I had the pleasure of meeting Shawn P. Williams a few weeks ago at SXSWi through a mutual friend–although I knew about Williams and his blog Dallas South News ever since he and I both won a Statesman Social Media Award in 2011.

Williams was gracious enough to give me a signed copy of his newly released book, Blogging While Black which I dove into and finished within two days.  It’s a quick read, but full of tactical advice that can benefit bloggers from every genre; and it’s chock full of inspiration which I’m bringing back here to my own humble blog.

Williams originally started blogging as an experiment –it was something he’d heard of, and he decided to give it a try as a way to keep himself busy while his wife was in nursing school.

The book follows Williams’ blogging over a span of two years (2007-2009) as he launched his community-centric blog and guided it to national prominence; blogging his way through the Shaquanda Cotton case, the Jena 6 case, and the election of President Barack Obama.  Throughout his recounting of the events you can see how both Williams and his blog evolved, gaining savvy and prowess in the black blogosphere and far beyond.

It’s pretty clear that Williams’ blogging success can be summed up with a single word:  adaptability.  He took his cues from his community, the political environment, and his own intuition–like a good journalist, he ‘followed the story’ rather than trying to make it.

But the most exciting part of this book for me was the practical application of blogging to activism.  I have often waxed poetic about the democratic nature of web-based media and in Chapter 3, Williams write about why blogging can be so effective for black activists:

“In many instances African-Americans have relied on charismatic leaders to sustain momentum.  The civil rights movement essentially died when Martin Luther King was struc down on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel.  The Nation of Islam floundered after the death of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad until Minister Louis Farrakhan took over.  And churches across the country are so dependent on their pastor (who so often started the church) they cannot survive when that pastor is no longer there. 

“One of the things that made me hopeful about this online civil rights movement was that there was no leader.  There was no one person telling everyone else what to do.  And no one had to get permission from the established leaders to participate.  We all just did what needed to be done, wrote what needed to be written, and said what needed to be said.”

These words are shades of the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, and every other revolutionary style initiative that has taken place in the past 10 years.

I think one of the most important lessons the Muslim blogosphere can take from this book is the idea of a blogging as a community with a purpose.  There is no need to bring everyone under a single ideology (political or religious) to have an effective movement.  The individual voices of Muslim bloggers can stand alone, but when the moment comes for us to band together to combat injustice being done to our entire community, we must be ready to do so without reservation.  That sounds idealistic, particularly for a community that is as dysfunctional as ours often is–but when you read of the impact that Williams and  other black bloggers had on local and national events, the proposition doesn’t seem so out of reach.

Thanks again to Shawn Williams for the copy of his book, and for the much-needed inspiration it has brought me.  As he wrote in closing on the very first blog post of Dallas South News, “Don’t just make noise– make a difference.”

You can buy Blogging While Black by Shawn P. Williams at Amazon.com