A Firefighter Election: Can a Veteran of Wisconsin Uprising Rescue the IAFF?
By Steve Early
A rare contested race for president of the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) has given its members a clear choice between a union traditionalist from Boston and a progressive activist who backed massive labor protests against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker a decade ago—and then joined electoral efforts to oust the anti-union Republican.
In mail balloting already underway local union delegates are casting votes on behalf of 320,000 IAFF members throughout the U.S. and Canada. They are choosing a replacement for 75-year old Harold Schaitberger, a full-time union official for more than four decades and a longtime mover-and-shaker in national Democratic Party circles, who announced his retirement last fall. Vying to succeed him are IAFF Secretary-Treasurer Edward Kelly, a 47- year old Air Force veteran and former leader of the union’s Massachusetts branch, and Mahlon Mitchell, a 43- year old African-American from Madison, who heads the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin
Both are energetic, ambitious, and young—by US labor leader standards. But Kelly more strongly reflects the insular “old school” culture of this public sector craft union, while Mitchell, a 2016 Democratic National Convention delegate for Bernie Sanders, has favored Fire Fighter alliances with other public workers facing budget cuts or loss of their workplace rights. Advocating the latter approach put Mitchell in the national spotlight for the first time ten years ago this month. That’s when Walker, Wisconsin’s right-wing governor and the Republican dominated state legislature were pushing Act 10, a law designed to weaken public sector unions—other than those representing police and fire-fighters. Under the strong local leadership of Madison Firefighter president Joe Conway, and with Mitchell newly installed as the union’s statewide leader, the IAFF refused to be part of Walker’s divide-and-conquer strategy.
Instead, Fire Fighters united with other public workers, who were not granted any Act 10 exemption. At rallies and marches involving up to 100,100 people, the charismatic Mitchell was a frequent speaker, attired, as always in his dress uniform. “I saw first-hand his ability to bring people together and make us stronger,” says Justin Pluess, a white fire fighter from Wisconsin Rapids, a small paper mill town in the middle of the state. “His willingness to take on one of the worst union-busting governors ever helped rekindle the labor movement in Wisconsin. He made union members proud to be union again.”
When Act 10 was passed in March, 2011, despite weeks of protests and a peaceful occupation of the state Capitol building, Conway was among the trade union militants calling for a general strike, industrial action which Mitchell did not favor. But Mitchell soon became part of the Wisconsin Democratic Party’s attempt to recall Walker and his Republican Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch. In that 2012 recall vote, the governor defeated Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett by a 53 to 46 percent margin. Running for Lieutenant Governor against Kleefisch, Mitchell received more than 1,150,000 votes and lost by a closer margin than Barrett. Six years later, the Fire Fighter leader finished second in a crowded field of Democrats competing for the chance to oust Walker in the state’s 2018 general election. The primary winner, current Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, ended up driving the architect of Act 10 from office by less than 30,000 votes out of 2. 5 million cast.
A Class Speaker at Harvard
Mitchell’s current opponent, Ed Kelly advertises himself as the son, grandson, brother, nephew and cousin of fire fighters, in a union where family connections count for a lot. In 1997, he joined the Boston Fire Department, which has been described as the city’s “whitest public safety agency,” despite its now majority minority population. Four years later, Kelly was among the hundreds of out-of-town fire-fighters dispatched to the World Trade Center site in Manhattan after the 9/11 attacks. Kelly was also a first responder to the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. He was elected president of the IAFF’s Boston local, then its 12,000-member state federation, on whose behalf he did legislative lobbying. In 2015, his union sent “Edzo,” as he’s known, to the prestigious Harvard Trade Union Program, where fellow students chose him to be their class speaker.
Kelly’s dedication to fellow veterans has led, however, to controversial political endorsements and hiring decisions. Last year, in the Bay State, he helped arrange Fire Fighter backing for a former police officer and two-time Trump supporter running for state rep on Cape Cod. West Barnstable, Mass. Republican Steven Xiarhos, who lost a son in Afghanistan, defeated Jim Dever, a labor-backed Democrat who works for NAGE/SEIU, one the state’s larger public employee unions. A Massachusetts labor leader calls that IAFF intervention “a disaster” and describes Kelly as someone who has “gotten a break-and-a-half just to end up where he is now in the union.” After his election as IAFF Secretary-Treasurer in 2016, Kelly hired former Green Beret major Matt Golsteyn, who served with his brother in Afghanistan. A month later, Golsteyn admitted to committing a war crime during a Fox News interview and was charged with murder by the Army. This made him a conservative cause celebre and candidate for White House clemency. In late 2019, Trump pardoned Golsteyn, who then joined the president onstage at a Florida fundraiser that generated $3.5 million for Republican re-election efforts. This was eight months after the IAFF, under Schaitberger’s leadership, had made an early endorsement of Joe Biden’s candidacy. Golsteyn remains at his $236,000 a year union headquarters post as Kelly’s chief of operations.
Kelly’s relationship with Schaitberger worsened last year due to his own covert maneuvering to replace the IAFF president when his term of office ended this winter. Conservative news outlets like The Free Beacon and Wall Street Journal ran embarrassing articles about Schaitberger’s pension benefits and handling of union funds, based on records obtained from Kelly’s office. In an interview with the Intercept, Brian Rice, president of the California Professional Firefighters, described these leaks as a “a veiled coup, a power struggle, aimed at the IAFF leadership,” which threatened to tarnish its organizational reputation. To Kelly critics, like Bryan Jeffries, head of the Professional Fire Fighters of Arizona, they also seemed to be the work of “some very right-leaning elements within our union.” Instead of running for re-election, Schaitberger decided to retire, leaving the field open for a contested race for the union’s top job, which pays $371,000 a year, five or six times more than the average fire-fighter earns.
Local Endorsements
Because of the pandemic, the IAFF held a virtual convention in late January, which enabled many more of its small locals to participate. About 70% of all IAFF affiliates have fewer than 50 members, but the union’s internal politics tend to be dominated by its bigger city locals. The 3,323 delegates now casting weighted ballots, based on their local’s membership size, have been wooed on-line and in person by both the Kelly and Mitchell campaigns. Neither candidate has been endorsed by a majority of IAFF locals. Kelly has his strongest support in his native northeast, although after union officials in Philadelphia endorsed him without sufficient rank-and-file in-put, angry members forced a re-vote which revealed nearly equal support for the two candidates. In northern California, Mitchell is backed by the 30,000-member state Fire Fighters organization, plus San Francisco Local 798, Oakland Local 55, and other IAFF affiliates in Berkeley, Hayward, Milpitas, San Jose, and Sacramento.
Both candidates have campaign websites showcasing their latest endorsement videos. But Mitchell has twice as many Facebook followers as Kelly, and he posts links to substantive discussions, conducted via Zoom, with rank-and-filers around the country. Kelly has rejected Mitchell’s repeated demand for a “face-to-face” debate—despite no shortage of issues to discuss. While fire fighters have won good pay and benefits in parts of the country with strong public sector bargaining laws, those working in some “right-to-work” states lag far behind. Many are able to retire early but then lack affordable pre-Medicare age health coverage. As the New York Times reported recently, “the safety of firefighters has become an urgent concern amid the worsening effects of climate change, which bring rising temperatures that prime the nation for increasingly devastating fires.” Adding to that threat is on-the-job exposure to carcinogenic chemicals in the protective equipment that firefighters have worn for years; in 2019, cancer caused 75 percent of all active duty firefighter deaths. During his campaign, Mitchell has made such occupational hazards and better mental health coverage a major focus. And, his backers believe, he will be a far better strategist in the union’s upcoming fight to protect fire services from a cascade of Covid-19 related state and local budget cuts.
A Toxic Workplace?
While some Mitchell supporters rate the contest as “neck and neck,” the candidate representing greater diversity and change is competing on tough electoral terrain. The workforce represented by the IAFF is more predominantly white and male than the U.S. military and even local police forces. Fewer than 8 percent of all U.S. fire fighters are African-American and few have risen, like Mitchell, to leadership positions. Even in Canada, where the IAFF has 23,000 members, an increasingly diverse city like Calgary (which has a Muslim mayor) has few women firefighters and its black or indigenous ones have been subjected to years of hazing, harassment, and racial slurs.
Although the IAFF backed Biden last year and Hillary Clinton in 2016, one official from another union who spoke at a Fire Fighters national convention just a few years ago was warned beforehand that his audience was heavily Republican. When Mitchell himself addressed IAFF convention delegates, during his 2018 bid to become Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial nominee, he criticized his home-state for having the highest African-American incarceration rate in the country. It was not a big applause line before a largely white crowd otherwise sympathetic to his political advocacy for the union and its job-related causes.
One IAFF member who’s definitely rooting for Mahlon Mitchell, when the ballots are counted on March 4, is Andrea Hall. She’s the first-ever African-American female fire captain from Fulton County, Georgia, who now serves as president of IAFF Local 3920. On January 20, she impressed millions of U.S. presidential inauguration viewers by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, while providing her own American Sign Language version while she spoke. Similar dexterity, in addressing multiple audiences, has been a key part of Mitchell’s own past success as a IAFF trail-blazer. It remains to be seen whether it will get him to the top of the union ladder this time around.
