Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King

Is boycotting old school and played out?

To celebrate Dr. King's birthday, I wanted to explore the power or lack thereof of boycotting as a possible solution to helping to solve our Economic Enslavement.

For those new to the blog, please read my other posts by searching under 'buy black'.  

Definition of Boycott

Webster: to engage in a concerted refusal to have dealings with (as a person, store, or organization) usually to express disapproval or to force acceptance of certain conditions  

Wordiq.com- A boycott is a refusal to buy, sell, or otherwise trade with an individual or business who is generally believed by the participants in the boycott to be doing something morally wrong.

This wrong can be stated in any terms, and is not always one that is widespread. A boycott may be oriented towards shaming offenders rather than punishing them economically, depending on its duration and scope. When long-term and widespread, a boycott is just one of many tactics in moral purchasing

Quick History from Wordiq.com

Although the term itself was not coined until 1880, the practice dates back to at least 1830, when the National Negro Convention encouraged a boycott of slave-produced goods. Other instances of boycotts are their use by African Americans during the US civil rights movement; the United Farm Workers union grape and lettuce boycotts; the American boycott of British goods at the time of the American Revolution; the Indian boycott of British goods organized by Mohandas Gandhi; and the Arab League boycott of Israel and companies trading with Israel. Other examples include the refusal of the United States (under President Jimmy Carter) to participate in the 1980 Summer Olympics, held in Moscow that year (to protest the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan), the retaliatory boycott of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles by most of the Eastern bloc, and the movement that advocated "disinvestment" in South Africa during the 1980s in opposition to that country's apartheid regime

During the civil rights movement, one of the strategies implemented was the boycott. The Montgomery Bus Boycott stands out the most where we actually didn't ride those buses for over a year from 1955-1956.  In 1965, the Chicago Freedom Movement used boycotting of schools to help achieve its aims.

I encourage everyone to read some of the actually history of the bus boycott found here: http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/civilrights-55-65/montbus.html.  Here are a couple of interesting notes from it:

1. In response, the MIA worked out a "private taxi" plan, under which blacks w ho owned cars picked up and dropped off blacks who needed rides at designated points. The plan was elaborate and took a great deal of planning; consequently, the MIA appointed a Transportation Committee to oversee it. The service worked so well so quickly that even the White Citizens Council (whose membership doubled during one month of the boycott) had to admit that it moved with "military precision."
2. Whites also tried to break down the "private taxi" system that many blacks relied on as their only means of transportation to and from work. Some churches had purchased station wagons, usually called "rolling churches," to be used in the private taxi service. Liability insurance was canceled four times in four months before King found insurance through a black agent in Atlanta, underwritten by Lloyd's of London. The police also arrested drivers for minor traffic offenses. When King dropped by a pickup point to help transport blacks waiting there, he was arrested for driving thirty miles per hour in a twenty-five mile per hour zone.
3. Despite all the pressures to end the boycott, blacks continued to stay off the buses. One white bus driver stopped to let off a lone black man in a black neighborhood. Looking in his rear view mirror, he saw an old black woman with a cane rushing towards the bus. He opened the door and said, "You don't have to rush auntie. I'll wait for you." The woman replied, "In the first place, I ain't your auntie. In the second place, I ain't rushing to get on your bus. I'm jus' trying to catch up with that nigger who just got off, so I can hit him with this here stick."

Dr. King on Economic Justice 

Dr. King also spoke of economics and the importance of it in our social uplift. He said, http://www.civilrights.org/archives/2009/01/017-king2009.html

"...this is America's opportunity to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The question is whether America will do it. There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will." - Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution, March 31, 1968.

"The time has come for an all-out world war against poverty. The rich nations must use their vast resources of wealth to develop the underdeveloped, school the unschooled, and feed the unfed. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for "the least of these." - The Quest for Peace and Justice, December 11, 1964.

"But we must see that the struggle today is much more difficult. It's more difficult today because we are struggling now for genuine equality. And it's much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee a livable income and a good solid job. It's much easier to guarantee the right to vote than it is to guarantee the right to live in sanitary, decent housing conditions. It is much easier to integrate a public park than it is to make genuine, quality, integrated education a reality. And so today we are struggling for something which says we demand genuine equality." - The Other America, April 14, 1967.

Do Boycotts work today?

Well, in order for us to end our economic enslavement we will have to employ several strategies to achieve economic parity in this society and one of those that should be considered is definitely boycotting. The question still remains, is it old school and has it lost its power?

Apparently it is still viable given its recent history. A quick research finds these notable changes that companies made as a result of boycotting.

• May 2007 The De Beers boycott has been called off by Survival International after the company sold its diamond deposit at Gope on the lands of the Kalahari Bushmen. The Bushmen have been forced from their ancestral homelands.The campaign had made Gope ‘a problematic asset for De Beers'.
• October 2005 The Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade (CAFT) stated that Inditex Group, which owned fashion chain Zara, had decided to withdraw fur from all the group's 2,064 stores in 52 countries.

• April 2000 Following a long campaign of protest, Mitsubishi surprised campaigners by announcing that it was pulling out of an industrial salt project in Mexico for environmental reasons.

Why Boycotts work

Lets examine why boycotting is effective.

1. hurts company financially

When companies loose profits they are not happy.

2. garners negative publicity

Many companies have several products and having their name perceived as a negative company can hurt all the products and all their customers.

3. tarnishes image or brand

Companies invest millions and millions of dollars over long periods of time to create a powerful image of a brand. This brand has a strong loyal customer base that these companies know represent substantial ongoing residual revenue.

4. shows unity and power of group organizing it

The longer a group sustains a boycott the stronger its image and power becomes in the eyes of other companies that they could impact in the future. It serves notice that we are a force to be reckoned with.

5. builds momentum in any movement

One success leads to another. It shows the group that we are making progress. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a major catalyst in the Civil Rights Movement.

Can we implement a program successfully?

Today we stand primed and ready to launch more strategic and systematic campaigns than we could have ever dreamed of before. Communication possibilities create intriguing methods of implementation that weren't availble until now.

• Text messages 
• Internet (websites)
• social networks (facebook, twitter, etc.)
• email campaigns
• National Talk Radio Shows:
• (Steve Harvey, Tom Joiner, Michael Basdin, Al Sharpton, Warren Balentine

Conclusion

Yes, boycotts do work and we have the ability to organize and communicate our message of how we want to end our Economic Enslavement worldwide! So, what are we waiting for, lets start our journey to financial freedom tomorrow by boycotting __________ and negotiate immediate supplier contracts with _______________ products!!! Notice that I didn't say ownership of their franchises. Notice that I didn't say a certain number of jobs.

I said to give us a product in their distribution chain because everybody reading my blog knows that to end our economic enslavement we must build the companies that will create the jobs that we own and control in our communities.

Just getting several McDonald's chains won't solve our collective problem. We are more educated now and as a result we are asking for more this time around. Boycotts here we come!

For those new to the blog, you can read my other posts by searching under 'buy black'.All comments welcome and appreciated. Let's learn and grow together.

Please encourage a friend to check out the articles. I will be writing one or two every month and continue my ongoing research on the topic.

Note: The blog is really growing, we are up to 100 hits a week!! Thanks for all your support.

Rich