THE FREEDOM SCHOOL
10-week virtual webinar of campaigns that bent the arc of history.
APRIL 2021 - JUNE 2021
WHAT IS THE FREEDOM SCHOOL?
As part of SpadeWork, the Freedom School profiles key strategic campaigns that altered the course of history not as an academic exercise, but as an important part of training organizers.
SpadeWork places its lineage alongside the rich history of freedom struggles around the world. We are inspired by these examples of courage and deep love of people. The Freedom School underscores an essential organizer practice: study, reflect and learn from movement victories and mistakes. Then apply… rinse, repeat…
We’ve asked friends (and friends of friends) to be presenters because they have personally taken part in these movements. They speak from the heart. But they’ve also reflected on the key lessons that these campaigns can teach us in our collective path to liberation.
But apologies, in advance. We recognize that these are complex stories squeezed into a short webinar. Shortcuts will cause consternation but that’s inevitable. Time and space for discussion will be maddeningly abrupt. Still, we’re endeavoring to make each session as engaging as possible, including provision of a simultaneous interpretation into Spanish and English. It will not be perfect. But what campaign is? In any case, it’s free but you have to register.
LIST OF SESSIONS:
South Africa Divestment Campaign
Respect for Mother Earth Beats Big Oil
Justice for Janitors Campaign
A Way to Organize People for Survival
Prison Abolition Means Transformation
Urban Poor Organizing in Ecuador
Grape Boycott of the United Farm Workers
Development & Displacement in The Philippines
SNCC & Freedom Summer
April 26, 2021: 10am – 12 noon (PST)
South Africa Divestment Campaign
Key Topics: Global movement to dismantle apartheid in South Africa; boycott strategy and corporate targeting; racial solidarity and national liberation.
Presenter: Prexy Nesbitt, Presidential Fellow in Peace Studies, Chapman College.
Overview: The U.S. government collaborated with European colonizers as part of the cold war struggle, and supported white minority rule in southern Africa.
Opponents began organizing as soon as apartheid was implemented in 1948. By 1951, the N.A.A.C.P. president Walter White was working to oppose World Bank loans to South Africa. There were protests against the shipment of South African goods and demonstrations targeting bank loans to South Africa. In 1970 African-American workers at Polaroid protested the company’s involvement with the apartheid pass system.
During the 1970s, activists began a Boycott Gulf campaign to protest the oil company’s support of Portuguese colonial rule in Africa. Union workers around the country began refusing to unload ships carrying Rhodesian chrome. But, aside from diamonds and gold, there were few consumer products from South Africa to boycott.
Divestment began to affect South Africa as corporations let apartheid leaders know that it had become too expensive to continue operating there. Nelson Mandela and all the other political prisoners were freed from prison in 1990. As apartheid was dismantled, Mandela was elected president in 1994. It was the end of a long struggle in which divestment played a role, although certainly not the only role. (Excerpt from: Divestment Was Just One Weapon in Battle Against Apartheid, Cecile Counts, 2013.)
May 4, 2021: 10am – 12 noon (PST)
Respect for Mother Earth Beats Big Oil
Key Topics: strategic alliances; environment; Native spirituality and organizing worldview ; prospects under a Biden administration; big oil
Presenter: Judith Le Blanc is a citizen of the Caddo Tribe of Oklahoma and director of the Native Organizers Alliance (NOA), a national Native training and organizing network.
Overview: On January 20, 2021, President Biden signed an executive order cancelling the permit for the Keystone XL oil pipeline. It is the result of years of relentless work and dedication from tribes and grassroots organizers in a strategic alliance with white farmers and ranchers and environmental groups. What a traditional elder said during one of the darkest periods of the struggle in 2017 prefaced the victory that was to come nearly four years later:
“What began as a struggle to protect the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s water supply and sacred sites grew into an international movement to protect the water for the 17 million people who live, work and play along the shores of the Missouri. Along the way, we were joined by thousands more from all around the world….As we believe, we’re all related, and that all we do in life, and nature has an impact on every one of us…we can act on the wisdom and knowledge of our ancestors, and protect future generations from destruction if we work strategically. We must lead with love for humanity, for community and for Mother Earth.
