Often Overlooked, The Power of Ritual in Organizing
The rituals of the organization are as important as good systems and management. They signal what is most valued and create a stickiness that binds people to the organization.
When I was coming up, it was hard to get our hands on stuff about organizing. One exception was The Organizer Mailing. Put out by the ORGANIZE Training Center, The Organizer Mailing, which came out four times a year, was a booklet of news clippings and papers about organizing and larger political and cultural matters. In an issue, you might find a piece dissecting a organizing campaign, a feature about a neighborhood leader, or clippings from local fights around the country.
For an organizer in Southern Indiana, or anywhere for that matter, The Organizing Mailing was a lifeline to the craft.
One of the pieces I most remember was titled the Soft Arts of Organizing, by Larry McNeil, who was then with the Industrial Areas Foundation. In it he distinguishes between the hard arts of “recruitment, focused actions, and disciplined meetings” with the soft arts of “listening, empathy, thoughtfulness, and ritual.” Things that are harder to quantify, but as essential as anything we do.
What struck me most then was the emphasis on ritual and what ritutals symbolized. When I joined the National People’s Action (NPA) family as a local organizer in the mid-1990s, I entered an organization that was among the best at weaving ritual throughout everything it did. Though I never heard anyone use the word, ritual was everywhere.
The NPA convention was an annual rite of passage in the organization. Each Spring, for forty-some years, a thousand people from working-class neighborhoods packed buses, trains, and planes to go to Washington DC. We came to express our power and advance our campaigns. Most importantly, it was a place where we set the culture of the organization.
[This tradition lives on, as what is now People’s Action prepares for its first national convention since the pandemic. Check out this promotional video. People’s Action was created through a merger of multiple organizations, but also carries on many parts of the NPA tradition.]
Within the three-day NPA tradition, there were dozens of smaller rituals that did more to build the organization than anything else we did the rest of the year. The most life-changing was the Sunday home action. This was an action at the home of a US Cabinet Secretary or a well-heeled corporate lobbyist. At the time, NPA was one of the few organizations who did home actions, and the only I know of to do it so often and in Washington, DC.
The lead up to the action, the action itself, and the post-action all contained smaller customs that gave power to the larger ritual of this edgy protest.
Before the action, we always had a plenary to set things up. From the stage, members shared stories of how they’d been harmed, made clear who was responsible for this harm, and detailed how our many efforts to get a meeting with the public official or corporate leader in question had been rejected or ignored.
As people shared their story, you could count on boisterous refrains from the membership of “that ain’t right!” While this might seem a small detail, those three words said a lot about the organization. It signaled that we were people who were clear about what is right and what is wrong. We don’t keep these thoughts to ourselves. When we call bullshit on bullshit, we do it out loud. It also signaled that members can be themselves in this organization. We talk here like we talk back home. No one has to change who they are because we’re at some big national conference. It’s our national conference. So we say, “that ain’t right.”
Small detail, big meaning.
After we set up the action, with a marching band leading the way, all of us marched to the parking lot and loaded onto yellow school buses. When we visited the home or office of powerful national decision-makers, we always got there on yellow school buses. At first, this was because they were the cheapest way. Over time, as people had so many powerful experiences on yellow school buses, they began to take on special meaning, symbolizing a spirit of joyous rebellion, a bedrock of the organization’s culture to this day.
That didn’t happen by accident. Organizers built those yellow school buses into the symbolism of the organization. You would see yellow school buses on posters, flyers, buttons, and they appeared in our stories and songs. To the uninitiated, references to buses probably didn’t make a lick of sense, but once you’d experienced one NPA direct action, you got it. The symbol of that yellow school bus brought back the feeling of being a part of something bigger, acting powerfully, and winning. Seeing it made you want to come back to the next convention and have a bigger role in the organization.
We prided ourselves on being rowdy and having discipline. Within the action itself, another essential ritual was the leadership team putting their fists in the air to bring us all to silence. When you have a thousand or more people together, you need ways to keep the crowd organized. If the leadership needed silence to negotiate with the target or the police, or to update folks in the back about what was going on, they would put their first in the air, and this was the signal for us all to hush up. Then others in the crowd would quickly do the same, and in an instant this once boisterous crowd stood in absolute silence, fists raised high.
I remember my first NPA Convention, and it was breathtaking to be part of a group organized enough to be loud as hell one second, and as quiet as a church mouse the next.
There were two outcomes of these direct actions. We would win an agreement, meaning that the decision-maker agreed to our demands or to meet with us. Or, they would not be home or refuse to agree to shit. In the latter case we would usually leave some kind of memento – depending on the person we were protesting, it might be a big trophy with a horse’s ass on it, or a six-foot tall pink slip at their door, alerting them that they’d been fired by NPA. Last week, I was reminded of the time we left a toilet at the doorstep of a US Department of Agriculture Secretary who had stuck it to smaller famers for “flushing the family farm down the drain.”
Regardless of the outcome or the prop we left behind, we would then march back to the yellow school buses, and break into our anthem: “When NPA Goes Marching In” to the tune of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” There was not a single action over 35 years that did not end with this song.
This ritual grew out of an action. In the 1970s, one of the biggest issues facing neighborhoods was bank redlining, with banks refusing to make loans to people, not based on their ability to repay, but because of their race or ethnicity, gender, or the place they lived. In 1979, NPA organizers got word that the American Bankers Association, the lobbying arm of the big banks, was having its convention in New Orleans. Determined to keep the heat on, NPA organized people from neighborhoods across the country to travel to Louisiana for a series of actions dubbed “The Battle of New Orleans.” The pinnacle moment was when the bankers were partying on their cruise ship, and uninvited, hundreds of people from NPA joined them, taping a big red streamer around the ship to symbolize redlining their party. That night, as they celebrated the action, Paul Battle, an organizer from Iowa, started singing:
“When NPA goes marching in,
When NPA goes marching in,
Oh, I want to be in that number,
When NPA goes marching in.”
The entire crowd joined in, and singing “When NPA Goes Marching In” after an action became one of the most dependable rituals in the organization. This song, and all of its associations - joy, teamwork, discipline, and winning made more people want “to be in that number” that is now People’s Action.
In your organizing, the rituals and the symbols will be unique to what you are building. Your rituals don’t need to be, and in fact shouldn’t be, the ones I named here, but you need to have them. Find the ones that reinforce the culture you want to create. Like all the soft arts, they are as important as effective systems, good management, and all the other things we do to build vibrant and powerful organizing, but often overlooked.
I was at a collaborative action with our local immigrants rights group & they brought an effigy pinata of the target of the protest. Pinata's themselves have their own set of songs and rituals, but the fact that at the end of it someone hits the target and candy falls out felt particularly powerful.
A couple years in a row, we schlepped toilets down to DC from Syracuse for props for actions. We had started to use them at our actions at home after hearing about how the Muskegon, Mi. NPA group used to wheel toilets into their city hall etc. We had a good working relationship with an affordable housing provider down the street--they liked our mission so they would offer us spare toilets when they were replaced. Rich had several in his garage ready to use! My favorite NPA toilet was of course the "Andrew Cuomo, ain't done shit" toilet at HUD HQ