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“A fascinating fight for a man’s place in our time”
By Ousmane Power-Greene
Book Review
Jeffrey B. Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883 – 1918. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
Jeffrey B. Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1918-1926. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020.
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As black socialist Frank Crosswaith once wrote, “The story of the New Negro’s fascinating fight for a man’s place in our time is the story of Hubert H. Harrison. And when the impartial historian writes the history of the black man’s bid for a square deal, he will be building, with the written word, a monument to Dr. Harrison which will stand for all time as a symbol of inspiration to the men and women of the Negro race as they move forward to positions of power, prestige and pride.” With the publication of Jeffrey Perry’s groundbreaking two-volume biography, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism (2008) and Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality(2020), scholars, activists, and community organizers have a study of the life and ideas of one of the most important black radical intellectuals of the twentieth century. For over forty years, Jeffrey Perry has been researching and writing about Hubert H. Harrison despite his marginalization among those scholars who research the New Negro movement or “Harlem Renaissance”. Thus, readers have only a glimpse of Harrison’s importance in works, such as Phillip S. Foner’s classic, American Socialism and Black Americans: From the Age of Jackson to World War II and Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Twentieth-Century America. Since 2000, however, Harrison’s writings and speeches have appeared in edited collections, such as Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Gene Andrew Jarrett, The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892-1938 (2007).
Simply put, Perry’s Hubert Harrison demonstrates Harrison is the key link between early twentieth century black radicalism and the Marxist tradition that shaped the ideological vision of leaders, such as Marcus Garvey and A. Philip Randolph.
“Harrison’s public criticism of Booker T. Washington brought the Wizard of Tuskegee, as Washington was known then, to use his influence to have Harrison fired from his job”
Born in 1883, Hubert Harrison immigrated to America from the Caribbean island of St. Croix as a seventeen-year-old orphan in 1900. Without much evidence about Harrison’s early life, Perry provides a thorough examination of the key events in the Danish Caribbean that influenced the young Harrison to leave his home for the United States. When Harrison arrived in New York in 1900, he entered a city where blacks were limited to menial jobs and lived in the worst tenements. The oppressive conditions blacks endured in Manhattan did not discourage Harrison, and he soon found his way to the lyceums at St. Benedict’s and St. Mark’s where he met other black working-class intellectuals such as John Bruce, a lay historian and journalist, and Arthur Schomburg, the legendary bibliophile and collector of African artifacts. Within this context, Harrison refined his oratory skills by overcoming a lisp and developed his ideas about the role of race and class in American history.
Eager to earn a living through his writings, Harrison published book reviews in newspapers, such as the New York Times, making him one of the earliest African Americans to do so. While Harrison’s intellectual gifts were apparent in his book reviews and lectures, he struggled to earn a decent living from his writings, and this forced him to seek other means to support himself. Harrison took a position as a postal worker in 1907, and Perry explains that such role was one of the best paying jobs for African Americans at that time. By linking up with fellow postal workers, Harrison joined a study circle to discuss, among other things, the challenges black people faced in New York City and the nation. In this context, Harrison found a satisfying space to develop his ideas and share his own historical work on the Reconstruction era, which he hoped to have published.
Harrison’s companionship with other black postal workers would end, however, when Harrison’s public criticism of Booker T. Washington brought the Wizard of Tuskegee, as Washington was known then, to use his influence to have Harrison fired from his job at the Post Office. As Perry recounts in startling detail, Harrison was fired for writing several letters to local papers that criticized Booker T. Washington’s statements abroad, which Harrison believed had downplayed African Americans’ plight in the United States. On the surface, it would appear that Harrison’s removal was a consequence of complaints he had made over an unjustified reduction of his salary, but, as Perry proves, Booker T. Washington’s friend Charles W. Anderson bragged about how he orchestrated Harrison’s termination in a letter to Washington in September 1911. By the end of the month, Harrison would be removed from his position at the Post Office, and this would cause turmoil for Harrison’s family, forcing him into poverty.
Although losing his job at the post office caused his family financial hardship, Harrison used this bleak circumstance to pursue full-time employment with the Socialist Party as a lecturer. Although there is tremendous uncertainty surrounding the date when Harrison actually joined the Socialist Party, Perry argues that it most likely happened in 1911 after he was fired from the Post Office. Between 1911 and 1912, Harrison became “Local New York’s foremost Black speaker, its leading Black organizer and theoretician, and the head of the Colored Socialist Club,” according to Perry (173). Yet, Harrison’s efforts to recruit more blacks into the Socialist Party were challenged, as Perry explains, by “conservative party leaders” who at the local and national level failed to adequately deal with the question of how to bring black people en masse into the Socialist Party, while changing white supremacist attitudes rampant among many of its members.
“We say Race First, because you have all along insisted on Race First and class after when you didn’t need our help.”
By the end of 1912, Harrison had gravitated toward the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) brand of socialism. Yet, when the Socialist Party rejected the IWW’s advocacy of a more militant politics, Harrison found himself, once again, at odds with party heads. In fact, Perry writes that, “Harrison found that support of his work by leadership of Local New York was waning,” (175) and this has been linked to W.E.B. Du Bois’s vocal criticism of Harrison’s quest to form socialist branches within predominately black New York communities. This ideological riff with those who supported Du Bois’s position would soon drive Harrison from the Socialist Party.
The specific circumstances surrounding Harrison’s departure from the Socialist Party surrounded his negative response to an Executive Committee command for him to forgo a debate with a well-known anti-socialist speaker named Frank Urban. Perry writes that “the ideological break, followed by the suspension, marked a major turning point” in Harrison’s life. Yet, this re-orientation away from the Socialist Party did not mean that Harrison renounced socialism, and Harrison continued to view himself as a socialist throughout his life.
Perry points out that Harrison’s break from the Socialist Party led him to focus on organizing African Americans in opposition to race-based oppression in the United States and abroad. Harrison’s shift from a “class first” position to “race first” position was distinct for this time period. In his oft-cited essay, “Race First versus Class First” Harrison explained: “We can respect the Socialists of Scandinavia, France, Germany or England on their record. But your record so far does not entitle you to the respect of those of us who can see all around a subject. We say Race First, because you have all along insisted on Race First and class after when you didn’t need our help.”[1] By 1915 he would become one of the leading New Negro radicals, coining the phrase “Race First,” and emerging as its most influential and visible leaders.
Over the next three years, Harrison provided black Harlemites with an unfettered voice that called out all who opposed militant action against racism in the court of public opinion. Harrison’s outdoor lectures established him as one of the most visible public orators, who, as his contemporaries pointed out, had earned near icon status for his “encyclopedic” grasp of a wide variety of social, political, and scientific topics. Those who listened to his soap box orations walked away enlightened, humored, and aware of a new strain of race radicalism that sought to include the masses, rather than a talented tenth, in the struggle for civil rights, political power, and economic independence.
In 1917, Harrison founded the Liberty League of Negro Americans and became the editor of its organ, The Voice. This organization was the first of its kind in Harlem, and Harrison used mass meetings and editorials in The Voice to call for “equal justice before the law and equal opportunity” regardless whether or not such demands bumped up against the social norms or powerful leaders. One of the organization’s central aims was to “Stop Lynching and Disenfranchisement in the Land Which We Love and Make the South ‘Safe For Democracy’” (282). The Liberty League boasted a broad array of African Americans from various backgrounds, political affiliations, and class positions. Several of the Liberty League’s most notable members were Marcus Garvey, Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr., and Madame C. J. Walker.
By 1918, Harrison’s influence had extended beyond Harlem and into a national arena. The Boston-based newspaper editor and racial agitator William Monroe Trotter (also a member of the Liberty League) found in Harrison an able ally in the struggle against white supremacy in America and throughout the world. Jeffrey Perry illustrates Harrison’s rise to national prominence through his role at the Liberty Congress in Washington, D.C. in June 1918. Attended by 115 delegates from 35 states, the Liberty Congress, as Perry explains, “was a precursor to the March on Washington Movement during World War II (led by A. Philip Randolph) and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom during the Vietnam War (led by Randolph and Martin Luther King, Jr.) (381). Those in attendance called on lawmakers to make lynching a federal crime, to enforce the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and to compel the President and Congress to recognize the link between justifications for U.S. involvement in the war in slogans, such as “to make the world safe for democracy,” and the just treatment of African Americans who endured race riots, lynching, and discrimination. Having been nominated unanimously as president of the congress, Harrison now had a national constituency, and he used his platform to challenge the leadership of other African Americans, such as Du Bois’s whose “Close the Ranks” editorial in The Crisis magazine called for patriotism during the height of racist mob violence against black people in cities throughout the nation.
“With more wit and wisdom than Marcus Garvey, and deeper roots in the black community than Alain Locke, Harrison straddled white leftist intellectual circles and black radical street corner politics in ways that were unmatched by his contemporaries.”
