Raleigh, North Carolina
One thousand enthusiastic celebrants at the fiftieth anniversary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee here were credited by a top White House official with making possible the Barack Obama presidency, as the group passed the torch to a new generation fighting for a constitutional right to quality education.
It may have been the last assemblage of the original SNCC tribe of organizers, now averaging 65 years in age, but the promise of SNCC's children, now between their teens and 30s, was evident in hundreds of young faces from all over the country.
US Attorney General Eric Holder spoke on Saturday at the same Raleigh site where SNCC was founded as a coordinating network for the exploding sit-in movement that began in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960. After internal debate, the conference steering committee invited President Obama. The decision to send Holder was freighted with memories of Justice Department officials in the early 1960s who, after initial hesitancy, often struggled alone to prevent segregationist violence against young civil rights workers helping local people to register and vote. John Doar, now 89, who faced down racist officials on many occasions, sat in the crowd as the new attorney general spoke.
Holder, under fire from the right as he tries to rebuild the Justice Department's civil rights division, told the crowd that "the nation is in your debt."
"There is a straight line from those lunch counter sit-ins [of 1960] to the Oval Office today, and a straight line to the sixth floor of the Justice Department where I serve today," Holder said. His late sister-in-law, Vivian Malone Jones, defied Governor George Wallace to integrate the University of Alabama in 1963.
"This progress could not have happened without SNCC's work," he went on. "The path was blazed by you, and I stand on your shoulders."
Holder pledged to strengthen civil rights enforcement and place a new emphasis on trying to reverse policies that have incarcerated young men and women of color for longer sentences than their white counterparts.
"We are counting on you to rekindle the spirit of 1960 and build on SNCC's achievements. You look strong to me. This army is not disbanding. There still is marching to be done. Stay as committed as back then."
Holder's speech attracted little attention in the mainstream media. But if a primary purpose of the SNCC conference was to claim a legacy in history, the legitimizing import of Holder's official remarks was important. In the early 1960s, SNCC was criticized privately by President John Kennedy, prior to the 1963 March on Washington, as a group of "radicals" and "sons of bitches." Representative John Lewis, who preceded Holder on the Raleigh stage, was under severe pressure in 1963 from the Kennedy administration and mainstream civil rights leaders to tone down the speech, in which he famously demanded to know, "Where is our political party?" Robert Kennedy at first tried to freeze the Freedom Rides, and even questioned the loyalty of the early SNCC militants. In time, that tension would lessen, as SNCC kept up the heat on the Kennedys, a process that may lie ahead in SNCC's relations with Barack Obama.
SNCC became "a blip in the dominant [civil rights] narrative," according to 37-year-old Tufts historian Peniel Joseph, who attended the conference. Historicizing SNCC is extremely important, he said, though there is a danger that "glorifying" the early SNCC implies that a "bad SNCC" developed after 1966 with the rise of Black Power, calls for self-defense and revolutionary internationalism. Those apparent extremes should not be discredited, Joseph said, but contextualized in the failed social response of the US government; the escalation of the Vietnam War at the same time as the Selma, Alabama, march; and the employment of counterintelligence programs by the FBI.
The historian Taylor Branch was one of the few to question whether SNCC inadvertently might have contributed to what he called the "shocking distortion of history" in which SNCC's role is largely erased. "The empirical achievements of the 1960s are buried under amnesia," Branch lamented. "It's understandable that segregationists would want to discredit that era. But we are complicit in failing to embrace nonviolence and our own achievements, partly because of the frustrations over how long it took for society to reform. As a result, many Americans don't know and appreciate the way the reforms we won have benefited them."
As an example, Branch pointed to the 1964 crisis at the Democratic National Convention, when the party establishment rejected the challenge of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic delegation, organized by SNCC. The compromise offered by Johnson--two seats without a vote--was indeed token, Branch said, but in a wider sense it was an effort that would lead to a more open Democratic Party. Completely forgotten, he claimed, is that at their convention a few weeks earlier, the Republicans expelled most of their few black delegates in order to win more white segregationist voters.
