Racism in My Experience Part 12
Organizing for Social Justice
When I was in Boston, I was involved with organizations for welfare rights, for tenant’s rights, for health care rights, for seniors, for the disabled and for peace. Later in CA, I was involved with organizations for immigrant rights, for the homeless, for child care providers, for gig workers, for clinics, for hospitals, for patients, for doctors, for kids, for pregnant women, and for small businesses.
The connective tissues among and between all the different interest groups who actually shared so much in common were too often missing. For example, the organizers working with the public housing tenants had different targets, issues and agendas from those working with tenants of 221(d)(3) private, but federally subsidized housing. The organizers associated with the elderly poor had different issues and constituencies and programmatic targets than those working with poor moms and their kids. Organizers affiliated with veterans were not working with the organizers working with those individuals seeking unemployment insurance. Divide and conquer strategies are deeply embedded in the very structure of our social safety net; they are reflected in the different agencies, the different budget allocations, the different Congressional Committees. Legislative priorities do change sometimes very dramatically when budget chairs or legislative leaders are black or Latino, but there was not then (and is still not now) a consistent unifying set of beliefs or principles. Andrew Yang was the first Presidential candidate since George McGovern in 1972 to seek a universal basic income that unites rather than divides us.
There was nearly always a tension between highly educated white organizers and the poorer or less educated or minority groups whose lives, health and well-being were being impacted by the public or private policies at issue. Sometimes, it was over power and fame; other times it was personality, sometimes just basic respect, and occasionally strategy and tactics. Although these differences were oft expressed in racial terms, I don’t now perceive those differences as racist. Over time, the complexion of the organizers shifted from white to black and brown; I think that may have lessened tensions and internal organizational struggles but only to a degree.
Language use was a key issue. I can remember vividly one of my friends and clients in a tenant’s union explaining to me that my use of legal terminology and four syllable words and academic languages was a turn off for the tenants with whom we were working. Use clear and concise everyday English and short sentences -- his indelible message to me.
The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was the greatest community organizer of our lifetime; he brought the ministry and leadership of the church into the civil rights struggle. He expanded his organizing from civil rights into a mission for peace and against the war. He expanded his ministry from civil rights into the struggle against hunger and poverty. Our nation would be so much stronger if not for his assassination. Many of the organizers were faith-based and enormously effective as a result. The lessons of the Bible (both Old and New Testaments) are powerful and timeless sermons on the need for social justice. Religious organizations like the Quakers, the Catholics, the Anglicans, Reform Jews, Buddhists and Muslims were often leading or supportive and deeply involved in the drive for social justice.
Organizations like the Southern Baptists began as a reformist mixture of whites and blacks in the South believing in individual salvation and scriptural literalism. In the lead up to the Civil War, they became firmly identified with justifying Southern slavery and thereafter with embracing and defending segregation and racial bigotry. Only relatively recently (in the mid 90s) did the church recant its long time (over 150 years) support for segregation and white supremacy groups. They likewise viewed women as subordinate to their husbands. They allied with the Catholic Church in their opposition to reproductive rights. They condemned homosexuality and strongly opposed gay rights. As a result the Southern Baptists were on the opposite side of most of the social justice movements from the 60’s to the present day.
Evangelical Christianity started as a reformist religious movement with famous preachers and large, open air revivals. It emphasized the social justice messages of the Bible and individual, personal salvation by becoming “born again” and “good works”. They were strongly affiliated with the abolitionist movement in the lead up to the Civil War; read the excellent recent biography of Frederick Douglass. William Jennings Bryan, a famous evangelical, populist and progressive, was the frequent Democratic candidate for the Presidency at the end of the 19th and early 20th Century. He was a staunch liberal associated with women’s suffrage, direct election of Senators, the federal income tax, opposition to the First World War and opposition to the gold standard. He was, at the same time, a biblical conservative, famed for attacking Darwin’s theories of evolution in the Scopes trial. By the 70’s, evangelical Christianity had morphed into a conservative political movement in the US under the influence of preachers like James Falwell and Pat Robertson and political strategists like Ralph Reed. It became enmeshed with the Republican Party and became notable for its hostility to reproductive rights, immigration, and gay marriage, and for its opposition to religious freedoms for religions other than Christianity (“we are a Christian nation”). In counterpoint Jim Wallis, a noted evangelical, finds the social justice teachings of Jesus are the paramount message of the Bible. "I would suggest that the Bible is neither "conservative" nor "liberal" as we understand those terms in a political context today ... It is traditional or conservative on issues of family values, sexual integrity, and personal responsibility, while being progressive, populist, or even radical on issues like poverty and racial justice”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Wallis One of my favorite memories was of LA Voice/Pico clergy in their collars totally defusing disruptive Tea Party and new right activists during demonstrations in support of the Affordable Care Act. They were so welcome in the offices of local politicians when they appeared in support of extending health coverage to undocumented children.