Through Perry’s prodigious research we have a portrait of a committed man, unwavering in his struggle to eradicate racial prejudice in America and abroad, who provided others with a theory for race advancement in his time and for future generations. There were three pillars of Harrison’s efforts: First, a race consciousness rooted in a class consciousness that depended on community engagement. Second, the central role the black intellectual and critic in shaping the way black and white people interpreted literature and culture. Finally, a program, based in black communities, that approached the struggle for racial justice through an international lens. Perry not only documents in careful detail Harrison’s effort towards these ends, he shows the ways Harrison’s visibility within the Harlem community broadened his base of supporters.
With more wit and wisdom than Marcus Garvey, and deeper roots in the black community than Alain Locke, Harrison straddled white leftist intellectual circles and black radical street corner politics in ways that were unmatched by his contemporaries. Although A. Phillip Randolph, and Marcus Garvey had been known to criticize nearly all black rivals, these two giants of black nationalism and labor radicalism never committed one printed word of condemnation toward Harrison. Beyond activists, Harrison also earned the respect of white critics H.L. Mencken, playwright Eugene O’Neil, and black poets and artists often associated with the “Harlem Renaissance,” such as Claude McKay, Augusta Savage, and the actor Charles Gilpin.
Jeffrey Perry’s biography shows that Harrison was no closet intellectual, fomenting self-indulgent ramblings about racial injustice, the oppressive nature of capitalism, or the failure of the American dream. Always a man of the people, Harrison was in fact the consummate public intellectual, and for much of his life, as Perry explains, he remained dedicated to advocating in behalf of those who lacked power not for his personal benefit, but for the broader public good. As a public intellectual for and among poor black people, Harrison’s life has much to teach us about the dignity of working on behalf of those without jobs, political clout, or formal education. Whether lecturing on a Wall Street corner, or in Harlem, Harrison used his extraordinary intellectual gift to encourage those less educated to join in the conversation, to become informed, to be free thinkers, to agitate for rights, to stand up to so-called leaders and demand more. He called on those with power and influence to put aside pettiness, and to unite for a common cause.
Perry’s primary accomplishment, then, is that he presents readers with a thorough rendering of the Harrison’s life within a community of black and white activists intellectuals, striving to organize toward race and class equality. Not only does Perry’s biography chronicle Harrison’s efforts, it also places Harrison squarely within the major Progressive movements and New Negro Movement in the early twentieth century. Harrison’s broad array of admirers, from opposing political camps and various intellectual persuasions, attests to Harrison’s significance, and, indeed, as Perry shows in this excellent biography, his commitment to the struggle for equality made him the voice of Harlem radicalism.
Over the past five years, several other biographies of central figures of the early twentieth century, most notably Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro, The Life of Alain Locke (2018) and Kerri Greenidge, Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter (2019), have provided greater attention to figures who dominated the era often identified as the “Harlem Renaissance” or “New Negro Renaissance.” For this reason, Jeffrey Perry’s two-volume biography fits squarely within the context of revived interest in early black radicalism on the one hand and art, literature, and intellectualism on the other hand. Yet, Perry’s biographical treatment shows Harrison’s centrality within, and among, radicals, artists, intellectuals, who have come to understand this monumental Afro-American, Afro-Caribbean radical intellectual.
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[1] Hubert Henry Harrison, When Africa Awakes, Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1997), 81.
Remembering Frank Soracco
By Mike Miller
Frank Soracco was a friend of mine. He died from heart failure at the end of 2020. We met during my late 1962 to end of 1966 days as Bay Area regional representative for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
In 1964, Frank, son of a Placerville, CA, Republican doctor, a high school teacher and football coach, showed up at our “Snick” office to volunteer. For a couple of months, he participated in fund-raising, education about the Deep South civil rights movement, political pressure on the Federal Government, and volunteer recruitment activities. By the Fall, as had happened to me the year before, the compelling drama of what was happening in the South drew Frank to go. He packed his VW Bug and headed for Selma, Alabama. He participated in door-to-door canvassing to convince local people to attempt to register to vote—which in those days could lead to firing, eviction, denial of loan applications, home firebombing, beating and death. Frank earned the trust of local people and SNCC staff.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was invited by the local Dallas County Black political/citizenship organization to come to Selma. That caused resentment among SNCC people; Frank wasn’t one of them. He fully participated with SCLC in the organizing work for the important Selma marches. Those marches, the largely SNCC-organized Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s challenge to the 1964 Democratic Party Convention seating of its racist Mississippi state party, and challenge to the January, 1965, Congressional seating of the State’s racist House delegation, led to passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
There were several marches, some accompanied by police violence, others protected by a federal presence. Frank was so respected by that time that he was named co-marshal for the marches with SNCC’s Ivanhoe Donaldson.
During the violence of “Bloody Sunday” march Frank was attacked with cattle prods and billy-clubs as he ran from the police. He came upon Rachel West, a local nine-year-old frozen in place and crying, swept her up in one arm, like he was picking up a football, and rescued her.
She later wrote her story in Selma, Lord, Selma, which became a Disney film, and was interviewed by the producers of Eyes on the Prize, the classic PBS documentary on the period: “If he hadn’t grabbed me,” she said, “I don’t think I’d be here today.”
On one occasion Frank was arrested by Selma police and thrown in jail with Martin Luther King. Therein lies an illustration of Frank’s character.
It is important to know that the law enforcement mix in Selma included Police Chief Wilson Baker, intent on avoiding the kind of violence erupting elsewhere in police encounters with civil rights activity and convinced it was the strategic way to kill “The Movement”, and the brutality (baton beatings, intimidation with police horses, use of cattle prods) of County Sheriff Jim Clark and State Trooper Director Al Lingo.
Recognizing their differences, Frank started talking with Baker, hoping to develop some kind of relationship with him that might help civil rights. Frank was one of the most relational people I’ve ever known, so this was not out of character.
Frank, Martin Luther King and hundreds of others were arrested because they violated a local law requiring permits for public marches. Baker put Frank in a cell with King; that was illegal. Like everything else in Alabama, jails were segregated. I thought a lot about that incident. The only thing that explains it is that Baker knew Frank would be badly beaten in the white cell and didn’t want that to happen.
About 20 years later, when Taylor Branch was working on Pillar of Fire, the second volume of his important trilogy The King Years, he interviewed Frank, and asked him who he might talk with to get a Selma white’s view of those times. Frank proposed Baker’s widow, set up the interview and accompanied Branch to meet her. That’s the kind of person Frank was.
Frank left SNCC in the mid-1960s, moved to Los Angeles, used his SNCC organizing skills and contacts with “friends of SNCC” to raise the startup money for what became the successful Marina Del Rey restaurant, The Fiasco. He built a small apartment underneath the restaurant where he hosted SNCC and other friends who traveled to LA, often with free meals upstairs for people far less financially successful (me among them) than he had become.
He was a generous donor to ORGANIZE Training Center, the nonprofit I direct.
Frank made the world a better place.
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“A Shave and a Haircut”, A User’s Guide to Door Knocking
By Nelson Perez-Olney
Last year I spent two weeks canvassing in the general election in Arizona and another three weeks canvassing in the Georgia Senate run-off election.
I’d canvassed before for local candidates in the San Francisco bay area, but never for more than a few hours maybe one, two Saturdays out of the year. On those more local campaigns the only thing I can really say I learned is that most of the time when you canvass people are not home.
But if you canvass every day for weeks at a time, you soon come to realize that there is more to it than knocking on doors that probably won’t open, dropping a flyer and moving on. You will have conversations with voters, far more than you might expect. You will have tense encounters with people who don’t want you in their neighborhood. You will probably get lost down unfamiliar streets. You will get caught in the rain. You will have someone threaten to call the cops on you.
I’m no expert on political campaigns or messaging or the strategic decisions that go into figuring out a ground game. But I have walked plenty of doors and definitely gotten into the nitty gritty of getting out the vote. I’ve seen how powerful talking to a voter face to face can be and how important it is to reach out to people in person. I worry that too many of us think a campaign can be won on advertising and the power of a sound political platform alone. That if people hear a candidate say the right things and seem competent that will be enough to send them to the polls. But often it’s much smaller things that keep people from voting for candidates. Sometimes they need practical information like where their polling place is or how they can register for an absentee ballot. Sometimes they don’t realize that just because they’re a felon doesn’t mean they can’t vote. Sometimes they just need someone to remind them every day that they are planning to go early vote this Friday, at 4pm, at the church on Greyson highway, and that their sister will be watching their kids while they vote. Sometimes they don’t realize that today is the last day to vote and they only have 2 hours left to cast their ballot! And sometimes they just need to see that someone has come from thousands of miles away to knock on their door and personally ask them to make sure they cast their vote because both of their futures hang in the balance.
So I’d like to share a few tips for new canvassers or people who have never done it before. I hope that in reading them you will get a glimpse of what political canvassing is really like and be inspired to give it a try.
The Door Knocker’s Tip Guide
First and foremost, understand why this election, this candidate, this issue is so important to you.Maybe it’s because your brother lost his health insurance and is worried about what will happen to him if he’s hospitalized with COVID, or any unforeseen event. Maybe someone in your family needs to be paid more than our paltry excuse for a minimum wage. Maybe you’re afraid that when your kids think about going to college the thought of high student debt keeps them away. Whatever your reason, keep it close to your heart. Not only will it give you the motivation and courage you need to walk for 6 hours a day, 7 days a week, talking to total strangers whose reactions to your politics you cannot predict, but your reasons are a reflection of your humanity. If you present your humanity to the person in front of you, they are far more likely to engage with you and feel solidarity.
