They Call It “Not Organic.” We Used to Call It Organizing.
On protest, memory, and why coordination is not a conspiracy.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the first time I ever carried a protest sign.
It was 1961, in Norfolk, Virginia. I was twelve years old, standing outside Foreman Field beside my mother’s friend, Rowena Warren Stancil, holding a sign that read, “In War We Fight Together. Why Not Sit Together in Peace?” We were protesting segregated seating and the Washington Redskins’ refusal to hire Black players. There were flyers. There were phone calls. There were meetings. There were disagreements, even within the civil rights community, about whether the protest should happen at all.
In other words, it was not “spontaneous.”
It was organized.
Lately, I keep hearing a new phrase used like an accusation: This isn’t organic.
What people seem to mean by that is: these folks didn’t just wander out of their houses by accident. They planned this. They coordinated. They told each other where to go and when to show up.
Well. Yes. That’s how things work.
Nothing important in American history happened because a large group of people coincidentally had the same idea at the same time and decided to meet in the same place.
The Civil Rights Movement was organized. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was organized. The March on Washington was organized. The lunch counter sit-ins were organized. The voter registration drives were organized.
So were labor movements. So were women’s marches. So was the American Revolution.
Democracy is not a flash mob.
It is slow and deliberate. It requires phone calls, meetings, arguments, clipboards, carpools, flyers, church basements, union halls, and living rooms. It requires someone to say, If we’re going to do this, we have to do it together.
Even in Norfolk in 1961, there were debates. The NAACP had been assured the stands would not be segregated and did not support a demonstration. Others believed that polite promises were not enough. Someone printed flyers anyway. Someone listed a phone number. Someone went to court to stop them. And still, some people showed up.
That is what organizing looks like in real life. It is never neat. It is never unanimous. It is never simple.
But somewhere along the way, people in power decided to pretend that this very normal human behavior is suspicious.
They want you to believe:
If people coordinate, they must be controlled.
If they bring signs, someone must be paying them.
If they show up in numbers, it must be a setup.
But churches organize.
PTAs organize.
Neighborhood associations organize.
HOAs organize.
Book clubs organize.
No one calls that an “operation.”
We only hear this language when people organize to challenge power.
When I was twelve years old, no one paid me to hold that sign. No one paid my mother. No one paid Miss Rowena. No one paid the people who printed flyers or made phone calls or took the risk of being seen.
People showed up because they cared.
Yes, sometimes organizations raise money for buses or water or printing. That is not “paying protesters.” That is logistics. It is the grown-up version of everyone bringing what they can.
The idea that a movement must be “spontaneous” to be legitimate is one of the most dangerous lies in modern politics. It trains people to distrust their own neighbors. It teaches people to see participation itself as suspicious. And it quietly rewrites history into something that never actually existed.
Because every right we have that someone once had to fight for came from people who planned.
They met.
They argued.
They organized.
And then they showed up.
When I look back at that photograph from 1961, I don’t see manipulation. I see inheritance. I see adults teaching a child that citizenship is not a spectator sport.
What they now call “not organic,” we used to just call democracy.
And the moment a country starts treating organizing itself as something suspect is the moment it starts forgetting how it ever changed at all.