Since its founding in 1999, the purpose of this Civil Rights Movement Archive (CRMA), has been to make original, primary-source materials, analyses, and commentaries, about the Freedom Movement freely available to the public. Our goal is two-fold:
In our view, however, the gains made by the Freedom Movement were won by the courage, determination, and dedicated activity of hundreds of thousands of men and women of all ages and social positions in cities, towns, and hamlets across the South. It was their blood, sweat, and tears that forced change up from below. And without them, there would have been no mass movement, no famous leaders, no court rulings, no new laws — and no change.
Now we are in an new era when the values of freedom, justice, and equality championed by freedom movements past and present are under unrelenting attack by the political descendants of those who so fiercely opposed us half a century ago. And at the same time, Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications are increasingly dominating the "infosphere" — the environment of digitized data, communication networks, mass and social media, and information services, that shape our society, culture, and politics.
To meet this challenge, CRMA and a number of other organizations that share our up from below and popular social change viewpoint are coalescing around the Movement History Initiative (MHI).
This article looks at two AI-related issues:
To begin exploring these questions, we posed four search questions to different levels of AI product:
We posed those questions to four of the many AI platforms currently available to the public:
Note that Perplexity chooses (or allows users to select) among various AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, its own Sonar2, or others, to answer a question or perform a task. For these test questions, we ran Perplexity in Auto Mode letting it select the platform for each question. Since we were running Perplexity in Paid mode, in a sense we were comparing the difference between Paid and Unpaid modes.
For this comparison, we group information sources into two categories:
For their answers to our four queries, Gemini and Grok tended more towards popular sources such as Britannica and Wikipedia; while Claude and Perplexity gave more emphasis to academic sources such NAR, LOC, Smithsonian, and Stanford. In this context "Smithsonian" usually means the NMAAHC (colloquially the "Blacksonian") and "Stanford Univ" usually means the King Research & Education Institute.
The information sources the AI platforms used to generate specific sentences or paragraphs were discernible only to a very limited extent. But because our prompt included, "Cite Sources," they did refer readers to additional information. All four AI's referred readers primarily to MSA sources, but in come cases they did include a few referrals to CRMA, SDG, and Zinn.
Both Grok and Claude made limited use of SDG for both the MFDP and LCFO questions. The paid-account used for Perplexity was CRMA's, and Perplexity's information sources were weighted towards CRMA materials. It's not clear what sources Perplexity would have used to answer questions from someone else's paid account.
While all four AI platforms frequently cited the King Research Center at Stanford University as a mainstream authority, none of them cited the King Center in Atlanta as a source.
Unsurprisingly, where AI is concerned it's a case of, "You get what you pay for," in terms of length and complexity. (In this context, being forced to log in is a kind of implicit payment because log-in data is monetized.) Answers from the three platforms that did not charge an explicit fee were around 2000- 2600 words, the paid-subscriber response from Perplexity was 5619 words.
Length aside, all of the AI responses were remarkable similar. All of their answers were predominantly shaped by and reflected the views of Mainstream Authorities. Mainstream authorities who assume that — and mainstream media that acts as if — there is one single, objective truth in politics and society and that they are the impartial dispensers of that truth.
While some single, objective truths do exist in science, in human affairs, interpretations and understandings are always influenced by factors of race, class, gender, political orientation, and economic self-interest on the part of whomever the speaker or publisher is. Therefore, the fact that all four AI platforms focused on the same events and presented essentially the same interpretation does not mean their responses are somehow objectively true or correct to the exclusion of all other points of view. Rather it means than that their answers are based on the assumptions and values of the sector of society that Mainstream Authority publishers represent.
For the most part, the AI articles to our prompts did contain information that was accurate and useful. Our problem with the responses that AI generated from Mainstream Authorities concern what they Omit and what they Focus on. To whit:
Nonviolence:
- Media-Centric: All four responses portrayed nonviolence as a media strategy designed to sway public opinion ("a dramatic moral contrast for the media – Gemini; "a tactic that worked, precisely because it exposed white violence to national television" – Perplexity). But to movement organizers, the most important effect of nonviolent resistance was the way that nonviolent defiance of segregation and a commitment to freedom and full rights forever changed the participants, their families and their communities — even though the overwhelming majority of nonviolent actions received absolutely no mention at all in news media. It was nonviolent defiance that made it impossible for the Jim Crow system to continue functioning in the South because Black folk simply refused to accept it any longer. And that, in turn, eventually shifted public opinion in the North.
- Nonviolence and organizing: None of the four AI responses discussed how the movement used interpersonal techniques of nonviolence and nonviolent tactics as organizing methods. And while a few famous individual practitioners of nonviolence were called out and honored, the political and economic power of tens of thousands of nonviolent protesters filling the jails and hundreds of thousands filling the streets was not mentioned.
- Self-defense: Only one of the four responses made a passing reference to the fact that most participants considered self-defense against violent terrorism to be a legitimate tactic when necessary and feasible. Nonviolence was always presented as a binary either/or, rather than a continuum of possible social-change tactics and responses to repression, oppression, and terrorism.
