It’s too cold, snowy for social justice marches
But that doesn’t mean movement has ended
Over the summer, they banged on windows, roused city leadership late at night and marched in the streets by the thousands to protest injustices against Black lives.
The momentum was like nothing the Lehigh Valley or the country had seen in multiple generations. Nor was the leadership: It wasn’t one key organization or individual leading the cause for social and systemic change, but a collective that came together to coordinate, plan and envision a new future.
Like the summer temperature, the heat of the moment inevitably cooled down. Fall arrived and election season stirred up an electorate, but even that energy can be fleeting.
Yet, activists and organizers say, the work continues, if not in the very loud and visible way seen over the summer.
“There’s been a lot more planning than noise making,” said Rodney Bushe, an organizer with POWER Lehigh Valley who was among the loudest at many Lehigh Valley protests.
The coalition that led many summer protests — including members of familiar organizations like the Unidos Foundation, Lehigh Valley Stands Up, POWER Lehigh Valley, Cohesion, and Black Lives Matter Lehigh Valley — still meets regularly to talk about issues to address in their communities immediately, like local elections, and in the near and distant future, like community and school policing.
Meanwhile, an even broader coalition of area nonprofit, business and community leaders, brought together by the Color Outside the Lines initiative of the Community Action Committee of the Lehigh Valley, are getting close to sharing the summation of their work: a strategic plan to address systemic issues specific to this
region.
For activists, the goal moving forward is to be proactive rather than reactive, as they were during the tense summer. Protests erupted in response to the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, among others, and in the Lehigh Valley to the arrest of a man whose forceful restraint by an Allentown police officer was captured on video.
“Last year in 2020 we did a lot of chasing — trying to follow what was happening and have a response to it,” said Ashleigh Strange, organizer for Lehigh Valley Stands Up. “There was a lot to chase in 2020.”
Elections
The activist network first channeled the summer momentum into a coordinated effort to get residents registered to vote and to the polls for the presidential election.
Members of the coalition set up a framework that they would employ around future issues: Each lent support to efforts driven by their respective organizations, in addition to teaming up for activities.
Leading up to the election, they set up car caravans and drove block by block in Allentown with music and QR codes to easily get people registered to vote. On Election Day, POWER Lehigh Valley rented vans to shuffle voters around, and Black Lives Matter Lehigh Valley partnered with LANTA to get all-day bus passes for people in need of transportation to the polls.
“It was an all-hands-on-deck type of thing,” said Justan Parker, founder of BLM Lehigh Valley.
They consider flipping
Northampton County and Pennsylvania from Republican to Democrat and electing Joe Biden a win and an outgrowth of the engagement and anger this summer wrought. A recordhigh three-quarters of registered Lehigh Valley voters turned out for the November election.
Almost immediately afterward, the coalition’s focus shifted toward municipal elections, which have a more direct impact on people at the local level.
Attention brought to social injustices over the summer inspired a few of the Democratic contenders in Allentown’s crowded City Council race, including Parker. It also spurred Arthur Louis Benson, a city resident, musician, canvasser and member of the collective, to consider running as an independent.
Diverse representation, the collective has determined, is a key ingredient to achieving some of the goals set out by activists over the summer, such as reimagining police budgets.
“For the government we have right now, we need a seat at this table,” Parker said. “I’m transitioning from banging on City Council windows to actually wanting to be behind those doors, write legislation.”
But the work also entails informing voters of who these candidates are, why they’re there and why residents should exercise their right.
“We can sit there and scream til we’re blue in the face about something, but if we don’t vote, then it’s all for naught,” Benson said.
This entails endless one-onone conversations, what some in the voter engagement sphere call “deep canvassing,” as well as virtual and socially distanced programming. For example, Lehigh Valley Stands Up hosted a “petition party” Saturday at Cedar Beach park to give participating candidates a chance to introduce themselves and get the signatures they need to get on the ballot.
