Chapter 10 — The Window · The World We Make Together

The Window

A window changes a room without removing the wall.

It admits light, air, weather, noise, and a view of something beyond the space we occupy. We can stand inside and watch rain move across another building. We can see someone approaching before they reach the door. We can discover that the room feels dark not because the sun has disappeared but because the blinds were closed.

The opening matters.

So does the frame.

A window never shows the whole world outside. It selects a portion. The tree appears, but not its roots. The street is visible until it turns beyond the building. A person passes through the view for several seconds, then continues into a life the room cannot see.

We may forget the frame because the view feels expansive, especially when we are the person standing inside.

We look outward and believe we have seen the neighborhood. We have seen only what the window permits from where we stand. Someone across the street sees our room through a different opening. The same rain falls between us, but it touches different glass.

A window can enlarge perspective.

It cannot make perspective complete.

Shared power begins with this recognition.

No person, office, profession, community, model, or movement contains every form of knowledge needed to govern a shared world. People occupy different rooms and inherit different windows. Some stand close enough to see what is happening below. Others look from a height that reveals patterns invisible from the street.

The task is not to decide which view is real. Both may be real. The task is to build relationships through which each view can alter what the others understand and what they are able to do.

This is power-with.

Not the absence of walls.

An opening between them.

On February 1, 1960, four Black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University sat at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro.

The protest spread.

Within weeks, students across the South were organizing sit-ins against segregated stores and lunch counters. The actions were disciplined, visible, and difficult for established civil-rights organizations to control. Young people were not waiting for a national organization to select the next campaign. They were acting from campuses, local relationships, and conditions they encountered directly.

Ella Baker recognized what was happening.

At the time, she was serving as executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She had already spent years organizing through the NAACP and other networks—traveling through communities, identifying local leaders, and learning how national organizations often depended upon people whose names never became nationally familiar.

Baker persuaded SCLC to support a gathering of student activists at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, during Easter weekend in April 1960. More than two hundred participants attended. Out of that gathering came the organization that became the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC.¹

A familiar model of leadership would have treated the students as recruits. An established organization possessed funding, offices, experienced leaders, national relationships, and public recognition. The students possessed energy and a rapidly spreading protest. The efficient response might have been to bring their efforts beneath an existing structure.

Baker urged something else. She encouraged the students to preserve their autonomy rather than become the youth division of SCLC or another established organization. She believed the movement needed people capable of leading from their own communities, not merely followers organized around a few charismatic national figures.²

This did not mean she believed leaders were unnecessary. She had called the conference, used her relationships to gather people who might not otherwise have met, persuaded established leaders to provide resources, and advised students whose choices would carry risks she understood better than many of them did.

Baker exercised leadership. But her leadership did not require the new organization to remain dependent upon her.

This is the difference between entering the center of the photograph and helping other people find one another beyond its frame.

A leader-centered organization tends to concentrate interpretation.

The person at the center explains what the moment means. They identify the problem, select the strategy, and become the voice through which the movement reaches the public. Participants may contribute enormous labor, but the organization’s meaning travels through a recognizable face.

This can be powerful. A movement needs language, negotiation, coordination, funding, public attention, and someone capable of making decisions when events move quickly. A visible leader can gather scattered efforts into a common signal. The danger is not visibility itself. The danger is dependence.

When the person at the center becomes the source of direction, other people may remain active without becoming more capable of interpreting the struggle themselves. They wait for strategy. They repeat language produced elsewhere. Local knowledge travels upward, but authority rarely travels back down. The movement grows. Its members may not.

Baker’s group-centered approach asked a different question:

What kind of people must participants become if the work is to continue without constant instruction from above?

They would need to organize meetings, study local power, build relationships, raise money, negotiate disagreement, recognize danger, train others, and revise plans when conditions changed.

These capacities could not be delivered through a speech. They had to be practiced.

Power-with does not begin when everyone receives an equal amount of authority. It begins when the relationship increases what participants can understand and accomplish.

Baker’s influence often appears paradoxical because the more completely her organizing philosophy worked, the less necessary it became for her to remain visibly in charge.

She brought people together so they could act without waiting for her. She shared relationships accumulated over years of travel and organizing. In the summer of 1960, she directed Bob Moses toward contacts in the Deep South, including Mississippi organizer Amzie Moore. Those connections helped lead SNCC toward sustained voter-registration organizing in Mississippi rather than limiting itself to the sit-in campaigns through which the student movement had first become visible.³

The network was not a list of interchangeable names. Each relationship contained local history.

