From Our Ancestors, For Our Future: Lessons from Legendary Organizers Ella Baker and Anne Braden on Building Justice Movements Today
The challenges before us are daunting. The need for powerful and dynamic activism for justice is clear. But what do we do? This workshop draws insights and lessons from two of the most effective organizers of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s, Ella Baker and Anne Braden. Ella Baker and Anne Braden used a relationship-based approach to organizing in which… Show more they helped build strong communities, effective groups, and democratic leadership to seek justice. We will explore what we can learn from Ella Baker’s emphasis on direct action and group-centered leadership to help us think about strategy and developing leaders today. We will look at Anne Braden’s anti-racist organizing in white communities to learn how she was able to call on white people’s self-interest to build their commitment to ending white supremacy. What can we learn from Ella Baker who helped turn the Montgomery Bus Boycott into a mass national movement, who helped turn the student sit-in movement into a national student movement? What can we learn from Anne Braden who knew that white Southerner’s needed to be saved from white supremacy too, and who helped create an anti-racist politics and organizing strategy that continues to bring thousands of white people into the movement, decades later. Let’s be inspired by the work of these two leaders, and draw on their legacies to help us build the movements we need today.
Cost includes continental breakfast
Sliding scale tickets are available / no one is turned away for lack of funds. Please contact the Fund for Santa Barbara office at 962-9164 to purchase
__________
About Chris Crass
Chris Crass is a longtime organizer working to build powerful working class-based, feminist, multiracial movements for collective liberation. Throughout the 1990s he was an organizer with Food Not Bombs, an economic justice anti-poverty group, strengthening the direct action-based anti-capitalist Left. In the 2000s, he was an organizer with the Catalyst Project, which combines political education and organizing to develop and support anti-racist politics, leadership, and organization in white communities and builds dynamic multiracial alliances locally and nationally.
He has written and spoken widely about anti-racist organizing, lessons from women of color feminism, strategies to build visionary movements, and leadership for liberation. His essays have been translated into half a dozen languages, taught in hundreds of classrooms, and included in over a dozen anthologies including Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World, On the Road to Healing: An Anthology for Men Ending Sexism, and We Have Not Been Moved: Resisting Racism and Militarism in 21 st Century America . His book Towards Collective Liberation: anti-racist organizing, feminist praxis, and movement building strategy draws lessons from his organizing over the past 25 years, as well as lessons from case studies of historic and contemporary anti-racist organizing.
This workshop is presented by the Fund for Santa Barbara.
Show less