The Next Move: Fight For Every Block with Gerald Taylor

Season 2, Episode 6

Gerald Taylor’s 40-year career began when he was 17, as a youth leader in the Civil Rights movement. It’s been further defined by his 35 years as national senior organizer and Southeast Regional Director with the Industrial Areas Foundation. He has also lectured on theories of social change and community organizing at colleges and universities including Duke University, Vanderbilt University, and UNC Chapel-Hill.

In this episode of The Next Move, Gerald challenges us to fight for every block, and for every county. To not write places off, but to instead write them into what we are building. In his words, “We need to have the willingness, the guts to go into counties and states, where we're not going to be in the majority.”   

He’s not asking us to do something he himself has not done. He has spent a lifetime organizing beyond choir.

More of my favorite takeaways from our conversation:

What it Takes to Build an Organization

I think the IAF (Industrial Areas Foundation) experience taught me a lot about how we think about building capacity. I think one is: you always think scale. You always think of how big do we need to build something to have significant influence in a city or a town or a county or a state? Our approach was kind of interesting, people would come and say, can you help start an organization? And we'd say back, these are the conditions that have to be met, before we'll come in. So effectively, people have to self organize, before we actually even start sending an organizer in. So you put conditions - how many churches had to be recruited? How much money do you have to raise, how many people had to commit to go to leadership training.

The Issue is the Organization

So, in every project that I think I started or went into, we had literally thousands of people that went through leadership training. In Memphis alone, we had 6,000 people go through house meetings together. We did not have one issue for the first couple of years. The issue was building the organization, and training, and study, and training, and study, and worship, and engaged in each other, and raising the money together, and putting black and white in the same room to negotiate this stuff. The willingness to build something that could get to enough power that you could challenge the governing framework of a place, not many organizations get to that moment.

What it Takes to Organize People from Different Cultures

It is respect for culture, for people's culture, and understanding that you start with people where they are, not where you think they should be. That you revel in their genius, their experiences, their music, their art, the way they walk and talk and the food they eat. 

You listen to their stories, and if you're going to build something that's going to be that complex, you have to create notions of respect across traditions and communities. You've got to fight for things that people all are going to benefit from.

Population shifts ≠ Power shifts

Now, we're talking about it, about this kind of population determinism, that somehow we're going to grow the Black and Latino and Asian population so much in the United States that we're going to come to power automatically.

It's not going to happen that way.

The Action is in the Reaction

One of the IAF's axioms I've always loved and we've always had is, the action is in the reaction. It's not what you do. It's how people react to what you do that is important. So that actions should be planned to get a particular reaction that you want.  Too much organizing does not start with, "What is the reaction we're going for, and how do we organize the campaigns to get the reaction that we want?" If we're not getting the reaction that we want, then, damn it, the strategy isn’t working; and we’ve got to rethink it.

Where We Go from Here

I would say we would need to train a generation to have the willingness, the guts to go into counties and states where we're not going to be in the majority, to be willing to go in and fight for every county, every community, and do that with integrity.

To have the willingness to go into rural communities and listen to people's stories and their struggles and why they're angry. And we're not going to get everybody. We know that in any organizing we don't get everybody.

But a willingness to fight for every block because the others who want this country to be an oligarchy, a anti-democratic state dominated by a minority of whites, they're fighting for every block, every street.

You can learn more about Gerald Taylor and his work at peoplesaction.org/nextmove.

Join the conversation and listen to this great episode with Gerald Taylor in its entirety here, or click here for a copy of the full transcript!