9 Be For, Not Just Against

I was interviewed last week on public radio
A man called up with something that I didn’t know
My name is Grant, he said,
Here’s what you need to hear
I’m a custodian—at least I was until last year

But now the jobs we did have all been privatized
Our lives, the public good, sold for the lowest price
A corporation does the cleaning work we did
They want the money not to help some troubled kid

Now we are standing at the edge of a forest of lies
Where all we hold in common has been privatized
Where corporations own every corner of our land
When everything is private, where will freedom stand

When those who only live for profit
Work to tear this country down
All we have to stand on is our common ground
And only we can find our way back home from here
We are custodians of all that we hold dear

One criticism community organizers run into goes like this: “Okay, we know what you’re against. But what are you for? Are you just trying to tear things down, or are you working to build them up?”

Well, sometimes organizers are trying to tear things down, without necessarily trying to figure out what comes next. That’s not always our responsibility. The courageous women who started the Women’s Movement were concerned with tearing down the legal and social barriers that made women second-class citizens, kept them out of jobs, programs, and systems that were reserved for men, left them vulnerable to sexual exploitation and harassment.

The lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender warriors who fought the police at Stonewall were trying to stop violence against their community and its most vulnerable members. The brave women and men who, at great risk, built the Freedom Movement wanted to tear down a system of legal segregation that not only kept African Americans down economically and socially, but placed them at continuing risk of violence.

It was hardly supporters of the fight to end legal segregation who criticized the Freedom Movement for not always having answers to “What happens next?” Virtually all of the Movement’s critics were fighting to keep segregation. Far from being constructive criticism, their attacks were a deliberate tactic designed to undermine and discredit a movement they hated and wanted to destroy.

Still, from a practical perspective, it’s useful, as a part of any creative community organizing campaign, to be advocating for a positive as well as opposing a negative.

Gail, Les, Jacob, and I agreed that a good way to attack and discredit the proposed for-profit private jail, while being “for” as well as “against,” would be to issue a research report. The document would suggest public policy changes that could save Shelby County money. It would also recommend alternatives to incarceration for those unfortunate enough to be caught up in the criminal justice system that would be cheaper than putting them in jail. We would use the report to organize a “free media” campaign to raise awareness of the issue, both locally and nationally.

A multinational corporation would simply give an already sympathetic think tank a substantial sum of money to conduct “independent” research on the situation, as Corrections Corporation of America and the other for-profit private prison corporations had been doing for years.

Between Grassroots Leadership and the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center, we’d be lucky to scrape together enough cash to buy printing paper.

Gail wasn’t worried. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. The question is, who are we going to get to write the report?”

I was back in Memphis now, eating breakfast with the team.

I thought a minute. “BBS,” I said.

“I don’t know, Si.” Les was skeptical. “I don’t think we can get the British Broadcasting Corporation interested in a local fight like this. Anyway, it’s BBC, not BBS.”

BBS, I explained, was another item in the creative community organizer’s toolbox. It stands for “beg, borrow, and steal.” It’s how organizations with limited income survive. In the Brookside Strike, when I was organizing a “second front” in the Carolinas, I had called around the country and gotten over a dozen organizers to come help out for at least a month each. Now we needed to borrow some skilled researchers and policy analysts.

“I’m calling Bob.” Gail already had her cell phone out. “We can probably steal him for a week, if I ask him nicely enough.”

That’s the “beg” part.

“Sure, no problem, Gail. I can drive up there first thing next week.” Bob Libal is Grassroots Leadership’s utility outfielder, as well as our Texas campaign coordinator, someone who can play just about any organizing position and do a good job at it. “But I don’t know enough about jails to write that section of the report. You know, the part where we’re going to recommend policy changes and alternatives to incarceration. We need someone who’s a national specialist on jail policy. Like Dana Kaplan, if we could get her. She’s the best. She knows more about jails than just about anybody.”

Dana, now executive director of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, was at the time a Soros Justice Fellow with the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York.

We decided that a principled political analysis and argument was the only responsible way to approach her.

“Hey, Dana,” Gail said over the phone. “How would you like a free trip to Memphis and all the barbecue you can eat?”

