The Pope follows in the tradition of Martin Luther King and others in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Keenly aware of the power of southern segregationists, they advanced a politics aimed at winning over the broad middle of American society.

Divisions among the people contribute to the discouragement which many feel today. As I recently suggested, Pope Francis' climate encyclical, Laudato Si, calling for a politics of inclusive dialogue and empowering civic action, a "politics of a common life," offers resources for overcoming such divisions. It goes beyond the good versus evil mindset that often characterizes efforts to address challenges of climate change.

The Pope follows in the tradition of Martin Luther King and others in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Keenly aware of the power of southern segregationists, they advanced a politics aimed at winning over the broad middle of American society. This politics is not well known by a new generation of activists on college campuses and elsewhere who are schooled by door-to-door issue canvassing based on good versus evil scripts, mass media full of labeling and demonization, and polarizing interpretations of movements like civil rights. As Gerald Taylor, a black youth leader in the civil rights movement who became one of the greatest organizers and public intellectuals of my generation told me in an interview, "There is a place for protest in any movement. The question is, What comes next?"

King was schooled by leaders and organizers like Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Stanley Levinson who themselves had been shaped by the movements and politics of the 1930s. They had learned the hard lesson that to secure deep democratic change and to win the struggle against fascism required recognizing the immense complexity of every community and finding ways to build broad alliances. Saul Alinsky, a key architect of community organizing also shaped by the thirties' movements, summarized this lesson in Reveille for Radicals,

"You start with the people, their traditions, their prejudices, their habits, their attitudes, and all of those other circumstances that make up their lives....To understand the traditions of a people is . . . to ascertain those social forces which argue for constructive democratic action as well as those which obstruct democratic action."

In this vein, King constantly put forward a public narrative to "win over the middle of America," a phrase of Bayard Rustin. He recognized what community organizers called "the world as it is," full of diverse interests, ironies, and contradictions. His speech, "The Drum Major Instinct," March 4, 1968, conveys these themes and an alliance-building politics with a story.

"When we were in jail in Birmingham the other day, the white wardens enjoyed coming around the cell to talk about the race problem...showing us where segregation was so right. So we would get to talking...about where they lived, and how much they were earning. And when those brothers told me what they were earning, I said, 'Now, you know what? You ought to be marching with us...You fail to see that the same forces that oppress Negroes in American society oppress poor white people. All you are living on is the satisfaction of...thinking that you are somebody big because you are white.'"

When I was working for SCLC in St. Augustine, Florida, I told King about being freed by the Klu Klux Klan after we discussed how they were being used by big shots and the idea that they might make alliances with blacks. King assigned me to organize poor whites, which I did in Durham, North Carolina, for six years in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In our community organization, ACT, we saw many examples of poor whites giving up the satisfaction of thinking they were "somebody big" because of skin color. People reached across the color line in ways which continue to ripple through the political culture of the city.

Today's young activists know little of such experiences. Instead they mostly hear interpretations which neglect the pluralistic, inclusive politics at the movement's heart. For instance, in her influential biography of Ella Baker, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement described in my last blog, and in other writings, the activist historian Barbara Ransby weakens her account by dismissing King as a "top-down leader." She gives no recognition to the cross-partisan, pluralistic, democratic politics of SCLC.

Instead, she touts highly polarizing groups like the Black Panthers as exemplary. She neglects the fact that Baker believed in politics which could win broad majority support, based on her thirties' experiences. In her treatments of movements today such as a recent piece in Colorlines on the Black Lives Matter protests, Ransby praises "revolutionary" language and argues that "the most oppressed" are the vanguard of change.

An alienated stance is likely to alienate most people.

In contrast, the foundations of the movement were SCLC's grassroots Citizenship Education Program (CEP), as well as freedom schools of SNCC and youth councils and adult branches of NAACP. CEP's goal, according to Septima Clark, was "to broaden the scope of democracy to include everyone and deepen the concept to include every relationship." From 1961 to 1968, CEP, directed by Dorothy Cotton, trained more than 8,000 people at the Dorchester Center in McIntosh, Georgia, who returned to their communities and trained tens of thousands more in community organizing skills and nonviolent change-making. The focus was not only on skills but also on shifts in identity from oppressed victim to constructive agent of change. As Cotton describes in If Your Back's Not Bent: The Role of the Citizenship Education Program in the Civil Rights Movement, "People who had lived for generations with a sense of impotence, with a consciousness of anger and victimization, now knew in no uncertain terms that if things were going to change, they themselves had to change them."

King often spent time with participants, who showed him that people who experienced terrible injustice could discipline anger in ways that made them role models for the nation. He often told their stories.

Young people need to hear these. And as Gerald Taylor says, young activists need to move "from protest to governance." Taylor observes that skills of mobilizing are different than skills of governing, working with others across differences to solve problems and create civic goods, and building sustainable centers of democratic power. Without such skills of governing and building, preexisting power groups will take over.

In my next blog I take up this approach, using experiences from the 1990s.

