It is Always Darkest Before the Dawn

On discovering there is more of us than them

That which cannot sustain will not. I believe we are witnessing the beginning of breakdown, and I believe that breakdown is also the beginning of renewal. The recognition is spreading.

In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Bill asks Mike how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” Mike says. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

The sudden part can dominate our understanding of what happened. We remember the event that made a failure impossible to ignore, while the years that produced it recede from view. Something similar can happen when we look back on political change: the moment a movement becomes impossible to ignore can conceal how much work preceded it.

Knowing what is wrong can leave a person feeling helpless for years. Recognizing that other people are prepared to do something about it changes what that person can imagine doing themselves.

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On the morning of December 5, 1955, Black residents of Montgomery watched buses pass their homes without the passengers who ordinarily filled them, as boycott organizer Jo Ann Robinson later recalled in her memoir. People who lived along the routes began telephoning people who did not, spreading the news that the boycott was working.

They already knew what riding those buses meant. Robinson and the Women’s Political Council had spent years pressing for changes to the treatment of Black passengers before Rosa Parks’s arrest. After the arrest, Robinson and her collaborators distributed thousands of leaflets calling on people to stay off the buses.

Now the response could be seen from a front porch. A person deciding whether to participate had evidence that other people were participating too. The empty buses made a community’s capacity for refusal visible to the community itself.

Robinson wrote that the boycotters “astounded themselves”. At the mass meeting that evening, participants voted to continue what had begun as a one-day protest. The first day’s success helped them commit to something much longer.

Segregation remained in force while they made that decision. It would take more than a year of protest and a federal court challenge before Black residents boarded desegregated buses in December 1956. But the beginning of the change belongs to the period when victory was still uncertain. People had discovered something about what they could do together, and were already putting that knowledge to work.

From the far side of a victory, we can mistake the people who achieved it for people who knew they would win. They had to decide whether to keep going before they could know how the story ended.

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In Leipzig, prayer meetings for peace and human rights had been held at St Nicholas’s Church since 1982. By the autumn of 1989, a growing movement was taking its demands into the streets.

On October 9, roughly 70,000 people marched in Leipzig despite the threat of repression, and the security forces did not intervene. The following Monday, the crowd grew to 120,000. People who had seen a demonstration survive could reconsider the risk of joining the next one.

Standing together without being dispersed gave people a reason to doubt that the state’s power over them was as complete as it appeared. In chanting “We are the people,” the demonstrators expressed a claim that the size of the crowd allowed them to see.

The Berlin Wall opened a month later. By then, people had already spent weeks demonstrating that they were willing to act against the regime in public.

Montgomery and Leipzig involved different struggles, and neither can be reduced to a sudden change of mood. In Montgomery, organizers arranged transportation and regular meetings that helped people sustain the boycott. Leipzig’s demonstrations grew from years of gathering. The spreading recognition had somewhere to go because people had done the work of bringing one another together.

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Despair can make our own moment seem uniquely closed. We can look at the power an institution still holds and fail to imagine how people might begin to change their relationship to it. These histories allow us to see people acting while the institutions they opposed could still punish them.

An arrangement can persist because people do not yet see a way to refuse it together. That is different from believing in it. When the refusal becomes visible, someone who felt alone can make a different assessment of what is possible.

That is the recognition I believe is spreading now. Anger by itself can exhaust us. Recognition has to become a reason to find one another and undertake work we could not sustain alone.

I believe renewal begins while the outcome remains in doubt. Helping someone remain involved when they are close to giving up can make the next act of refusal less lonely for both of us. We can begin that work before we have persuaded ourselves that we will succeed.

Let us begin.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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