This week, as we all know by now, is the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Martin Luther King gave his “I have a dream” speech that day, but he was only one speaker in a very long program. Speakers at the march ranged from labor leader Walther Reuther to 1920s cabaret performer Josephine Baker, who flew to the US from her home in France specially for the occasion. Mahalia Jackson sang, as did Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.

But other than King’s, only one speech from that day is remembered anymore. It’s the one given by John Lewis, the 23-year-old chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Lewis was (if you don’t count Dylan and Baez, each about a year younger) the youngest person to address the crowd, and perhaps the most radical.

The original draft of Lewis’ speech was a blistering attack on racism, the white South, and the Democratic party. In it, Lewis predicted that a revolution was coming in America, one that would shake the nation to its foundations and remake the South completely. It was a great speech, but it was bit much for some of the march’s organizers.

On the day before the march, the Catholic archbishop of Washington DC — who was scheduled to give the opening invocation the next morning — received a copy of Lewis’ speech. The archbishop’s complaints sparked a crisis among march organizers, one that eventually pulled in government officials, labor leaders, and other white clergy. Even as the early speakers at the march were on stage, Lewis was huddled in a small guard station under the Abraham Lincoln statue in the memorial with Dr. King, A. Philip Randolph, and white church leader Eugene Carson Blake, negotiating changes.

The amended speech was typed up just moments before Lewis went on stage.  Here are thirteen of the biggest changes made:

• His statement that there was “not one thing” in Kennedy’s civil rights bill to “protect our people from police brutality” was struck.

• His reference to Southerners in one Virginia town “who must live in constant fear in a police state” was softened to “fear of a police state.”

• A reference to “black citizens who want to vote” was changed to “black people who want to vote.”

• The statement “segregation is evil and … must be destroyed in all its forms” was cut.

• As was a declaration that America “is still a place of cheap political leaders.”

• A reference to politicians “who build their careers on immoral compromise and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic and social exploitation” was given the qualification “There are exceptions, of course. We salute those.”

• This paragraph was eliminated in its entirety:

It seems to me that the Albany indictment is part of a conspiracy on the part of the federal government and local politicians in the interest of expediency. I want to know, which side is the federal government on? The revolution is at hand, and we must free ourselves of the chains of political and economic slavery. The nonviolent revolution is saying, “We will not wait for the courts to act, for we have been waiting for hundreds of years. We will not wait for the President, the Justice Department, nor Congress, but we will take matters into our own hands and create a source of power, outside of any national structure, that could and would assure us a victory.”

• As was this one:

We cannot depend on any political party, for both the Democrats and the Republicans have betrayed the basic principles of the Declaration of Independence. We all recognize the fact that if any radical social, political and economic changes are to take place in our society, the people, the masses, must bring them about.

• And this one:

The revolution is a serious one. Mr. Kennedy is trying to take the revolution out of the streets and put it into the courts. Listen, Mr. Kennedy. Listen, Mr. Congressman. Listen, fellow citizens. The black masses are on the march for jobs and freedom, and we must say to the politicians that there won’t be a “cooling-off” period. All of us must get in the revolution.

• In a sentence in which Lewis called on Americans to “get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village and every hamlet of this nation until true freedom comes, until the revolution is complete,” the phrase “the revolution” was changed to “the revolution of 1776.”

• A declaration that those present at the March on Washington would eventually march through the “heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own “scorched earth” policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground — nonviolently” was struck.

• His closing declaration that the movement would “splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces” was softened with a statement that it would do so “by the forces of our demands, our determination and our numbers,” and his closing promise to recreate the region “in the image of democracy” had the words “God and” shoehorned in.

• The speech’s ominous penultimate line, “We will make the action of the past few months look petty,” was cut, replaced with the final statement “For we cannot stop, and we will not and cannot be patient.”

You can see every edit that was made to Lewis’ original draft in its original context here.

Police records obtained by the website The Daily Caller show that several of the bias incidents that shook the Oberlin campus this spring were the work of two white male students, one of whom was an Obama volunteer. The two students — Dylan Bleier and Matt Alden — were suspended from Oberlin when their involvement in the incidents came to light this spring, and have apparently not returned to campus.

