11 Learn Your Limits

Down in the darkness, down at the breaker
Close on the midnight hour
Steadily working, quietly leaving
Trailing a thin line of powder
The little Schuykill Valley town is all lit up tonight
By flames that lick like tongues from the breaker fire
The tight-lipped Coal and Iron Police
Won’t get much sleep tonight
Looking for the sons of Molly Maguire

Down in the tavern, banded together
Strong men are hiding their sorrow
Over at Pottstown, there at the prison
Ten men are hanging tomorrow
I only tried to organize the men I worked among
But I’m hanging in the morning, will you miss me
And Monday early, so they say, the mines will open back
The Coal and Iron Police are drinking whiskey

Down in the darkness, standing together
Ten men are lined on the gallows
Holding a red rose, waiting for sunrise
King of the Mollies, Jack Kehoe

The trap is sprung and Molly’s sons
Are traveling into time
Murdered by the men who hope to hang her
But the unborn souls of union men
Are all with her tonight
And the Pennsylvania pits are dark with anger

When people find out I’ve spent forty-five years working as a civil rights, labor, and community organizer in the Deep South and Appalachia, often the first thing they ask is, “Did you experience a lot of violence?”

I suppose this makes sense as a way of introducing yourself. In the United States, one of the first things people ask when they meet someone new is, “What do you do for a living?” In many countries, such a question is considered the height of rudeness. But, hey, we’re a young nation, and our public manners still have a ways to go.

Set in that context, “Did you experience a lot of violence?” is at least a reasonable opening gambit. But it’s not a question I generally want to answer, particularly when I suspect that the person asking the question is in danger of romanticizing violence, and will be happiest if I look off into the distance, a troubled expression on my face and, after a long apparently painful pause, simply nod my head yes.

I usually escape by saying that as far as violence goes in my life as an organizer I’ve been remarkably lucky, and then change the subject. It’s true that I’ve personally experienced very little violence—certainly almost nothing compared to truly courageous people like John Lewis, today a leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, and a major force for all things good. As chairman of SNCC during the Southern Civil Rights Movement, Lewis probably held the record for number of times arrested, beaten, or both. In the front line of marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, during the Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1964, he was clubbed so badly by Alabama state troopers on horseback that he ended up in the hospital with a concussion.

But it’s also true that I’ve been in some situations, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, where the threat of violence hung over every day’s work. This was particularly true in the Deep South during the Southern Civil Rights Movement, and in the Appalachian coalfields. It didn’t often happen to me—but it certainly did happen.

Far too often, the violence was not simply a threat, but a reality. Ask anyone close to the Southern Civil Rights Movement, and they can recite from memory the names of some of those who were murdered as part of southern segregationists’ struggle to preserve what they saw as their way of life. We will call out their names like a litany.

Emmett Louis Till was brutally lynched in 1955 at the age of fourteen in the small Mississippi town of Money for allegedly whistling at a white woman.

Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Denise McNair—young schoolgirls—were killed in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

Forty names are engraved on the black Canadian granite of the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. These are just the dead we know, not the hundreds who died anonymously. There is a little-known but wrenching fact related to the 1964 disappearance of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, three civil rights workers, an African American and two Jews, who were kidnapped, shot at point-blank range, and buried beneath an earthen dam in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in June 1964. During the massive search for the three young men, the would-be rescuers dragging one of Mississippi’s many dark rivers pulled up the body of an African American who had obviously been murdered. The newspapers described him as “unknown.” To history, perhaps, but not to the Black family who waited in vain for him to return home, an all-too-common condition in the Deep South in those violent days.

Life in the coalfields was also tense, the potential for violence endemic, and the outcome sometimes startlingly brutal: Witness the murder of Lawrence Jones on the Brookside picket line. If not everyone went armed every day, they kept a rifle, shotgun, pistol, or revolver near at hand in their home, women and men alike.

Here’s how seriously the UMWA took the potential for violence. I’m not a particularly big person, but I’m not what you’d call small, either. In those days I hit the scales at about 170 pounds, and stood about five feet ten, closer to six feet in the cowboy boots I had started wearing in a futile attempt at protective coloration.