Moore understood Mississippi in ways a visitor could not. He knew which counties were dangerous, which local people possessed credibility, how disenfranchisement was maintained, and why voter registration could become a foundation for broader political power.

Moses brought other capacities: he could travel, listen, teach, organize, and connect local work to a developing student movement.

Baker understood enough about both people to bring their paths together. No one person created what followed, and leadership still occurred.

Baker opened one window. Moore opened another. Moses entered, looked, listened, and helped build relationships through which more people could see and act. The power emerged between them.

This kind of leadership is harder to celebrate because it does not fit comfortably into the heroic frame.

The hero changes history through extraordinary action. The organizer changes the relationships through which many people become capable of historical action.

The first model gives us a person to remember. The second gives us a network that becomes difficult to narrate without simplifying it into another hero.

Even Baker can be turned into the singular source of group-centered leadership. We discover a person who resisted heroic history and make her the hero of resistance to heroic history.

The contradiction cannot be eliminated completely. Human beings remember through people. Baker made distinctive judgments. Her experience mattered. Another adviser might have absorbed the students into an existing hierarchy.

But remembering her well requires noticing what she attempted to make visible: the movement contained more intelligence than its most recognizable leaders. Ordinary people already possessed knowledge, relationships, grievances, courage, caution, and capacities formed through lives the national movement could not see completely.

Leadership could gather those capacities. It could also crowd them out.

A window can become a mirror at night.

During the day, the light outside is stronger, and we see through the glass. After dark, the illuminated room reflects back at us. We approach the same window expecting the street and find our own face instead.

Institutions experience this without noticing.

They create a listening session.

They invite local people.

They ask questions, collect comments, and study the responses.

But the institution’s own language, categories, deadlines, and assumptions remain so brightly illuminated that everything received through the window reflects the institution back to itself.

Residents describe a problem.

Officials translate it into an existing program.

Workers identify a risk.

Management converts it into a performance concern.

Students explain why a rule fails.

The school records resistance to expectations.

The window exists.

Nothing truly enters.

Power-with requires more than the opportunity to speak. It requires the possibility that what enters will change the room.

Several years before SNCC’s founding, another form of shared capacity was developing on Johns Island, South Carolina.

Black residents faced literacy tests designed to keep them from registering to vote. The tests transformed unequal education into political exclusion. A person denied adequate schooling could then be told that their inability to satisfy a registrar proved they were unprepared for citizenship.

Esau Jenkins, a local businessman and community leader, was already helping residents learn material needed for voter registration. He transported workers between Johns Island and Charleston and used the travel time for civic education. Septima Clark, an experienced teacher and civil-rights organizer, worked with Jenkins and Highlander Folk School to develop a broader educational program.

In January 1957, the first Citizenship School class met at the Progressive Club on Johns Island. Bernice Robinson, a beautician and local community member rather than a formally credentialed schoolteacher, became its primary teacher. Clark, Jenkins, and Robinson helped shape a curriculum connecting reading and writing to the concrete work of citizenship, voter registration, community problems, and ordinary life.⁴

The choice of Robinson mattered. Adults who had been denied educational opportunities did not need another institution reproducing the humiliation through which exclusion had been justified. A conventional teacher might have entered as the person who possessed knowledge and interpreted the students through what they lacked.

Robinson understood the community and the people entering the room. The school did not begin with the assumption that the adults were empty. They knew how to work, raise families, navigate local institutions, understand danger, sustain churches and community organizations, and survive within a political order designed to deny them power. They needed literacy through which that knowledge could enter the official processes governing their lives.

The school did not manufacture citizens. It helped citizens cross a barrier built to prevent the state from recognizing them.

This distinction changes the meaning of education.

Under power-over, education moves primarily in one direction: the teacher possesses, the student receives, the institution defines competence, and the learner demonstrates compliance. There are times when this direction is necessary—expertise matters—but teaching becomes domination when the student’s existing knowledge is treated as absence and the teacher’s perspective becomes the complete measure of reality.

The Citizenship Schools joined instruction to agency. Students learned to read and write in relation to practical needs: completing forms, understanding laws, registering to vote, conducting meetings, and addressing community concerns. The educational method was shaped around adults whose intelligence had never depended upon formal recognition.