While the primary emphasis of the Raleigh conference was to celebrate SNCC's overall role in defeating segregation and winning voting rights, there was no effort at dividing "good" from "bad" SNCCs, to distance the organization from its more radical phases. The room was jammed with old militants of all stripes. Amiri Baraka gave a presentation on the black arts. Kathleen Cleaver, former wife of Eldridge Cleaver and now teaching at Emory University, stood cheering for third-graders from Oakland, California, where the Black Panther office was headquartered. Peniel Joseph is writing a positive history of the late Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure). (In private communications with Holder's office, the SNCC conference representatives lodged a forceful complaint against the transfer of another of their later chairs, H. Rap Brown [Jamil Abdullah al-Amin], to a high-security Colorado prison far from his Atlanta home. He is serving a life term for allegedly shooting two Atlanta sheriff's deputies in 2000 after they tried to arrest him at home for failure to appear on a speeding offense. One of the deputies died.)
The fact that the Raleigh conference was overwhelmingly interracial was a sign that old antagonisms have been transcended and largely healed.
A women's workshop asserted a historic role for SNCC in the rise of the women's liberation movement, another once-contentious issue put to rest.
Dimmed the most in the legacy discussions was SNCC's early leadership in opposing the military draft and the Vietnam War. That opposition began as early as 1964, not in the later "bad" period, and resulted in SNCC original member Julian Bond's being expelled from the Georgia legislature in January 1966. A federal court restored Bond's seat, and he later became president of the national NAACP.
By comparison, the raging wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the latter now led by President Obama, were little mentioned during some forty-five workshops and forums. In fairness, it is safe to assume that the 1,000 participants were overwhelmingly critical of the current wars, and that point was driven home by keynote speakers like the Reverend James Lawson and Harry Belafonte. But the main focus of the workshops was SNCC's civil rights impact and legacy.
It will be impossible to report the outcome of so many workshops until transcripts are released by the organizers. The topics were diverse and speakers were many, including: the early student movement, how activists became field organizers, how SNCC built an organization, "more than a hamburger," Alabama/Black Power, Southwest Georgia, lessons of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and so on.
Perhaps the most important question on everyone's mind was the future. Just as important as securing a legacy in history was opening the way to a better tomorrow. That was the focus of two plenary sessions, which amounted to a ritual transition within the SNCC tribe. On Saturday in the sanctuary of the First Baptist Church, the grown-up "children" rose one by one to take their elders' places, with the quiet blessings of those elders who were still alive. While hundreds wept, clapped their hands and sang, they came to the pulpit to declare themselves: Maishe Moses (Bob and Janet Moses), her brother Omo, James Forman Jr. (James Forman and Dinky Romilly), Tarik Smith (Frank and Jean Smith), Sabina Varela (Maria Varela and Lorenzo Zuniga), Bakari Sellers (Cleveland and Gwendolyn Sellers), Zora Cobb (Charles Cobb and Ann Chin), Hollis Watkins Jr. (Hollis Watkins and Nayo Barbara Watkins), Gina Belafonte (Harry and Julie Belafonte). Sherry Bevel (James Bevel and Diane Nash) combined humor and compassion for her father, who was convicted of incest in 2008, released on appeal and died shortly afterward:
It would be a shame if his wit and energy was forgotten. We have had great men and women who were caught up in drug or alcohol problems, or were philandering with underage girls. But I for one don't think we should just forget Thomas Jefferson.
The following morning, in SNCC style, the meaning of this ritual transition took material form. Bob Moses and David Dennis, who represented SNCC and CORE in Mississippi and still work together, addressed a large breakfast. In his customary low-key way, Moses asked people to "think about" pushing for a constitutional amendment to guarantee the right to quality education for every single American. People then sat in small discussion groups. The abstract idea was made real by the presence of young people, many of them the children of SNCC, who are already organizing through a remedial algebra project and a broader young people's project aimed against economic and educational disenfranchisement and mass incarceration of young people of color, their own generational peers. As the first SNCC stood with the demonized of the Black Belt, this newer generation was immersed in organizing the demonized of the inner cities. To discuss what such an effort might look like, sparked by two organizing efforts, the Algebra Project and the Young People's Project, aimed at addressing the educational and economic disenfranchisement of young people of color. Moses offered a few words of historical background:
When Jimmie Travis was shot in 1963, we got into a Mississippi court. John Doar was there. The judge asked why are you taking illiterates to vote. So the subtext was education. In 1870 in Mississippi the Fifteenth Amendment had been approved. The black voters had put into the governors office Adelbert Ames, under the protection of federal troops. President Grant asked for an amendment to guarantee all children the right to an education. Then in 1876 the backlash came. They said the money should be used to build railroads in the Delta, not for schools. We got sharecropper education. That's where we were until 1963. Then we got Jim Crow out of public accommodations, out of the Democratic Party, and we got the right to vote. We didn't get Jim Crow out of education. So that's the work we have to do. Some people have issues with a Constitution written by white people. But think of it as an evolution. We have moved from being property to being second-class constitutional people, and now we must become constitutionalized as people with a right to quality education.