The Daily Caller cites Bleier’s support for Obama and his membership in an anti-racism organization as evidence that the hate crimes were false-flag hoaxes, but the student allegedly told campus police that he was simply trolling — that he performed the acts as “a joke to see the college overreact to it as they have with the other racial postings that have been posted on campus.”

Indeed, despite the Caller’s insinuations there seems to be no evidence of a subterranean pro-tolerance motive behind the incidents. Though Bleier has posted occasional anti-racist comments online over the years, I’ve found no evidence that he was involved in any anti-racist groups on campus, or that he participated in any of the organizing around the spring’s hate crimes, as is typical in faked incidents that are intended to raise awareness of bigotry.

Both Bleier and Alden, moreover, were vocal defenders of ObieTalk, an online campus forum that others had criticized as a haven for harassment and bigoted speech. In response to an April 2012 blogpost about ObieTalk, one such forum, Alden wrote that those who “don’t want to read offensive things about either individuals or groups” should simply stay off the site. “Whining and crying like a little child,” he wrote, “isn’t going to change the fact that…you need tissues in order to get through reading the contents of an anonymous message board.”

In December of last year Bleier took a similar view when quoted on the subject in a campus newspaper article.  “Free speech should be protected unless it’s actively inciting hate or violence against a group,” he said then.

A student interviewed by the Caller endorsed the view that Bleier and Alden had no political motive. “Considering they were trolls,” he said, “they were kind of getting what they wanted out of people getting so upset about it.”

According to the Caller Bleier is a member of an organization called Ithaca White Allies Against Structural Racism, but the site says he only joined the group in May of this year — well after the incidents occurred, and after he was removed from campus.

Update | I’d like to delve a little deeper into the “hoax” framing of this story, which is getting lots of traction on right-wing blogs.

The Oberlin student newspaper reported in March that Bleier and Alden — who they did not name at the time — were suspected of having posted hate speech on ObieTalk and other online forums at Oberlin “over the last year.” In all, they said, there had been “well over a dozen ” bias-related incidents on campus that semester alone.

If these allegations are true, and Bleier and Alden were the only individuals involved — and it should be noted that they have denied responsibility for some of the acts of vandalism, and have not to my knowledge been questioned about the forum postings — then they perpetrated a string of dozens of bigoted acts over a period of months, in the face of mounting campus alarm.

If that’s what happened, if that’s what they did, then whether they or their friends consider them biased against people of color, Jews, women, and LGBT people seems quite beside the point. A sustained campaign of bigoted vandalism that has the intent and effect of provoking fear and panic among the members of your community may be a hoax, but it’s also something else.

It’s a bias crime.

August 24 Update | Oberlin has released a statement on the Daily Caller’s report. Whatever their motivations, the statement says, “These actions were real. The fear and disruption they caused in our community were real.” It goes on to note that the incidents, which ” included racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic graffiti, flyers, and Internet postings, as well as written harassment of targeted individuals including threats of bodily harm and rape … occurred on a virtually daily basis over a period of weeks.”

The statement offers no new information on the perpetrators and confirms none of the Caller’s allegations or speculation.

Every fall a couple of professors at Beloit College churn out something they call the Mindset List, a supposed peek inside the worldview of the incoming first-year class.

Entries, which are largely the result of content-scraping general interest magazines from the year of the average student’s birth, range from the banal (“Planes have never landed at Stapleton Airport in Denver.”) to the inaccurate (“With GPS, they have never needed directions to get someplace, just an address.”) to the simply mystifying (“‘Dude’ has never had a negative tone.”)

While the list is mostly just pointless and weird, it’s also intended to make readers feel simultaneously old and superior — a singularly toxic combination for a college professor. The list panders to the professoriate by acting as if their students exist in a perpetual now, oblivious to any historical event that predated their birth while simultaneously obsessed with and hobbled by contemporary technology.

There are certainly arenas in which young people (who, by the way, make up an ever-shrinking subset of new college students each year) tend to be less informed or less experienced than their elders. That’s true of every new generation, by definition. But there are also ways in which their generation is far more savvy, far more accomplished, far more capable than their elders.