Spend more time studying the ins and outs of voting than candidate platforms. You want to be an expert at helping people vote. Learn the voting schedule in the state you’re canvassing. Learn how to find polling places and how to register for absentee ballots. Learn how a properly filled out absentee ballot looks, where it has to be signed, how much postage it needs. Learn how to track the status of a ballot. Find out how to get a voter to the polls if they have a disability. The majority of the people you talk to are going to want to talk logistics, not politics.
Learn to use your cell phone. For those of you who haven’t canvassed since the days of paper voter sheets, you will probably be rather intimidated by the new programs being used today to track conversations with voters. You might be frustrated at first, wondering who in their right mind would think flipping back and forth between different apps is easier than a simple clipboard and pencil. But cell phones offer far more tools for the modern canvasser than sheets and sheets of paper. They streamline access to voting information, to maps, to vote tracking websites. Information you can pass directly to the voter by texting or emailing them on the spot. It’s hard enough to have a natural conversation. Don’t add fumbling around with loose papers to the mix. Which leads me to…
Backpacks. Carry one. Have your water, your hat, your sweater, your extra literature neatly stored where it won’t get in the way of your hands. The fuller your arms are the less relaxed you will betalking to a voter. I encouraged newer canvassers to assume a posture at the doors that makes you feel confident and empowered. Having your hands free while you talk helps you seem human and less like a dispassionate salesman.
Ignore no soliciting signs. People seem to forget they put those in their windows and rarely give you grief for ringing their doorbell.
Study your script. The script you are handed on your first day is a wonderful outline of all the key points you need to go over with a voter. Have they voted? Who are they voting for? Do they know their polling location, or do they plan to submit an absentee ballot? What’s their plan for getting to the polls (date, time, method of transportation)? You might walk away from a door thinking you had a great conversation with a voter about when and where they plan to vote, only to realize you forgot to ask if they were even supporting your candidates. The script will tell you every question you need to ask.
Ditch your script. Its awkward. It’s wordy. It’s probably not how you normally talk. If you try to recite your script, you’ll probably get tongue tied. If you try to read your script (even worse than reciting) you will come off as cold and impersonal, unenthusiastic. Also, its inflexible. If you’re relying on the script only to find that your voter is deviating wildly from it, you’re going to have some really awkward conversations if you try to stick to canned lines. Make the script your own. Think about what information it seeks and put that in your own words. Be flexible. Canvassing is about connection. Connection is about conversations. Good conversations are never scripted.
Gated communities are not inaccessible. Drive in after another car. Walk in when someone opens the gate walking out. Just make sure you have your team lead on speed dial. It’s possible someone might try to get you kicked out, but sometimes they can be talked down. I had a very pleasant conversation with a security guard while his boss argued with my supervisor about my right to be there. In the end he bid me good day and drove off. We’d share a friendly wave whenever we passed as I continued to canvass his residents.
Knock that door. Don’t tap. Give it a good rap with your knuckles, or else use a hard object that won’t damage their door. Houses are big and a timid tap could easily get lost beneath the sounds of the washing machine or kids playing. Ring the bell too. I mean, you want them to know you’re there, don’t you? Also, instead of three solid knocks equally spaced, try a “shave and a haircut”. You don’t want people thinking you’re the cops.
Your voter is not their demographics. Don’t assume because your voter is Black or Latino that they’ll vote Democrat. Don’t get freaked out that you’re probably talking to a Trump supporter because your voter is a fifty-year-old white male with a pickup truck in the driveway. Let the voter speak for themselves and try not to be surprised by what they say. You’ll get better at this the more doors you knock.
Be excited. If you positively ID your voter as supporting your candidates, celebrate right then and there. I like to dance a little, or else raise my fists in victory, which usually brought a smile to the voter’s lips. If you’re having fun, the voter will have fun and will probably be more willing to plan their trip to the polls with you.
Compliment voters on their dogs, their Christmas or Halloween decorations, or the giant gong they have instead of a doorbell. If you like Star Wars and the voter has an R2D2 t-shirt on ask them whether they thought “The Last Jedi” made any sense. It’ll help you find common ground and relax.
Don’t give the voter an out. If you ask, “Can you spare a moment to talk about voting,” they’ll say “No, I’m busy,” or now isn’t a good time. Instead ask “Have you voted for (whoever/whatever you are working for) yet?” Don’t ask “can I have your phone number to follow up with you on your vote plan?” Instead say “I’m going to text you the voting plan we just discussed. What’s your phone number?”
Don’t get stuck talking to undecided voters. Ask them to share what’s important to them and what their concerns are. Make a connection on those concerns. Share similar concerns of your own and say why you support progressive candidates and a progressive agenda to address those concerns. But don’t spend too long with them. If you spend half an hour with an undecided only to have them not shift at all, you could very well have wasted your time. You have other voters to talk to who will be more committed to your candidates but who could use a little help finding their polling place or navigating a specific impediment to voting. Let the undecided mull over your discussion. Let them think about what it meant that you came to their door. Get their phone number. Text them later when you have time. Keep the connection alive. But don’t wait around for them to change their mind.
Get the voter’s phone number. This may seem like a very bold ask, but it’s very important. If you text a voter reminders about a specific vote plan you discussed together, they will be less likely to forget to vote on the appointed day. Voters are busy people. Be a helpful reminder. And if they need help with something in the future, like figuring out why their absentee ballot hasn’t arrived yet, or needing to know what form of ID to bring to the polls, you can be an easy point of contact for them. Also, if you have their number you can create accountability. Tell them to send you a selfie with their “I voted” sticker. Or a shot of their entire family going to the polls. Or they can send a pic of themselves putting their absentee ballot in the mailbox. I know, it seems crazy, but it’s actually pretty effective and voters seem to enjoy it. Who doesn’t like sharing an awesome selfie? Plus, it’ll give you a boost to see people proudly following through on their promise to vote.
Don’t argue with voters. If the person is spouting QAnon theories you should thank them for their time and walk away.
Take time to regroup and breath if you had a tough door. Give yourself time to rest. You don’t have to be a perfect canvasser all the time. And don’t carry the bad door with you to the next door. The only people who know you messed up are you and the last voter. Each new door is a chance for a new first impression.
Always remember that canvassing is really hard work. You may knock eighty doors in a day, talk to only twenty people, fifteen of whom actually support your candidates, five of which have already voted, another five of which aren’t willing to tell you more than that they support your candidates. If among those last five you’re able to have inspiring conversations, help folks find their polling place, or create vote plans then you’ve had a pretty good day. This work is about getting votes one by one. Your job is to add a few drops a day to the growing wave.
…
For hope, look South
By Nelson Perez-Olney
Photo: Robert Gumpert
A few years ago I went south on a whim, booking a plane ticket to Dallas and a return flight from Atlanta, giving myself two weeks to make my way across a part of the country I’d never visited before. I rode the Greyhound across the rolling hills of Texas, the forested highways of Tennessee, the moonlit interstates in Georgia. Along the way my trip gained purpose and meaning. What started as a vague stirring to see the lands indelibly branded SLAVE STATES became a solid plan to visit as many monuments and museums documenting a struggle (past and present) for the soul of the United States. Maybe it’s a California boy’s prejudice, but down there I could not but feel as if the ghosts of that struggle were to be found around the next street corner, behind the trees and veils of Spanish moss. Nowhere else has that history felt more alive to me.
Our country was reckoning very publicly once again with police violence against African Americans. Efforts to remove the confederate flag from state buildings and debates on tearing down confederate monuments were in full swing. The day before I arrived in Dallas, five police officers were killed by a sniper during a peaceful protest against the killing of Alton Sterling. I arrived in New Orleans the day after protesters spray painted “Justice 4 Alton Sterling” across the base of a monument dedicated to Robert E Lee.
Here was the land where the seeds of racism and oppression were so deeply sewn and where they manifested in their most horrific forms. Here a building where slaves were held before being sold. Here the stop where Rosa Parks boarded a bus in Montgomery. Here the plantations that grew rich off slave labor. And here Fort Sumter, the first battle ground of the civil war.
Here was the motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed.
Even the very busses I rode had their own story to tell, having once ferried freedom riders towards angry crowds and roadside terrorism.
Surrounded by so much evidence of oppression, past and present, it’s easy for those of us not from there to feel like the South will forever be backwards. Forever be that massive red block at the bottom of the map, intractable in its conservatism, an anchor dragging along the ocean floor. A place unworthy of hope.
Four years later I returned, this time for the Georgia Senate runoff election.
And just like last time I came without really thinking much about the greater significance of where I was and why I was there. I thought only of the race’s political importance in the present. I’d gone to Arizona to campaign for Biden in October and I wanted to complete the victory with a win in Georgia. I wanted a democratic agenda to have a fighting chance in Congress.
What came to me later was what the election represented in the arc of American and especially southern history.