Moses asked the conference to repeat with him the preamble to the Constitution, beginning with the universally known phrase, "We, the People." He noted that it didn't say we the government, didn't even say we the citizens, an implied reference to immigrants of today. As I rolled the phrase around in my memory, I began to understand another way to say it, more in keeping with the SNCC tradition. If one takes the comma away, one can simply assert in common language, "Who are we? We the people," not something a politician wants to hear.
After Moses finished, Albert Sykes from Jackson, Mississippi, rose to represent the Young People's Project. Sykes first met Moses when he was in sixth grade in the Algebra Project, and gradually became a mentor and organizer, starting thirteen years ago. He called on the conference to unite behind his new generation. "We are transitioning from the sit-in movement of 1960 to a stand-up movement of young people. For us, literacy is the next frontier. And we're gonna need your moral capital, your financial capital, lawyers to get us out of jail, and we need to spread across the whole country."
As he spoke, at least 100 young people from many states were moving around the room distributing sign-up sheets. Moses said, "Now we're gonna ask you to do some work." The tables came alive with conversation.
Something had shifted in the long weekend. Now the past was very much present, and a future of some kind was beginning again. The tribe of SNCC was still gathered, their spirits high, but the children were leading now, and the work of the future was beginning again.
As one SNCC veteran, Doris Derby, declared as the conference wound down, "When they say SNCC is a state of mind, they are right."
Senator Tom Hayden, the Nation Institute's Carey McWilliams Fellow, has played an active role in American politics and history for over three decades, beginning with the student, civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s.
"Tom Hayden changed America," wrote Nicholas Lemann, national correspondent for The Atlantic, of Hayden's role in the 1960s. Richard Goodwin, former speechwriter for John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, said that Hayden, "without even knowing it, inspired the Great Society."
Hayden was elected to the California State Legislature in 1982, where he served for ten years in the Assembly before being elected to the State Senate in 1992, where he served eight years.
Hayden has been described as "the conscience of the Senate" by columnist Dan Walters of theSacramento Bee, and as "the liberal rebel" by George Skelton of the Los Angeles Times. "He has carved out a key watchdog role," according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
He is author of over 175 measures ranging from reform of money in politics, worker safety, school decentralization, small business tax relief, domestic violence, lessening gang violence in the inner city, stopping student fee increases at universities, protecting endangered species like salmon, overhauling three strikes, you're out laws, and a measure signed into law that will assist Holocaust survivors in receiving recognition and compensation for having been exploited as slave labor during the Nazi era.
Hayden is the author of eleven books, including his autobiography, Reunion; a book on the spirituality and the environment, Lost Gospel of the Earth; a collection of essays on the aftermath of the Irish potato famine, Irish Hunger (Roberts Rhinehart) and a book on his Irish background,Irish on the Inside: In Search of the Soul of Irish America (Verso); Radical Nomad, a biography of C. Wright Mills (Paradigm Publishers); and, most recently, Ending the War in Iraq (2007). A collection of his work, Writings for a Democratic Society: The Tom Hayden Reader was published this year .
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March 24th, 2010 at 12:26 pm
Well written post! I too am hoping that the page escapes the wiki editors this time round. Sadly when people can hide behind their keyboards, its easier for them to show their true colors, twitter is an open forum for all colors/creeds and genders. If the overactivity of one group irks another, they are more than welcome to start their own trends and tweet about it.
March 24th, 2010 at 1:19 pm
Excellent article.I kept wondering why they kept pulling down the page yet I a kenyan badly wanted one, but i knew they would eventually lose the battle, he is up there, after all he is MAKMENDE!
