Of all the “green” films at Sundance, the most important film for the climate movement was the one that exposed what the greens lack: “Freedom Riders.”
In my eyes, “Freedom Riders” represents everything that the climate movement is missing: commitment, sacrifice, boldness and confrontation. The facts of this film blow away a lot of the conventional wisdom that is holding our movement back from realizing its true potential. This is a film that the entire climate movement needs to see. There were more lessons in this film than I could process in one sitting, but here are some thoughts.
Motivation. We are always told that people need to feel personally threatened by the climate crisis in order to act. Some of the key figures in “Freedom Riders” were white students in Tennessee who were not threatened in any way by the status quo; yet they made a bold commitment to ride into certain danger in the deep South. They dropped out of school during finals, and literally signed their last wills and testaments before they left.
Nonviolence. The film clarified a difference between nonviolence and avoidance of violence. The Freedom Riders, who were committed to nonviolence, were also clearly and intentionally inciting violence against themselves. This they saw as necessary in order to escalate the situation to a point where it could no longer be ignored.
Politics. There were a lot of unintentional correlations between Obama and the Kennedys, who really didn’t want to have to deal with civil rights. The activists involved knew they had to create enough social upheaval that Kennedy had to pick sides, which was a huge political risk. Nothing about the political situation favored the Freedom Riders.
Sacrifice. This really puts our movement in perspective. There is not one of us in this movement who have committed anything close to the level of sacrifice that the Freedom Riders did.
Numbers. The Freedom Riders were vastly outnumbered everywhere they went, even when they rallied the whole movement in Birmingham. At the peak there were a few hundred Riders, but they achieved major national legal changes that ended formal segregation against immense political opposition. Their strength was never in numbers, but in their willingness to sacrifice. We have more than enough people in our movement to force the change we seek. A small group willing to throw themselves into the gears of the machine really can stop the machine.
These lessons are invaluable to our movement right now. The most common question among climate activists since Copenhagen has been, “Where do we go from here?” We know that what we have been doing hasn’t worked. I suggest we learn from the social movements of the past and try something new for us and old for America: sacrifice, confrontation, boldness.
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