For the second year in a row, anti-war students from across the country came together for “Our Spring Break.” This two week event held from March 8 to March 21st (see ourspringbreak.org) provided over 50 student activists with the opportunity to hold direct action and lobbying efforts to end the war in Iraq.  We attempted to “match actions with words” as Martin Luther King prescribed in his seminal call for anti-war activism within his speech Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. The parallels between the America King saw then and the America we see today are uncanny, and we modeled our efforts to demand an end to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan after King’s example.

Our Spring Break included a whirlwind of trainings provided by the staff of Campus Progress, Witness Against Torture, and other organizations. While we did not always agree about the specific ways to make our work most effective, we all came together for various events, including various speeches, our Cost of War rally, as well as our March of the Dead action.

While spring break is over, Our Spring Break continues through various new media tools. We are specifically coordinating our efforts through the aptly named Break Silence wiki in order to organize the various blog posts and hours of video footage we created in order to do our part to, well, Break Silence! The Our Spring Break Video Hub is a particularly useful resource if you are interested in seeing and tangentially experiencing what we were up to, and you can also go to the Breaking the Silence on Our Spring Break page if you would like to check out our new media campaigns in real time.

While the wiki is still in development, when it is finished, we will use it to distribute these videos through various social networks like Twitter, with the firm goal in mind of achieving mainstream media attention.

We would love to have your advice and support as we continue King’s effort to “transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”

This post was written by Harry Waisbren, a member of Campus Progress, on behalf of recent action grant recipient, Our Spring Break.