Multinational corporations often need to get some elected body to vote for legislation that will help them extend their reach and increase their profits. That body could be a city council, a county commission, a state legislature, or the Congress of the United States.

Right now, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) needed the Shelby County council. They were working as hard as they could to get it and had made sure some of the main power brokers in the county would be on their side.

The white Republicans on the council were the easiest. Like so many Republicans anywhere in the country, their basic philosophy of government could be summed up as, “The private sector can do it better.” Privatization is a natural for them.

Unions, on the other hand, were not in CCA’s scheme of things. Moreover, AFSCME Local 1733, founded in the wake of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination by the same striking sanitation workers for whom Dr. King had gone to Memphis in the first place, wasn’t just a union. It was a Black union, and a reasonably powerful one.

None of the seven white Republicans on the Shelby County council owed their jobs to African American votes. From every perspective, they were natural allies for CCA.

Not so the six Black Democrats. Some of them had a history of commitment to community and had been outspoken on labor, civil rights, and neighborhood issues. All of them were dependent on Black votes—and AFSCME had a history of delivering votes to its allies. The union’s goodwill meant not just votes from the fifteen hundred employees at the two facilities, but from their children, parents, neighbors, friends, aunts, uncles—you name it.

Despite the white Republican majority on the Shelby County council, Corrections Corporation of America wasn’t taking any chances, and was working hard to swing elements of the African American community behind their plan to build the new private mega-jail. Never mind that a great majority of the people who would spend time in it were young Black men, or that the radical growth in incarceration across the United States, by now spurred largely by the for-profit private prison industry, was stripping Black communities across the country of their young people, women and men alike.

So CCA rolled out their biggest guns. Thurgood Marshall Jr., son of the great African American freedom fighter and Supreme Court justice, had accepted a seat on the CCA board of directors, and he was spending time in Memphis lobbying the Black community to support privatization. So was Benjamin Hooks, past president of the NAACP, president of the National Civil Rights Museum, the elder statesperson among African American leaders in Memphis, whose family business had been promised a lucrative contract, should CCA win.

There were a number of constituencies in a position to influence the members of the county council, and they all had to be part of our plan. Gail and her team developed slightly varying arguments for the different constituencies they wanted to mobilize against the proposed jail, based on what they saw as each group’s perceived self-interest.

For the AFSCME members whose jobs depended on keeping the facilities public, no argument was necessary. Their role was to bring the rest of the Shelby County labor movement into the fight, to help other unionized workers see that if CCA won, all public employees, and all union members, were at risk.

For the faith community, the moral argument was key. Over the past several years, primarily through work with the Roman Catholic Church and the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., Grassroots Leadership had honed that argument down to a fine edge, and we had a strong set of official denominational resolutions to back it up.

Convincing the Black business community which side they were on didn’t take much talking. The public employees at the two facilities were not only their friends, neighbors, and relatives, they were among their best customers, earning salaries that were considerably higher than what most other African Americans in the county made. If, as usually happened when a jail or prison was privatized, every employee was terminated, and only some rehired, at significantly reduced wages and slashed benefits, that loss would be passed directly on to the Black business owners.

The white business community was more of a challenge. Businesspeople of a feather do tend to flock together, so CCA was a natural ally for them. But they also had a self-interest in promoting Memphis as a tourist destination. They had spent a long time trying to live down the legacy of Dr. King’s assassination in 1968, not to mention the city’s reputation as poverty stricken and racially divided. Now the city hosted the National Civil Rights Museum. You could stand and stare at the actual spot where Dr. King bled to death on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, then tour the museum, moved and inspired by the raw courage and commitment of the young and old activists who had finally taken on and destroyed the system of American apartheid called segregation.

And oh, yes, they had a trinity for which any city anywhere in the world would have traded their best-loved mayor: B. B. King, Isaac Hayes, and Elvis Presley. Graceland was the number one tourist destination for hundreds of thousands of fanatical Elvis fans around the world, who came back year after year to worship at the shrine. Many nights of the week on Beale Street, historic home of the blues, the incomparable B. B. King held forth in his own club. When the music stopped, you could see how much damage you could do to a plate of ribs at Isaac Hayes’s restaurant, as Gail, Les, Jacob, and I had so enjoyably done.