As I argued recently, Pope Francis' climate encyclical, Laudato Si, shows powerful resources in Catholic and other faith traditions for addressing the challenge of climate change. But in immediate terms, it does little to affect the pessimistic public mood.

As I argued recently, Pope Francis' climate encyclical, Laudato Si, shows powerful resources in Catholic and other faith traditions for addressing the challenge of climate change. But in immediate terms, it does little to affect the pessimistic public mood.

As I argued recently, Pope Francis' climate encyclical, Laudato Si, shows powerful resources in Catholic and other faith traditions for addressing the challenge of climate change. But in immediate terms, it does little to affect the pessimistic public mood.

In June, the NBC-Wall Street Journal Poll found that only 31 percent of American adults believe the country is headed in the right direction. Gallup polling for years has shown a steady decline in public trust of institutions. Recent polls show that only the military (with 72%) and small business (with 67%) have strong majorities with "a great deal" and "quite a lot" of confidence. Other major institutions are widely viewed with suspicion. The figures of confidence for schools is 31%, for banks, 28%, for big business, 21 % and for Congress less than 10 %.

Such discouragement breeds a mood of scarcity, awakening what Nancy Cantor calls the "sleeping ghosts" of "hibernating bigotry," a concept proposed by Rupert Nacoste.

But there are important lessons from our history and recent experiences for turning around fatalism and creating foundations for renewed hope. In this blog I address the insights of Ella Baker in the freedom movement. In subsequent blogs I take up insights of Martin Luther King, and then describe lessons from the partnerships of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship over the last 20 years.

Ella Baker was a brilliant "behind the scenes" grassroots organizer in the civil rights movement. Barbara Ransby, in her book, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, argues that she was "one of the most important African American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement."

Born in Norfolk Virginia in 1903, Baker grew up in Littleton, North Carolina, hearing her grandmother tells stories of slave revolts. After graduating from Shaw University in 1927 as valedictorian, she moved to New York. She was shaped by the vibrant intellectual, civic and political activist culture of the Harlem Renaissance.

She went to work for the NAACP, the leading civil rights organization, in 1940 and became director of its local branches in 1943, travelling widely across the South. As Ransby put it, "She pushed the organization to decentralize its leadership structure and to aid its membership in more activist campaigns on the local level. Baker believed that the strength of an organization grew from the bottom up and not the top down. She believed that the work of the branches was the life blood of the NAACP."

Baker also developed a bird's eye view of black communities in the South. She reported to her close friends Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levinson in New York that the region was showing a dramatic increase in local activism. The three talked about possibilities for a new movement - and realized it would take a broader consciousness among local folks that they were not alone if collective hope was to emerge sufficient to overcome decades of fatalism and despair.

When the Southern Christian Leadership Conference formed in 1957 in the wake of the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott with Martin Luther King as its president, Rustin, advisor and mentor of King, succeeded in making Baker the first executive secretary. She moved to Atlanta, where the organization was located, with an explicit mission developed by herself with Rustin and Levinson: to create a larger consciousness of the fledgling movement. Her first campaign, a voter registration effort called the Crusade For Citizenship, was a twenty city project to make visible the grassroots ferment, to the nation and most importantly to local leaders and activists.

In 1960, following the first student sit-ins at North Carolina A&T college in Greensboro, SCLC convened a meeting of students from across the south. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee emerged and Baker saw potential to develop a style of grassroots leadership. She soon left SCLC to work with the new organization, and helped the young activists take up voter registration, work with the Congress on Racial Equality to organize "freedom rides" to desegregate bus stations, and help organize black sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta.

I was on staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), in 1964 and 1965, and only met Baker once. But she was a legendary figure in the movement and I heard many stories from my peers about her keen organizing and political philosophy. Baker was convinced that "strong people don't need strong leaders." She was dedicated to principles of self-organizing agency. "People under the heel," she said, "had to be the ones to decide what action they were going to take to get (out) from under their oppression."

Baker was also the principal architect of the concept of "participatory democracy," the idea that people have the right to participate in decisions which affect their lives. Taken up by the Students for a Democratic Society, the vision inspired students throughout the 1960s and reverberated across the world.
In Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, Barbara Ransby argues that Baker and King had radically different philosophies of change. For Baker change came from the bottom up. For King, it was "top down." But in my own experience the differences were more of emphasis than of kind, and both played necessary roles.

King, like other SCLC leaders, was a magnificent artist of what can be called "cultural organizing." They opened immense public space by effectively contesting the individualist, consumerist, white-centered version of the American dream in mainstream public culture, a version which had taken hold in the 1950s, and by articulating an inclusive, communitarian alternative.

King also was a staunch supporter of the Citizenship Education Program, SCLC's grassroots leadership effort for which I worked. He eloquently brought stories of the dignity and heroism of local folks to the attention of the nation. Like Baker, he was also a keen observer and strategist of the psychology of hope.

I describe some of his contributions in my next blog.

Pope Francis' encyclical on climate change, Laudato Si, is a bold and brilliant challenge to business as usual. "It is time to acknowledge that light-hearted superficiality has done no good," Francis wrote. "We must regain the conviction that we need one another, that we have a shared responsibility for others and the world, and that being good and decent are worth it."