Learning opened a window in both directions. Students gained access to written institutions that had been used to exclude them. Organizers gained access to local knowledge that could not be supplied by a national office. The person who learned became capable of teaching someone else. Power did not simply move from teacher to student. A new capacity entered the relationship.

The Citizenship School model expanded across the Sea Islands and the South. Highlander supported the early program, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference took responsibility for its broader development in 1961. Septima Clark, Dorothy Cotton, Andrew Young, Bernice Robinson, local teachers, churches, and community organizers helped carry the work into many communities.⁵

Expansion created opportunity. It also created a recurring danger.

A model born from one community can become a program administered to another. The curriculum becomes standardized. Training becomes professionalized. The organization begins counting schools, teachers, students, and registrations. The local relationship through which the first school worked becomes a method that can be reproduced without the same history of trust.

Every successful practice faces this problem. To spread, it must become portable. To remain responsive, it must stay local.

Too little structure and the work depends upon a few people who cannot sustain it indefinitely. Too much structure and the program begins teaching communities how to fit the institution rather than teaching the institution how to learn from communities.

Power-with must therefore solve more than participation. It must create ways for coordination and local judgment to coexist.

People sometimes mistake this for a choice between experts and ordinary people: either trained professionals design the program, or local communities govern themselves; either national organizations supply strategy, or grassroots participants act autonomously; either the state manages a resource, or individuals are left alone to compete over it.

The contrast is attractive because each side identifies a real failure. Experts can become distant. Local groups can become parochial. Central authority can ignore conditions on the ground. Decentralized action can reproduce exclusion, protect local elites, or fail to coordinate across boundaries.

Shared power does not choose one location and declare that wisdom lives there. It asks how knowledge and authority should move among locations. The national organization may see patterns across many communities; the local organizer sees relationships hidden inside the pattern. The expert understands technical constraints; the resident understands how the proposed system will enter ordinary life.

A strong institution does not flatten these differences into equal opinions. It builds a process through which different forms of knowledge can correct one another.

Elinor Ostrom spent much of her career studying communities that governed shared resources.

Forests, fisheries, grazing lands, irrigation systems, groundwater basins, and other common-pool resources create a difficult problem. Individuals benefit from using the resource, but overuse can damage or destroy what everyone depends upon.

A familiar theory offers two broad solutions: private ownership can assign responsibility by giving someone control, or central government can create and enforce rules for everyone.

Ostrom’s research challenged the assumption that communities unable to rely entirely upon either markets or central authority would inevitably exhaust the resource. She documented cases in which users developed durable institutions for governing shared resources themselves. In 2009, she received the economics prize for her analysis of governance, especially the commons.⁶

The important word is not themselves. It is governing.

The successful communities did not simply trust everyone to act generously. They developed rules. They clarified who could use the resource. They connected obligations to benefits. They created ways for users to participate in modifying rules. They monitored behavior and resource conditions. They used sanctions that could become stronger when violations continued. They established accessible ways to resolve conflicts. They depended upon larger authorities recognizing their right to organize rather than continually overriding the local arrangement.⁷

Power-with did not replace structure. It produced structure through relationship.

The arrangement is easy to romanticize.

A community gathers beside a shared resource, listens to inherited wisdom, and manages the commons harmoniously.

Actual communities contain conflict. People have unequal land, status, family connections, time, knowledge, and ability to absorb loss. A local group may exclude outsiders whose survival also depends upon the resource. Longstanding rules may carry longstanding injustice. The person with the most influence can dominate a meeting without holding a formal title.

Community control is not automatically democratic. Local knowledge is not automatically correct. Participation does not remove power.

Ostrom’s work matters partly because it did not reduce successful self-governance to goodwill. The arrangements endured when people built institutions appropriate to the resource and possessed ways to monitor, revise, enforce, and contest the rules.

This is the difference between faith in people and governing with people. Faith says ordinary people will cooperate if authority stops interfering. Governing with people asks what relationships, information, boundaries, responsibilities, and protections make cooperation possible when goodwill is incomplete.

Power-with is not innocence. It is organized interdependence.

A window joins separation and connection.

The wall remains because rooms serve different purposes. A kitchen is not a bedroom. A clinic is not a courtroom. A local council is not a national legislature. Distinct spaces allow distinct responsibilities. The opening matters because no room is sufficient by itself.