Though the UMWA organizers at Brookside didn’t exactly weigh in each morning, like I used to do when I wrestled in high school and college, my guess is I was the lightest of the lot by some sixty pounds, and the shortest by at least six inches. They were amazing human specimens, men who had worked underground since they were youngsters, with biceps and triceps as hard as the coal they dug, that swelled the arms of their T-shirts to an extent that made me green with envy. Temperamentally, they were some of the warmest and most thoughtful people I’ve ever met. Visually, they could stop a coal truck.

The UMWA sent bodyguards to Harlan County to protect them.

The lead bodyguard was a coal miner named Rich Hall. Rich wasn’t any larger than the organizers, but he was a karate expert, and unbelievably fast. We’d be sitting in one of the trailers the union had rented in Jones’ Trailer Park in Harlan, drinking beer, spitting tobacco, and, as that good southern expression goes, “talking trash.”

One moment you’d be sitting on the raggedy sofa that passed for furniture in the UMWA organizers’ trailer, with Rich relaxing in a chair opposite you, at least eight feet away. A second later he’d be sitting next to you. You never even saw him cross the room. He was that fast.

One day when we were going through our usual post-work male rituals, Rich turned to me and said, “Si, can you crush a beer can with one hand?”

I felt my biceps and triceps swell. Moments like this don’t require speech, just a nod. I nodded, then nodded again for good luck, twice in quick succession.

“Show me,” Rich said.

In those days, beer cans were still made from steel, not aluminum or some soybean derivative like they are today. One-handed beer can crushing was a reasonably serious test of manhood.

I drained the beer I had been drinking and placed the empty can in my right hand. Looking Rich straight in the eyes, I squeezed.

The beer can crumpled. I felt like I had just won a gold medal in the Olympics.

Rich shook his head scornfully. “Not like that,” he said.

He emptied his beer can, set it on the table, and gripped the top rim of the can with his four fingers and thumb.

“Like this.” Slowly, steadily, he drew his thumb and fingers towards each other.

The rim of the beer can shivered for a moment, then gave up the ghost and collapsed into a tiny point.

The closest I ever came to serious injury during my forty-five-year organizing career was not on a picket line or freedom march, but in Granny Hager’s living room, on the banks of the Kentucky River in Hazard—you guessed it—Kentucky. (In the southern mountains, the term “Granny,” like “Aunt” in Aunt Molly Jackson, is a mark of deep respect and admiration for a community elder—not, as when applied by whites in the Deep South to African Americans, a derisive, sneering insult.)

Granny was an old white woman, leaner than a split locust fence rail, and twice as tough. She was at least in her eighties by then, and the coal companies paid tribute to her long history of fighting them tooth and nail by giving her a hard time at every opportunity.

It was a process in which they showed themselves to be remarkably creative community harassers. Granny’s house sat on a narrow strip of land between the river and the railroad track. Every night, the coal company would leave a train with a hundred gondolas hooked up to it—at least a mile long—in front of her house.

To get from the road to her house, Granny had two choices. She could either walk all the way to either the locomotive or the caboose end of the train, cross the tracks, and then walk back along the other side of the tracks until she got to her house—a long hard trip at any age, especially in the dark and carrying a sack of groceries. Or she could, as she always did, crouch down and, on her hands and knees, crawl under a coal car from one side of the track to the other, from the road to her house.

I don’t know how many of you have had the experience of crawling under a coal car in the dead of night, in eastern Kentucky or anywhere else. I don’t recommend it. Everyone knew the coal company was capable of anything, especially when it came to Granny Hager—including deciding to move the train suddenly. Had I been there at that moment, it would have been very hard for my friends to explain to my family what had happened to me.

In those days, our children were still too young to go to school, so they could travel pretty much anywhere with me. I had one of those old Dodge vans with the engine between the two front seats, covered by a flat metal cowling. I took the legs off two fiberglass kitchen chairs, bolted the seats to the engine cover, and hooked up a couple of seat belts, so that the kids could ride along, one in front of the other.