On Christmas Day I met a fellow volunteer canvasser in Selma, Alabama and together we walked across the Edmund Pettus bridge. Here, in 1965, marchers including the late John Lewis were beaten and tear gassed by local police while protesting the exclusion of blacks from the polls. It seemed a fitting pilgrimage for those of us who had come all the way to Georgia to join in the long fight against voter suppression.
On New Year’s Day we had the privilege of a private visit to the legacy museum in Montgomery, Alabama, only a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Atlanta. The museum is built into a warehouse that once held slaves. And though tiny it is packed with an overwhelming and stunning display of the ways in which this country did and does wrong by millions of its people. From slavery to mass incarceration the museum documents how the oppression of blacks has evolved over the centuries. And of course, it spends considerable time recounting the terrorism used to keep blacks from exercising their civil rights, voting.
Not far from the museum is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a haunting tribute built for the over 4400 African Americans lynched to preserve white supremacy. Metal blocks etched with the names of the murdered and the counties in which they were killed hang from the ceiling, grim stand ins for brutalized bodies. On the walls are some of the “crimes” committed by the dead: filing a lawsuit against local whites, being the relative of someone the lynchers were looking for, not addressing whites with the right words.
Voting
This month two Democrats won the Senate seats in Georgia, their campaigns triumphing over a runoff system designed to favor white segregationists, the purging of voter rolls that disproportionately affected the black community, stringent voter ID and signature match laws, the closing of polling places in Democrat leaning counties, and onerous barriers to voting for the formerly incarcerated. It took record turnout and continuous voter registration drives. It took lawsuits against voter purging. It took years of coalition building between many different communities. It took favorable demographic shifts. It took a failed gubernatorial campaign. It took what felt like the entire ground game of the general election descending on one state. It took voters waiting in dauntingly long lines to cast their ballots. It took every last ounce of patience from an electorate who’d had their doorbells rung and phones called multiple times a day for months and months and months as Stacey Abrams encouraged canvassers to “irritate the dickens out of them.”
In short it took maximum effort and commitment on the part of grassroots organizations, campaigns, volunteers and voters alike. They weren’t just fighting against Loeffler and Purdue, Kemp and Trump, they were fighting the segregationists of the mid-twentieth century, the white mobs of Jim Crow. The legacies of the Civil War and the system of slavery it sought to end.
Georgia On My Mind
Photo: Robert Gumpert
So here is the tonic for those who despair of overcoming the weight of that history. Yes, the South is the land of the Confederacy, of slavery and Jim Crow. Home to some of the most egregious acts of oppression ever committed. But that legacy belongs to all of the United States. Every part of this country, north south east and west, owes its origin and wealth to our “peculiar institution” as well as other less notorious programs of government sanctioned/ignored exploitation and murder of the poor, immigrants, women. But growing up many (perhaps most) of us learned to identify the South as the repository of all blame. A place we can dismiss with a wave of our “clean” hands. Somewhere we can mark on the map and say, “here there be backwards, unreasonable people.”
Yet in doing so we also dismiss the effort it took to bring the South to this moment. We dismiss the courageous resistance people mounted in the face of the segregation juggernaut. We dismiss the sit-ins, and marches, and court battles, the voter registration drives and public disobedience. We dismiss the planning and organization and face to face conversations and human connection. Georgia remembered those lessons. Georgia acted on those lessons, and when many northern states failed to reject Trump, Georgia did.
And then did it again.
The joy of this victory is tempered by the reality that all it delivers is some breathing room for Joe Biden. It is hardly the foundation for a strong, progressive agenda. But it is instructive for those of us on the Left who have mostly stayed out of the political and activist fray. In a year where the blue wave predicted by pollsters and demographics failed to manifest, Georgia offers a vision of how to turn polling numbers into votes.
For hope, look south.
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The Face of the Insurrection
By Harris Gruman
Following coverage of the storming of the Capitol, I was transported back to a summer day in 2016. There I confronted the face of what is now being called a mob, a riot, an insurrection. During the dark days of the Trump presidency, I recalled this encounter over and over. Even as it haunted me as a worst-case scenario of alienated extremism, it provided a glimmer of hope.
It was in Utah, between visits to National Parks. I was in a laundromat at 1:30 on a weekday afternoon, washing our hiking clothes – a weird time to be in an empty laundromat in a mangy strip mall along the highway that ran through town, but that’s travelling. Empty, that is, until an athletic young man came in with a basket of what looked like mostly toddler’s clothing.
He was angry, banging things around, mumbling irritably. Not the most comforting companion, but I kept reading my paper.
Then he began speaking for my benefit. He was on a political tirade about that [B-word] Hillary Clinton and our [N-word] president. I now saw him clearly, close-cropped blond hair, late twenties, solid and trim. My responses, facial twitches and grunts, were non-committal. Do they have concealed carry here in Utah? Why are these machines so slow?
He was a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, three tours in all, and now he was unemployed, doing the washing while his wife worked down the road at Wal-Mart. The Democrats only cared about transgendered people and immigrants. Trump was his choice.
“My uncle in Wyoming thinks we should kill President Obama.” That tripped my fuse.
I leaned forward. “Soldier, that’s treason!”
For the first time, his face lost its combativeness. “Yeah?”
I explained my point in neutral, yet forceful Civics 101 terms. For the first time we were making eye contact. The conversation turned to the wars he’d seen. We both discussed them with a dispassionate eye to their dragging pointlessness. He was impressed with my knowledge of the history and situation; he probably didn’t meet many civilians who were daily readers of the “New York Times”.
Like so many soldiers before him, of whatever ideological stripe, he resented those who sent him there, and even more, those who had forgotten him since. The [F-word] “politicians.”
Now he was back on his plight and his grievances. They wouldn’t even hire a guy like him at McDonalds, because “they have all the Mexicans they can use, never mind they can’t speak English.” This went on for a while, as I returned to contemplating the slow progress of the dryers.
Suddenly he asked, “What do you do?”
“I work for a labor union.”
He released a long audible sigh. “God, I wish I had a union job!”
A new image arose, displacing the mad militia uncle, Wal-Mart and McDonalds, villainous politicians. I heard about a father who worked for the railroad, a member of the Brotherhood of Railroad Brakemen. Family life, economic security, pride. Could his dad have even voted Democrat? Did it even matter then?
And was such a thing still possible?
Back in 2016, I met a face in the rioting white supremacist crowd of January 6th, 2021. Yes, he was a racist. Yes, he was resenting people even worse off than himself. Yes, he was far too ready for murderous violence.
But don’t talk to him about white privilege (save that for people like me) or label him “a deplorable.”
Get him that union job.
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THIS MOMENT
By Stewart Acuff
This is a huge moment in our country’s history for many reasons: the fascist assault on our democracy, undeniably evil and unstable president, the nation changing victories in Georgia, and more.
Huge events all.
But I believe this moment is most critical in our long struggle for racial justice.
I think and deeply believe it is root and branch time for racial justice. Root and branch is an old country saying about clearing land for crops as in–we will fell the timber, clear the land down to every root and branch.
It is time for us to do that to white supremacy and white nationalism.
It is time for us to get on our knees working to root out every vestige of oppressing people of color, especially Black people who’ve suffered their own unique hell in American history.
Black people and our children have been leading us to fundamentally challenge this disease on the nation’s body.
Now it is so clear what white supremacy costs us, the evidence so compelling. The domestic terrorists who assaulted our democracy for the president were all motivated by race hate.
The Violent Right is in a race war against a democratic, pluralistic, diverse, just society.
I could write for days and nights about the awful ramifications of race hate, including deluding much of the working class.
It is now very clear our nation is under internal assault in furtherance of a racial civil war.
All of us, especially us white folks got to get serious about rooting out racism.
I’m not talking about understanding one another or getting along or charity or even working together.
I mean the hard and dirty work of fighting white supremacy and nationalism with intent to destroy it root and branch.
I mean defending Black people, fighting against mass incarceration, official brutality, and fighting the Radical Right .
I mean taking leadership from Black people, supporting Black candidates, buying Black.
I mean destroying white supremacy.
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Georgia Shows the Way, D.C. Shows the Stakes
By Editors Organizing Upgrade
This is a statement from the Editors of Organizing UpGrade, we at the Stansbury Forum thought it important to share.
Over the last 48 hours, we’ve seen a stark picture of the two paths that lie before us: a racial justice democracy or white authoritarianism. On Tuesday, a multi-racial working class bloc took to the ballot box to elect Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the Senate in Georgia. That the movement was led by Black voters, and that long-term organizing in communities of color to build independent political power played a crucial role in the victories, was no coincidence: the struggle for racial justice has always been central to the defense of democratic rights in the U.S. With Democrats now in control of the Presidency and both chambers of Congress, progressives have a significant opening to push the Democratic Party to expand our democracy and deliver material relief for working class people of all races.
But yesterday, we saw an anti-democratic, insurrectionary effort inside and outside the halls of Congress to overturn the results of the election. A dozen Republican Senators and 60 Representatives attempted to block the democratic process using arcane legislative maneuvers inside the Capitol before their violent allies stormed the building in a desperate attempt to achieve the same anti-democratic ends.
