EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The mission of The Gathering for Justice is to build an intergenerational movement, rooted in history, cultures and nonviolent direct action. Our purpose is to heal communities, build collective strength and generate an environment of hope and opportunity.
The Gathering for Justice, also simply known as The Gathering, is a project of The Tides Center a 501c3 organization. The Gathering is a civil rights organization dedicated to building a national movement to end child incarceration and address social unrest through direct action using nonviolent means. We were founded in August 29, 2005 by Mr. Harry Belafonte and Elders of our past civil rights movements, after Mr. Belafonte saw a news clip of a five year old girl, Jaisha Scott, get handcuffed in school by 4 cops, for being unruly in school. The sight of a five year old, getting arrested rather than being handled by school counselors and community sickened, Mr. Belafonte and other elders who have fought long and hard for justice and freedom. After initial conversations with Marian Wright Edelman, Children's Defense Fund and James Bell at the Burns Institute, it became clear, that our country that arrests children, has fallen to a moral low reminiscent of Jim Crow.
Civil rights and social justice organizations have come to understand that collective action on a national basis is required to stop child incarceration and challenge the immoral process that perpetuates an unjust justice system.
The Gathering is a national movement that creates a coordinated space to 1) fortify relationships between grassroots organizations regionally, 2) support local campaigns around child incarceration and 3) enhance the ongoing organizing of nonviolent direct action training. Central to the mission of The Gathering is to awaken and strengthen the moral conscience of this country, to the growing catastrophe of childhood incarceration and the obvious social unrest in under-funded and developing socioeconomic areas such as rural or urban centers.
With the tenets above as our guiding vision, building on the lessons we learned over the past three years and the paths blazed by organizations who have come before us, The Gathering is in a strong position to begin institutionalizing our efforts as we are seeing a true grassroots movement being formed throughout America. We operate under the assumption that our added value is in remaining with the people in the streets and facilitating and supporting and elevating their local campaigns and policy issues. Providing a safe space for policy and model exchange as well as training in nonviolence and organizing models, The Gathering will not take the lead in a campaign; it will support the people in their campaigns and provide national support from all partners. We will make major investments in assessing our regional groups to tease out their capacity in engaging young people in nonviolent movements to end child incarceration.
Historical Context:
"When the consciousness of submerged humanity awakens, the motive force is present for profound change which then reshapes the purpose of government and other controlling and central institutions of society." The Common Good, Marc Raskin,.
Throughout the history of the United States, collective action has been a successful model for change. In the last few decades, the civil rights movement has given us a model of nonviolent organizing at the grassroots level. This model of organizing provided young people with a tool to fight injustice and a transformative process to get there. The personal and communal transformation that happens while organizing through nonviolence has been removed from our current organizing models. This shift has moved us away from qualitative driven models and analysis to more quantitative driven ones. The non profit industry has shifted focus from radical change to organizational survival, which has created a community of competition, rather than collective action. Organizations create their own silos and then attempt to create movement without regard or respect to a collective action already taking place within other entities sharing the same values and goals.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, The Montgomery Improvement Association was actualized. It last 381 days and 98% of black people in Montgomery participated in the boycott. This effort desgregagated buses and the civil rights movement was introduced to the country. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a cohesive and organized strategic operation. It did not just happen, Rosa Parks and others were being trained in nonviolence on how to be strategic, tactical and grounded. They planned, tested and evaluated their plan and were prepared to follow up the act of nonviolence with a substantive campaign.
This catalyst was not the only effort, pushing to end Jim Crow, efforts through out the deep south to introduce this methodology of nonviolence into organizing gave activists and citizens an entry point to fight against their own oppression. These efforts coalesced around the training and philosophy of nonviolence and the injustice of Jim Crow.
The model was adaptable. Students from Greensboro North Carolina, after being introduced to Dr. Martin Luther Kings philosophy nonviolence and direct action, started student sit ins in their local restaurants, a group of students in Nashville, being trained By Rev. Jim Lawson, a pacifist, staged sit ins in the lunch counters in Woolworths, hundreds were arrested, and lunch counter began to integrate. This energy and dedication to this philosophy changed the country in record time. In six months, these sit ins ended segregation at restaurants in 26 southern cities.
When we stop romanticizing our history and start analyzing it, we see that these events were planned for and calculated. They operated in solidarity around a philosophy and issue and created a decentralized structure that allowed for maximum participation from community and leaders. Desegregation did not just happen in America because it was right, it happened because the streets demanded it.
The Gathering embodies the same energy and timing that several young black students had in North Carolina at Shaw University in the 1960's. There the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, was created to coordinate lunch counter sit-ins, support their leaders, and publicize their activities. Over the course of the next decade, civil rights activism moved beyond lunch counter sit-ins. Through this, SNCC sought to change society by creating alternative institutions, instead of altering the existing ones. It rallied the oppressed by glorifying their qualities, and it viewed prejudice as a core social problem in the same vein as racism or sexism.