Already, conservatives and liberals alike have mounted rebuttals in ways that illustrate the limits of their own ideologies.

Former governor Jeb Bush, a convert to Catholicism, said religion "ought to be about making us better as people and less about things that end up getting into the political realm."

In fact the encyclical shows the profound resources of the Christian faith to illuminate the problems in what Bush means by "politics." "A politics concerned with immediate results, supported by consumerist sectors of the population, is driven to produce short-term growth," Francis writes. "The myopia of power politics delays the inclusion of a far-sighted environmental agenda," adding that "we need to reject a magical concept of the market, which would suggest that problems can be solved simply by an increase in the profits of companies or individuals." The evidence is now overwhelming, he argues, integrating religious faith with science, that unbounded faith in the market is radically insufficient.

Meanwhile Joseph Heath, a professor of philosophy, took aim from the left. Writing in The New York Times, Heath argued that Pope Francis "wants an economic system that satisfies not whatever desires people happen to have but the desires that they should have -- a system that promotes the common good, according to the church's specification of what that good is," but "appeals to a conception of the common good that is specifically Christian." Heath proposed "that we cannot wait around for people to come to some kind of spiritual agreement" and called for a "liberal" solution, carbon credits, "so that all businesses and consumers are held accountable and charged for the environmental consequences of their actions."

Heath, like the conventional left, envisions solutions enacted by governments and guided by scientifically-trained experts. While Francis shares with the left concerns about unregulated capitalism he describes a pattern neglected by the left. "The basic problem goes even deeper" than concentrated economic power, he argues. "It is the way that humanity has taken up... an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm [that] exalts the concept of a subject, who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object." He adds: "The technocratic paradigm also tends to dominant economic and political life."

Both Bush and Heath miss Pope Francis' call for a different kind of politics based on relationships and the dignity of each person. "What is needed is a politics which is far-sighted and capable of a new, integral, and interdisciplinary approach," Francis proposes. "A strategy for real change calls for rethinking processes in their entirety."

Pope Francis is calling for a politics attentive to the overall ecology -- what I would call a politics of democracy, not only politics about issues in democracy. This is like "the politics of a common life" which theologian and political theorist Luke Bretherton describes in broad-based community organizing in his new book, Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship, and the Politics of a Common Life.

Such politics does not begin with a "common good" determined by Christians or anyone else. Rather it develops a sense of multiple and overarching "commons" in the process of collaborative work, negotiation, and dialogue over time.

This politics is richly conveyed by Bretherton's account of London Citizens. The group, among other accomplishments, brought "the Corporation," at the center of global finance, out of the shadows and won anti-usury measures which for the first time regulate its powers.

Democratizing politics like this opens space for immense diversity. In London Citizens, Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims join with secular organizations to create "a realm in which those of different faiths and identities forge a common life," a space where "religious beliefs and practices co-construct and are interwoven with other patterns of belief and practices."

Laudito Si envisions in effect expanding such politics vastly in scope to the narrative we have about our common world. Along the way, while the encyclical evaluates policies like the carbon tax from a Catholic vantage, it doesn't prescribe. "There are no uniform recipes," Francis argues. "He's not saying what the solutions are," said Cardinal Donald Wuerl of the Washington diocese to Judy Woodruff on the NewsHour. "He's not saying to politicians here's what you must do. He is saying 'I'm calling everyone to look at the problems and begin to come up with the solutions. We have to work together.'"

Like broad-based community organizing, Pope Francis also pays special attention to action which develops the power and capacities of everyday citizens and communities, including the most vulnerable. "While the existing world order proves powerless to assume its responsibilities, local individuals and groups can make a real difference." Francis says. "A healthy politics is sorely needed capable of reforming and coordinating institutions... and overcoming undue pressure and bureaucratic inertia."

This politics needs a large spirit. "Even the best mechanisms can break down when there are no worthy goals and values...to serve as the basis of a noble and generous society." I would suggest that such spirit and sense of abundance is nourished by a democratic way of life.

There is also historical irony here.

As the political theorist Michael Walzer shows in The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions, the democratic movements of the 20th century -- he analyzes Algeria, Israel and India and also draws wider conclusions -- were based on a "secularizing, modernizing, and developmental creed." They envisioned "a new beginning, a new politics, a new culture, a new economy... a new man and woman." They disdained traditional cultures and religions.

They also provoked counterrevolutions from populations that concluded, after a time, that they didn't want to be "made over" by secular modernizers.

Laudato Si and its politics, by way of contrast, are grounded in ancient faith traditions and also promise new hope.

Times they are a changing.

Pope Francis' encyclical on climate change, Laudato Si, is a bold and brilliant challenge to business as usual. Already, conservatives and liberals alike have mounted rebuttals in ways that illustrate the limits of their own ideologies.

Pope Francis' encyclical on climate change, Laudato Si, is a bold and brilliant challenge to business as usual. Already, conservatives and liberals alike have mounted rebuttals in ways that illustrate the limits of their own ideologies.