Chattanooga Organized for Action continues to “fight the good fight” for workers rights
“History is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.” When his friend Daryl Black, former director of the Chattanooga History Center, shared this quote, Michael Gilliland was already applying his take on the adage to empower people. “Maybe there are better stories about ourselves,” thought Gilliland, the native Chattanoogan and Board Chair of Chattanooga Organized for Action (COA).
The nonprofit organization works to advance the local social justice movement, driven by the philosophy that “by organizing our communities to win change, we can write a new story for Chattanooga—one that lifts up the marginalized and makes sure none of us are left behind.”
In his tenure at COA, Gilliland has not so much worked to set the record straight, but to give air time to the lesser known and forgotten people and events of the past that provide a context for Chattanooga’s culture today.
One way Gilliland is making an impact is through multi-media walking tours and exhibits at museums and City Hall. “I didn’t want to write a white paper that would end up on a library shelf,” Gilliland says. Instead, Gilliland and COA partnered with graphic design students at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga to design a theme-based series of posters that feature local resisters and revolutionaries in “The People’s History of Chattanooga” project.
After countless hours spent culling through decades of newspaper articles preserved on micro film, “The People’s History” kicked off its first theme in the series that focused on white supremacy. Currently, they are in a similar process of organizing research and collaborating with additional local artists for the next theme, The Labor Movement.
“We’re on the frontlines of a war against working class people,” Gilliland says, citing wage disparities and Chattanooga’s unemployment rate, which at a reported 27 percent of the city’s residents living below the poverty line is nearly double the national average. “People are trained to organize themselves, to kick people on the rung below them on the ladder.” Gilliland adds, “Workers need to understand about organizing together to promote their interests.”
One of the goals of “The People’s History” is to demonstrate that action can get results. “The number one feeling we get organizing with community members is not apathy,” Gilliland says, “it’s hopelessness.”
“The only way this is going to change is if we can create a better narrative about who we are and where we want to be,” Gilliland says. “The South is not just the history of the Confederacy, the South can every bit as much be defined as the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement. Why can’t we be telling that story?”
Among the stories Gilliland and his team will tell through the next installment is how during a 1935 workers’ strike in Daisy, Tennessee, while under gunfire by the company men, strikers joined in song with Highlander Folk School music director Zilphia Horton to turn the outcome in their favor—inaugurating “ We Shall Not Be Moved” as a civil rights anthem.