New wave of protests depends on masses, not dynamic leader

CHICAGO -- The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. marching arm-in-arm with other civil rights activists. Cesar Chavez hoisting a picket sign in a farm workers' strike. Gloria Steinem rallying other feminists for equal rights.

During the 1960s and into the 1970s, amid the turbulence of protests for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, every movement seemed to have a famous face -- someone at a podium or at the front of a march who possessed a charismatic style, soaring oratory and an inspiring message.

Not so today.

The new wave of political activism, marked by protests in the nation's capital and cities across America, looks more anonymous.

Since the presidential election of Donald Trump, there have been marches for women, science, the Dreamers -- immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children -- and most recently, gun control, a response to the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. In all those events, multitudes of voices, some more high-profile than others, have represented each cause.

Have America's protests changed so they rely more on the masses and less on one captivating leader?

The answer, some experts say, is yes, for two reasons: Progressive politics have moved in that direction -- think Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street -- and social media has radically transformed activism. Decades ago, it could take weeks of planning, newspaper ads, phone trees and a rousing speaker to organize a successful protest. Now a Facebook post or a series of tweets can fill the streets, jam a state capitol or block an expressway.

"With the rise of social media, it's definitely a lot easier for people to mobilize more quickly and you don't necessarily need to have one charismatic leader like Dr. King, who had almost some kind of magical quality," said Rachel Einwohner, a Purdue University sociology professor. "But you still do need some powerful message that really resonates with a lot of people."

Social media also makes it harder for a leader to emerge because it frequently traffics in bruising personal attacks, says Dana R. Fisher, a University of Maryland sociologist who is writing a book "American Resistance" about large-scale protests.

"I wonder to the degree to which people can lead in the same way in this era of Twitter and Facebook," she said. "Everybody's a critic. ... With people trolling and then clashing on social media, it may be harder to create a following in the same way that we saw with these leaders in the past."

Technology alone hasn't created the shift. Some progressives believe there's "something inherently wrong or problematic" about having one dynamic person seize the spotlight, said Fabio Rojas, an Indiana University sociology professor. "Modern progressive social movements see themselves as a very democratic form of politics. When they make decisions, they want a lot of consensus. They want a lot of deliberation."

Black Lives Matter, which has been in the forefront of protests against police violence and fatal shootings of black men, is among the many movements adopting this approach.

"The model of the charismatic leader was not something that we were interested in and in fact, many of us were trained to believe that the people themselves are going to set themselves free, not one person," says Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of the group. It's "dangerous," she says, to have one leader because that person becomes "the target of praise or the target of demise."

Black Lives Matters, she says, was inspired by '60s activist groups, including the Black Panther Party, which combined militancy and social programs (free breakfast for children), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a civil rights organization involved in sit-ins and voter registration that became more radical in its later years.

Cullors says her group, formed in 2013 in response to the acquittal of a neighborhood watch volunteer in the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teen, is sometimes misunderstood.

"People assume because we hit the streets and protested that we don't believe in anything else ... and that because we don't have a single leader, we're aimless." Instead, she says, Black Lives Matter, which has 40 chapters in the U.S., Canada and England, has a clear strategy, including participating in electoral politics. Some members are running for office, and in 2016, the group, with other organizations, signed on to a policy plan that called for universal health care and an end to the death penalty.

Another leaderless movement that shook up the establishment, Occupy Wall Street, was influenced, in part, by the Arab Spring, the uprisings in several Middle East countries bringing hundreds of thousands in the streets, leading to the toppling of some regimes.

The sometimes raucous protests in 2011 transformed a park in the heart of New York's financial district into an encampment with sleeping bags, tents, a makeshift kitchen and a rallying cry -- "We are the 99 Percent" -- condemning the concentration of wealth in the U.S.

Micah White, the group's co-founder, says even though it took only a few thousand dollars to launch the movement, half of America had heard of it a month later. "That's priceless," he says. "You can't even get a Super Bowl ad that would reach that many people."

Many credit Occupy with putting economic inequality on the national radar, but White says the group's real goal -- to end the influence of money on democracy -- was "a constructive failure. ... The main lesson is that street protests do not translate into political change because elected representatives are not required to listen to the majority."

During the two months of the Occupy protests, White says, the encampments "devolved into paralysis when asked to come up with a list of demands." But he also notes there still was a worldwide ripple effect.

"The way social movements are created now is that you release an idea that other people take up as their own," White says. "That's precisely why Occupy was spread to 82 countries. We couldn't have organized Occupy Wall Street in 82 countries. ... The strength of leaderless movements is in their capacity to spread extremely quickly. Their weakness is in their inability to make complex decisions."

Occupy wasn't the first protest to employ disruptive tactics.