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On the
Freedom Side How Five Decades of Youth Activists Have
Remixed American History
Wesley C.
Hogan
Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019 Paperback.
vi+354 p. ISBN 978-1469652481. $27.95
Reviewed by Lesley Speed Federation University
Australia, Ballarat
The roles of youth in
freedom movements in the United States since the 1960s are the focus of Wesley
C. Hogan’s On the Freedom Side. The
book takes its title from a song performed by the activist group the Dream
Defenders at the Lincoln Memorial after the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman
for killing Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, an event that drew global attention
in 2012. Indeed, Hogan’s book refers to many key moments and movements, from
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s to twenty-first-century
Indigenous opposition to the oil industry’s Dakota Access Pipeline. The
political range of the organisations in On
the Freedom Side extends from the racial and economic campaigns of the Ella
Baker Center for Human Rights (EBC) to the queer intersectionality of
Southerners on New Ground (SONG); undocumented immigrant youth in United We
Dream; the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) that includes the Dream Defenders, Black
Lives Matter (BLM) and Black Youth Project 100; and the Native American youth
activists of the Indigenous People’s Power Project and the International
Indigenous Youth Council. While this is a historical study, Hogan highlights
the contemporary and changing aspects of the movements in this book, which is
avowedly ‘evocative and descriptive but also speculative and impressionistic’
rather than seeking to put forward a definitive account [12]. On
the Freedom Side centres on examining the essential role of organising in
freedom movements, in taking ideas to action and connecting people with shared
or intersecting interests. As Hogan points out, organising is central to
finding ‘ways for people to govern themselves’, and indicative of how freedom
movements look beyond ‘finding better representatives or parties’ [204]. At the
same time, however, organising is an area of activism that is largely invisible
to history. While the movements here require no introduction, the book uses
interviews and anecdotes from organisers and participants to provide a sense of
immersion in how these movements were fuelled and shaped by organising. Hogan demonstrates
how these ‘stories resist a single line of influence and instead reach back to
alternative genealogies whose historical dynamism often evades journalists and
scholars’ [12]. Echoing her role as Director of the Center for Documentary
Studies at Duke University, the book is characterised by a strong sense of
proximity to human interactions within and between organisations, a proximity
that can often also be found in screen documentaries. Of central
significance is the work and legacy of the African American activist Ella Baker
(1903-1986), an organiser who worked largely behind the scenes over several
decades. On the Freedom Side positions
Baker as significant not only for her relatively well-known work in the Civil
Rights movement in the 1960s, including her role as a mentor in the SNCC. Of
more specific salience here is the key moment in 1960 when Baker decided to
‘dedicate her work to young people, to their vision of change’ [22]. This
moment is shown to be central to how Baker’s work forms a legacy for contemporary
activists. An example is the EBC, established after Baker’s death, which
follows its namesake’s example by organising with black, brown and low-income
people to address political and economic inequalities. Arguing that young
people have ‘taken the lead’ in the US and globally in democratic movements
since the 1960s, Hogan writes that these ‘are Ella Baker’s children’ [10]. Indeed,
it has become almost a dictum that ‘the most pressing challenges of today, from
climate change to escalating inequality and war, are the result of mature,
adult decision-making’ [11]. Yet Hogan’s book also transcends such generalisations
by presenting a history that refutes characterisations of relationships between
youth and adulthood as unequivocally conflicted. Instead, On the Freedom Side presents a nuanced analysis of how Ella Baker’s
activism involved a commitment to intergenerational collaboration and to listening
and working with people of diverse backgrounds, approaches that are shown to
inform the movements in this book. The history in On the Freedom Side is relevant in many
ways to the present day. Indeed, the role of youth in political movements has
become increasingly visible and topical since the Occupy movement and other
global protests in 2011. The focus of Hogan’s book resonates with the prominence
of strikingly young activists in the late 2010s around the world, in strikes by
school students against climate change and in the work of the Swedish
environmentalist Greta Thunberg. While having affinities with global
developments, however, the integrity of Hogan’s study is grounded in events in the
regional United States and in the significance of the local in international issues.