A couple of years ago, I put together an alternative Beloit list focusing specifically on students’ experience of higher education. Here are a few more things the Beloit Mindset folks failed to tell profs about the young members of the class of 2017:

• They have always had the world’s knowledge at their fingertips.
• They have always been able to imagine a black president.
• They never thought basic computer literacy was worth mentioning on a resume.
• They grew up thinking that anti-gay prejudice was stupid.
• They know a lot more about safe sex than you do, and are significantly more likely to practice it.
• They have never lived in a world in which “intersectionality” wasn’t a term, or a thing.
• They are far more conversant with the popular culture of your generation with than you are with theirs.
• They write for pleasure more than you did at their age, and more than you do now.
• They think email is for old people.
• They think you’re old.
• They understand you better than you understand them.

As I noted in my previous post about last month’s US Student Assocation Congress, USSA’s presidential election attracted considerably more drama than the vice presidential, despite the fact that it was uncontested. The veep race was, however, a fascinating one.

There are limits to how much I can say about the vice presidential contest. I know both candidates pretty well, and respect them both, but as an alumnus of USSA I wasn’t privy to much of their campaigning. My sense of the specifics of their platforms and agendas is incomplete, and the differences in their vision for the Association were nuanced enough that I don’t trust myself to lay them out here without misrepresenting one or both of them.

So what can I say?

Well, the two candidates share a lot in common. Both are veterans of USSA, and both hail from colleges that lie at the core of USSA’s current membership. Maxwell Love is from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, USSA’s first home and the site of its constitutional convention, a university that has always been a mainstay of the Association and of American student organizing. John Connelly is from Rutgers, a relative newcomer to USSA membership, but a campus that has seen extraordinary student power activism in recent years and is one of the founding members of New Jersey United Students, perhaps the most exciting new state student association of the moment. Both Max and John racked up impressive lists of campaigns and victories in their just-finished undergraduate years.

Another trait the two share is more surprising, at least in the USSA context — both are white men. In the last quarter century, as USSA has intensified its commitment to racial and gender justice work, each of its full-time officers (unless there’s someone I’ve forgotten or missed) have been women, students of color, or both. White men have frequently served on USSA staff during that time, and on its board of directors and part-time officer positions (as the Association’s National Secretary in my undergraduate years, my name is on that latter list), but none has served as president or vice president.

To elect a white man to the national office would have been a departure for the Association in and of itself. To have done so in an election in which no woman or student of color ran indicates, I think, a shift in organizational culture. This shift is not a shift away from anti-racist or anti-sexist organizing — those commitments remain strong in USSA. Rather, I think it’s a reflection of the Association’s growing comfort with that focus as one that does not need constant re-affirmation.

It’s also, I think, a reflection of the maturation of the student organizing milieu, and of the character of these two candidates. Max and John are both sure-footed anti-racist and anti-sexist activists, comfortable with both the rhetoric and the practice of that work. Their comfort with issues of identity, inclusion, and social justice is powerful, and that comfort was far rarer among white male student activists a generation ago.

For all their similarities, Max and John differ in one interesting demographic respect. Though neither comes from a wealthy background, Connelly identifies, and is identified, more strongly with a working class identity than does Love. The USSA Working Class Caucus has been a growing presence in the Association in recent years, as the student movement has turned more forcefully to economic access issues and as (in part inspired by Occupy) activists have become more comfortable discussing class alongside race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and ability. This difference wasn’t a major issue in the veep race, but it was discussed more than I’ve seen class identity talked about in previous USSA campaigns, and it reflects the growing salience of such discussions in the Association.

Okay, so that’s (some of) the background. What of the election itself?

Well, it was close. Close enough that there was a runoff in a two-person race — a story for another day. In the second round of balloting, Max Love defeated John Connelly by a margin that was clear and decisive but not overwhelming. In advance of the election there was some concern about potential dissatisfaction by certain campuses in the event of either candidate’s loss, but both Connelly and Love committed to working through those concerns, and at the end of the Congress my understanding was that most folks were on a pretty even keel.

Obviously there’s much more to say about the new officers and the coming year’s plans, and I may try to conduct and post interviews with Love and Sophie Zaman later this summer. But for now, that’s the nuts-and-bolts version.

Last week I attended the 66th annual National Student Congress of the United States Student Association. Obligations to the group kept me from blogging while I was there, but I threw together a few notes on my return, and I’m going to try to write some of them up over the next few days. 

