Welcome to the first installment of The East Utopia Trading Company's newsletter, The Essay. In this space we'll talk about the history of the heroes, icons and ideas featured on our t-shirts.
There is no better introduction to the EUTC philosophy than a design from our Activist's Dictionary Collection. Democracy is a verb.
John Lewis: Activist in the Service of Democracy
In a now famous essay. the late, great Representative John Lewis shared his insights about a life of political engagement just before he passed away. In many ways, Lewis ran the gamut of an exemplary activist's life.
He started out as a founding leader of SNCC, the Student's Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at Fisk University in Nashville. He ended with a long and distinguished career as a U.S. Representative, considered by many as the conscience of Congress.
SNCC was the tip of the spear for the Civil Rights Movement over and over again. They emerged with the lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville and Greensboro, NC. They were the force behind The Freedom Rides in 1961.As dangerous as the Freedom Rides were, they really put their bodies on the line during the Mississippi Freedom Summer.
Freedom Summer
During a 10 week period:
- 1,062 people were arrested (out-of-state volunteers and locals)
- 80 Freedom Summer workers were beaten
- 37 churches were bombed or burned
- 30 Black homes or businesses were bombed or burned
- 4 civil rights workers were killed (one in a head-on collision)
- 4 people were critically wounded
- At least 3 Mississippi Black people were murdered because of their support for the Civil Rights Movement
In June 1964, CORE workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were arrested by a Neshoba County deputy who was also a Klan member. Released after dark, they were ambushed, abducted, and murdered by Klansmen. Goodman and Schwerner were shot immediately; Chaney was beaten and shot. After a weeks-long federal search, their bodies were found buried in an earthen dam.
Leader of SNCC, Bearing the Brunt of the Civil Rights Movement
Lewis was a Freedom Rider. He was among those rides who were subject to a savage beating in Montgomery, Alabama, to arrest in Jackson, Mississippi, and to confinement in the Maximum Security (Death Row) Unit of the infamous Mississippi State Penitentiary--"Parchman Farm".
As leader of SNCC, he was among the Big Seven civil rights leaders —John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Dorothy Height, and Whitney Young. These leaders of seven major civil rights organizations were instrumental in organizing the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The March was considered central to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1963.
Lewis took multiple arrests for acts of civil disobedience leading SNCC. Most famously he was bludgeoned mercilessly leading the March on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in March of 1965. This was one of the events that galvanized the nation and led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
From Civil Disobedience to Representation
Representing Georgia’s 5th District, he consistently ranked among the most liberal members of the House and grounded his work in his good trouble philosophy—pushing for racial justice, peace, and equality.
He opposed:
- The 1991 Gulf War
- NAFTA
- The 2000 China trade deal
- The 1996 welfare-reform bill
Lewis argued that such measures betrayed the poor and working class.
Lewis supported progressive taxation, voting rights, LGBTQ equality, and healthcare reform, often blending policy work with direct action. He was arrested at Darfur genocide protests and led a 2016 sit-in on the House floor to demand gun-safety legislation after the Orlando massacre.
One of his most enduring legislative successes was championing the creation of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, a fight he began in 1988 that culminated in its 2016 opening.
All of which is a long wind up to his farewell essay as he faced his own death. Too many of us don’t know what a giant this man was. Humble, short in stature, soft-spoken, he towered over those around him.
In the essay, he characterized a point of view that he absorbed and adopted from Martin Luther King Jr. There are two passages in his New York Times piece that are captured succinctly in our Activist's Dictionary series.
The Meaning of Democracy is a Verb
The best known passage has become characterized as Democracy is a Verb.
[KIng] said each of us has a moral obligation to stand up, speak up and speak out. When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.
This idea of citizenship goes far beyond the way many of us grew up thinking about it. The citizen is an active and engaged moral actor in the public affairs of their community and the nation at large.
For King and Lewis, Jefferson in his stated philosophy and for Benjamin Franklin —embodied in his life as he lived it, citizenship meant more than being passively represented in government. It meant going beyond periodically turning up to vote for President once every four years. It means that the political process is written into our lives and, as democratic citizens, it is a process that we write as a community, a beloved community.
