I'm finding it pretty amazing that somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 people rallied down in Jena, Louisiana yesterday. An interesting article in the Chicago Tribune this morning suggested that the protest sort of spontaneously generated out of the blogs of black bloggers. While Googling around to explore that idea, I started to wonder: is what we saw yesterday was really all that different than the organizing done during the civil rights era? To put it another way, is activist James Rucker (of Color of Change) working online qualitatively from activist John Lewis working offline in the 1960s? I put up a post on the topic over at Personal Democracy Forum, and I'm reposting it below:

Is there any chance that in the pre-Internet age several thousand people would have found themselves in Jena, a tiny speck of a town in central Louisiana, yesterday? The New York Times has estimated that a crowd of about 10,000 gathered to protest the treatment of six young black men arrested for the beating of a white classmate; event organizers pegged it at closer to 50,000. But either estimate makes clear that the gathering was huge. And the fact that a crowd of that size suddenly materialized without much attention being paid to the case by TV and in print media made me wonder: how exactly did so many people knew that they belonged in Jena yesterday?

Today the answer is looking a lot like it involves two primary compotents: community blogs, bloggers, and talk radio -- while not Facebook, "social networks" all the same; and the organizing power of a few influential black social leaders.

Of course, the civil rights era of the 1960s was driven by social networks of a kind. Except back then, the networks were less Color for Change, one of the most influential online civil rights groups today, and more Southern Christian Leadership Conference and SNCC. In 60's, decisions were made by leaders like John Lewis and Martin Luther King sitting in a room together to hashing out strategy and plans. But even such central figures in the movement like Lewis and King had a limited tools for raising attention to and awareness what they were doing. Make what you will out of the fact that the "Bloody Sunday" march on Selma had about 600 participants.

Things have changed. Al Sharpton, who took part in some of the events in Louisiana yesterday, credits the Internet, blogs, and talk radio with fueling the enormous crowd yesterday in Jena:

Ten years ago this couldn't have happened. You didn't have the Internet and you didn't have black blogs and you didn't have national radio shows. Now we can talk to all of black America every day.

A Chicago Tribune article today focuses on the Color for Change and its leader James Rucker, as well as other black bloggers and their blogs, for raising awareness of the Jena 6 and leading to yesterday's enormous rally. A little digging into how the rally came about suggests that radio hosts played an integral role as well: Tom Joyner (aided, importantly, by his BlackAmericaWeb.com news network) and Michael Baisden of the normally apolitical afternoon radio show called "Love, Lust, & Lies" also used their soapboxes to prod people to get to Jena yesterday.

But I'm left wondering today: to what extent what happened in Jena was a result of leadership by Rucker, Joyner, and Baisden, and how much their leadership was a matter of, like Gandhi used to like to say: "There go my people. I have to go and run and catch up because I am their leader."

No matter how powerful the social networks involved, could tens of thousands of people really have been drawn to Jena yesterday without such strong leadership entered into the mix? I dunno, I really don't. But I'd be curious to dig more deeply into Jena to find out.

I'm didn't do a great job articulating the question, but I do think that it's an interesting one on some level. As I put it in the title over on PdF -- is this about social networks (new!) or social leaders (same old). I'm in a phase where I'm having trouble of thinking that the Internet's impact on politics is anything beyond the introduction of new distribution networks. But I'm probably just in a mood.