March 24th, 2010 at 2:11 pm
Seems that as of 9 p.m. in Nairobi the Makmende wikipedia page is down and out again… but this time its giving this response:
Server not found
Firefox can’t find the server at http://www.wikipedia.org.
thats after logging into the main wikipedia page and running a search. Did Kenya overload their servers I wonder?
March 24th, 2010 at 2:48 pm
the name ‘Makmende’ takes us (Nairobians) back to our childhood days. I won’t lie, growing up in Nairobi was awesome! We all wanted to be heroes n heroines. We all watched Bruce Lee movies countless of times and oogled at Chuck Norris posters while sucking on 10 cent Patcos (sweets). Now, we have a chance to reconnect with other equally nostalgic yet unfortunately estranged brothers and we’re doing it Makmende-style!
March 24th, 2010 at 2:57 pm
I’m excited for “Makmenderians” and I think your reference to Danah Boyd’s talk quite fascinating: racism online. Hmmm.
March 24th, 2010 at 3:02 pm
As a pretty active wikipedia contributor I feel that I should “defend” if that is an appropriate word, the actions of wikipedia here.
The codes for deletion used are very narrow guidelines for speedy deletion. Speedy deletion is not a process that makes judgements about whether or not a subject should be included in the encyclopedia but its a process that allows administrators to delete pages whose quality is so bad as to be effectively vandalism. In this case the codes used suggest that the previous attempts were in the first and third cases incomprehensible and in the second case simply text copied from another site. An analagous situation would be if the first page about numa-numa boy was simply a long string of repeating numanuma text. Clearly that would not be appropriate for inclusion on wikipedia. So the initial page creations were not a judgement about the subject of that page but about the very low quality of it.
Now the second question is why no-one had created a page before hand that actually had content on it. To which the obvious answer is that no english speaker had made an effort to do so, the demographics of the english wikipedia undoubtely mean that at present is demonstrates systematic bias towards topics of interest to american computer literate men.
There is actually an entire group of wikipedians (the systematic bias group) who are working to try and lessen this bias over time. As wikipedia is a relfection of the predominant internet users though it will likley to remain for the foreseeable future.
english wikipedia rejects wherever possible judgements about “culture” any subject that is notable (which is a topic for another day but broadly means there has been some third party independent coverage of that subject) merits inclusion. Language of course presents a larger barrier because if wikipedia is to be reliable it depends on people having sources for information; and obviously there is a bias in english wikipedia towards english sources. Again though, there are groups of wikipedians who work with the other wikis to translate articles that are better in other languages across, and foreign language sources are not in any way discouraged they are just less preferred than english one’s
Now, there is something important, if not new, in your observation of how the internet allows individuals to create closed silo’s insulated to their world view, but wikipedia; being an encyclopaedia that anyone can edit; tends to suffer from this much less than anywhere else and only to the extent of systematic bias as explained above.
March 24th, 2010 at 3:02 pm
Rob, while I like the idea that Wikipedia pissed Makmende off, and so he took it out, the truth is a bit more prosaic – basically, their Euro datacenter had cooling problems. When they tried to failover to their Florida datacenter, they broke DNS resolution, sending queries into the aether for a little while – more here: http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/03/global-outage-cooling-failure-and-dns/
Great to hear everyone’s comments on the phenomenon, and especially to see that Wikipedia page grow.
March 24th, 2010 at 3:56 pm
Alasdair, thanks for weighing in on the conversation. Like you, I’ve been paying attention to issues of sysematic bias on Wikipedia for some time now, back to the days of the CROSSBOW project. (Here’s a quote from a 2004 post from me in BoingBoing – http://boingboing.net/2004/09/27/zuckerman-wikipedia-.html . You’ll also find references to my work in the archives of the current CSB project.) I’m also actively working with the Wikipedia Foundation as an advisor trying to help the community strengthen participation in Wikipedias in underrepresented languages. In other words, I’m a critic, yes, but one who’s interested in seeing Wikipedia address and work through these problems.
As for this specific instance: I’m not able to review the earlier, deleted Wikipedia pages on Makmende. It’s possible that they were incomplete and amateurish and were therefore deleted.