“A reason folks don’t vote is they look at the ballot and don’t recognize new names, or don’t know how they got there,” Strange said. “We really want to open up the system to show who’s available, who’s out there talking to folks.”
Community buy-in
How many people protest in the streets versus how many stay involved in community issues and elections afterward is nowhere near a 1-to-1 ratio.
Lehigh Valley Stands Up cropped up in January 2020 with a half dozen organizers. About 2,000 people marched with the organization May 31 in Bethlehem; a couple dozen signed up to be on the organization’s research team. There might have been around 100 volunteers at the peak of the summer, Strange estimates, and now there are around 50 active.
To her, the most important thing is the people who have become engaged for perhaps the first time in their life.
“There are people on our leadership team that six months ago were just trying to make a buck and keep living,” she said. “I’d call that the biggest win. Even bigger than defeating Trump.”
Building community buy-in toward big systemic changes like how communities think about policing — “big asks,” Strange admits — happens this way: one person at a time, which inherently takes time.
In Easton, a group of three college-age women led the city’s impromptu summer protests and informally called themselves Women of Justice. Though life events separated the group, resident Annisa Amatul is keeping a slow march of her own.
The Moravian College graduate spent the fall in a job search and the winter getting acclimated to her role as a mental health technician in a Lehigh Valley Health Network intensive care unit. But in the meantime, she created a website called Necessary Resistance, where she shares news and analysis about social justice and human rights issues locally and nationally. Her goal is to build enough of a following that she can fundraise for meaningful causes, like the Innocence Project, and push for change in her own community, like including indigenous people in the city’s annual Heritage Day.
“The movement isn’t stopping ... just because not everybody’s out in the streets,” she said.
To Bushe, ushering community buy-in is also literal. He recently acquired a real estate license so he can better help members of his community build financial literacy and generational wealth through homeownership, denied to many in the past by systemic racism.
“This is something I’ve been thinking about for years, but definitely the momentum over the summer drove me,” he said.
The CACLV’s Campaign for Racial and Ethnic Justice, which oversees the Color Outside the Lines initiative, can measure community buy-in in at least one way: Since the killing of George Floyd, the team has connected with more than 1,200 individuals and groups — nonprofits, churches, private companies, school districts — to provide anti-racism training and resources, organizer Wilberto Sicard said.
In 2018, the Color Outside the Lines initiative began bringing together the Lehigh Valley’s major stakeholders to discuss how to close equity gaps in education, economic opportunity, quality of life, housing and criminal justice. But a large part of the work has also involved building trust, convincing stakeholders of the need, and convincing marginalized communities that they are serious, campaign director Kumari Ghafoor-Davis said.
“We can do all the system changing that we want, but if people’s hearts and minds aren’t there, it’s going to stay the same,” she said.
The future
Lehigh Valley activists have wanted to shift gears from defense to offense. That doesn’t mean protests won’t happen should events spur people to action, Bushe said, but they may see more listening sessions, vigils or block parties simply to build community.
A segment of the CACLV’s Campaign for Racial and Ethnic Justice spurred the creation of another nonprofit in December. The Lehigh Valley Justice Institute, whose board includes Parker, Sicard and a consortium of civil rights activists, professors and attorneys, will kick off a threeyear research plan to reimagine the criminal justice system in the region.
The Color Outside the Lines initiative is nearing completion of a five-to-seven-year strategic plan for the region, which the team hopes to release in the spring, Ghafoor-Davis said.
The plan, which nearly 200 of the Valley’s major public, private and community stakeholders have worked on, will address ways to combat systemic racism through equitable policy-making, accountability structures, and inclusive, anti-racist thinking.
There are many conversations about how to achieve change, but between the protests and the strategic planning, organizers are talking about the same issues, Sicard said. The “defund the police” mantra speaks to police-community relations. Budgets are value statements. The way things are is not necessarily the way things should be, he said.
Meanwhile, as the summer of protesting has laid bare, these issues are as urgent as they are complicated.
“People are still dying while we’re doing this work,” Ghafoor-Davis said.