Poverty, by America

A great book with a great message

around which we should mobilize

In the park with Jetta a couple days ago, thinking about all sorts of people and things. About how I drifted home from the airport after dropping Marrianne off to catch a flight to Pittsburgh.

 

The rush hour traffic was jammed up on the Stevenson from Cicero Avenue pretty much all the way to the Dan Ryan. Drivers frantically changing lanes, sometimes changing back instantly, looking for ways to shave minutes off their commutes to work. Meanwhile, I was, like I said, drifting; sliding carefully over to the left lane knowing that the right-side exit ramps to the Ryan northbound and south were the targets of probably 90 percent of the drivers around me.

 

At 75, I’m enjoying a level of health that my Bronzeville neighbors, 10 and 20 years younger than me, don’t share. The privilege that drives my longer life expectancy and relative comfort is rooted in my whiteness, my gender, my sexual orientation, and my class background. Retired these past many years, I still have the energy to stay fit, to take care of my home, to travel and to, sometimes, write.

 

I am privileged to have walked thousands of miles with Jetta. To have thought about so many different things on those walks. To have admired beauty. To have perceived great stories written in grit and rooted in the sometimes-blighted city in which we live, to have witnessed so many Chicago stories full of heroes, both visible and, more often, unsung; the heroes, the ordinary folks, who have labored to create a city that always rises above the worst that it could be and do, and sometimes shines with rare beauty.

 

For the immediate future, though, a piece of every day is and will be about how I must urge tired, chronically alarmed, old Jetta to wander wherever in the park she might want to go after I let her off the leash. “You don’t have a lot of time left in this life, Jetta,” I tell her. “Enjoy this beautiful day.”

 

I think also of my friend Richard and the time some years back, that Richard set aside an afternoon for a community of friends to stop by to say goodbye to Ginger, a noble-looking, golden-haired German shepherd, about to be put to sleep before she was 8 years old. I think about Richard himself, a big, dignified, Black man, who nevertheless was also a chronic complainer, constantly annoyed by both trivial and significant matters, Richard who gave of himself always to take care of his frail mom and his disabled brother, and was my best DC friend, a gay man who flamed exuberantly on Facebook, and who passed away before he was 60.

 

And here I am, 75 and healthy, privileged to take leisure whenever I spy the opportunity. Privileged to own the right clothes for any season and to live in a nice, big house with a brilliant, diligent, loving woman and to have children who have forgiven me for my failings more than I deserve.

And there is also, in my life, Isabel, a granddaughter who spreads cheer.

 

I have had what feels like years of running and jumping and hooping. I have acquired the language and perspective to express gratitude, and to recognize that my privilege is rooted in the price that others with less privilege have been forced to pay. Privilege that allowed a big, white, straight, middle-class guy to dodge the worst consequences of stupid risks that ended badly, the same or similar mistakes for which others almost certainly paid a higher price.

 

But, now comes a book, Matthew Desmond’s Poverty by America, that makes it clear that the cost of the wealth and power that some of us enjoy in a lifetime is paid by others who suffer, repeatedly, the injuries of class and race and other systemic hatreds, the outrageous cost of being poor in America. Desmond makes it clear from the start that his book is not about the lives of the poor, not about the “what” of poverty, but is about the “why.”

 

There have been plenty of good books, great ones, Desmond writes, about poverty and the poor. The list of reliable and noteworthy accounts of what the poor live with every day is long, stretching back to the 19^thcentury, Desmond notes, specifically citing books by Jacob Riis, Jane Adams, James Agee and Walker Evans, and the photojournalism of Dorothea Lange. Desmond ends the list with Michael Harrington’s The Other America, which, along with the impetus created by the Civil Rights movement, directly inspired Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.”

 

These are “books [that] help us understand the nature of poverty. They are vital. But they do not—and in fact cannot—answer the most fundamental question, which is: Why? Why all this American poverty? I’ve learned that this question requires a different approach. To understand the causes of poverty, we must look beyond the poor. Those of us living lives of privilege and plenty must examine ourselves. Are we—the secure, the insured, the housed, the college educated, the protected, the lucky—connected to all this needless suffering? This book is my attempt to answer that question, addressed to that ‘we.’ Which makes this a book about poverty that is not just about the poor. Instead, it’s a book about how the other other half lives, about how some lives are made small so that others may grow.” 