The one that’s currently under development followed a classic Wikipedia structure – it went up as a brief stub, and has accreted more content in the past few hours. What concerned me is that the attempt to delete that stub argued that the article was unsourced – actually, it was quite well sourced, including a reference to a Wall Street Journal online publication and five weblogs. Perhaps the user who nominated for deletion made a mistake. Or perhaps he acted in bad faith, trying to avoid a battle over notability and tried a different tactic to see the page removed.
If Wikipedia wants to make progress in improving areas where it’s weak – i.e., if it wants to address issues of systemic bias – the community needs to expand to include more Wikipedians from the developing world. Deleting three versions of an article important to Kenyans and trying to delete a fourth doesn’t send a strong message that Wikipedia is the open and welcoming community you and I both want it to be.
March 24th, 2010 at 5:01 pm
The earlier deletions were all Speedy deletions, a process that has strict controls over it precisely because of the potential for deletion without discussion. Only wikipedia administrators can speedily delete pages and in the absence of any evidence to the contrary and given the strict controls on speedy deletion I think it is reasonable to assume that they were simply acting based on the information available to them to delete what was either vandalis, nonsense or a copyright violation respectivly
In regards to the PROD notice proposed deletion it appears that this bottom post http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Salih here suggests that the reader missed the WSJ reference and made a mistake. ( as a generalisation Wikipedia does not usually consider blogs to be reliable enough sources for obvious reasons) , but this notice was removed within a few minutes and according to wikipedia processes such a notice could not be used again. The article could only now be deleted if there was community consensus in a deletion discussion, something that won’t happen because the topic & page are clearly notable.
I don’t see this “incident” as a flaw in wikipedia, or as sending a “message” about the nature of wikipedia as a welcoming community but actually an example of wikipedia’s processess and systems operating as they should. (Though maybe like all wikipedia editors i am tainted by assuming good faith :p)
Although I think there are a lot of interesting and detailed discussions to be had about the nature of the wikipedia community I am not really sure that this was a good example of somewhere where there has been a real failure.
March 24th, 2010 at 6:32 pm
[...] an article about the phenomenon written by Africa blogger Ethan Zuckerman. Share Entertainment blogosphere, featured, [...]
March 24th, 2010 at 7:31 pm
One issue here is mainly one of using deletion as a substitute for simple page-blanking and discussion. The ‘deletion’ process and surrounding combat is often a distraction that draws attention to the meta-conversation rather than to knowledge and article improvement and the value of verifiability/notability.
The first instance of the article was a joke.
1: “Makmende. Kenyan Superhero. Spawned. Not born. Amphibious. Breaths underwater.”
The second and third were appropriate stubs, hastily deleted.
2 and 3: Reposts of the text from http://liwani.com/?p=167
First it was deleted as a copyvio (perhaps; who was the poster? this short text was just cut and pasted from the website linked as a ’source’… but hasty – clearly the original author wasn’t going to complain while authority to publish was worked out).
Then it was recreated and deleted as a non-notable character from a non-notabale band (the latter part is untrue; the band has had a WP article since June 2008).
As it stands now, the article title “Makmende” should probably point to a section in the article about “Just A Band” — by current style guidelines, an ongoing fad that is primarily related to an existing topic should be a section on that topic’s article, not a new article.
If someone wanted to make a standalone article about Makmende, s/he would be advised to do more serious research into the history of the term, its significance in kenyan culture, and when in the past it has been used to reference popular culture… and will have to find references older than last month.
March 24th, 2010 at 7:34 pm
Great way to weigh in your thoughts, Ethan. Glad to see he’s up. Been evangelising web 2.0 and this is the first positive viral we’ve seen (though not as linear as though it were affiliated with a brand, but the principle still the same – by the people for the people)
Last thing that went viral (within FB mostly and a little on Twitter – though not in the same context was a poster depicting a fictitious promotion by Security Company G4S. Twitpic here –
All in all good thoughts. Let’s just hope that this case will grow (sure of that) and that we can see more people take the gamble with viral.
March 24th, 2010 at 7:58 pm
[...] and to understand who Makmende really is in the context of technology and and media in the Kenya space: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2010/03/24/makmendes-so-huge-he-cant-fit-in-wikipedia/ [...]
