10 Find the Glue

We were the world’s first colony
We yet may be its last
Five hundred years ruled by another land
The violence, the cruelty
The stealing of our past
Who dared to hope that peace might be at hand?

Five centuries have hardened us
To struggle and resist
‘Til neighbors seem like enemies, not friends
Until one day we find within
The courage to desist
From violence that grows and never ends

If those who prayed for violence
And shed their children’s blood
Can work for peace that lasts beyond all time
Then enemies in other lands
May some day staunch the flood
Of war that breaks all hearts, both yours and mine

The Irish sea that sheltered us
And sometimes kept us safe
Still breaks its heart upon the English shore

But when the storm is over
And the sea lies wide as dreams
Then peace will rise
From these green hills once more

My first serious encounters with the role of race in organizing came during the summer of 1965, working with SNCC in Forrest City, Arkansas. In Centre County, Pennsylvania, where I had lived until the age of fifteen, I almost never saw anyone who was a person of color, with the exception of the athletes who were just beginning to arrive at Penn State to play football and basketball. Certainly, anyone in any position of power or authority was white.

Now, everything was reversed. The leaders of SNCC and of the Southern Civil Rights Movement nationally were almost all African Americans. The local leaders of the Movement in Forrest City were all Black. The local SNCC project leader was Black, as were the great majority of the SNCC staff and volunteers. The community we lived in, that sheltered, nurtured, and protected the SNCC workers, was exclusively Black. Beyond the boundaries of the Black community lay white communities, which offered only threat and danger.

The visible national leaders of SNCC, some of whom occasionally arrived in Arkansas from headquarters in Atlanta, who spoke with us and framed the Movement in broader political terms, were Black: James Foreman, Julian Bond, John Lewis, Stokely Carmichael. So were the heads of the other major national civil rights organizations: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at SCLC, James Farmer at CORE, Roy Wilkins at the NAACP, Whitney Young at the Urban League.

I am speaking now of my view in the summer of 1965, at the age of twenty-one, of how that particular world looked to me as someone whose main Movement job was doing carpentry in Freedom Centers and repairing cars and mimeographs, the now-extinct copying machines that preceded the Xerox generation. Later, with the benefit of hindsight and history books, I came to understand some of what was less visible. Women leaders of SNCC and of the Movement, such as Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer, were excluded from formal organizational positions, even as they exercised extraordinary leadership and influence. Some whites also played leadership roles, but generally not as visibly as those who were Black.

Among these white behind-the-scenes activists was my uncle Arnold Aronson, my mother’s older brother, whose work over many years helped inspire and shape my own. Arnie was one of three cofounders of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights coalition, together with the great labor leader A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and NAACP national president Roy Wilkins.

Arnie worked behind the scenes with all the great African American leaders of the Movement—King, Lewis, Young, Farmer, Wilkins, Randolph—on many critical strategies, campaigns, and events. Yet he was never a public spokesperson for the Movement. In fact, for the rest of his long life, in which he continued to work on civil rights issues, he refused to speak or write about what he had done in the 1960s, believing that in a progressive democratic movement that appropriately belonged to African Americans, the role of the white participants was to support that movement, not to lead or speak for it.

My uncle’s salary was paid by the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council in New York, where he lived, but he spent the week in Washington, D.C. Our family had recently moved from Pennsylvania to Chevy Chase, Maryland, just across the District of Columbia line. Orphaned together at relatively young ages, Arnie and Mom were understandably quite close, so he stayed with us whenever he was in town. At night, Arnie, Mom, and Pop would sprawl across the bed and chairs in my parents’ bedroom, and he would tell us what had happened in the day’s meetings and discussions.

Many of the high-level strategy meetings took place at the Shoreham Hotel, an elegant brick and wood structure in downtown D.C., with a long curving porch studded with rocking chairs. It wouldn’t have looked out of place on a southern plantation. In fact, Washington in those days was very much a southern city, with “white only” and “colored only” drinking fountains within sight of the U.S. capitol.

When I was home from college, I served as Arnie’s chauffeur. His eldest son and I share the same first name—in traditional Jewish families, children are never named after a living relative, lest the Angel of Death confuse the two and take the younger by mistake—but after those who have passed on. My cousin and I were both named after our grandfather, Arnie and Mom’s father, Simon Hirsh Aronson. To avoid confusion, Arnie and his spouse, my aunt Annette, called me “Cuz” and their oldest by the name he and I shared.