(Desmond, Poverty, by America, pgs. 7-8)

 

On pages 176 and 177, Desmond quotes James Baldwin as part of his effort to explain why the United States, which celebrates itself for its great wealth, would tolerate endemic poverty. The quote nowhere near captures the range and subtlety of Desmond’s explanation, but it’s a foundational piece in the structure of his argument.

 

“’Any real change,’ writes James Baldwin, ‘implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or thought one knew; to what one possessed or dreamed that one possessed.”

 

At the time, Baldwin was pointing to pending desegregation as the threat on the horizon for (mostly) white folks that warned of a coming dispossession that would strip white people of their most celebrated entitlement, their supremacy, which might be the last of many privileges to go, but would, they feared, crumble and collapse, swept away by a tide of enemies, hated and feared, people not like them.

 

But Baldwin, were he here today, might well be writing the same thing to assess MAGA, which developed out of the renewed threat white folks always knew was coming, had known for years, out of a past that was literally perceived by white folks as a black hole, and manifested itself finally just as Trump was preaching nativism and nostalgia for the edenic past, as Black. Lives. Matter.

 

I’m not saying that the various narcissistic and psychopathic demagogues, like Trump (who arise always to amplify and soothe those fears), require anything from the rest of us—no sympathy, no understanding, and certainly no forgiveness. But I am saying that we must understand what terrors infest the minds and hearts of those they incite.

 

We must understand those fears because the changes that must happen to eliminate the inequities and injustices that plague our society will take a bigger movement than any that have tackled the problem before. In his epilogue, Desmond describes a few movements that made a difference in the past.

 

“Behind every great blow dealt to the scourge of poverty, there have been ordinary Americans who have bound themselves to one another to accomplish extraordinary things. Social movements spark ideas, providing the blueprint for reform, as when the unemployed workers’ movement of the late nineteenth century called for a public works program decades before the New Deal,” he writes.

 

“Most important, movements apply the heat. The American labor movement was the dominant force behind the New Deal. The tenants’ union that rose up during the Depression provoked Congress to establish our public housing system. How was President Johnson able to break through congressional gridlock to deliver the civil rights acts, the Great Society and the War on Poverty? The civil rights movement forced his hand by putting unrelenting pressure on lawmakers. Johnson admitted as much in 1965, telling Congress that the actions of Black Americans who had joined the civil rights movement ‘called upon us to make good the promise of America. And who among us can say that we would have made the same progress had it not been for [their] persistent bravery, and [their] faith in American democracy?’”

(Desmond, Poverty, by America, pgs. 183-184)

 

And, we must understand the fears of our fellow citizens who have been and are incited to hate and dread the progress that others make because the movement that must be built if we are ever to end poverty, by America, must necessarily be the largest in the history of this country and cannot be confined only to those who already believe that the arc of history bends toward justice. Without those who are afraid and wish to barricade themselves away from the future, we cannot build a movement big enough to force the change that we wish to see.

 

Because, if poverty in America, and all the social consequences that arise from poverty, is ever to end, it will be because Americans who have benefitted from the inequity that is an integral part of our society, will also have come to understand that what they must give up on the way to a country that is both equitable and just will be much less than what they gain.

 

“When your power comes from people,” Desmond writes. “you need a lot of them. The movement must grow, which means we can’t afford to write anyone off. As Alicia Garza, co-creator of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, has put it, ‘To build the kind of movement that we need to get the things that we deserve, we can’t be afraid to establish a base that is larger than the people we feel comfortable with.’ That is, ‘We have to reach beyond the choir.’”

 

Indeed, it is likely that a significant percentage of those who voted for Donald Trump, and even the true believers who think that the 2020 election was stolen, follow Trump because his relentless fury at “outsiders,” at those who want their fair share of the wealth of this richest of all countries will get that share at the expense of those who live a precarious middle-class life, a life that they insist that they “earned.” Their stability and their luxurious, earned or otherwise, precarious or not, the goal of the demagogue is to stoke fear and hatred among them because when the demagogue succeeds at that work they are rewarded while the people who revere them find themselves alienated from their neighbors, and blind to genuinely common interests.

 

Desmond shares a story about activists trying to get signatures supporting a higher minimum wage at a mall in western Michigan, Maga country. “I really thought we were going to be punched or something was going to happen,” Sara Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage, told Desmond.