The local environment is at the heart of the actions of Native American youth
against the Dakota Access Pipeline, while involving cultural and environmental concerns
that are also relevant to Indigenous peoples abroad. While the chapter about
the M4BL examines activism that responded to deaths of black males in Florida
and in Ferguson, Missouri, the importance of this history has since been
reinforced by the 2020 George Floyd protests both within and outside the US. The
book’s references to the actions of President Trump’s government, such as
placing immigrant children in detention centres, are both a reminder of the
continuing relevance of freedom movements in the US and a magnet for
international debate. Hogan’s history is strikingly contemporary, fostering
awareness of how some periods are significant because ‘people figure out how to
act’ and these are times that ‘in the process rearrange people’s heads and lift
cultures onto a different track’ [9]. Not concerned only
with protest marches and pamphlets, On
the Freedom Side also emphasises the significance for activism of recreational
and cultural forms, creative styles and individual expression. These are
brought together in Hogan’s linking of remix culture to role-playing, social
media and artistic work in social programs and political organising. As she
suggests, the book is both about and for young people, who ‘may find in these
pages a past that provides both expected and unforeseen paths for reinventing,
reclaiming, and remixing strategies to build on their time – the mixtapes of
their own generation’ [12]. The metaphor of the mixtape is harnessed to remix
culture, of which the significance here extends from music and its role in
social movements to the mixing of influences and approaches from the history of
freedom movements. Like the immersive encounters with movements in this book,
democracy is characterised by Hogan as ‘a lived experiment, a constant process
of exploration, struggle, invention, and reinvention’ [13]. With music as a
leitmotif, On the Freedom Side situates
recreational and cultural activities as important in the work of freedom
movements. The book opens with an account of an after-school programme in
Petersburg, Virginia, where children race each other in a gym to answer
mathematical questions. For activism, the strategic and tactical usefulness of
play, theatre, storytelling and music are evident in theatre workshops and creative
curricula run by youth organisers linked to the EBC and transformative
storytelling by undocumented youth. Storytelling and art also formed part of
the Indigenous movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Drawing on a
cultural tradition of relay runs while using social media to publicise their
delivery of a petition, Indigenous youth activists ‘innovated within sacred
traditions’ and formed a precedent for other movements internationally [163]. On the Freedom Side delineates how various
contemporary movements have been shaped by social media, which famously enabled
people with shared interests to communicate and work together globally. However,
these organisations’ relationships with social media are also complex. An
example is BLM, of which the name was popularised as a hashtag, which was then
used by a wider range of people whose stances do not necessarily coincide with those
of BLM chapters. The book’s positioning of organising as a core activity that
is not limited to, or primarily associated with, advanced technology is
underscored by accounts of how BLM and the Dream Defenders came to view social
media as a useful tool but not as their primary realm for organising. Intersectionality is
another theme central to this book, and is no less distinctively associated
with contemporary youth than social media are. Intersections of ethnicity,
gender and youth are both part of Ella Baker’s legacy and have been
increasingly foregrounded, with LGBTQ perspectives, in twenty-first-century
activism. On the Freedom Side
observes that as recently as the turn of the century, organisers faced
obstacles in attempting to bringing together LGBTQ and black perspectives in
social movements. Indeed, in this book the focus on youth is actually one of
several attributes of identity that converge in the movements examined, challenging
and moving away from the limitations of single-identity politics. These movements
bring together, in various configurations, LGBTQ, race, class and gender
perspectives, disability receiving less attention. Queer, black feminist
influence was central to the development of BLM, for example, just as SONG has
collaborated with the M4BL; BLM supported Indigenous opposition to the oil
pipeline, and queer activists have had a major role in the undocumented youth
movement. Drawing on and expanding the legacy of Ella Baker’s role in African
American and youth activism, On the
Freedom Side examines relationships between generations of youth activism and
intersectional politics.
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