It may appear at first that the divisions within the Republican Party represent a turn to sanity. But in fact, even those Republicans opposed to a coup support voter suppression. They too want apartheid, but with a democratic cover. The split within the GOP should be widened if possible, but we cannot be lulled into seeing one wing as an ally. And within the Democratic Party, the fight for all to support racial justice and a fully inclusive democracy is far from won.
It is no accident that those storming the Capitol are carrying Confederate flags. They are launching a new round of the Civil War many have been fighting for decades: a war to return to full and open white supremacy and limited democratic rights.
We will need to remain vigilant in the days leading up to the inauguration and support movement’s calls to deal with white supremacist terrorism and the instigation of violence by Trump and his enablers as the anti-human, criminal acts that they are. The broad front we built in defense of democracy will need to stay together and grow further to create the conditions for us to fight for the future we need.
As Calvin Cheung-Miaw argued in “The Pivot of U.S. Politics: Racial Justice and Democracy,” our path is clear: we must continue to build at the base, fighting for a true inclusive democracy that this country never achieved.
…
An update from Calvin Cheung-Miaw of
Armed Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, and forced the Congress into lockdown. Five years ago, this would have been unthinkable. Today, nobody – however worried – can claim to be genuinely shocked.
How did we get here?
In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, commentators debated whether Trump’s supporters were motivated by racism or by declining economic fortunes. It’s difficult, however, to assign a single overarching motivation to such a large and heterogenous group of voters, which included former Obama supporters and enthusiastic white supremacists, denizens of the Rustbelt, survivors of the opioid crisis, and the high-toned Republicans of Greenwich, Connecticut.
Politics is not just about aggregating disparate groups to achieve greater numbers, however. It’s also about cohering and transforming those groups into a new social force. This was Trumpism’s project: to take a social base riven with contradictions, and reshape it in some crucial ways. First, Trumpism demanded fidelity to the personal fortunes of Trump above those of any other principle, scruple, commitment, or even the GOP party. Second, Trumpism sought to filter supporters’ understanding of the world through a set of frameworks — Sinophobia, Islamophobia, the rhetoric of law and order, anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-communism, conspiracy theories — that together reinforced racial inequality, patriarchy, and national chauvinism. This was all undergirded by the broader commitments of the GOP to delivering policies favoring untrammeled corporate power, appointing a judiciary that delighted right-wing evangelicals, rolling back civil rights protections, and – crucially – the willingness to hold onto power through white minority rule achieved via mass disenfranchisement.
In his four years in the presidency, Trump – assisted by the peculiar dynamics of social media and mass media – has been wildly successful in cohering and refashioning his social base. And no matter how disastrous we thought this development was, each week seems to prove that we actually underestimated the dangers it poses.
TURMOIL AND ESCALATION
After November 3rd, Trumpism’s demand for fidelity to Trump above all else has become the subject of fierce contention within the GOP. As Trump promoted the theory that the election had been stolen from him, indifferent to the pandemic exploding through our communities and unconcerned with the details of vaccine distribution, the top echelons of Republican leadership tried to usher Trump off the stage without a direct confrontation. Until January 6, this strategy was an utter failure. Rather than fade into the background, Trump has escalated his attack on the election, organizing a portion of the Republican party and a significant chunk of his base into being openly and explicitly the faction of overthrowing democracy. The armed mobs storming the capitol at Trump’s behest as I’m writing this are, of course, one face of this faction and certainly the most dangerous. The other are the politicians who are intent on discrediting the results of the election through more proper channels. The general anti-democratic thrust of their politics constitutes a weapon, one that is already being used by the Pennsylvania GOP state senators that have refused to seat a Democratwhose electoral victory was certified by the Pennsylvania Department of State.
This faction is opposed by another faction of the party, which has broken with Trump over the election results. The tradition of a peaceful transfer of power is of huge importance to major sections of the ruling class both ideologically and in terms of the ability to project U.S. soft power internationally. And most of the high echelon corporate capitalists in the GOP seem to have decided that allowing right-wing populists who have a base outside their control is not in their long-range interest. They would prefer to regain “institutionalist” control over the GOP and retain actual elections as mechanisms to resolve their internal differences. They are signaling (via such things as Mitch McConnel’s wife Elaine Chao resigning from Trump’s cabinet and a call for Trump’s immediate removal by the National Association of Manufacturers that they may make a real bid to reassert their primacy.
Whether these divisions will intensify into a de facto split in the Republican Party or will get patched over is not yet determined. Trump’s present factionalists in the GOP are motivated by personal opportunism, to be sure, but we can also expect them to try to tamp down (for the moment) the wildest actions of their militia and thug wing and turn the momentum behind “Stop the Steal” into renewed efforts to implement stricter voter ID laws, roll back vote-by-mail access, reduce the number of polling places in communities of color, and execute mass purges of the voting rolls. Most of the GOP politicians and corporate leaders who are currently denouncing Trump will be eager to join them if they believe the Q-Anon/Proud Boy current that surfaced under Trump can be pushed out of the limelight. It is not out of the question that most of the GOPers now fighting one another could coalesce around an alignment that preserved the GOP as an expression of white nationalist authoritarianism and all-wealth-to-the-1% economics but dispensed with personal loyalty to Trump as a defining characteristic.
That kind of joint effort to bolster white authoritarian rule would be matched by enormous funds poured into campaigns targeting voters of color in the hope that a segment can be won over to a right-wing populist worldview, enough to secure the party’s political fortunes. And however the divisions in the right play out, we are likely to see a ferocious campaign of “anti-communism” by the entire GOP against even the most modest reforms proposed by the Biden administration, with more and more politicians condoning – as Rep. Chip Roy has recently – the idea that we are effectively in a state of civil war.
HOPE AND CHANGE
When I wake up in the morning, the first question I ask myself is, “What do we need to do to stop a red wave in 2022?” A key part of our strategy has to be winning concrete improvements in people’s lives. The struggle against the right, the struggle for racial justice and democracy, needs to be intermeshed with the pitched battle to deal with the immense suffering in our communities, a battle over who will pay for reconstructing society in the wake of the carnage wrought by the pandemic.
The victories in Georgia – the fruits of a decade of effort by determined community organizing, largely rooted in communities of color – mean we have a chance to make some headway in this fight.
We still, however, face the fact that the anti-right front is heterogeneous, and the class and ideological differences pose a challenge for us being able to win the kind of bold changes we need right now. And it’s not at all clear what politics Biden is going to try to lead with.
So what do we have in our favor?
First, through the last two decades, social justice forces have grown in sophistication and capacity. This is how we were able to make an impact on the presidential election, and on the runoff elections this week. And it may allow us – if we move quickly and boldly – to take advantage of the right’s current divisions and neutralize or win over the portion of their supporters. More than a few are genuinely shocked at the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters carrying Confederate Flags and wearing Auschwitz Camp t-shirts; others are newly open to the argument that rather than caring about their economic hardships, Trump has been running a personal-benefit con game all along.
Second, we have on our side our people’s longing for freedom and dignity. We’re still in the jaws of a crisis – of health, of housing, of hunger, layered on top of racial oppression, which will surely produce a wave of resistance. We are in the midst of a decade of upheaval – and we know that when people’s demands take the shape of mass protest it has the possibility to reshape the balance of forces and reset the agenda within the anti-Trump coalition. That’s what gives us hope.
Parts of this article draw from a talk the author gave to volunteers of Seed the Vote. Many of the ideas here originated in conversations between the author and Whitney Maxey. The author thanks Marcy Rein and Max Elbaum for feedback on an early draft.
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FRED HIRSCH – DOING THE WORK THAT NEEDED TO BE DONE
By David Bacon
Fred Hirsch, born in 1933, died on December 15, 2020 in San Jose.
When Adriana Garcia heard about his death, it was a blow. “The whole South Bay is hurting,” she mourned. Garcia heads MAIZ, a militant organization of Latina women in Silicon Valley. For many years she and Fred co-chaired the annual May Day march from San Jose’s eastside barrio to City Hall downtown.
The recovery of May Day was one of the great political changes that took place during Fred’s lifetime. May Day commemorates the great demonstrations in Chicago in 1886 for the eight-hour day, and the execution of the Haymarket martyrs a year later for leading them. When Fred became a political activist and Communist in the 1950s, the holiday had become virtually illegal, a victim of Cold War hysteria. It was called the “Communist holiday,” celebrated everywhere in the world but here.
Fred grew up in New York, where police on horseback attacked the May Day rally in the city’s Union Square in 1952. They clubbed down mothers with strollers who were holding signs calling for justice for Willie McGee, a victim of legal lynching in Mississippi. Years later it was no surprise that Fred helped organize a local support network for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. SNCC fought the racism and political repression in the South that killed McGee, and its courageous student activists helped end the dark years of McCarthyism.
Even by the 1970s, fear of redbaiting still kept most delegates away from the May Day events Fred would organize among delegates to the Santa Clara County (now South Bay) Labor Council. In 2006, though, everything changed. Millions of immigrants chose May Day, a holiday they knew well from back home, to pour into the streets, protesting a law that would have made it a felony to lack immigration papers. Tens of thousands marched in San Jose. In the years that followed, when Fred and Adriana asked unions to come out for May Day, they’d bring banners and arrive by the busload.