An institution without windows begins interpreting its own air as the climate. An institution made entirely of windows cannot hold anything. Shared power needs boundaries. It also needs crossings.

The Citizenship Schools kept the difference between teacher and learner while letting each enlarge the other. SNCC kept leaders while letting leadership emerge from organizing and local knowledge, not only national visibility. Commons governance kept authority while placing rule-making, monitoring, and accountability among people dependent upon the resource—often with recognition from larger institutions.

These arrangements are not identical. They share a direction: power becomes less like an object held at the top and more like a capacity generated through connected roles.

This capacity can be difficult to measure because no one possesses it alone. A leader gives an order, and the result can be attributed to the leader. A government spends money, and the expenditure can be counted.

Power-with appears in what the relationships allow: a warning travels before the failure; a local person becomes capable of organizing others; a rule changes because the people living under it can show what it does; a shared resource remains available because users have developed institutions for restraint; a movement continues after its most visible leader leaves.

These outcomes can look leaderless from a distance. They are usually full of leadership—distributed, situational, and partly hidden inside the capacity of other people. Less satisfying to the heroic imagination, and often more durable.

The word empowerment often obscures this. An institution says it will empower workers, students, patients, residents, or citizens. The sentence places power inside the institution first: we possess it; we will give some to you. The gift can be withdrawn.

A manager can grant decision rights, a government can devolve authority, a school can permit students to control part of their learning. But people rarely begin without power. They possess knowledge, relationships, labor, refusal, interpretation, attention, memory, and the capacity to organize. The institution may not recognize these forms, may prevent them from affecting official decisions, or may make their use costly.

Shared power is therefore not always the transfer of something authority owns. It can be the removal of barriers preventing existing capacities from entering the decision.

The Citizenship School did not give residents an interest in their community. SNCC did not give students courage. Ostrom’s communities did not receive dependence upon the commons from a researcher. The relationships already existed. What changed was whether those relationships could become organized power.

This does not absolve institutions of responsibility.

A person may possess agency while lacking the money, information, legal standing, safety, or time needed to make that agency effective. Telling people they already have power can become another form of abandonment: organize yourselves, solve your community’s problems, take ownership. The institution withdraws resources and calls the withdrawal empowerment.

Real power-with requires material conditions—time to meet, usable information, protection from retaliation, access to expertise, ways to challenge decisions, and resources proportionate to the responsibility people are expected to carry.

A person invited to participate after working two jobs does not enter with the same freedom as the official paid to attend. A worker asked for candid feedback while employment remains insecure does not speak from equal safety. A community asked to manage a failing service without adequate funding has received responsibility more than power.

When burdens move downward while control remains above, participation has not become shared power.

The difference can often be found by asking what happens after disagreement.

A weak participatory process welcomes input until participants challenge the institution’s preferred outcome. Then authority returns: the schedule cannot change; the budget has already been approved; the legal department will not permit it; the expert recommendation must prevail.

Some constraints are real. Money runs out. Laws impose limits. Technical facts exclude certain solutions. Leaders remain responsible for decisions they cannot delegate entirely.

The test is whether constraints entered the process honestly: whether participants were told which questions were open, could examine the evidence supporting the limit, could shape alternatives within it, had a route for challenging an interpretation presented as necessity, and who decided when discussion was complete.

Power-with does not guarantee that everyone prevails. It requires that people not be invited to influence what has already been made untouchable.

The same principle applies within movements.

An organization committed to participation can still punish dissent. The language changes. A corporation calls disagreement disloyal. A movement calls it harmful to the cause.

Both may have legitimate reasons to protect coordinated action. A campaign cannot change direction every time one participant objects. A movement facing violence or repression may require discipline, secrecy, and rapid decisions. But moral purpose does not remove the dangers of concentrated authority. People who believe they are acting for justice can become especially confident that opposition reflects ignorance, selfishness, or betrayal.

Power-with must preserve the possibility that the group is wrong—protecting the relationships through which disagreement can survive without ending participation. The person who questions strategy remains part of the group. The local chapter can identify a national mistake. The people bearing the greatest risk can influence which risks are considered acceptable. Leadership remains responsible for coordination. It is not permitted to become the sole interpreter of the mission.

