A road sign that reads, “Turning point”, symbolizing a renaissance in the use of movement tools and strategies.
Image Credit: Roger Bradshaw on Unsplash

This year’s Just Economy Conference of 1,300 community development advocates, held by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) was unlike any other. Having taken place at the nation’s capital at the end of March, for many, the event marked the first national meeting they had attended since the national elections of November 2024.

Advocates who came discussed many local initiatives—ranging from community land trusts to public banking campaigns to housing affordability and inclusive finance. There were some wins worth celebrating. For example, Tiffany Crutcher, a board member of Justice for Greenwood in Tulsa, OK, shared with conference-goers how Mayor Monroe Nichols, who was elected Tulsa’s first Black mayor last November, has promised to develop a “road to repair” plan for the descendants and two remaining survivors of the 1921 massacre.

But at a broader level, the conference offered a time and place to take stock of the present diminished state of civil rights in the United States, as well as planning how to build power going forward.

“It’s been too easy to dismiss how impactful those [Black Lives Matter] demonstrations were. What we are witnessing is a tremendous backlash against what those protests exposed.”

As S. Mitra Kalita, cofounder and CEO of URL Media, sardonically noted when speaking on one of the plenary panels, “When diversity is considered revolutionary, we know we’re not on our firmest footing.”

At the gathering, conversation on the conference stage centered on three topics: How to make sense of current racial justice backlash, how to build a deeper vision of economic justice, and how to build the movement for the long haul.

Making Sense of the Backlash

NCRC’s conference, as has been noted in NPQ before, attracts a broad audience—in addition to community organizers, it attracts bankers (especially from community development departments) and even government officials. It is, nonetheless, one of the most grassroots-oriented conferences held in Washington, DC—and has been for decades.

For NCRC and its national network of over 600 community-based organizations, confronting periods of backlash after racial and economic justice victories is hardly a new phenomenon. Indeed, the organization’s founding comes out of a successful campaign 35 years ago, in 1990, to defend the Community Reinvestment Act—a law passed in 1977 to counter redlining, by creating a legal affirmative obligation for banks to invest in low-income communities.

Nonetheless, while attacks on civil rights are not new, the ferocity of today’s attacks are of a different order of magnitude.

For Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, the strength of the backlash is, in at least in part, a sign of the power of the Black Lives Matter movement and the record-setting national wave of protests that followed the police murder of George Floyd in 2020.

Taylor remarked at the conference that, “It’s been too easy to dismiss how impactful those demonstrations were. What we are witnessing is a tremendous backlash against what those protests exposed.”

Specifically, according to Taylor, the protests made obvious the responsibility of government and business to engage in active repair of the damage wrought by structural racism. As Taylor put it, “If the government had a role in breaking it, if the private sector did, they need to pay a role in fixing things. That is the crux of the issue. These people don’t want to pay for things. It is not just racism as an abstract idea but the recognition that you need to do something about it.”

“We need a renaissance in the use of [movement] tools and how these tools [are maximized] in the 21st century.”

If economic resistance is one driver of backlash, keynote speaker Jesse Van Tol, CEO of NCRC, emphasized another—the historical throughline of White supremacy and authoritarianism in US history, ranging from the Jim Crow laws that predominated in the South for much of the first two-thirds of the 20th century, to the rise of the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement that backs President Donald Trump today.

Van Tol recalled that when he was growing up, he had neighbors who flew Confederate flags. For this group, Van Tol noted, the antebellum South was “a great place…that could be made great again.” MAGA, Van Tol observed, has “resurrected that story of the Lost Cause, the myth of the antebellum South. They have modernized it, stripped it of its geographic specificity, and applied it to the whole country.…It’s a vision of the future that says that if we could just go back to this mythical, magical past that never was…we could move forward into a greater future, a great America.”

Toward a Positive Vision

But if there are both economic and racist drivers to the current backlash, how can advocates respond? In a conversation with Van Tol at the conference, Marc Morial, former mayor of New Orleans and longtime CEO of the National Urban League, noted that the tools used by racial and economic justice advocates are mostly based on victories from the 1960s and 1970s. “We need a renaissance in the use of tools and how these tools [are maximized] in the 21st century,” Morial said.

Morial called for a greater focus on housing justice, in particular. Housing, he noted, has been a major driver behind inflation and the rising costs of living. In fact, housing is responsible for 30 percent or more of expenditures for many families. Home prices have also long been rising far faster than inflation, especially since the pandemic. And rental prices, too, have historically increased well beyond the rate of inflation—again, a trend that has been exacerbated in recent years.

Housing, Morial insisted, should be a “human right, and we’ve got to talk about it and not be afraid to talk about it in those terms.” More broadly, Morial called for having eradicating poverty as a “North Star” and for developing a progressive alternative to the right-wing Project 2025.

Morial’s comments were echoed by others. Alonzo Waheed, who is a senior program director at Equity and Transformation, a group founded by and run by formerly incarcerated people in Chicago, called for the establishment of a guaranteed income as a critical antipoverty intervention. In his own address, Van Tol also called for reducing the wealth gap, noting that, “It is clear to me that the wealth inequality we have is unsustainable.”

“We’ve become domesticated. We’ve forgotten that a tax status is not a movement.”

Building the Movement for the Long Haul

A third leading theme that conference speakers addressed involved how to advance the movement for racial and economic justice in the current period.

Taylor observed that, “The demonstrations from five years ago were extremely powerful and not enough.” Taylor called for introspection—ensuring that there is “space within our organizations to talk about why things are happening and what is it that we want to be different, what is it we are fighting for” and calling for developing “the bonds and connections of solidarity” among communities, which can be advanced in part by developing a clearer sense of common ideas and politics.

Meanwhile, Van Tol called for a “return to a movement mentality,” noting that the community networks that comprise the network are full of what he called movement lions. “You have fought for liberty and justice for all…many of you have dedicated your lives to making this world a better place.” But, he added, “We’ve become domesticated. We’ve forgotten that a tax status is not a movement. In short, we’ve forgotten how to roar.”

Waheed, for his part, challenged the banks who helped sponsor and were present at the conference to take a stand for justice, noting, “We have financial institutions in this room. They are funding both sides. And our side is losing.”

Addressing the group of bankers at the conference, he added, “We are fighting for our lives. It is on your watch. What part are you going to play?”