Another animating principle was socialism including Marxism, political theories from the 19th Century that sought to improve the plight of the impoverished and exploited industrial worker. Socialism established utopian communal societies from Massachusetts to Indiana to Texas. Socialism sought social change in the workplace and seeded and influenced the growth of modern unions. Marx, one of the later and among the best known socialist thinkers, had been deeply interested in the American Civil War as a revolutionary moment. He analogized the breaking of the Southern slave state during the Civil War to the breaking of the serf state (in Russia for example). He saw each as struggles against feudal overlords. He was, however, far more interested in the struggles between factory workers and the large industrialists in the advanced economic societies of Germany and England. His successors in thought were split between the Socialists (largely democratic and electoral in nature, Eugene Debs, also a noted pacifist was their perennial candidate for President, Bernie Sanders was a recent candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination) and the Communists (espousing violent overthrow of the state, followed by the dictatorship of the proletariat and influenced by the Russian Revolution and Vladimir Lenin).
During the depths of the Great Depression, the US Communist Party tried somewhat successfully to organize oppressed and impoverished workers in the South across racial lines; they tried to organize black and white Southerners for tenant sharecroppers’ rights, for worker’s rights in the Alabama steel mills and for civil rights. After World War One and again after World War Two, the Socialist Party and then the Communist Party respectively were smashed during post war Red Scares, and periods of quiescent ferment overlaid with a climate of fear ensued. In the 1960’s, the New Left emerged; it was led by white student organizers such as Tom Hayden; they were influenced partly by Michael Harrington and his book “The Other America”, partly by Dr. King and SNCC, later by Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, and partly by pacifism, by opposition to the Vietnam War and the neo-colonial military adventures of the US around the world under the guise of anti-communism. The New Left was never very successful in joining or influencing either the worker’s rights movements or the civil rights movements, but it did animate an enduring middle class cultural revolution that transformed the staid, stolid and racist American nation of the 50’s into many of the vibrant and diverse cultures of today’s America, including the women’s movement, and LGBTQ movement. It alienated portions of the working class with its opposition to the war and the police and was far more successful mobilizing middle class students.
The union movement emerged in response to the exploitation of powerless workers in three stages: 1) the craft workers union movement like the carpenters or plumbers or machinists epitomized by the AFL and the IWW (International Workers of the World) a broad-based worker organizing effort during the progressive era, 2) the industrial workers unions like the auto workers or steel workers during the Great Depression, and 3) the public employees unions like teachers and police and firefighters that emerged during the 60’s and 70’s. More recently, unions like SEIU have begun to organize the low-wage workers like childcare and home care, janitors and airport workers, and of course, the UFW has been organizing low wage farm workers since the 60’s.