Ella Baker’s group-centered approach is sometimes summarized as a preference for strong people rather than strong leaders.

The distinction can be misunderstood as hostility toward excellence. A movement needs people with unusual courage, judgment, discipline, and skill—organizers who can see relationships others have not noticed, speakers who can give language to a moment.

The question is what their strength produces around them. Does the great speaker leave everyone waiting for the next speech? Does the expert make the group increasingly dependent upon expertise no one else can access? Does the organizer create followers or organizers? Does the leader’s presence enlarge the room or fill it?

A strong leader can create weak surroundings. A less visible leader can help strength spread.

This may be the clearest measure of power-with:

After the relationship, can more people act wisely than before?

The answer will never be complete. People develop capacity unevenly. Some participants do not want greater responsibility. Others want authority without accountability. A person may learn to lead in one setting and remain passive in another.

Shared power can also slow action. More voices reveal more consequences; the decision that looked simple from one office becomes difficult after the people affected enter the room. Delay can protect the status quo—or show that the earlier simplicity was false.

The goal is not maximum participation in every decision. It is participation proportionate to knowledge, consequence, responsibility, and the possibility of correction: who understands this part, who will live with the result, who must coordinate the whole, who can stop preventable harm, who remains accountable if the group fails, which decisions need speed, and which only appear urgent because authority dislikes being questioned.

No universal chart answers these questions. Shared power is a practice of continually arranging the room.

The window near the table has been closed all morning.

People inside have been discussing the heat.

One person adjusts the thermostat. Another says the building always warms at this hour. Someone proposes moving the meeting to a different room. They examine the system controlling the air and debate whether it is functioning properly.

Then someone near the wall unlatches the window.

The room changes.

The act does not prove that windows are the solution to every problem. Outside air may be hotter. Noise may interrupt the meeting. The building may require the window to remain closed for safety, energy use, or climate control.

But the opening reveals that the group had been debating within a frame no one had questioned.

This is what people outside established authority often contribute.

Not a complete answer.

A new opening.

The person closest to the problem may see an option invisible from the center. The person at the center may see a consequence invisible from the edge. Power-with begins when neither perspective is treated as the whole room.

The window opens.

Air enters.

Papers shift on the table.

Everyone has to adjust.

During daylight, the glass seems almost absent.

We look through it toward the street and forget that we remain inside. The frame is visible only at the edges.

At night, the reflection returns.

We see ourselves, the table behind us, the chair, the switch, the bowl that has not yet been cleared. The outside world has not disappeared. Our own light has become too strong to see it.

Institutions experience this continually.

They believe they are looking outward while encountering their own categories reflected back. They mistake consultation for listening, delegation for shared authority, and participation for consent.

The correction begins by noticing the glass: lower the light inside, move closer, open the latch, and allow what is outside to change the air of the room.

Power-with can operate within walls, roles, boundaries, and forms of authority without treating any position inside them as the measure of the whole world.

The leader sees something.

The worker sees something.

The citizen sees something.

The expert sees something.

The caregiver, organizer, student, neighbor, and stranger see something too.

No one owns the view.

Together, they may create an opening wide enough to act.

See Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), and SNCC Digital Gateway, “Birth of SNCC,” https://snccdigital.org/, on the Shaw University conference of April 15–17, 1960. ↩
See Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, on Baker’s insistence that students retain autonomy and practice group-centered leadership rather than become a youth division of an established organization. ↩
See Ransby and Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), on Baker’s connecting Bob Moses with Deep South organizers including Amzie Moore and the turn toward Mississippi voter registration. ↩
See Lowcountry Digital History Initiative, “The Progressive Club, Johns Island,” https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/septima_clark/virtual-tour/the-progressive-club, on the Progressive Club class beginning in 1957 and the roles of Septima Clark, Esau Jenkins, Bernice Robinson, and Highlander Folk School. ↩
See Lowcountry Digital History Initiative, “The Progressive Club, Johns Island,” and “Local and National Leader: Septima P. Clark,” https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/septima_clark/local-and-national-leader, on expansion beyond Johns Island and SCLC’s assumption of the broader Citizenship School program in 1961. ↩
See the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2009 citation for Elinor Ostrom “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons.” ↩
See Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), on design principles including boundaries, participation in rule-making, monitoring, graduated sanctions, conflict resolution, and recognition of the right to organize. ↩

The Window

Footnotes