Page 121 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

•
Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization
112
social change and struggle. African American activist intellectuals, such as Du Bois,
politicized collective grievances and mobilized White activists and reformers who par-
ticipated in the antislavery movement and their children and others. Some White re-
formers and radicals supported the struggle to legally dismantle racial segregation; this
struggle received some White assistance in several forms from some foundations,
clergy, and student volunteers. J. C. Jenkins and M. Eckert call these supporters “con-
32
science constituencies.” At the turn of the century, several African American organi-
zations, such as the Niagra Movement (1905), which evolved into The National
Association for the Advancement of the Colored People (NAACP) (1909); the Na-
tional Urban League (1911), and others emerged and promoted the African American
movement.Social structural factors and processes and conjunctures in the form of war,
migration, economic and political changes, urban community formation, and human
agency in the form of the consolidation of the activist intellectual bloc, politicized po-
litical grievances, and the formation of independent institutions and organizations fa-
cilitated the development of Black nationalism in the first half of the twentieth
century.
Movement scholars explain that “the level of infrastructure in a given population
is itself shaped by the type of macro factors. . . . Broad macro-processes, such as in-
dustrialization, urbanization, mass migration, and the like, largely determine the de-
gree to which groups in society are organized and the structure of that organization.
The extent and structure of that organization in turn imply very different potentials
33
of collective action.” The majority of Blacks moved to cities and became members
of the urban working class during the first half of the twentieth century.This created
conducive conditions for the development of Black institutions and organizations.
Then African Americans started to be connected together through social networks,
the media, transportation, and communication networks and technologies by over-
coming their dispersion in rural areas.The geographic concentration in cities increased
the density of interaction among them and facilitated recruitment in various move-
ment organizations.The indigenous institutions and organizations became the foun-
dation of professional social movements and political organizations. According to D.
McAdam, J. D. McCarthy, and M. N. Zald, “The key concept linking macro- and
micro-processes in movement emergence is that of the micro-mobilization context. A
micro-mobilization context can be defined as any small group setting in which
processes of collective attribution are combined with rudimentary forms of organiza-
tion to produce mobilization for collective action.” 34
The African American movement blossomed and galvanized the African American
people and their supporters for collective action in the urban setting. Explaining how
urbanization and collective action were related in African American society, McAdam,
McCarthy, and Zald expound that “the rural to urban migration of blacks within the
South greatly enhanced the prospects for collective action by transforming an impov-
erished, geographically dispersed mass into an increasing well organized urban popu-
lation.” 35 Similar types of socioeconomic conditions, and historical, cultural, and
political factors and conjunctures facilitated the development of Oromo nationalism.
The Rise of Oromo Nationalism
36
Oromo nationalism only developed into a mass movement in the early 1990s. This
development occurred after a long period of resistance. Like African Americans, ini-