The labor movement has been in significant and steady decline since the 50’s, with the growth in union membership concentrated in the public sector jobs, and the decline in private union membership coinciding with a massive rise in income inequality. https://www.epi.org/chart/union-fact-sheet-figure-a-union-membership-and-share-of-income-going-to-the-top-10-2-4-2-2 and https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/23/385843576/50-years-of-shrinking-union-membership-in-one-map Part of the decline paralleled the losses of American manufacturing jobs to automation and/or foreign competition; part due to the move of manufacturing from the unionized North to the non-unionized Southern states; part due to a huge growth in service sector jobs and economy which is less susceptible to unionization, and part due to the growth of the gig economy, flex workers or contract workers who often have none of the benefits and protections guaranteed for employees. https://qz.com/1542019/union-membership-in-the-us-keeps-on-falling-like-almost-everywhere-else/
The union movement in the 50’s and 60’s emerged as a key ally of civil rights groups in fighting segregation. However it was not always so. https://www.lib.umd.edu/unions/social/african-americans-rights and https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1997/summer/american-labor-movement.html Some components of the early AFL had been segregated unions, and excluded skilled black workers as unwanted competition; whereas the CIO unions emerging during the Great Depression were explicitly opposed to segregation and that was built into their union charters. Some AFL unions had been used to exclude black workers from the better paying craft jobs and had a horrid early history of discrimination against Asian workers as well. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/herbert-hill/labor-unions-and-the-negrothe-record-of-discrimination/ Union’s racist internal practices began with their exclusionary apprenticeship programs, seniority and tenure rules, and restrictions on employing blacks in the better paid supervisorial positions, and these practices continued in many union locals, North and South, well into the civil rights era of the 50’s and 60s when the national AFL-CIO had become a key civil rights champion. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/herbert-hill/labor-unions-and-the-negrothe-record-of-discrimination/
I remember working closely over several years during the years of the Bush 2 Administration and the Davis Administration here in California with ACORN (at the time a premier and effective community organization) and SEIU (a large and effective union for service sector employees) on efforts to develop health coverage for family home childcare workers. There are at least three organizational structures of child care providers: Head Start, childcare centers and family home providers. Head Start is often a part of the pre-school public education system and federally funded and as a result has better pay and benefits for their workers. Childcare centers typically employ young women workers for very low wages (a national average of $10 an hour) and scanty health benefits. Family home providers more typically comprise middle-aged women who provide childcare in their own homes; they are self-employed or micro-businesses; many are minorities. In this instance, ACORN was working with the family home providers to get them health insurance, better education and training to deliver child educational services, and better compensation; our target was state government. SEIU joined the effort, believing it could advance their cause, as it had previously been successful in developing health care coverage breakthroughs for home health care workers. It proved an interesting dynamic; the child care providers thought of themselves as minority small business owners and wanted to be recognized and treated as such. SEIU thought of them as workers or employees to be unionized; they wanted to identify an employer who would pay for the costs of the benefits and better training, but the family home provider was the employer. When we approached the state legislature to help fund a pilot program offering health benefits, better training and better educational outcomes for the children in childcare, another arm of SEIU sought to block funding for our pilot asking why these providers should get better access to health benefits. And as we approached local government, yet another different arm of SEIU was right there arguing that the new provider network should be limited to county hospitals and county clinics – a deal breaker for the family home providers “why am I paying a premium to go to the county facilities when I already pay my taxes for that; the waits are way too long and the quality (at that time the then infamous MLK Hospital in Willowbrook) is too dangerous”. The Affordable Care Act eventually solved the problems of availability and affordability of health insurance for many low and moderate income uninsured child care workers; it gave them a choice of plans, a choice of providers, financial assistance in paying the premium, and guaranteed issuance to those with pre-existing health conditions. Governor Newsom last year recognized family home childcare providers rights to organize and bargain with the state for better pay – the culmination of a twenty-year struggle and the beginning of the next phase of organizing and negotiating. https://laist.com/2019/09/13/ab_378_child_care_workers_union_seiu.php
A recent article in the New York Times highlights the promise of community organizing. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/opinion/2020-low-income-voters.html It recounts the efforts of Appalachian coal mining communities in Eastern Kentucky and low income workers from Louisville and Lexington, the joining of faith-based organizing from different religious communities to upend Matt Bevin in last year’s Kentucky gubernatorial election. The potential impacts for changing the political calculus for social justice in the 2020 elections are enormous. https://capitalandmain.com/mapping-electoral-power-of-low-income-voters-0814
Prepared by: Lucien Wulsin
Dated: 9/17/20