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Collective Movements, Activated Opinion, and the Politics of the Extraordinary Taeku Lee
The central political fact in a free society is the tremendous contagiousness of conflict . . . there is usually nothing to keep the audience from getting into the game. E. E. Schattschneider
Introduction On December 1, 1955, an African American seamstress defies a bus driver’s demand to give up her seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama, touching off a year-long boycott of the National City Lines buses in Montgomery and nearly a decade of nonviolent direct action throughout the American South. On April 30, 1977, 14 women wearing white head scarves with names embroidered on them gather at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires seeking answers about their “disappeared” children, sparking three decades of demonstrations against the military government in Argentina. On June 5, 1989, a lone, anonymous man stands steadfast in the path of a column of four Chinese Type 59 battle tanks, in the culminating moment of seven weeks of protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. On August 18, 2006, a Cape Malay Muslim and veteran antiapartheid activist leads 44 others and occupies the provincial offices in Cape Town, South Africa, to protest the government’s failure to treat its HIV-positive prisoners with antiretrovirals. On the same day, the XVI International AIDS Society Conference in Toronto declares a Global Day of Action for the following week.
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