“Okay, Cuz,” he’d say when I picked up the ringing phone, “I’m ready. Come get me.”

I’d drive down to the Shoreham and insert my ‘53 Chevy into the line of limousines waiting in the hotel’s long curving driveway. One by one, the uniformed chauffeurs would step outside their elegant vehicles, stand facing the hotel’s front doors, and announce, to take the then vice president of the United States as an example, “The Honorable Hubert Humphrey.” On one occasion, I did the same, standing outside my battered vehicle in my own SNCC uniform of blue jeans and work shirt and proudly announcing, “My uncle, Arnold Aronson.”

I never got to meet any of the famous leaders of the Movement, except for one lunch at Arnie and Annette’s house with Roy Wilkins. Wilkins arrived driving a bright red sports car, an MG-TD as I recall. I was excited to meet him, but appalled that he owned what to me seemed such an expensive car. I had just come up from Arkansas, and I complained to my uncle that one of the national leaders of the Movement should be driving such a beautiful vehicle when my sisters and brothers in SNCC were risking their lives daily.

“Drop it, Cuz.” Arnie spoke firmly. “He’s earned it.”

Given how extraordinarily hard it is to build multiracial organizations even today, when we supposedly live in a more racially enlightened period than we did almost fifty years ago, how do we explain the willingness of so many whites in the Southern Civil Rights Movement to accept the leadership of African Americans? Of course, not all whites accepted that leadership. Many resented it, rejected it, challenged it, tried to exercise their white power and privilege, attempted to take over leadership.

But, that reality aside, how do we explain the participation of whites in the Southern Civil Rights Movement at all, given the historic reluctance of so many white progressives to participate in movements led by people of color? What was I doing there anyway?

Personally, I find it difficult and a little dangerous to try to explain forty-five years later why I did whatever I did way back then. The temptation to revisionism and political correctness is always there. Memory is misleading at best, even in the short term. But, whatever I said or felt at the time, here’s what I now think was really going on.

To start with, I was deeply influenced by peer pressure. Even on primarily white campuses, being involved in the Movement was a cool thing to do: picketing, marching, getting arrested (very cool), occupying buildings (really cool—I did it, I know), “going South” (the coolest of all).

I was also lucky enough to be raised by parents who were passionate about racial justice. For them it was an expression and an extension of their religious beliefs. Mom and Pop were outraged by the injustices done to African Americans in the United States, and they were outspoken about civil rights.

At the same time, Pop in particular was adamant that he and Mom were “not political” and were simply “doing what’s right.” (Unlike the parents of “Red Diaper Babies” I met for the first time in SNCC, so called because their parents were members of the Communist Party, my folks were at their most radical registered Democrats.) In going South and joining SNCC, I was doing what my parents had raised me to do, even if I terrified them by doing it.

Mom and Pop also both came from large extended families that lost heavily in the Holocaust. They understood in their gut the dangers of any authoritarian racism. While my folks never said this explicitly, the message I felt and learned clearly was, “If this can happen to Black people in the United States today, it can happen to Jews tomorrow.”

No one ever said this to me directly. But I’m convinced that emotion was absolutely there, not just in our family, but throughout the North American Jewish community. The Southern Civil Rights Movement began only fifteen years after World War II ended, partly because of the energy and anger brought back to the United States by returning African American war veterans. For Jews whose memories of the Holocaust were still bleeding wounds, the response of white racists to the Southern Civil Rights Movement must have been terrifying: the mobs, the Klan, the American Nazi Party; the dogs, guns, sneering sheriffs; the violence against children as well as adults, the burnings, the murders.

Besides, the enemies of African Americans were usually also enemies of Jews. My mother remembered how during her childhood, at the cottage in New Hampshire they rented one summer, the Klan had come and set up a burning cross on their front lawn. Frightened by the rise of right-wing racism but also proud of the resistance put up by southern Black communities, how could so many Jews not have been moved?

To be clear: My parents were careful not to confuse the level of U.S. anti-Semitism in the 1960s (real, not to be taken lightly, but not an everyday problem for most Jews) with the level of racism against African Americans (out of control, virulent, violent, deadly, an immediate daily threat and danger to every Black person). But they understood the Civil Rights Movement, not just as “their fight,” but as “our fight.”

