Journalism and Civil Resistance: Rev. Jim Lawson in Mexico - The Making of the Video

By Al Giordano

The Rev. Jim Lawson delivers the keynote remarks at the 2010 Narco News School of Authentic Journalism. Photo DR 2010 Noah Friedman-Rudovsky.

Last June, during a visit to Boston, Massachusetts, I met Jim Lawson, a hero of American history, to me and to many others, for his singular role in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. As we chatted, I mentioned a late mutual friend, Wally Nelson (1909-2002) and Jim lit up, remembering that he had attended high school with Wally and his brothers. It was Wally, a World War II draft resister, who, prior to my first stint as an 18-year-old political prisoner in the US, had trained me to cope with jailhouse life – and there I was, thirty years later, meeting a man who knew Wally seventy years ago as a teen. I felt as if I had met, in Jim, a long lost family member.

Wally Nelson (1909-2002), ¡Presente!

Community organizing and civil resistance have long been the methods of successful political change in America and throughout the world, but only in the past few years have these themes surfaced and been talked about openly in wider circles again. And based on three-plus decades of either doing them or reporting about them, I view those organizing and resistance methods as the seeds of effective political action that survived these lost decades of the US left, most of which had detoured into academic identity politics and self-referential versions of “activism” that had too often lost connection to the goals of constructing and winning greater justice, freedom and authentic democracy.

Listen for five minutes to Jim Lawson and one quickly realizes that those seeds, while they may have suffered fallow soil for a spell, never died. His own personal story, of going to India in his youth to study Gandhi’s independence movement and methods, of meeting Martin Luther King, Jr., of working alongside the martyred civil rights leader from 1957-1968, of organizing and training the participants in the 1960 Nashville lunch counter sit-ins to end racial segregation, is the story of every community organizer that has ever launched and won a battle, while it is also singular for the magnitude of wider history that shifted due to a single local organizing campaign.

Days after meeting Jim, as I boarded an airplane back to Latin America, news arrived that a military coup d’etat had assaulted Honduras. I soon headed there to report on the civil resistance efforts against that attack on democracy. Traveling throughout the many regions of Honduras I witnessed many strategies and tactics at work; some brilliant, some not, some effective, and some counterproductive, and spent much of the summer of 2009 documenting and reporting on those resistance efforts here on The Field.

One of the frustrations of reporting from Honduras and its regions was reading, listening and seeing how so many well-meaning “alternative media” reporters and activists offered coverage of the resistance in a manner as superficial as that tossed up by commercial media organizations. It underscored my view that a journalist that doesn’t understand the underlying strategic dynamics of a civil resistance or social movement rarely succeeds in being able to help the participants achieve their goals. Whenever the commercial and alternative media alike report obsessively on demonstrations and marches, the predictable police violence against them and the riot porn that typically ensues – ignorant or aloof to the deeper organizing efforts behind the scenes – movements that seek to be seen and heard tend to, more and more, narrow and pitch their tactics to the media, choosing demonstrations and marches over all other forms of organizing and resistance.

Repressive regimes – like that in Honduras - love when that happens, because they know how to count the size of crowds and then know exactly how many cops, tear gas canisters, infiltrator-provocateurs and other weapons to send in to disperse those actions. It’s no secret that the Honduran resistance has not (yet) won its quest to change its country, constitution and government for the better. And throughout the summer, I saw painful reminder after reminder of how we who try to do independent media and journalism share part of the responsibility when the movements we cover do not succeed. And I thought a lot during those weeks about Lawson’s experience in Nashville and beyond, and how by organizing a different kind of grassroots campaign, he and his collaborators not only won desegregation of their city, but did so in a way that sparked and inspired a gigantic national movement that achieved profound changes and expanded civil rights in an entire country, while fueling related liberation struggles worldwide.

It was during those often difficult Honduran days and nights that I determined that the next Narco News School of Authentic Journalism would teach not only the mechanics of investigative and online journalism, documentary filmmaking and video production, but would also train its participants to understand and know the strategic dynamics of civil resistance, especially of the kind that, throughout history, has succeeded in its goals. Today, in the twenty-first century, to be an effective journalist reporting on resistance struggles, it is now a Sine Qua Non that a reporter must develop a keen understanding of how exactly winning strategies function to be worth a spit while reporting them. Without bettering ourselves in that way, any effort we make to cover social movements becomes a big and ineffective waste of time both for us and for those movements.

And so I called Jim Lawson in Nashville and he agreed to come to Mexico this February to share his experience with our 69 students and professors at the School of Authentic Journalism. With the support of the Autonomous University of Yucatán and the daily Por Esto! newspaper in Mérida, we were able to invite the general public to Lawson’s keynote speech to the 2010 j-school, titled, “Journalism and Civil Resistance.”

Thanks to the creative hard work of the students and professors of the School, we filmed that event, and today present the first of at least three viral videos that share what Jim taught us, now, with a wider global audience in at least two languages, English and Spanish.

2004 School of Authentic Journalism graduate turned professor Greg Berger and I developed the script for this first of the Lawson tapes, and then Greg – with assistance from 2010 graduates Karina González, Ter García and Marine Lormant, as well as the translating labors of Fernando León Romero – edited and produced this video, Journalism and Civil Resistance: Rev. Jim Lawson in Mexico:

Greg, also a filmmaking professor at the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos (Morelos State University), adds these notes on how this video was produced:

I often tell my students that on order to edit a video and make it come alive, you have to spend hours alone with your footage and live with it, watching and listening to it again and again until you become a part of the images you are assembling.

