia:

On reflection, he realized it was a mistake for the campaign to have aimed its marches at politicians, since few African Americans were allowed to vote and as a result their views were not important to officeholders. Merchants in Albany would have been a better target because they needed the trade of blacks, and the merchants in turn could influence politicians.

To answer both questions—who can give you your demand and who you have leverage over—you’ll need to do some research with your group. If you’re dealing with a company, you may want to look into their governance structure (who is whose boss), their major clients, and the laws that they have to comply with, for example. If you’re looking at a government, it may be wise to look into what systems of public input exist, which politicians sit on the committees relevant to your issue, and which of them are most politically vulnerable (who had the narrowest win in a recent election or was recently involved in a scandal). The targets you have leverage over may impact the demand you choose—the “demand” and “target” steps don’t have to happen in any particular order.

A Series of Escalating Actions

Once your group has agreed on the specific demand and target, there comes the most important part: designing and executing direct actions to ratchet up the pressure until you win. This is a huge topic on which much of How We Win is focused—and even that book is not enough to do it justice. I have drawn some key considerations for designing your escalating actions from Lakey’s book below.

Asking nicely: If possible, meet with your target before beginning your campaign. This has a variety of benefits, including helping you and the target understand each other and giving you greater legitimacy in the eyes of the allies you want on your side. This is a principle both Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. held by and advocated.

Think about drama: No matter what leverage you have over the target, your success will depend on the amount of public and media attention you can draw with your actions. Alice Paul, who used militant tactics like daily picketing of the White House with her Silent Sentinels, was far more successful in winning women’s suffrage than organizers focused on traditional actions like mass marches, which the public and press were accustomed to.

Use “Action Logic”: The best action is one where people seeing it can understand what you want without reading any signs or pamphlets. For example, when a North Philadelphia neighborhood was denied adequate trash service, community members gathered up trash from their neighborhood and dumped it on the steps of City Hall to demand change.

Be what you want to see: A powerful form of action logic is to paint a picture of the change you’re fighting for. For example, activists fighting evictions have held family “sleep-ins” at City Hall, while LGBTQ people demanding the right to marry have “held mass ‘weddings’ of couples in a public plaza, complete with clerics presiding.”

Cover your bases: There’s some legwork involved in a successful action. You should always rehearse your actions to make sure your group members are prepared and debrief afterwards so you can learn for the future. Additionally, you should have a system for communicating with traditional media, running social media, and coordinating with allies. If your action involves the risk of someone being arrested, make sure to have a team to keep track of who’s in jail and pick them up when they’re released.

Conclusion

It is impossible to do justice to the enormous topic of direct action in this short of a piece. My hope, however, is that the lessons I have shared will lead someone to pick up How We Win (or any other book on the topic) and get campaigning. The Trump administration has already left a trail of suffering and destruction through thousands of lives, and we cannot know how much more harm it will do. Even after the current administration is gone, there will always be injustices in our lives and changes that need to be made. No matter what fight we’re fighting, we will be well-equipped to win with the art of direct action.

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A little update: My goal is currently to post an article on Monday every two weeks, so I hoped to have this one up three days ago. Sorry about that! Creating Oregon Power & Policy has been an amazing experience so far, and I’ve learned so much, whether from research, drafting articles, or hearing your feedback. I have more ideas for articles every day, and I’m planning on trying some new things. Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you have a great rest of your week!