Memphis was trying hard. You could visit the old Sun Records studio, grab a microphone, and pretend you were there when Sam Phillips took a crew of what even the city’s mostly racially righteous upper-class Caucasians would privately have called “white trash”—poor country boys with names like Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash—and helped create rock and roll.

The old trolley cars had been brought back, each a different set of colors, nostalgia on wheels. There was the great river itself, the monumental Mississippi, so wide as it slid by the city that you could barely see across. But you could stand there on the shore and imagine Huck Finn steering his raft through the vicious currents, while his African American companion Jim, to whom Mark Twain never even gave a last name, hid under a pile of whatever was handy to evade the slave catchers hot on his trail.

Memphis, the white business leaders hoped and probably prayed, was finally coming back. What they definitely did not want, and absolutely didn’t need, was another period like the one they’d gone through after Dr. King’s murder.

So, to persuade them to use their influence with the county council, we would do our utmost to link, in the public mind, what was happening in 2005 to what had happened in 1968.

People around the world responded to our email blast asking them to write to the Memphis-Shelby County Chamber of Commerce. We told them that if they had been thinking about possibly relocating their business to the area, or having their national association hold its annual conference there, or even just bringing the kids for a week’s vacation—but now were concerned about what was happening and weren’t so sure they wanted to go to Memphis after all—they should let the Chamber know.

We don’t know how many letters, calls, or emails the Chamber of Commerce received. That’s one of the challenges of creative community organizing. We come up with the best tactics we can, and we launch them out into the world, like carrier pigeons from a rooftop.

Then we wait. Sometimes we hear something, other times we don’t. We just have to trust that, out there in the world, some of our tactics will eventually find their way home.

Then there were the elected officials. If they weren’t going to oppose CCA, they at least had to be persuaded to stay out of the fight.

That’s another core principle of creative community organizing. If you can’t get a person or institution to support you, you want to do everything in your power to convince them that it’s in their best self-interest to be neutral.

Luckily, most elected officials usually pay attention to which way the wind of public opinion is blowing.

Remember the old saying, “In the United States, any child can grow up to be president”? You’re not going to find a lot of poor and working people who believe that. They’re not even sure their children will grow up to be employed.

But there is one community left that absolutely trusts in the truth of that saying, and even takes that faith one step further, to the belief that, some day, they personally could become president of the United States.

Secretly or openly, all U.S. Senators, congresspersons, state governors, and big-city mayors believes this is their destiny. At a minimum, each is hoping and working to move at least one rung up the ladder: from mayor to governor, from member of Congress to United States Senator.

Whether it was true or not, everyone in Memphis and Shelby County assumed that both the city mayor and the county mayor had political ambitions. So, like the sheriff, both mayors were going to be very careful. Signing a contract with Corrections Corporation of America to privatize the county jail and the penal farm would have meant many things, but one of them could have been the near-destruction of AFSCME Local 1733. Although the mayors, like many elected officials in Shelby County and Memphis, had no love for the union, and would have been happy to have a freer hand in dealing with the county’s public employees, neither of them wanted, in the middle of their own campaign for higher office, to be attacked as someone who tried to break Dr. King’s union.

Finally, the remaining constituency we needed to organize were the young people, the students.

“Gail, this is so inspiring.” I was practically beaming. “There must be a hundred young people here for the county council meeting.”

“Thank you, Si,” Gail answered. “We did our best.”

“That was just brilliant, too, to have a couple of uniformed correctional officers present our report, where we called for fewer jail cells and more alternatives to incarceration.” I couldn’t have been more pleased. “Dana and Bob did a great job researching and writing our paper, but having the C.O.s present really brought it home.”

Gail’s grin was infectious. “Well, you know, we like to keep them guessing. Les, Jacob, and I figured they were probably expecting a couple of white hippies to present the report.” She hesitated for a second. “No offense, Si.”

“It’s okay, Gail. I didn’t take it that way. I know what you meant.”

“Thank you.” Gail was never anything but gracious. “You know, Si, those young people have come to every single meeting of the county council since we started the campaign.”