 

“[Jayaraman] and her team stood out,” Desmond writes. “They were all women of color, including two wearing hijabs, in a place where nearly all the shoppers were white. ‘But we’d walk up to them and say. ‘Do you want to sign a petition for 15 [dollars an hour]?’ Ninety-nine percent of people said, ‘I already signed it,’ or ‘Where can I sign?’ It reminded Sara of what happened almost two years before, in November 2020. One Fair Wage were gathered outside the statehouse in Albany, New York, to call for a $15-an-hour minimum wage for tipped workers. The crowd of mostly Black and Hispanic New Yorkers had bought with them a twenty-four-foot-high statue of a flexing and aproned Black woman nicknamed Elena the Essential worker. As the workers were chanting and cheering on speakers, a group of white men and women in red MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hats approached. Unbeknownst to One Fair Wage, the day of their rally was also the day the state legislature had scheduled to certify the results of the presidential election, and MAGA protesters had gathered earlier to challenge the count. When the pro-Trump protesters learned that the workers were there to push for higher wages, they shook hands and joined their protest.”

(Desmond, Poverty, by America, pgs. 187-188)

 

So, there it is. It’s not about the demagogues. It’s about the people who feel that they don’t have all that they need and are in danger of losing what they have. They should be the building blocks of an historic movement, one that works in their interests and ours. People need to know that their privilege, however limited it might be, is an obstacle in the way of our collective challenge to bend the moral arc. They need to know that giving up privilege opens a doorway to a better world.

The Time Is Now: White Supremacy and Climate Change

As winter approaches, it is clear that Joe Biden will be our next president. But a remarkable number of people, led by our current president, are still arguing with the evidence and our political divisions threaten to fuel a rocky and unproductive, if not outright dangerous, transition from one administration to another. We, Americans, whoever we voted for, are almost universally suspicious of and alienated from most of the partisans who disagree with us.

 

But the truth is, we’ve been living in that divided country for quite a long time.  Arguably that estrangement began developing with the Vietnam War and Watergate, but it has additional roots in political controversies that followed. The Reagan-era and a partisanship that waged war on both the safety net and on imaginary “welfare queens” accelerated our discontents. So did Iran-Contra and US-subsidized mercenary warfare in Central America. The divide grew larger with the misogyny of both Bill Clinton and his political opponents, the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, the bipartisan expansion of the carceral state, and “the end of big government.” The excesses of the Trump administration and the failure to manage the pandemic merely added new material to the top of the mountain between us.

 

With each decade since the victories of the Civil Rights movement, the divisions have gotten wider and more obvious until this moment in time when it is next to impossible to identify a political figure with the ability to bridge the chasm across which some of us stare at each other with stunned incomprehension, if not with pure loathing. Regardless of what other detail we might add to our list of divisive issues and events, the energy that powers our divisions is rooted in the racism and white supremacy, the misogyny and machismo, and the homophobia and xenophobia that have been a part of our history since the first Europeans invaded the Western hemisphere.

 

 

The struggle ahead

 

But today is the day after, in the most fundamental sense. Everything we have to say about what we think our country is, and how it became what it is now, surely matters. But it is only at dawn on the day after that we can begin to do something about making the United States what we want it to be.

 

That work should begin with ourselves as individuals, with accepting that recent events may be discouraging, that recent defeats may have blunted our faith in what we can accomplish both individually and collectively. But we must begin by recognizing that whatever it is that lies in our individual capacity to achieve, our collective mental health depends on affirming our belief in what is possible for us to achieve together.

 

We must take on the small myriad challenges directly before us. We have to rebuild our communities, our cities and our states, and we must do so while also focusing on the challenges that loom the largest. And of all the very large challenges, the ones that threaten us all and that will get far worse in the absence of unity, climate change is the most severe, the one that will track us all down, wherever we are, and teach us that the old fantasies of the good life are pipe dreams and distractions. There is no express train to ride to a better life, no flight path to safety.

 

 

The urgent work of managing climate change

 

The exact date of the beginning of the climate crisis that the world and that the United States are living with now will be a matter of historical debate for some time to come, perhaps for generations. At some future time, the when, how, and why of the crisis itself will be the basis for a whole new field of historical study.

 

Regardless, climate change is upon us full blown. The continuing effects on less-developed countries as coastlines are submerged, as once arable land turns to desert, and as tens of millions of climate refugees continue their forced migrations, will get much worse. And the politics of our time threaten to  grow even more tumultuous than they already are.