The Activist's Dictionary
I've tried to embody that in an entry in The Activist's Dictionary. While democracy has been characterized as a verb, I went ahead and distilled that into a dictionary entry.
Democracy as a Verb
DEMOCRACY
(verb)
To act with courage and responsibility —through voting, grassroots lobbying, striking, sit-ins, and protests — to enact the just will of the people and hold leaders to account.
That’s voting up and down the ticket in every election you can get to. But also petitioning your elected officials, showing up at public meetings and townhalls; striking, sitting-in, and protesting when day-to-day democracy won’t respond to the legitimate claims of justice; striking and boycotting against economic elites to achieve just outcomes and bring democratic values into the economic sphere.
This is a thick vision of democracy and citizenship that goes beyond the thin version most of us were raised on.
- It pushes us to be more than mere consumers (and YES, I recognize the irony of me saying that in what is essentially a marketing newsletter meant to sell t-shirts).
- It demands we embrace our full civic identities as voters and tax-payers, workers and business owners, renters and homeowners ... stakeholders in our community across the full range of public questions and interests.
- This version of citizenship requires a free, contestory press and a citizenry that self-organizes into public interest groups and accountable, responsive political parties.
The individual is lost in a mass society. We participate meaningfully in democracy when we act with others.
Our Giving Program plugs you into democratic action
At The East Utopia Trading Company, our Giving Program allows our customers to choose among The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Jobs With Justice, ProPublica, The ACLU, PEN America, and Planned Parenthood at check out to donate 5% of their purchase (about 20% of our profits).
Those are groups that represent a range of key democratic values and goals. They have demonstrated long term effectiveness. That is the barest table stakes but it helps our regular customers achieve a bit thicker conception of themselves as citizens.
We try to go further than that. Where it makes sense, we also link from products in our catalog to other, relevant organization to point our community to drive donation and volunteer opportunities.
At the risk of losing customers we want to highlight even more organizations than those we are able to connect to at checkout.
As you browse our products —products that we hope support and activist and intellectual life— look for links to drive donations and volunteer opportunities. Here are some that we’ve already linked to:
Nonviolence isn't defined by the absence of violence
Finally, I want to touch on another reference that Lewis made to the philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr.
He was talking about the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. He said we are all complicit when we tolerate injustice.
Both aspects are to be kept front of mind when we think about nonviolence. Nonviolence, in King’s sense, is not merely the avoidance of committing violence in the political realm. It is a fully realized philosophy of achieving social change.
It was adapted from ancient Indian religious philosophies by Mahatma Gandhi. He adapted it in the anti-colonial struggle he engaged against the British Empire.
That philosophy was adopted and developed in this country by James Lawson in Nashville who spent time studying nonviolence in India. Lawson trained the SNCC kids in the discipline and courage of nonviolence for their first lunch counter sit-ins.
It was pressed on King in a more mature form than he understood it by Bayard Rustin during the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1956. Rustin trained in nonviolence in India with Gandhi's circle of activists and under the Quaker pacifist organizer A.J. Muste.
NONVIOLENCE
(noun)
A political philosophy of activism. It refrains from violence and embraces discipline and courage. It provokes strife, disorder, and violence to gain leverage and the moral high ground.
Nonviolence is out of fashion in some of the more vocal corners of the left these days. That's a shame.Our side is never going to win in a violence against violence confrontation with the forces of reaction. More importantly because it stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the philosophy of nonviolence.
Nonviolence is not merely the absence of violence from resistance by the exploited and downtrodden. Nonviolence requires discipline and courage because violence is assumed and expected.
Violence is by practitioners in their actions, they are clear that they could be provoking violence against themselves. The point of provoking strife, disorder, and violence is to gain leverage and the moral high ground.
That's how King got the upper hand against Bull Connor. The violence is expected but it takes courage and discipline to answer back against spitting, cursing, the hurling of the most offensive slurs, beatings, and even murder with love. It's love in the face of the worst humanity will dish out that brings the transformative nature of nonviolence.
That was the message of John Lewis and hopefully what EUTC can make some small contribution towards.
In solidarity,
Marc Brazeau
Proprietor - The East Utopia Trading Company