As a creative community organizer, I am always trying to figure out people’s common self-interest, the glue that binds political organizations and movements. My own personal self-interest, as a white Jew in a movement led by African Americans, was in seeing that the systems of violent repression being used against Black people were stopped in their tracks, before they spread to me and my family. It is no accident that the overwhelming majority of the white participants in the Southern Civil Rights Movement were Jewish—estimates range from 50 percent up, at a time when Jews made up less than 3 percent of the total U.S. population.

But however much I and other Jews, as well as other whites, may have seen the Movement as “our fight, too,” it really wasn’t our fight in any immediate self-interested sense. Whites active in the Southern Civil Rights Movement were concerned with ending segregation, with strengthening democracy. Blacks were concerned with economic and physical survival, with staying alive. Only in occasional moments were whites in the Movement really threatened with physical violence: on integrated picket lines, in restaurants (but only when eating with Black coworkers or when recognized as civil rights workers), in confrontations with the law and with vigilantes. Beyond those moments, we could step back into our white skins, disappear into the anonymity and privilege of whiteness. In many cases, we were stepping back into class privilege as well. Only a few white civil rights activists came from families that shared the desperate poverty of most southern African Americans.

Thinking back forty-five years, I believe I also had a second self-interest: that of all those who dream of a better world, a more democratic society, a more just economy, who feel rightly that every injustice in some way diminishes them as well—a moral self-interest, if you will.

I inherited that dream from my mother. Mom believed passionately in the possibility of racial justice, that people of different races and ethnicities could and should work and live together, not just out of economic self-interest, but in real friendship and love. I believe she intentionally raised me to do something to help make her dream real in the world.

It’s a great inheritance—and a hard one to live up to. Given the many reasons that so many people of color and whites consistently find not to be in social or personal relationship with each other, building solidarity across this wide divide requires a set of self-interests so overwhelming that they can overcome the inertia and antagonism built up over many years. Put crassly, at least in the South, many white people and African Americans would just as soon not have to deal with each other in serious ways, and will only do so if they absolutely have to.

So you have to find the glue that will help people stick together.

In my work as a creative community organizer, I’ve seen this happen in two ways.

The first is what I think of as “defensive organizing.” In this situation, a community is confronted with a threat, often from the outside, something that could at least partly destroy that community’s quality of life: a toxic or nuclear waste dump, turkey or hog farm, slaughterhouse, prison, high-voltage power line, polluting industrial facility. To the extent that members of the community see this as a threat, they will mobilize to keep it from happening. To the extent that the community includes different racial groups, they will at least in the short run work together.

But such unity is usually short-lived. Because such situations are defensive in nature, and because the timetable is largely controlled by outside forces, things happen very quickly. The community needs to mobilize with remarkable speed if there is to be an effective opposition. So there is rarely the time and space to do the critical work of storytelling, interpersonal exploration, celebration, and discussion that can build understanding and unity across racial lines, and create a shared political understanding and agreement that is potentially transformative. Because the issue that brings community members together is limited, so is its potential. Even if an organization is founded to deal with the situation, it is not likely to survive beyond the immediate issue and campaign.

If the organization does survive, it is unlikely to have a broad political perspective, since it was originally organized around a very specific goal. It was built to stop something rather than to start something. Winning means that the community’s quality of life will not get any worse, not that it will get better.

The second situation in which I’ve seen whites willing to participate in political movements led by people of color is where there was a common and ongoing economic self-interest. That’s the glue.

I learned some of my most important lessons about the importance of finding the glue while working as a union organizer in textile mills across the South in the late 1970s. A basic principle understood by both the mill companies and the union was that African American workers were much more likely to support organizing drives than white workers. (This was before the great influx of Spanish-speaking workers into the South and the textile industry, another constituency that could be counted on to be strongly pro-union.) Generally, in a union representation election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), you could count on 80 percent to 90 percent of Black workers voting for the union.

Both labor and management had figured this out. Management’s response was to establish a de facto ceiling of about 40 percent for African Americans in the workforce—go higher and you were virtually inviting the union organizers to town. If we could get about 80 percent of the Black workers to vote for the union, we only needed about one-third of the white workers (20 percent of eligible voters) for victory.

What this also meant was that while African American workers were a minority in the plant, they were a majority within those actively working for the union. So the union organizing campaign required a coalition across racial lines. If racist and anti-union traditions among white workers were too strong, they didn’t participate and the union lost. If their desire for dignity and respect on the job, fairer treatment, better wages and working conditions was strong enough to outweigh their reasons not to be in a union with Black workers, then the union won.