Our oldest son Simon was five at the time and in that particular young male developmental stage when firearms are a prime object of desire. When he noticed what he thought was a cap pistol lying on the small table next to where Granny Hager was sitting, his eyes lit up. He reached for it, picked it up, swung around, and, with that wonderful smile he still has, aimed it directly at me, his index finger on the trigger.

I couldn’t see down the dark barrel, but I did see the bullets in the ancient .32 revolver’s chambers pointing straight at me. I am no Rich Hall, but I have never come out of a chair and across a room so quickly in my life.

Stories about violence, and even potential violence, are seductive, aren’t they?

Speaking of seduction: One early afternoon, back when I was working with SNCC in Forrest City, Arkansas, Mrs. Brown came by the Freedom Center.

“Got a minute?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Come over to the house with me.”

Mrs. Brown’s house was one of the few buildings in the Black community that had two floors. When we got inside, she stopped at the foot of the stairs leading to the second floor where she slept, and turned to look at me.

“Come upstairs,” she said.

I hesitated. SNCC workers, female and male, were often approached by community members with something more than freedom on their minds. But, as far as SNCC’s principles were concerned, local folks were strictly off limits. Any experienced organizer will tell you that getting mixed up romantically with a community member is not just a bad idea, but a serious violation of professional ethics, like a psychiatrist sleeping with a client.

“Come,” she said again, and started up the stairs.

Before I finish this particular story, some background may be helpful. I had by now grown more or less used to the South’s love affair with firearms—although I do know it isn’t restricted to the South, that even female governors of Alaska are subject to the contagion.

Several years before I went South to join SNCC, when I was still in my late teens, I was hitchhiking across Texas. I was picked up by a middle-aged white man driving a beat up pickup truck. He looked me over carefully as he slowed almost to a halt, and finally decided to stop, right next to me. I opened the passenger side door and climbed into the cab.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Don’t mention it,” he replied, ignoring the fact that I already had. “Just don’t try anything.”

The only thing I was trying was to get back to my parents’ home in safely suburban Maryland. I had been out on the road for a couple of months, traveling by thumb through the United States and Mexico, sleeping in graveyards and county jails, and that was way long enough.

“No problem.” I answered, hoping that would end the conversation.

It didn’t. “You know why you’d better not try anything?”

Feeling a direct yes or no answer was probably too definitive under the circumstances, I made a discreet noise in my throat to indicate that I didn’t.

“Open the glove compartment.”

I stretched forward and flipped open the lid.

“See that pistol?”

I did. In fact, I was seriously shocked to see it. I’m not sure that I had ever seen any sort of firearm up close before. While I’m sure there are at least a few Jewish deer hunters out there somewhere in the American heartland, generally speaking, it’s not our thing. It would be at least somewhat unusual, for example, if the person sitting next to you in the synagogue whispered, “Hey, what do you say when Rosh Hashanah services are over, we hit the woods, and see if we can’t bag us a ten-pointer?” It’s probably happened at some point in our history, but I’m personally not aware of it.

Even in my temporary state of shock, it did occur to me that if there was “trouble,” whatever that meant, I was a lot closer to the glove compartment than he was. If he really was worried about me “trying something,” pointing out that there was a pistol inches away from me didn’t seem very smart on his part.

But keep in mind, all this was new to me. I was a rabbi’s son from up North. What did I know from pistols?

I felt some sort of response was required. “How come you carry a pistol in your glove compartment?”

He’d been staring straight ahead at the road, hands tight on the steering wheel, ever since I’d stepped into the truck. It wasn’t really necessary in that part of Texas, since there was no chance whatsoever that the road would bend even slightly in the next five hundred miles, but that’s what he was doing. Now he turned his head to the right, looked directly at me, and said, “On account of there’s so much violence around here.”

This happened a good twenty years before I married feminist philosopher Elizabeth Minnich, who has helped me partially overcome my understandably irritating organizer’s tendency to always go directly to strategies and tactics. These days, I occasionally venture into, if not thinking philosophically, then at least reflecting briefly before speaking. Still, I knew even then there was something deeply wrong with his logic.

Nonetheless, I decided it was just as well not to say anything. The old truck sped on into the Texas night.

In the South, you see a lot of bumper stickers commenting on firearms. One very popular one reads, “I’ll give up my gun when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.”