This year one of USSA’s two national officer elections was uncontested, with an incumbent officer standing unopposed for the presidency. The other was fiercely contested, with two prominent members of the Association competing for the vice presidency in an election that pitted major factions and important organizing centers within USSA against each other in a race that would have historic consequences whoever won.

Guess which election was more contentious.

Now guess again.

Every year since I can remember, the vice president of USSA has gone on to the presidency at the end of their one-year term. In an organization in which all officers and staff are typically fresh out of college and in which it’s extremely rare for anyone to stay on salary for more than a couple of years, this progression — a year as vice president, then a year as president — lends structure, predictability, and continuity. Moving up isn’t guaranteed, since you still have to face the membership as a candidate for president, but it’s expected. When folks other than the incumbent veep run for USSA president, it’s almost always in a protest or symbolic campaign.

This year’s vice president, Sophia Zaman, won that office in a closely fought four-way race in 2012. A campus organizer from U-Mass Amherst, Zaman wasn’t universally admired as vice president, and partway through her term rumors began to pop up within USSA that the Association’s president, Tiffany Loftin, was thinking of running for re-election.

Though Loftin declared months ago that she would not be a candidate this summer, some in USSA held out hope that she’d change her mind. At the nominating session at the Congress, though, neither Loftin nor anyone else placed their name in nomination against Zaman. (Loftin was nominated, but she declined.)

With only one candidate standing for the presidency, and that candidate being the incumbent vice president and presumptive president according to USSA tradition, one might think that the drama around the race would have died down at that point. Instead, the opposite happened.

Opponents of Zaman’s presidency continued to quietly discuss mechanisms for moving forward, with a “no confidence” vote emerging as their strategy. This strategy seems to have been based in part on a misreading of the USSA constitution that had given rise to the false belief that if “no confidence” had beaten Zaman in the balloting, Loftin would have automatically continued on as president.

In the end, the opposition to Zaman turned out to be fairly minor — despite the vote-no murmurings she easily won a first-ballot victory. With the election over, the mood of the Congress was (at least to my eyes, and in the opinion of several people I talked to) quickly transformed for the better. The confusion and skullduggery that surrounded the “no confidence” campaigning, however, cast a pall over the first few days of the meeting, for reasons that were as much structural as interpersonal.

An election is a very particular kind of a thing. It’s not a referendum, which is an up-or-down vote on a policy or an idea. It’s a mechanism for choosing a person to hold an office — in this case, an office that could not plausibly be left vacant. In a referendum, you can simply vote “no,” but in an election, if you vote, you’re necessarily voting for someone.

Which is why the “no confidence” campaign was so discombobulating for so many at the Congress — because the students behind the vote no boomlet were trying to achieve a result (installing someone other than Zaman as president) through a mechanism (an uncontested election in which Zaman was the only candidate) that was designed to produce the opposite outcome.

At one point right before the election began, several students on the plenary floor asked myself and my co-chair a series of technical questions about how potential no-confidence votes would be tallied. It took us several minutes to resolve the issue, because such votes are so alien to a typical electoral process. Not only was there nothing providing guidance in the USSA governing documents, Robert’s Rules of Order were silent, too. As I ultimately said from the chair, “a no confidence vote in an officer election just isn’t a thing.”

And there’s a reason for that. Like I noted earlier, an election is a process designed to produce a specific result — filling a position. A vote designed to leave that position vacant is a vote intended to thwart the process. An abstention or a blank ballot (each of which is contemplated in Robert’s) says “I don’t have a preference as to who wins.” A write-in vote says “I’d prefer this person to the declared candidate(s).” But a “no confidence” vote in an election is a vote for paralysis, for limbo.

The negative effects of the no-confidence campaign aren’t just structural, either, and weren’t in this case. With no candidate in the race against Zaman, there was little public discussion of her opponents’ criticisms of her vice presidency, and no opportunity for an open debate about her candidacy for president. The goals of Zaman’s opponents — to put someone else in office, or to send a message about their dissatisfaction — couldn’t be pursued openly, and so they couldn’t be pursued with appropriate clarity and rigor.

In the end, the no-confidence vote didn’t get much traction. As I noted earlier, Zaman won election with no trouble, and I saw little indication of lingering animosity after the vote. But for me, the whole thing served as a reminder of some basic facts of organizing and of process — if you want to contest an election, put up a candidate.

If you don’t, your target, and your focus, shifts from your opponent to the election itself.