These objective conditions made it easier for me to take on racial issues directly. Black workers would say to me, publicly or privately, “Look, why do we need the whites? They’re racists. They don’t really want to have anything to do with us anyway. If we start with the Black workers, focus on the issues that we care about most, like racism and discrimination, we can really mobilize and get the union in.”

I’d point out that, under U.S. labor law, you need 50 percent of the votes—and there weren’t enough Black workers in the mill to get to that number. Further, I’d say, of course we want to deal with racism and discrimination. That’s part of what the union stands for. But if we don’t make the campaign broad enough to include issues that white as well as Black workers care about, the whites won’t have any reason to want a union—which means Blacks won’t be able to get one, either.

White workers would say to me, privately or publicly, “Look, why do we need the Blacks? Most of the workers in this mill are white anyway, enough to win a union election. But they won’t join the union because they don’t want to be part of something that Black people control. You need to start with the white workers, make it clear that’s who the leaders of the union are going to be, and we can get those union cards signed like crazy. We’ve got nothing against the Blacks joining the union, but it’s just not going to work if they’re in charge.”

I’d point out that, under U.S. labor law, you need 50 percent of the votes in an NLRB-run election for the union to be certified as the bargaining agent for rank-and-file employees in that particular workplace. Because of the anti-unionism endemic to southern white mill workers since the violent failures of union organizing from the 1930s through the 1950s, white votes alone were never going to be enough in a mill that was 40 percent Black.

Furthermore, I’d say, the union is for everyone. It’s not just for Blacks and not just for whites, but for all workers. If the company discriminates against a Black worker because they’re Black, the union is going to stand up for them, just as the union is going to stand up for any worker who’s being pushed around by management. Take it or leave it. Either everyone gets a union or no one gets one.

There’s an old civil rights song that starts, “They say that freedom is a constant struggle.” This is true of all creative community organizing, and certainly of efforts that require bringing whites into organizations, campaigns, and movements led by people of color.

A delicate balancing act takes place within the organizing committee and organization. Generally, my experience is that having about two-thirds people of color and one-third white people in the room, on the committee, on the board, on the picket line works best. If there are proportionately too many white people, people of color perceive, usually correctly, that they will eventually be pushed out of leadership and power. If the number of white people drops significantly, whites will decide that this is a “Black thing” (or a Latino/Latina thing, or a South Asian thing, or a Native American thing), and not for them. It’s worth noting the irony of these dynamics: Most whites seem to think having 10 percent people of color in the room is fair representation, but that having 10 percent white people in the room means people of color have taken over.

Having a significant majority of people of color helps ensure that leadership stays in those hands. But it also makes it easier for people of color who are not in the leadership to participate. When people of color are in the majority, not just power but culture shifts. By reversing the usual ratio of participation and power in the dominant society, we open up the doors and the windows.

Perhaps because race so much defines the history and politics of the South, most southern organizers carry this consciousness with them. Among other things, southern organizers count. Ask organizers from most parts of the country what the racial balance in a meeting was and they’ll answer either “pretty good” or “pretty bad.” Ask southern organizers and they’ll give you an exact breakdown of how many people of color and how many whites were there, usually broken down by gender as well. When planning a meeting, an action, a leadership election, they’ll consciously strategize so that a good racial balance (usually meaning a people of color majority) is maintained.

For example, at Grassroots Leadership, where I’ve worked since 1980, at least two-thirds of the board members are people of color. I believe that on any racial justice issue the white members of the board would be passionate advocates and would vote for the right thing. But if the board were to split on racial lines, people of color control two-thirds of the votes. For me personally as a white founding executive director, it meant that my power could be counterbalanced and, if necessary, overruled. If whites are to play leadership roles in democratic movements, this kind of counterbalancing is both healthy and critical.

The same dynamic applies to gender. The Grassroots Leadership board consistently has at least two-thirds women on it. Again, if I were on the wrong side of a gender issue, I believe that the men on the board would vote against me. But, should some or all of them choose not to, the women have a clear enough majority to force the decision.

For all of us who want to see truly multiracial progressive democratic movements, we need to look for issues that create this possibility. Again, that’s the glue. For example, in 1996 Grassroots Leadership started organizing against the privatization of public assets in several southern states, including the growth of for-profit private prisons, in part because the transfer of public goods and services to private profit-making hands undercuts the well-being of both people of color and whites.