“He viewed his long activity, not as the work of one person alone, but as the product of a history, of a set of ideas, and of a collective of people fighting together”
To Fred, May Day wasn’t merely a radical symbol. It was a chance to connect union and community activists in San Jose to people far beyond the country’s borders, and to talk about a shared set of politics. Making those connections, seeing the world joined by the bonds of a common class struggle, was the thread that ran through Fred’s politics throughout his life.
I interviewed Fred not long before his death, to understand the political history of Silicon Valley, and his own work that helped shape it. Because Fred had been a “big C” Communist for most of his life, and a “little c” communist to its end, he viewed his long activity, not as the work of one person alone, but as the product of a history, of a set of ideas, and of a collective of people fighting together.
‘LITTLE OCCURRED SPONTANEOUSLY’
“A thread runs through Santa Clara Valley’s history of labor and community organizing,” he explained, “from the days of the canneries up through the heyday of industrial production in the high tech industry. Very little organizing or political activity occurred spontaneously. There was always a small group of left-wing, class-conscious, Marxist-oriented workers who met regularly, exchanged experiences, and planned campaigns.
“It was not one single group. New people came in and others moved on. Many simply got old, retired and died. Through much of the time an important strand of that thread was the Communist Party and the many friends with whom its members worked. But other groups with similar left ideas also organized and sought to influence people.”
Fred spent his working life as a plumber and pipefitter, after joining the union in New York in 1953. Being in the union brought political responsibilities – to defend it and the labor movement, and at the same time to fight for politics that represented the real interests of workers. At 20 that meant opposing the Korean War, calling for peace with the Soviet Union, and opening the union’s doors to Black workers. The local’s leaders told him plainly that once he passed his apprenticeship, they wanted him out.
He left New York with his wife Ginny and migrated to California. Leftwing politics kept him from getting work in Los Angeles as well, so they moved north. In San Jose Fred still faced redbaiting, but Communists hadn’t been driven out of the local labor movement and their presence helped the family survive. Fred also knew that survival depended on winning the respect of the plumbers he worked with. In a tribute to him after he’d been a member of United Association (UA) Local 393 for 50 years, Fred was called “a good mechanic” – plumber-speak for a worker who knows his job.
Transforming the labor movement – making it not just more militant, but anti-racist and even socialist – was the ever-present idea. Sometimes it meant organizing a trip with other unionists to show support for newspaper strikers in Detroit. Sometimes it meant going to Colombia to expose U.S. support for a murderous government and paramilitaries out to obliterate the union for oil workers. Sometimes it just meant showing up at a farmworkers boycott picket line in front of Safeway, in his VW van full of copies of the Communist newspaper, the People’s World.
Transforming the labor movement was part of Fred’s hope when he, Ginny and their daughter Liza moved to Delano in 1967, after the grape strike had been going on for two years. “The work they were doing in Delano,” he later remembered, “led me to hope that one day farmworkers could stimulate a transformation of our rather moribund AFL-CIO into a real labor movement. It seemed achievable. The organization of ill-fed, ill-housed, and ill-clothed agricultural workers, who truly had ‘nothing to lose but their chains and a world to win’ could change the shape of the workers’ struggle in California. Farmworkers, in their hundreds of thousands, could potentially provide a model of workers’ power that could lead organized labor into a new and militant era.”
Fred was physically courageous, and was beaten by foremen and strikebreakers as he went into fields, ostensibly to serve legal papers, but in reality to organize. Having been roughed up in his own union by fearful and angry right-wingers, someone should have told the scabs it would only make him more determined, and it did. But even in Delano he faced redbaiting, when the leaders of the then-called United Farm Workers Organizing Committee wouldn’t give him a real assignment. He called it “an anti-ideological hand-me-down from the prejudices of Saul Alinsky.”
But soon he was working with older Filipino workers, the “manongs,” chasing railroad cars shipping struck grapes out of Delano and the San Joaquin Valley. In order to track their movements and stop them, “We were to call a special number and report our whereabouts to our Filipino brothers, who would move pins on the map to follow the progress of the grapes.” In these old men Fred knew he’d found veterans of decades of strikes in the fields, going all the way back to the 1930s. He also knew he’d found a group of workers, Communists among them, who despite their age brought radical politics into the early United Farm Workers.
POWER COMES FROM THE BASE
Fred always had his eyes on the workers at the base of any union. He pinpointed early on the problems in the UFW’s structure that would ultimately weaken it. “There was a weakness in what I saw in Delano,” he recalled later, “that kept gnawing at me. Yes, the workers were getting organized, but they were not necessarily organizing themselves.” Fred’s politics inherited a set of principles from the Communist, socialist and anarchist traditions in the U.S. labor movement – that the power in the union comes from workers at the base who should control it, and that the more politically conscious those workers are, the greater capacity for fighting the union will have.
Finally, he and Ginny left Delano when Robert F. Kennedy won the union’s support for his presidential campaign. Fred later acknowledged that if Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated, the union would have won crucial support it needed in Washington. But he and Ginny remembered Kennedy as an aide to Senator Joe McCarthy, and later as the author of deregulation that destroyed much of the power of organized truckers. Even though Liza was later brutally redbaited and purged from the UFW, Fred continued to support the efforts of farmworkers themselves. “The UFW helped shape the life of our family,” he said. “Whatever its failings or accomplishments, it nurtured and developed a generation of organizers and activists who continue to make a positive impact on trade unionism and the political life of our nation.”
ORGANIZING IN THE COMMUNITY
Back in San Jose Fred was a key organizer of the huge upsurge of the civil rights and anti-war movements that transformed the politics of the Santa Clara Valley. His comrade-in-arms was Sofia Mendoza, who with her husband Gil and other Chicano community activists in the San Jose barrio began organizing against the Vietnam War.
The first of the student blowouts, which helped launch the Chicano movement, took place at San Jose’s Roosevelt Junior High in 1968. That led to student walkouts in Los Angeles, and eventually to the huge Chicano Moratorium march against the Vietnam War up Whittier Boulevard. In San Jose the movement began organizing marches on City Hall, and formed a committee to stop police brutality, the Community Alert Patrol(CAP). “The police had guns, mace and billy clubs,” Mendoza remembered. “They were always ready to attack us. It seemed as if nobody could stop what the police were doing.”
But CAP did stop them. Its members monitored police activity, much as the Black Panthers were doing in Oakland, documenting police beatings and arrests. Students organizing for ethnic studies classes at San Jose State University became some of CAP’s most active members, at the same time fighting to get military recruiters off the campus. CAP had the participation of Communists, socialists, Chicano nationalists and other leftwing groups.
Sofia, Fred and others believed San Jose needed a multi-issue organization to confront the many problems people faced in the barrios – discriminatory education, lack of medical services, poor housing, and of course the police. “We wanted an organization that was not limited to one ethnic group, that would organize our entire community,” she later recalled. “We called ourselves United People Arriba – United People Upward -because it got the idea across that people from different ethnic backgrounds were coming together in San Jose to work for social change – Blacks, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and whites working together in one organization.” Today Silicon Valley De-Bug’s Albert Covarrubias Justice Project, the community organizing of Somos Mayfair, and the Services, Immigrant Rights and Education Network all carry on the legacy of CAP and UP Arriba.
In 1972 Angela Davis, African American revolutionary feminist and then-leader of the Communist Party (CP), went on trial in San Jose, charged with kidnapping and murder, accused of providing the guns used by Jonathan Jackson in an attempt to free his brother, George, a leader of the Black political prisoners’ movement. Davis’ historic acquittal was the product of an international campaign that succeeded because a strong local committee mobilized support. Ginny Hirsch, assisted by Fred, researched every person named as a potential juror, work that ensured the jury included people open and fair about the prosecution’s false accusations. This kind of community research has since become a powerful tool in other trials of political activists.
FIGHTING DEPORTATIONS
The South Bay’s first fights against deportations began with the government’s effort to deport Lucio Bernabe, a cannery worker organizer. His defense was mounted by the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, put on the Attorney General’s list of “subversive organizations.” Further fights against raids in Silicon Valley electronic plants like Solectron, and garment factories like Levi’s, led Fred and other activists to oppose the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Although the law provided amnesty to undocumented people, which they supported, activists warned that the law’s prohibition on hiring workers without papers would lead to massive firings and attacks on unions. The law also reinstituted the hated “bracero” contract labor program, which Fred’s compañeros Bert Corona and Ernesto Galarza had fought all through the McCarthyite years.
In fighting IRCA, Fred challenged the AFL-CIO’s support for the bill, along with other beltway advocacy groups in Washington DC. They argued that if undocumented people were driven from their jobs and couldn’t work, they’d go home and leave the jobs to “us.” Fred and his cohorts lost the battle when the law passed in 1986, but continued to organize until they succeeded in 1998, when the AFL-CIO reversed its position, and called for amnesty and labor rights for immigrants. When similar immigration bills were introduced in years afterwards, Fred again defied the liberal Washington DC establishment and supported instead the Dignity Campaign for an immigration policy based on immigrant and labor rights.