To produce our newest video offering, "Journalism and Civil Resistance: Rev. Jim Lawson in Mérida" I had the privilege of spending a few sleepless nights listening to the words of the man Martin Luther King Jr. called "the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world."

Reverend Lawson told one of our students that to sustain our work as organizers and journalists, we must build a community of individuals united on a common journey.  He also suggested that we study the leaders from the great social struggles of human history from decades and centuries past.

The first step in editing a video is to assemble a kind of "palette" of audio visual material that can be cut up reconfigured and reorganized to create and effective message.  As I assembled the images that now make up our new video, I remembered Reverend Lawson's words and tried my best to enter the community of struggle which came of age in 1960 and whose effects continue to ripple through and shape our world. I became inspired as I watched images of Jim and his contemporaries of 1960 wage a non-violent assault on a wicked and corrupt social system in Nashville and other cities.  I remembered my first entry into political struggle as a young boy in the 1980s living under the Reagan regime, when I marched as one of millions in anti-war and anti-nuclear that were direct descendants of the 1960's struggles for social justice.

The "palette" of film and video I worked with included archival material from the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) which maintains a large library of film and video in the public domain that can be downloaded in fairly high quality form and re-edited. It's a fantastic resource that can be used by film and video makers free of charge. Much of the black and white film I used in the video comes from an educational film called "Integration Report," which includes footage shot by documentary film pioneers Albert Maysles and Richard Leacock early on in their careers.  In fact, the "Direct Cinema" techniques of those two filmmakers, which included embedding themselves in important social movements, are still important tools for practitioners of authentic journalism today.

My goal in selecting and editing archival footage was to provide illustration to Jim’s message, and to help make it accessible to a new generation of organizers, journalists, and viewers. It is my hope that the video helps to broaden the community of individuals united in common cause of which Jim spoke.

In February, when Jim gave his talk, I thrust a camera into the hands of young scholar Sebastian Kolendo and told him to shoot images of people’s reactions to the lecture. In a conventional film or communications school, most students are not given the chance to go out and shoot until they have been lectured to death and over-instructed on how to use a camera. I find that when you ask students to do something that they might have been afraid to do, that they usually rise to the challenge. In my own life my camera skills were acquired on the job as I documented urgent stories of social movements that needed to be told, and so I try to give my own students the same opportunity. As I watched Sebastian crawl through the aisles of the auditorium, gradually becoming accustomed to the camera, Jim stood at the podium and talked about his practice of letting young students of community organizing assume leadership roles. It was clear to me that it was similar to what we practice in the School of Authentic Journalism. Through montage, videomakers can make such connections emerge on screen, and so in the video there is a visual interlude which juxtaposes Jim’s ideas about training young organizers with images of what we do in the school.

Everything we do at the school is a collaborative effort, and so it should be noted that Jesse Freeston, Oscar Estrada, Paul Findlay, Milena Velis and several other students and professors helped film the event.

The part of Jim Lawson’s keynote talk that Greg references, in which he speaks of the necessity to push others into leadership roles, appears in this video with a brief montage relating that organizing method to those of the School of Authentic Journalism. There, you’ll see a screen shot of the story reported by 2010 scholar Kara Newhouse, Building an Authentic Journalism Movement: School Takes Lessons from Civil Rights Leader James Lawson and the History of the Highlander Center (February 21, 2010, Narco News).

Although I was head-spinningly busy directing the School and its logistics, large and small, during its ten intensive days and nights, Kara is a persistent reporter with a nose for news who kept after me for an interview about the subject of her story, in which she asked me about whether our School had borrowed any of its teaching methods from that of the Highlander Center in Tennessee that was so central to training the organizers of the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s. In fact, she was on to something, and wrote this paragraph:

The lessons in movement building that the audience took from Lawson can also be learned from the Highlander Research and Education Center, a retreat site for training in grassroots organizing and coalition building. According to School president Al Giordano, the Center was famed in the 1960s and 70s for its influence on icons like Rosa Parks and Pete Seeger. Giordano said that he modeled the School for Authentic Journalism in part after the center, because, “When you pull people out of their everyday worlds and put them together in one place, all kinds of things are made possible.”

The rev. Lawson’s presence at the 2010 j-school helped us greatly in solidifying our School’s own vision of itself: The most successful social movements – like that which he and his colleagues organized in Nashville 50 years ago – have provided intensive training for their participants. Such training has historically lessened fear and panic among the ranks, while it increased discipline, creativity and empowerment.

Those of us who report and film movements for change also do our job better when we likewise teach, learn and prepare each other. It takes a well-trained authentic journalist to do justice to an effective movement and to report in ways that help, and not hinder, it. The School of Authentic Journalism had to be invented because no similar training program had existed for the media makers who walk alongside social movements. Now it does. And thanks to Jim, and the lessons he taught us from his unique experience as a strategist of movements, many of us are better, faster and more coherent at this work than we could have possibly been without his wise counsel, a wisdom born of experience which we now share with you.