Over time, we focused our anti-privatization efforts on the criminal justice system. Within the broad movement against the prison-industrial complex, a movement led primarily by people of color, we carved out a specific organizational niche by creating organizing campaigns that focus on the abolition of for-profit private prisons, jails, and detention centers, including immigrant detention centers. Grassroots Leadership’s statewide studies on “Education Versus Incarceration,” which document the link between increasing public dollars for prisons and decreasing funds for higher education, are an organizing tool specifically designed to help build bridges across racial lines.

Of course, what goes around comes around. The same links and principles that make progressive democratic organizing possible can also be used to undermine and oppose progressive policies. In several local campaigns to stop for-profit private prisons from being established, we’ve sometimes been defeated by multiracial campaigns. Both Blacks and whites, desperate for jobs, have seen private (and public) prisons as their only alternative and have fought to bring them to their communities—despite being well aware that their main use would be to warehouse young men, and increasingly women, of color.

We need, then, to be sure from the beginning that not only our processes but also the policies and goals we work towards help create the possibility of multiracial unity. How, in the real world of creative community organizing, do we actually do this?

Because so few people have successful experiences in working multiracially, there is also a real lack of knowledge about what to do and how to do it. When it comes to multiracial organizations and campaigns, there’s still work to do to develop the basic tools of the trade: the checklists, the do’s and don’ts, the places to be watchful and careful, the insights and intuitions that can guide organizational work. We also lack the theories that hold these elements of practice together, that make sense of the small details of daily work, that give them unity and coherence.

If we’re really going to make a difference, we as organizers need to develop and refine theories and practices, principles and techniques that we can use to resolve differences among people of color and white people. Learning to use these principles will help us build internally strong and viable community-based organizations, which can also work together to create vibrant, creative networks and coalitions. In addition to the focus on race, special attention has to be paid to issues of gender, class, sexual orientation, and distribution of power, which in turn also affect racial dynamics.

Such a theory and practice can only be developed over time, by the combined work of many people and organizations. But it is helpful to have a number of hypotheses to test against our developing knowledge, some ideas with which we can argue, some points of departure for our action and reflection.

In this spirit, let me offer as a starting point some preliminary principles for multiracial organizing. Organizations that want to address racial conflict and to build unity across racial lines need to take these principles into account and establish, or reestablish, them internally.

An institutional as distinct from a personal commitment to racial equity that is clearly and forcefully stated

An analysis of the organization’s purposes that demonstrates convincingly that these purposes cannot be met without equity

Issues that connect both the common and the differing self-interests of people of color and white people, that are of sufficient immediacy to overcome the substantial forces working against unity

Leaders, both people of color and white people, who are personally committed to racial equity

A political will shared by all participants to enforce the structures and rules relating to equity, even under enormous pressure

Structures of both governance and administration that share and/or rotate leadership and decision-making power among people of color and white people, and which help ensure that white people must accept the leadership of people of color, not just vice versa

Equity as a clear principle in agreements on division of all other resources, including money, power, seniority, job security, access, and publicity

Internal education, aimed at both white people and people of color, that deals explicitly with both positive (equity) and negative (racism) issues

A common opposition as well as common issues: often what unites us is not only what/whom we are for, but what/whom we are against

Processes that, at all levels, demonstrate the institutional commitment to equity: how and where meetings are held, how and to whom information is circulated, how and when decisions are made

Safe spaces within which these processes can be worked through, places to meet and talk where people of color and white people feel equally comfortable and powerful— along with the recognition that no space is fully safe

Culture that is balanced among people of color and white people and that is comparably accessible to each: norms of public and private speech, food, music, humor, art, history, stories

Social occasions as well as public events in which both personal and political relations can develop

Consistency in and among principles and practices, along with the attention to detail that helps ensure their continuity

Mutuality among people of color and white people in terms of responsibility for all of these principles, practices, and processes

Perhaps it’s time to revisit the words of the old civil rights song, “Black and white together, we shall not be moved.” Maybe it’s time to be moved, to move ourselves and others, within our constituencies and across constituency/racial lines. Maybe the beloved community of which Dr. King spoke is not something we reach some day in the future, but something we experience a little bit every day while, as creative community organizers, we walk and work towards it.