UNMASKING AFL-CIO/CIA TIES
In 1973 Chileans began to arrive in San Jose, and Father Cuchulainn Moriarty made Sacred Heart church on Alma Street the resettlement center for those who fled the fascist coup. Enraged, not just at the CIA’s organization of the coup, but at the deep complicity of the AFL-CIO’s International Department, Fred wrote one of the most damning exposes of its work, “An Analysis of our AFL-CIO Role in Latin America, or Under the Covers with the CIA.”
In just a relatively few pages, he did more than document the sordid history of the AFL-CIO’s support for fascism in Chile. The small pamphlet became the tool used by leftwing labor activists for many years, in the long struggle to cut the ties between the U.S. labor movement and the anti-communist intelligence apparatus of the government.
It was a long fight. In 1978 the first Salvadoran Communists and trade unionists appeared in San Jose, looking for help after the U.S. supported the Salvadoran government, and trained its death squads at the School of the Americas. It was the beginning of the Salvadoran civil war, and over the next decade two million Salvadorans sought refuge in the U.S., ironically, for what the U.S. itself was doing to their country. The first Salvadorans fleeing the death squads deployed against unions in the late 1970s sought out the Hirsch home on 16th Street. To expose what had made them flee, Fred and his comrades organized the Labor Action Committee on El Salvador, a forerunner of CISPES, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. Their work was so effective that when they invited Salvadoran leftwing trade unionists to come to the U.S. as guests of the South Bay Labor Council, the AFL-CIO’s president George Meany threatened to throw the council into trusteeship.
Mexican miners came north during a bitter strike at the huge Nacozari copper mine in Sonora, finding money and friends in San Jose. Fred went to Colombia and came back with another long report. He told labor council delegates, “I’m a retired plumber who’s been around the block a few times. I’m not easily moved, but in Colombia I saw a daily life reality I’d only glimpsed before, mostly in nightmares … We have to stop sending our taxes and soldiers to protect corporate interests in Colombia.” And when unions were pressured to supporting President George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, he responded by convincing his plumber’s local to send money to start U.S. Labor Against the War.
These were all solidarity actions from below, not only intended to provide support for workers themselves, but to show to the members of his own union the consequences of the actions of U.S. corporations, and the imperial system from which they profit. In Fred’s way of organizing, solidarity was a way to help his fellow pipefitters understand that the unions of Mexico, Chile or El Salvador were their true allies, and to reject the idea that unions here should defend a system that attacked them.
These were all solidarity actions from below, not only intended to provide support for workers themselves, but to show to the members of his own union the consequences of the actions of U.S. corporations, and the imperial system from which they profit. In Fred’s way of organizing, solidarity was a way to help his fellow pipefitters understand that the unions of Mexico, Chile or El Salvador were their true allies, and to reject the idea that unions here should defend a system that attacked them.
ORGANIZATION IS VITAL
Fred was not a voice in the wilderness, however, speaking out by himself. He saw a common interest between immigrants and native-born, between workers of color and white workers, between unions in the U.S. and those around the world. He never stopped trying to explain that class gave them something in common, and he found effective ways to convince white workers in particular that fighting racism and imperialism was in their own interest. Whether organizing for a progressive immigration policy or for solidarity with leftwing unions in El Salvador, Colombia and Iraq, he brought his own union’s members with him, along with delegates to his labor council, progressive elected officials, and many others.
Fred supported every significant social movement that arose in the South Bay for over six decades, but he never believed that a spontaneous upsurge would suddenly defeat capitalism. He believed in organization, not just of unions and communities, but of political activists. For many years he thought those activists could find a political home and education in the Communist Party, and an organization capable of planning a lifetime struggle to win socialism. At the end of his life he was no longer sure that the party was that organization, but if not the CP, some organization would have to play that role, he thought.
“It would have to have a clear focus on a socialist and democratic future in a world without war,” he told me at the end of our conversation. “It would have to fight injustice in our communities and worksites, our nation and our planet, promote serious education about the process for social change and organize people to take to the streets.”
Real revolutionaries in his beloved labor movement, he thought, need to band together to fight racism and sexism “all through the institutions and culture of our society.” And in doing all this, they should be humble, willing to do the work that needs doing, and glad to take leadership from the people around them. In short, Fred wanted “an organization like the Communist Party we dreamed and worked for so many years ago, but more effective than we were. Without it wonderful working class leftists will continue making enormous efforts to build progressive movements that ebb and flow, but won’t develop a strategy and build a base of their own.”
In the outpouring of messages from activists hearing of his death, it was apparent that plenty of people had absorbed Fred’s ideas. Virginia Rodriguez, the daughter of farmworkers and a lifetime labor organizer like him, passed away before he did. But she shared his confidence in a vision of an ongoing core of politically committed activists. “I came to believe,” she said, “that there will always be those individuals who will respond to the outer edges of what needs to be done, and who will step forward to take up responsibility for what is called for if change is to take place. In so doing, these people help move others to come along. It underscores the principle that if enough of us carry out a piece of what needs to be done, then change will most certainly come.”
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Thanks to the Farmworker Movement Documentation Project for preserving the memories of Fred Hirsch, Virginia Rodriguez and many others of their experiences working with the United Farm Workers.
All photos and copyright: David Bacon
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This tribute and remembrance of Fred Hirsch is being published jointly with our friends at Organizing Upgrade, a great site to checkout.
Evictions and the Road To Homelessness
By Harry Brill
Because national and local anti-eviction laws will expire on December 31 million tenants could face eviction. According to the Census Bureau 11.6 million tenants would not even be able to pay their rent the following month nor their mortgage payment if they are homeowners. Particularly troubling, the number of tenants struggling to meet their obligations has been increasing in the last several months,
The major problem is not only that the coronavirus is impacting people’s lives. Also, many millions of working people are being deprived of their livelihood. Particularly worrisome has been the considerable increase in long term unemployment. Just recently the number of workers unemployed for at least six months has tripled in one month from 1.2 million to 3.6 million. This huge jump is very rare and also quite ominous.
Could it be the dark cloud before the thunderstorm? Perhaps, because too many job seekers are crowding the job market. So even working people who have been fortunate enough to have a job have been forced to accept lower pay. Among the consequences is that a larger percentage of their income must be allocated to paying rent.
“In Los Angeles county 600,000 residents spend 90 percent of their income on rent.”
How much rent is just right? We have been told that affordable rent is about 30 percent of income. But this rule of thumb certainly does not apply to poor tenants because it would yield very little to the landlord. But unfortunately for tenants, the high rents that property owners charge leaves very little to renters.
According to researchers, a substantial number of poor tenants must pay at least 80 percent of their income to retain their apartments. In Los Angeles county 600,000 residents spend 90 percent of their income on rent. Clearly, the high rents do not leave much, if anything, for food and medical expenses. And since almost two thirds have children, their low income can be very problematic and even dangerous.
Moreover, when tenants face eviction they are often summoned to court. Think for a moment of the legal obligations of the judge. It is not their job to put pressure on the landlord to charge a more reasonable rent to protect the health of the tenant. Instead, their task is to do what they can to compel the tenant to meet financial obligations regardless of the adverse impact on the well-being of the family.
Some evicted tenants may have family members, friends, or an available facility to provide shelter to evicted families. But most tenants are not so lucky. And of course, for the same financial reasons they were evicted, they are unable to pay the rent for another apartment. So it is not surprising to learn that eviction is the main reason why evicted tenants are homeless.
What we have learned about the connection between eviction and homelessness is very disturbing. According to research in Seattle, 37 percent of evicted tenants are homeless. Also, according to the US Census Bureau, 26.4 percent who were interviewed claimed that they were unable to pay their rent.
The number of individuals and families living in the streets is substantially larger than the public realizes. That’s because of how the statistics are often reported. For example, according to a report on homelessness 12 percent of the residents in New York City are homeless. That doesn’t seem like much unless we know how many residents the 12 percent encompasses. So, it may surprise you that aside from those who live in shelters every night 4,000 New Yorkers live on the streets, in the subway system, and other public places.
Although the problems of the homeless are immense, it would be a serious mistake to assume that the rest of us are thriving. As a result of the downward slide in the economy and other nasty problems, there is a growing number of Americans who are in serious trouble. Since June almost 8 million Americans have joined the ranks of the poor. Cutbacks in government spending is part of the problem. It is immensely important that the government change its course by developing and funding programs that will improve the standard of living and the quality of life of all of us.
A good beginning is to pay serious attention to the advice and wisdom of Bernie Sanders. Unlike proposals that the federal government is seriously considering, which are both ungenerous and temporary, Bernie’s proposals seek to make both substantial and permanent improvements in the political landscape.
First, Bernie proposes that the federal government enact a federal program that guarantees stable jobs to everyone who wants to work. As Bernie correctly notes “There is more than enough work to be done in this country”.
Second, Medicare for All should be adopted as soon as possible. As Bernie notes, it would not only save billions of dollars that are paid to the private sector. It would prevent 68,000 unnecessary deaths a year.
Third, Bernie wants to guarantee housing as a human right and to eliminate homelessness. It would be paid for by a wealth tax on the top one-tenth of one percent. Don’t you agree that those who have a net worth of at least $32 million can afford it?
Clearly, we need to act on Bernie’s proposals. Words are not enough. So as Bernie insists “LET’S DO IT”
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