04/12/2020
We invite everyone to join us for a joint livestream discussion tomorrow, Sunday April 12th at 7PM EST!
“Today’s students don’t transform. And it’s because they are ignorant of and ill-prepared to make the moral choice. Young people like me don’t receive an excellent education like the Nashville students had from Lawson, King, and the people. Most students today receive a commodified ‘education’ that encourages them to take their student activism and make a profitable career out of it when they graduate college. We don’t have the ideological clarity to understand why our society is the way it is, the training to begin to non-cooperate with oppression, or the moral guidance to make the courageous choice to become the very new human beings a better world would birth. But it’s up to us now to continue the direct legacy of Diane Nash and the Nashville Student Movement and take on the great task of understanding our times so we are ideologically, spiritually, and morally ready to change our times.”
We at APAA and Lotus Collective at the University of Pennsylvania will be discussing Emily D**g’s article “For Young Activists, A Lesson from Nashville." We are young people dedicated to confronting the important questions of our time through organizing reading groups, film screenings, pop-ups, and other events. We draw on the ideas and writings of revolutionary thinkers in the Black Radical Tradition such as W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Grace Lee and Jimmy Boggs, Martin Luther King Jr. and Huey P. Newton, and are joining together to co-host these public readings. With colleges moving toward online instruction in the wake of the pandemic and the subsequent scattering of students and young people, what we do as both APAA and Lotus Collective is no longer separate due to the distinct questions and tensions on our campuses and in our student bodies. Joining together thus gives us the renewed opportunity to share our sense of responsibility around providing more clarity in the grounding ideas and values for young people in today’s times in order to build a better world.
Diane Nash is a Civil Rights organizer and revolutionary who was one of the key student leaders of the Nashville Student Movement during the Freedom Rides and Lunch Counter Sit-ins of the 1960s. Learning from the life and work of Diane Nash gives us young people and especially activists a guiding model of discipline and nonviolence that we should look to and strive toward in these times.
In the wake of the COVID -19 crisis, the limitations of mainstream student activism are even clearer. Student activists have been uprooted from their campuses, the center of their activist efforts and concerns. Many feel helpless and unable to make change during this time, but this is a critical time for us to reflect on what our activism strives towards and who it serves. Many student activism issues and methods are self-centered and reactionary, lacking the critical elements needed for a strong movement like the Nashville students were able to build. Nash is a model for young activists and demonstrates what is needed in order to form a strong, impactful student movement built upon principles and sacrifice. We recognize that historical figures like Nash and her comrades can guide us in this crisis and beyond so that we can transform ourselves in order to make the necessary moral choices to change society.
By Emily D**g. When I was a student, I was involved in multiple ebbs and flows of social justice activism. From protesting a University healthcare fee and heckling Trustees, to shutting down campus…