Nothing could have made me happier—and happiness makes me talk too much. I didn’t have a soapbox with me, but I sure was on one. “You know, Gail, so many folks my age are really down on young people today. They think they don’t care, that they’re only out for themselves, that all they think about is making money, they don’t want to get involved. Yet, right here in Memphis, here’s a hundred young people who are taking a stand for justice, who are . . . ”

I stopped in midsentence. I had seen the embarrassed glance go from Gail to Les to Jacob and back.

“Okay, you guys, what did you do?”

“Oh, nothing much.” The trio said it almost in unison.

“Come on, ‘fess up.” They looked around as if absent-mindedly, each waiting for the other to say something. Finally, Les broke the silence.

“Well, Si, you know we did a lot of work with the local colleges, and with the Memphis Theological Seminary, back when we were starting the campaign.” Les could have been delivering a sermon at Sunday Mass.

“Huh.”

Now it was Jacob’s turn to play attorney for the defense. “A lot of the professors really like what we’re doing. They think it’s an important lesson in how democracy works, or doesn’t work.”

“Uh-huh.”

Jacob couldn’t suppress his grin. “So we got the professors to give their students credit for sitting in the county council meetings.”

I covered my eyes with my hand. “They get course credit for just sitting in the meetings?”

“Not for just sitting in the meetings.” Gail’s air was almost professorial. “For helping pack the hall every time the council meets.”

“Si, they do have to write a paper about the experience.” Les, face serious, was summing up the argument for the jury. “They don’t get credit just for sitting there.”

Gail Tyree, Les Schmidt, and Jacob Flowers are three very creative community organizers.

This time, the barbecue joint was in Austin, Texas. Jacob and I were sitting at the table across from each other.

“That looks like really good barbecue.” He was staring wistfully at my plate.

“Jacob, I’m so sorry,” I said. “But I understand those scientists who do genetic engineering are working really hard on a vegan pig. One of these days, all this will be yours.”

“At least the local beer is good.”

It was. We clinked bottles.

“Well,” I said, “if anybody ever earned a couple of beers, we sure did. It was a great victory.”

Jacob looked thoughtful. “The amazing thing is that it’s still going on. They’re actually taking our recommendations for policy reform seriously, at least some of them. They even gave the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center a seat on the committee that’s looking at all this. We’ve got a seat at the table.”

“So we didn’t just stop something bad, we helped start something good.”

“That’s exactly right.” Jacob put his beer down on the battle-scarred table. “Si, can I ask you something?”

“That depends on what it is.”

He ignored me. “When you first got to Memphis, did you think we had a chance?”

I laughed. “No. Absolutely not.”

“No chance at all?”

“Maybe one out of fifty. No more than that.”

We both paused for a swallow. Jacob went on, “So why did you argue so hard for taking it on the way we did?”

“It’s like what Gail always says. It’s what we do.” I put my beer bottle down on the table. “You know, when we take on a campaign, there’s never any guarantee that we’ll win, or even break even. But, if we don’t take it on, we get an absolute guarantee.”

Jacob looked straight at me. “And that guarantee is?”

I met his eyes. “If we don’t take on the fight, there’s an absolute guarantee that we lose every time.”

He nodded. “Anything more than that?”

I thought for a minute.

“Well, it’s also who we are, isn’t it?”

We sat quietly for a minute or so. It was getting late. I had an early flight back to North Carolina in the morning. It was almost time to call it a night. But I had one more question.

“Do you think they’ll be back?” I asked.

Jacob laughed. “Si, you know better than to ask me that. Of course they’ll be back. You think they’re going to give up just because we beat them once? They’ve got too much at stake in Memphis—and they don’t like losing.”

I grinned. It had been a rhetorical question, and I’d been caught asking it. But I hung in there.

“So, when they come back, what are we going to do?”

Someone from the wait staff was passing by. Jacob caught their eye and held up two fingers, then turned and looked me. His smile was beatific.

“Same thing we did the last time, Si.” The sheer joy in his face lit up our dark corner of the barbecue joint. “It’s who we are. It’s what we do.”