We must plan and organize, not just politically, but also with the prayers that will give us the strength and courage to do what we need to do to stop this pipeline. Tribal leadership and Native communities are the keys to winning this struggle.” (from “Native People and Allies Pledge to Stop Keystone XL”, Native Organizers Alliance, 11/27/17)
The heart of this struggle and the Native and grassroots political power it built propelled this campaign to victory. But there is more to be done.
May 10, 2021: 10am – 12 noon (PST)
Justice for Janitors Campaign
Key Topics: organizing strategy in a “gig economy”; revival of the labor movement; conscientizacion and the immigrant base; expanding the organizing terrain beyond the workplace
Presenter: Salvador ”Chava” Bustamante, Director of Latinos United for a New America, and former First Vice President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1877.
Overview: At the University of Miami, janitors fasted for weeks as part of their lengthy and winning strike. Workers in wheelchairs, weakened by the fast, surrounded the university’s president, Donna Shalala and chanted in Spanish, “Union or death!” In Houston, 5,000 Janitors won a first-time union contract in a “right-to- work” state, despite the fact that bail was set at more than $20 million for people arrested for non-violent acts of civil disobedience in the city. Workers in cities across the nation went on strike in support of the Houston janitors, and allies in Europe occupied buildings. Finally, pension fund trustees in charge of $1 trillion in workers’ pension fund capital adopted “responsible contractor” procedures—committing to invest only in office buildings where janitors were treated fairly.
The Justice for Janitors campaign succeeded because it relentlessly went after the building owners and financiers at the top of the real estate industry—the people who truly had power over the janitors’ livelihood—not the cleaning companies who were powerless subcontractors.
The campaign also exposed an economy that was increasingly using sub-contracting and other schemes to separate and isolate workers from the corporations and companies that were actually in control of their wages, benefits and overall working conditions. Justice for Janitors became much more than a “union organizing campaign,” it grew into a movement. Its influence and impact extended far beyond the people directly involved in the campaign’s actions. Its success was rooted in its ability to pit the needs of an entire community against the wealth of the real estate industry. (Excerpt from: J4J: Inside an Epic Victory for American Labor, Javier Gonzales, 12/11/20)
MAY 17, 2021: 10am – 12 noon (PST)
A Way to Organize People for Survival
Key Topics: Mutual aid as an organizing response to a natural calamity; establishing cooperative structures; a weak state and alternative governance structures.
Presenter: Paola Aponte Cotto & Marisel Robles Gutiérrez, Comedores Sociales de Puerto Rico.
Overview: 2017 was a momentous year for Puerto Rico. After several decades full of austerity measures, Hurricane María reveals what already existed: a colonized people, poor and abandoned. Deprived of energy, water and supplies for months, the communities were cut off and without rescue. The negligence of the state was so much that the official numbers of deaths in Puerto Rico were 64 deaths, while studies added 4,695 deaths. Using the political organizing experience to respond to needs that Comedores Sociales de Puerto Rico has practiced (est. 2013) along with allies such as Urbe Apie who reclaim space for cultural use, we were able to respond quickly with the creation of the Center Mutual Support in the town of Caguas. A way to organize the people for survival.
Arguably, the political disaster tested, on a larger scale, the ability of people to respond with different forms of mutual support. More than a campaign, organized communities and activists from all over did not wait and began to work on the most pressing needs they were experiencing: community kitchens, reconstruction and cleaning brigades, coordination of transportation of supplies from the diaspora, among many other things. Many were able to understand the collective experience that “Only the People, Save the People.” We are part of an emerging movement in PR. After the CAM was established in Caguas, similar models spread to towns such as Humacao, San Juan, Lares, Las Marías, among others. To this day, several of these collective structures continue to exist as a means to organize the poor and those affected by these calamities.
