What Makes A Movement Effective

When a system of government is so corrupt that it becomes them versus the people, the only option is to fight against that system. For years this has been done through protests, organizations, riots, boycotts, activism, and more. In trying to achieve a goal of equality and basic human rights, building an effective movement comes with many challenges. Since this is a matter of basic needs being denied, it is very hard not to feel frustrated and angry. When a government seems to pull all the strings and get away with violence and excessive force, the people’s response is to push back in self defense. The question is how effective is this in achieving the goals they are fighting for? The protests going on today are about police brutality and supporting the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. In Sanya Mansoor’s article, “93% Of Black Lives Matter Protests Have Been Peaceful, New Report Finds.” Despite the false representation from the media, the majority of protests have been peaceful and typically become non-peaceful due to excess force from the police using rubber bullets and tear gas. The Armed Conflict And Event Data Project is warning about the heightened risk of political violence and civil unrest in the 2020 election, especially since the president and leader, Donald Trump, has made the tensions between racial inequality and police brutality worse.

Today the deaths of Black men and women by law enforcement have incited strong, but justified, feelings of anger and frustration. The BLM movement has had many different approaches, but it is important to look at which ones are working. For a movement to be effective they need media attention, but if that attention is negative, from things like violence, it will overshadow the importance of the message. The visuals of looting and rioting on the media, and the narrative the current administration is pushing is currently creating that negative attention that will hurt the BLM movement. It can push people on the fence to the side of opposition. Moderates see violence as an effort to create chaos and disorder and Republican candidates with law and order as their political message can be powerful enough to push these moderates onto their side.What causes moderates to sympathize with a movement's cause is when people see protesters being peaceful, and authority figures initiating the violence.

The reality of the BLM movement is that it is mostly a peaceful social movement. It is spontaneous and uses social media to spread the message. Using social media as a platform for political and social activism can be good, but “translating that into actual policy changes is very different.” It can be a very fast way to spread a movement’s message and organize marches, but it does not have the “underlying resilience” that long term movements, like the Civil Rights Movement, have. The spontaneity can cause it to be unorganized and not powerful enough to threaten authority. The way to make a social movement effective is to have a group of people fighting for the same cause in a public space where they will be seen and heard. Social movements are typically like this, but leadership is also required to make it effective. There needs to be a leader, or multiple leaders, to present clear goals and lay out a plan. Without these elements, the message of the movement will be unclear. The BLM movement and protest have a huge amount of young supporters, but there isn’t a distinct leader. The anger and frustration they feel for this cause needs to be used in making efforts for some sort of reform. They have strength in numbers and a lot of passion, but their weakness is in the lack of leadership and organization.

A movement that seemed to have started out as a social movement and shifted towards one of violence is the infamous Rhode Island Suffrage movement. Thomas Dorr was the leader of The Suffrage Party; he attempted to lay out their demands and ideas for reform. The first action they took was through an anonymous pamphlet that went around; it talked about suffrage reform and steps on how to overthrow a government. However, like the issue with the BLM movement on social media right now, achieving the steps to get policy changes is easier said than done. Every little bit of progress they made with gaining public support, creating a constitution to expand suffrage reform, and infiltrating the congress was stopped by the Charter Government and government-run organizations like the Landholders Convention. The Charter Government just responded with laws that made any efforts the Suffrage party made for reform illegal; it limited their freedom of democracy even more.