The quiet, relational work that builds movements and makes change possible
Zen W, 50501 St Louis
When people think about activism, they often think about protests.
Thousands of people in the streets. Signs held overhead. Chants. Marches. The moments that make the news.
And those gatherings matter. Some of the mass protests I have attended have been among the most powerful experiences of my life.
Something profound happens when huge numbers of people gather around a shared purpose. Even amid anger, grief, or rage, there can be a sense of awe-like joy. It’s like being at a Dylan concert when thousands recognize the first notes of a song or standing with strangers beneath the sky during an eclipse. For a moment, you are part of something much larger than yourself.
A mass protest can carry that same kind of energy.
But for the activists working behind the scenes, there is another side to those moments that many protesters never see.
The planning, meetings, safety teams, communications, and coalition building. Endless messages and last-minute changes. The people who arrive hours before anyone else and leave after everyone has gone home.
The work—and sometimes the personal cost—can be enormous, making burnout easy. That’s why I’ve come to pay close attention to what happens before, after, and between the protests.
Activism is organizing.
It is education, conversation, and relationship building. It’s learning how power works and who holds it. It’s showing up at a city council meeting when almost no one else does—calling legislators, registering voters, and making signs. It’s writing, teaching, listening, and sitting in rooms together to ask difficult questions and hear the answers that follow.
Over the last few years, I’ve watched neighborhood organizations form around issues that matter directly to the people who live there—proposed data centers, automated license plate readers such as Flock cameras, privacy, development, safety, and who gets to make decisions about a community.
That is activism too.
The most sustaining part of this work for me has been relational.
In recent years, I’ve developed relationships with leaders of grassroots organizations and nonprofits throughout the community. These experiences have shown me how powerful the relational side of activism can be—and how essential it is to sustaining a movement.
When organizations come together, we may bring different priorities, experiences, and approaches. We don’t have to be identical to work together. When we focus our energy where our values and goals align, the power of collective effort is palpable.
I cannot overstate how important this is in movement work.
And increasingly, I understand why the old saying all politics is local matters so much.
If we believe activism is primarily about showing up for the next large protest, we miss much of what movements require—and the many ways people can participate. Not everyone can march. Not everyone wants to speak into a microphone or organize a rally. Movements need researchers and writers, teachers and listeners, artists and strategists—people willing to knock on doors and people willing to sit around a table and learn.
Movements need people willing to change their own minds and remain in conversation with those who see things differently. That may be one of the quieter forms of resistance, but also one of the most consequential.
Sometimes activism looks like thousands of people filling a street. Sometimes it looks like ten people reading a book.
That is part of why the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) St. Louis and 50501 St. Louis are beginning the Resistance Reading Circle, starting with Jeanne Theoharis’s A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History.
You’re invited to read and join the conversation with us. Learn more and register for the Resistance Reading Circle.
The history we inherit about social movements matters because it shapes what we expect activism to look like now.
We have been handed a version of the Civil Rights Movement that can make change appear almost inevitable: a few extraordinary leaders emerged, people marched peacefully, the country recognized the injustice, laws changed, and progress followed.
The real history is both more beautiful and more terrible.
Change required years of organizing, education, relationship-building, strategy, disruption, persistence, and courage—along with ordinary people doing work that rarely made it into the history books. Activists were criticized for being too radical, too disruptive, or too impatient. They faced government repression, media distortion, racism both blatant and subtle, and enormous public resistance.
And still they organized.
One principle I have lived by for years is simple:
You have to be willing to be uncomfortable.
Activism can be joyful. There is tremendous joy in community, solidarity, friendship, music, collective action, and discovering that you are not alone in wanting something different.
But activism also requires us to become uncomfortable with the status quo.
It requires us to question the history we have been told.
It requires us to look directly at the distance between the stories a country tells about itself and the experiences of the people who have lived inside those stories. And then it asks us not to turn away from that discomfort, but to do something with it—to turn discomfort into knowledge, knowledge into connection, and connection into next steps.
Another principle I return to is equally simple:
Say what you’re going to do. Then do what you say.
We must look inward and identify what truly matters to us. What values are we unwilling to abandon? What is the moral or ethical line beneath all the noise?
And then we have to act from there—peacefully, but powerfully. Activism requires both fierceness and softness.
The ability to speak out—and the ability to listen. The willingness to share what you know—and the humility to learn from someone who knows more or understands something differently than you do. The courage to stand firmly in your values without believing that you have nothing left to learn.
Our Resistance Reading Circle isn’t separate from activism.
It is activism.
We are reading together because understanding the people and movements that came before us gives us something we desperately need in this incredibly difficult time. Not a blueprint. History doesn’t offer us that.
But it gives us perspective.
It reminds us that movements were built by imperfect people working under impossible circumstances. Change did not happen because the country came around. It happened because people organized, persisted, built relationships, learned from one another, took risks, and continued when progress seemed impossibly far away.
There is work for all of us in that history. Protest matters, but movements are built in all the spaces between the protests—in neighborhoods, meeting rooms, and around kitchen tables; in conversations between people who begin as strangers; in coalitions among people who understand that they need one another; and in the willingness to learn something that unsettles what we thought we knew.
And as we keep moving forward, I find myself returning to the belief that the arc toward justice may be long, but people—ordinary people, organized together—can keep bending it toward freedom.
That belief reminds us why we do this work at all: because together, through learning, organizing, listening, speaking out, and acting on what we believe, we can create something better than what exists now.
A more just society is not inevitable.
It is something we build together.