It has occurred to me that if you were the driver of a vehicle bearing that bumper sticker, and you knew that someone out there desperately wanted you to give up your gun, that is not particularly good advice to give them.

Another popular bumper sticker reads, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” Okay. But what do most people who kill people use to kill them? I rest my case.

In Forrest City in the summer of 1965, rifles and shotguns were everywhere: resting against the wall in a kitchen or living room, leaning against a bed, hanging in a rack over the front door of a house or the back window of a pickup truck, slung over a shoulder as the shoulder’s owner meandered down the road.

So I wasn’t all that surprised, when I walked into Mrs. Brown’s bedroom, to see a lever action .30-.30 rifle with a scope lying on the bed, right next to a box of cartridges. Strangely enough, I was relieved. If this was going to be a seduction, it was going to be a highly unusual one. I decided that wasn’t what this was about.

“Look out the window.” She spoke politely, but it was an order. I obeyed.

“What do you see?”

“Nothing much. Just the street and some houses.”

“What time have you got?”

I looked at my watch. “2:51.”

“Wait two minutes. He never misses.”

Sure enough, exactly two minutes later, at 2:53 P.M., I saw a police cruiser rolling slowly down the street. Even behind the shades, there was no mistaking the face.

“Jim Wilson,” I said. The police captain was the most vicious and violent man on the Forrest City force, with a reputation for using his power to rape African American women.

Mrs. Brown nodded. “He comes by here every day like clockwork, right at this time.”

She walked over to the bed, picked up the rifle, and stretched it out to me. “Here. This is for you.”

I didn’t know what to say. “What am I supposed to do with it?”

Mrs. Brown looked straight at me.

“Kill him.”

It is a measure of how traumatic that moment was that, to this day, I have no idea what happened next: what I said, if anything, what I did, other than that I got out of there as quickly as I could, leaving the rifle lying on the bed, feeling more than a little sick to my stomach. I have some vague recollection of Mrs. Brown arguing that this would mobilize the people who had been silent too long, but that makes no sense. The killing of a police officer by a civil rights worker, white or Black, would have led to unbelievable retribution and violence against the Black community. It had happened many times before, with no provocation. It would certainly happen again.

Telling this story, I am still trying to understand what happened and why. Had Mrs. Brown been one of the women Wilson had dragged into the back seat of his patrol car? Had this happened to a sister, a mother, a daughter, a friend? In the midst of a nonviolent movement, had something suddenly snapped? Or had she been waiting for years for someone who could be the agent of retribution, and had come to see me as that particular Angel of Death?

I said earlier that I usually avoid telling stories that involve violence or potential violence, because I don’t want to romanticize it. I don’t want those of you who are thinking about becoming organizers to think that the potential for violence in some situations makes the job exciting or heroic.

It doesn’t. It makes it terrifying.

I decided to write these stories down now—not standing alone, but with commentary—because, too often, organizers are unjustly accused by those in power of inciting violence.

That’s a lie, and it needs to be put to rest.

Still, the rumor is out there, and I don’t want this job to appeal falsely to those who are attracted to danger at best, violence at worst. I want people to become organizers because they are peacemakers, passionately committed to finding ways human beings can solve the very real problems that confront and divide us, without doing damage to each other.

Put simply, there is no place in any kind of organizing for violence, or the threat of violence. If that’s what you’re looking for, don’t come here.

But I want to be very, very clear that, in ruling out violence, I am by no means backing down on my lifelong commitment to nonviolent direct action, to confrontation, to conflict when absolutely necessary. I believe we must first do everything we can to achieve consensus, to find a solution that works and saves face for everyone. We need to do everything in our power to, as Dr. King in his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech so eloquently quoted the Old Testament prophet Amos, “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

But when the intransigence, the deep-seated prejudice, the drive for obscene wealth, the self-interested arrogance of those in power make compromise impossible, we should, as Dr. King did, confront them with all the nonviolent fierceness we can muster.

To raze a slumlord’s property to the ground; to drive an exploitative enterprise such as a for-profit private prison corporation or a predatory lender out of business; to make sure a sexual harasser is fired—that is not violence.

It’s called justice.