MFDP Challenge to Democratic Party:
- National Democratic Party: None of the AI responses mentioned that the MDFP challenge was in part also a challenge to the national (northern) Democratic Party leadership. None of them mentioned Freedom Movement criticisms of national party leaders who had refused to pass effective voting-rights legislation, failed to protect Black citizens from violent terrorism or police repression of basic human rights, been unwilling to enforce the Supreme Court's school desegregation ruling, and reluctant to effectively challenge Dixiecrat political power in either in the South or in Congress.
- Focus only on maneuvers and statements: The responses focused on political maneuvers, statements, and political positions while omitting mention of the broad mass support and popular action from within Black communities across the South. Neither Gemini nor Grok mentioned the mass alternate Freedom Registration by 80,000 Mississippi Blacks (though Claude and Perplexity did).
- The Compromise: All of the responses accepted President Johnson's use of the term "compromise" for the outcome he forced upon the MFDP. To MFDP delegates, an outcome that was enacted without consultation and announced to the press before they were even informed of it was a diktat, not a "compromise."
- Who wields political power: Central to the MFDP's convention challenge was the issue of who wields political power and who is allowed to participate in the political process — and not just in the South. The overwhelming majority of the 5000 or so official delegates to the national convention came from positions of political or economic power, or backgrounds of wealth. By contrast, the great majority of the unseated but directly-elected MFDP delegates were from the bottom of the economic and political pyramid. None of the AI even mentioned this.
- National political mobilization: None of the responses made any reference to the political mobilization by MFDP supporters across the North who were demanding that convention delegates from their states vote to seat the MFDP delegation. Nor was there any mention that had a vote to seat the MFDP been put to the convention, it might well have passed — which is why the result was imposed by diktat rather than a democratic vote by convention delegates.
Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO):
- Why an independent political party. Only Perplexity made any reference at all to why movement activists concluded that they needed to form an independent political party rather than work within the local Democratic Party as the MFDP had tried to do in Mississippi. None of the responses discussed freedom movement criticisms of the Democratic Party at both local and national levels.
- Who led the LCFO. County-level political party organizations in Alabama (and elsewhere) were (and still are) led and controlled by elected officials, and upper-strata business executives, landowners, organization leaders, and professionals. But the LCFO was build and led by people at the bottom of the economic/power pyramid. LCFO leader John Hulett was a small, hard-scrabble farmer. Other leaders and activists were from low-income occupations like laborers, maids, sharecroppers, grass-roots clergy, and small-scale self-employed. That difference was essential to LCFO identity, but none of the AI responses noted it.
- LCFO core issues. All of the AI responses described the racial issues that influenced the creation and growth of the LCFO. But none of them mentioned the issues of poverty, education, housing, health care, police repression, terrorist violence, or economic exploitation that formed essential elements of LCFO political campaigns. An essential reason for founding an independent political party was that the Alabama Democratic Party never addressed any of those issues in any positive way from the point of view of the state's Black citizens.
Black Power:
- Political power vs integration. Central to the call for Black Power were the differences in effect between institutional racism and personal prejudice/bigotry. For Black Power advocates, integrating Black people as individuals into the mainstream of white society could not address, ameliorate, or counter, inherent institutionalized racism on the part of government, business, education, and culture — only Black political power could do that. None of the AI responses mentioned or explored that concept, instead they all attributed the call for Black Power to, "the slow pace of integration."
- Colonialism. Supporters placed Black Power in a broader international context of a colonial system that allowed a white minority to rule over and exploit a global nonwhite majority. In that context, Black communities in the U.S. were viewed as a kind of racially-defined disempowered colony, and the call for Black Power was seen an integral part of the world-wide liberation anti-colonial struggle. None of the AI responses mentioned or explored that broader liberation context and concept.
The core purpose of CRMA and our sister MHI sites is to make available to students, activists, and researchers a forced up from below, mass popular action understanding of the Civil Rights Movement and current day struggles. In other words, to provide an alternative to the top-down, appeal-to-gracious-leaders framing so often presented by mainstream media, school textbooks, and popular culture.
In the past two years, however, three new factors have emerged that make achieving our purpose far more challenging:
Meanwhile, those of us in the middle and lower-strata of the social pyramid continue to have scant immediate influence on mainstream media and mainstream authorities. "Freedom of the press" has always applied most-powerfully to those who own presses and media platforms and corporate-owned and funded-by-the-wealthy nonprofit information sources tend to reflect the views and interests of their owners and funders.
But ever was it so. All of the successful social-justice struggles of the past overcame similar obstacles and opponents. Which means that we who are committed to a more just and equitable society need to continue creating, make more available, and consciously promote alternative information sources that are factual, reliable, and grounded in lives-lived realities.
As a practical matter, to achieve that we need to build, use, and promote Movement History Initiative (MHI) information sources and to create a robust network of alternative information sources that view and address social and political issues from bottom-up, justice and equality points of view.
Copyright © Bruce Hartford
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