March 24th, 2010 at 11:17 pm
@Alasdair
I’ve seen one of the articles later killed through speedy deletion. In that case, it was fully ok – a badly written article which didn’t give any sources.
The current version should be able to survive, though.
March 25th, 2010 at 12:52 am
Apparantly he is too big for Wikipedia. Article up for deletion once again. At least this time they are allowing a discussion before they try to pull it.
March 25th, 2010 at 1:19 am
[...] Street Journal [WSJ] Makmende stole the show, and rescued it at the same time [The African Accent] Makmende’s so huge, he can’t fit in Wikipedia [Zuckerman] Who are Kenya’s most beautiful women and handsome men? [DN] Announcing the Birth of [...]
March 25th, 2010 at 1:41 am
makmende is a super hero regardless….
March 25th, 2010 at 6:40 am
[...] este blog, ele está virando sensação na blogosfera queniana, se espalhando por toda a África Oriental e [...]
March 25th, 2010 at 7:46 am
Makmende doesn’t read books. He beats them up until he gets the information he wants
March 25th, 2010 at 10:12 am
makmende is the next big thing after obama.weather thy like it or not,weather the Wikipedia folks publish him or not,he will fly throgh out the world like the makmende he is.soon he will be bigger than Eduard Khil or Back Dorm Boys .HE IS MAKMENDE DAMN IT!!!!
March 25th, 2010 at 11:25 am
We are in 21st century where silly and mean issues like race should not be a linear scale…We are one people and that will never change….Self respect and respect for other people…i know w are going far..’makmendes’those are minor setbacks and we shall overcome YES WE CAN
March 25th, 2010 at 11:31 am
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER…DONT LET THEM FOOL YOU….we believe that this world has a place for everybody and we deserve equal chances….lets surmon the spirit of hard work and patriotizm and the change we need is coming…..tine will tell
March 26th, 2010 at 5:38 am
It will we good to have a ’scholarly’ wiki page on Makmende, but that is not what we need…
Makmende has just given a chance to a large percentage of Nairobis urban youth to relieve their childhood…
Question is will Makmende ride on this wave, sustain it and profit from it?
Bah, Makmende is bigger than Wiki who?
March 26th, 2010 at 6:43 am
What I love the most about the hype around Makmende is the fact that it started out simply as a group of friends getting together to help their boys (JAB) make a vid. No professional actors, no super fancy equipment, no massive budget. Just some friends and Just a band. If there ever was a sign that you can slay a giant with just a stone this is it. We’ve been raised to believe that money is what makes things happen, which is true to a large extent, but it’s not the ONLY thing that makes things happen. A little resourcefulness, a little creativity, a few good friends and many laughs later Makmende rules!
Hopefully the wikipedia page will stay, but regardless, what Makmende has managed to do in a few weeks is epic!
March 26th, 2010 at 7:43 am
Looks like the current article may stay- the deletion vote at the moment is unanimous keep.
March 26th, 2010 at 11:47 am
Thanks Ethan as always. A very interesting question: “what happens when we share a language but not a culture?”. Thanks—I have not answer.
March 26th, 2010 at 2:09 pm
Interesting discourse. I found the video somewhere and was impressed by the production. But to go on wiki, I doubt.
March 26th, 2010 at 3:06 pm
[...] (via …My heart’s in Accra) [...]
March 27th, 2010 at 5:39 am
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makmende
March 30th, 2010 at 5:20 pm
[...] Makmende, from Just a Band, for those of you, whom again, may have missed [...]
April 1st, 2010 at 9:21 am
who knew serach a small kenyan social character created for fun in short hilarious music video would cause such huge storm around the globosphere and blogosphere!trully we never grow up we just grow tall!like makmende!!
April 1st, 2010 at 7:04 pm
[...] Passé l’anecdote, le phénomène Makmende montre, comme le pointe le blogueur Ethan Zuckerman, à quel point l’Internet s’est développé rapidement ces dernières années au Kenya. Ce type [...]
April 2nd, 2010 at 1:21 pm
http://mwanamishale.wordpress.com/2010/03/20/the-return-of-makmende/#comment-6242
April 7th, 2010 at 2:33 pm