S1E9: Justin J. Pearson on campaigning to stop a pipeline headed for a Black neighborhood in Memphis

01/31/23 • 70 min

You’ll hear about how Justin’s grandmothers’ stories inspired him to fight (9:02), the history of Boxtown in Southwest Memphis (11:31), what happened when two oil companies proposed to build a pipeline through that part of town (13:30), and how they tried to avoid answering questions until they started to get blowback for calling the neighborhood “the point of least resistance” (16:27), why five people at a rally against the pipeline decided to start a new organization (18:13), how going door to door and working the phones helped them finally find homeowners who wanted to take on the companies (21:56), and partnered with largely-white climate groups and legal advocates to point of leverage to stop the pipeline (31:33), and even though the companies’ put a local NAACP leader on the payroll (35:15) ended up finally activating local elected officials to get involved (36:29) and even national influencers like Al Gore (39:46), what it felt like to “get the call” they had won (56:48) and how they successfully passed new laws to keep out future pipelines (58:15).

Justin J. Pearson is President and founder of Memphis Community Against Pollution (MCAP) and co-founder of Memphis Community Against the Pipeline which is a Black-led environmental justice organization that successfully defeated a multi-billion dollar company's crude oil pipeline project that would have poisoned Memphis’s drinking water and stolen land from the community. He is the Co-Lead and the Strategic Advisor for the Poor People's Campaign: National Call for Moral Revival. And one week ago he won a special election to replace Tennessee State Representative Barbara Cooper, who passed away last year and was an early ally to MCAP in their campaign. Next week he’ll become one of the state’s youngest elected officials.
Read a summary of this campaign on our website or at The Forge.

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Visit www.trainingforchange.org for workshops and training tools, or to make a donation. Follow us on social media @tfctrains. The Craft of Campaigns podcast is made possible by grassroots donors. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is hosted by Andrew Willis Garcés and produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier.

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Previous Episode

S1E8: Daniel Hunter on never using the same tactic twice, undoing a “done deal” in Philadelphia

In this episode we hear about how billionaire casino developers were threatening two working class neighborhoods (7:39), leading to a new campaigning organization to try NOT directly organizing against casinos but instead to win over more support by focusing on a lack of transparency (9:25), and doing it by designing tactics that used “show not tell” principles to create drama and suspense (11:11), and then designing subsequent short campaigns around possible leverage points to keep casinos away (20:15), but refusing to give up when they lost repeatedly in the courts (24:10), and why it was important to refuse to hold a march or rally and limit themselves to new tactics rather than use any that had worked in the past (27:34) and how a 17-year-old campaign feels especially relevant today (38:35).

For a description of each Casino-Free campaign you can read their direct action manual, and this calendar of Operation Transparency actions. You can also check out Daniel’s book, Strategy and Soul.
Read more about this episode on our website and at The Forge.
Daniel Hunter is the Associate Director for Global Training at 350.org, where he has developed numerous open source training materials available in many languages. He has trained thousands of activists, from ethnic minorities in Burma, pastors in Sierra Leone, to independence activists in northeast India, and has written multiple books, including the "Climate Resistance Handbook" and "Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow,” and he was an architect of Choose Democracy, a campaign to stop a coup in advance of the 2020 election.

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Next Episode

S1E10: Katey Lauer on how to grieve when our campaigns get stuck & weathering transitions with grace

In this episode, you’ll hear about a series of connected direct action climate campaigns that crested in 2013 (8:55), all focused on getting the Environmental Protection Agency to implement specific policies multiple organizations had been building towards for years (9:47), and what they did instead of acknowledging they were “stuck” (15:59), how the “turning on each other” she sees today feels similar to that moment (20:50) and what she wishes they had done, in hindsight, instead of “forcing something that wasn’t there” at a movement-wide strategy summit (18:42), and what West Virginia Can’t Wait is doing now to navigate a similar moment with those lessons in the foreground (22:56).
You can read more reflections about this campaign on our website and at The Forge.
For further reading about this campaign and Katey's current work:
WV Can’t Wait Awards 40 hometown heroes $2k eachGrist: What happened to the war on coal?ACE: Community-based water-testingHuffington Post: Protesters shut down Obama-backed mine

Katey Lauer is an organizer, facilitator, and trainer in West Virginia, with a deep love of place. She has formed and led grassroots organizations in the Appalachian mountains for fifteen years, as Coordinator of The Alliance for Appalachia, Lead Organizer of Appalachia Rising and The March on Blair Mountain, and founding Director of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum. Architect of the WV Can't Wait movement, Katey currently acts as Co-chair of this statewide formation that's out to win a people's government in the mountain state. Katey is also a Core Trainer at Training for Change.

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