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... we have to understand where we came from.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/septem...

At 10:22 on the morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, a bomb ripped through the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. It was Youth Day in the historic brick church, and five young girls dressed in their Sunday best were in the ladies’ lounge getting ready for their part in the Sunday service that was about to start. As Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins were chatting and adjusting their dresses, a charge of dynamite stashed under the steps that led to the church sanctuary blasted into the ladies’ lounge. It killed the four girls instantly. Standing at the sink in the back of the room, Addie’s sister Sarah survived with serious injuries.

Just five days before, Black children had entered formerly all-white schools after an August court order required an end to segregation in Birmingham’s public schools. This decision capped a fight over integration that had begun just after the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision in which the Supreme Court declared segregation unconstitutional.

In that same year, in the wake of the successful 381-day Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott to protest that city’s segregated bus system, Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, along with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, and strategist and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, started the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to challenge segregation through nonviolent protest, rather than trusting the work to the courts alone.

... we have to understand where we came from.

Indeed. But that parallel does not bode well for progressives or small-"l" liberals.

These kinds of events can be galvanizing. Especially when the folks who coalesce around the intense emotion of the inciting event are organized and disciplined. Occupy, Me Too and BLM all launched with intense interest (and BLM got a second and third act with the deaths of Eric Garner and George Floyd). But contrast those movements with the lasting change of the Civil Rights Movement. The progressive left's current infatuation with decentralization and leaderless movements crippled those efforts from the beginning, and ultimately they faded away.

Kirk's real talent wasn't in oratory or debate, but in organizing and building institutional capacities to make up for the erosion of the GOP's capabilities. If his successors in TPUSA have comparable skill, then this could be more like the watershed moments of the Civil Rights Movement than the recent damp squibs of collective protest.

He reminds me of D. C. Stephenson in his organizational talent.

If his successors in TPUSA have comparable skill,

Yes, here's hoping they don't. It's worth noting there were two founders of TPUSA. The other founder was anti-vaxx and died of Covid. Charlie was pro gun and died of...

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