Building on the lessons learned from SNCC and those that came after, The Gathering is building an intergenerational, movement, rooted in history, cultures and nonviolent direct action to heal communities, build collective strength and generate an environment of hope and opportunity. The inception of The Gathering was two years in the making. It started with several discussions around the idea for creating an environment for collective action. It is not enough for us to just commemorate past successes, but we must support the rebirth of a movement – a movement embodying the needs of today and the respective values and morals that come with such a charge.
The Rise of The Gathering for Justice
This process of measured reform only becomes successful when every generation picks up the mantle and demands their due. It has been over 50 years since Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat. The Gathering has taken the mantel of the struggles of the 60's to a multi cultural multi generational dynamic. The engagement of the veterans of civil rights struggles, our Elders, give us a chance to understand the collective past and move forward now targeting the criminal justice systems. Using a nonviolent methodology allows a movement to confront its targets and become better people.
The Gathering is aware that intermediary organizations claim space and relationship with communities they have never earned. Over the past 3 years we have brought young people together all over this country and listened to them, built their trust…asked nothing of them, but their commitment to creating an agenda.
Our leaders and partner organizations brought culture and trainings in nonviolence to help heal the void young people have from a life not recognized. It is essential for bridge organizations to support the communities they are encouraging to take on such endeavors, it is essential they see their own transformation every step of the process.
An organic role for The Gathering was discovered through building relationships with various communities, engaging in dialogue around Nonviolence as a movement and child incarceration, an extreme breakdown of our society, it became evident that we are not in need of another criminal justice organization. Our first partners in The Gathering included policy experts like The Burns Institute, The Children's Defense Fund, shaping criminal justice policy to end the rail to jail. Working with organizations like Barrios Unidos and Prison Moratorium Project we discovered models working on the frontlines with our children in the streets and prisons to change their perspective and give them options for a better life. The Advancement Project is doing incredible work helping young people stay out of prison. What was missing is a connective tissue, something organic to this diverse community all working to save the same children and very rarely cross pollinating ideas and resources. Connectivity will allow organizations to work out of their natural issue silos, expand their data and knowledge base through exchange, be uniformly trained on nonviolence and its applications, and uncover a unifying local policy issue regarding the criminalization of our children. The Gathering is dedicated to facilitating these exchanges on a local and national level.
The Gathering's coalition partners are made up of leaders representing Black, Latino, Native American, Asian, Pacific Islander and White community based organizations whose respective missions focus on justice for its constituencies. All members of The Gathering must be rooted in this principal of equality. From 2005-2007 over 3,000 youth and 200 Elders have come together and declared their commitment to this mobilization.
Highlights include:
Ë The first gathering in Atlanta, Georgia was of the Elders. In attendance were 200 national leaders not only representing the wisdom of history but also declaring their commitment and support to the objectives of the mission;
Ë The second was The Gathering of the Youth in Epps Alabama. This region, which gave birth to the black resistance movement and civil rights mobilization efforts, became the launch for the idea of becoming a national movement;
Ë The third was a Gathering of young people in Santa Cruz, California hosted by the Latino community. The young people, continuing the traditions of Cesar Chavez and the Mexican Farm Workers Movement, reinforced by the leaders and members of Barrios Unidos, expanded on the experiences derived from Epps Alabama;
Ë The fourth was hosted by Onondaga Nation. The young people of this Indigenous nation along with their Chiefs and Clan Mothers focused the group on the history of the original peoples of the United States and provided the visiting youth with a deeper understanding of the need for common bonding between all groups.
Ë The fifth was at Alex Haley Farm in Tennessee. Young people gathered from the regions of Appalachia which gave the white community of coal miners and those victimized by justice miscarried, the opportunity to instruct all who were gathered about the commonality of class experience across racial lines.
Ë The last gathering of this series was held in Orange County, CA. Young leaders from the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities put before the group thoughts and idea's that helped us understand the complexities and diversity of their community. Powerful parallels of their civil and human rights struggle in this country were revealed to all those in attendance.
The Gathering is an answer to the generational and racial schisms that have many ideologically similar organizations working in their own silos. It is a network of community based and civil rights leaders that have created an intergenerational, interracial, intercultural space to allow these social mobilizations an opportunity to build trust with one another that will facilitate true collaboration. This includes providing a safe environment for policy and model exchange, dialogue between the generations of activists in all communities, finding a national agenda that will allow us to support one another as we continue to pursue community objectives, and educating our youth leadership in the power of nonviolent protest and civil action. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating committee, the youth divisions of Southern Christian Leadership Conference, NAACP and Congress On Racial Equality are the tactical models we use to envision the possibilities of reclaiming our children from the system that takes them from the cradle to the penitentiary.