 

So far, the vast wealth of the United States and its residents has empowered many of us to ignore climate change. Polling responses make clear that as much as half the adult population have somehow been able to ignore the starkest proofs that the climate crisis is upon us. Five years ago, Republican Senator James Inhofe brought a snowball into a Senate session as a way of demonstrating his complete rejection of any evidence supporting the claim that the world is getting warmer, like, for instance, the fact that the year before, 2014, was at the time, the hottest on record. But the climate emergencies, like enormous forest fires and devastating and frequent hurricanes keep accumulating.

 

Small-scale climate migrations are already occurring. People in the hundreds of thousands who have been repeatedly displaced by coastal flooding or forest fires these past few years are finally deciding not to rebuild their homes and not to return to devastated communities. Indeed, one recent report estimated that more than one million US residents moved from environmentally unstable areas in 2018. And we know beyond any doubt that flooding, droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes, heat emergencies, and more will get more frequent, more sustained and more destructive.

 

The hundreds and thousands making decisions to leave areas where they have lived for decades, if not generations, will most often be making the cheapest and most convenient changes they can. But southern Californians moving to Arizona or Nevada will be moving from fires to frying pans, moving to areas where climate crisis in the form of droughts and heat emergencies will get much worse; those effects on ecologically fragile environments multiplied by population pressures increased by their own new arrival.

 

Northern Californians and Oregonians are also beginning their own migration, trickling further north along the Pacific Coast to places where drought, flooding and forest fires will also get worse. Perhaps, long-term, they will all end up in British Columbia, where, hopefully, a far-sighted Canadian government will move forward in the next decade or two to put in place the kind of infrastructure that will mitigate the worst effects of climate change in the Northwest.

 

Miami, FL, regarded by many climate scientists as the most endangered coastal city in the world, will be the eventual source of a significant stream of climate refugees, a stream that will be further swollen by tributaries of refugees moving north from other Florida communities. The wealthiest of those refugees may not seem like climate refugees, at all. Their wealth will allow them to move further up the coast to Georgia and the Carolinas as they wish, maintaining their high-maintenance quality of life as they go, creating new and photogenic spreads for magazines and TV shows highlighting the lives of the rich and famous.

 

But the poor and middle-income families living in threatened areas will find themselves forced to move, their property devalued, their resources exhausted by multiple emergencies. And because no one can predict the if and when and where the migrations can and should stop, it is past time for all of us to begin preparing to live lives that will be consistently more challenging than many Americans have ever been forced to live. It is time to begin recognizing that we are about to become a nation of migrants on a scale not previously reached by earlier migrations.

 

 

 

Ending white supremacy is key

 

The claim that the lives we will be living will be more difficult for many of us than our lives before the escalating climate crisis needs qualification; it is important to note that for African Americans who have always had to negotiate life in a white supremacist country, hardship and challenge will not be a new experience. That people of color and the poor will bear the burdens of global climate change sooner and more extensively than the wealthy and more securely situated is not news.

 

White supremacy, itself, is the scaffolding for all the arguments that divide working people and the poor against each other, dramatically reducing the effectiveness of their political mobilizations. This leaves our collective fate in the hands of the very people who profit from our social divisions. It is also the basis for arguing that the first step toward managing climate change should begin with a multi-racial and multi-generational movement to dismantle white supremacy.

 

It can be done, with enormous difficulty, of course, but demography may finally be on the side of such a movement. After all, Gen Z is the largest and most diverse generational cohort in US history. And though no generation is ever a cohesive whole, it seems obvious that a significant fraction of that cohort is far past fed-up with the status quo, and already mobilized in pursuit of sweeping change.

 

In her recently published book, Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of the African American slave who may have been the first American to introduce the notion of vaccination as a means to controlling an epidemic.

 

“Cotton Mather was a Puritan minister and lay scientist in Boston and had come into possession of an African man named Onesimus. The enslaved African told of a procedure he had undergone back in his homeland that had protected him from [smallpox]. People in West Africa had discovered that they could fend off contagions by inoculating themselves with a specimen of fluid from an infected person. Mather was intrigued by the idea Onesimus described. He researched it, and decided to call it ‘variolation.’ It would become the precursor to immunization and ‘the Holy Grail of smallpox prevention for Western doctors and scientists,’ wrote the medical ethicist and author Harriet A. Washington.”

 

Wilkerson’s account details the outrage with which Bostonians greeted Mather’s attempts to promote inoculation as cure for the smallpox epidemic that raged in Boston in 1721. “They feared it could spread smallpox all the more,” she writes, “and they also wanted nothing to do with a practice that had come from Africa and had been suggested by an African slave.”

 

But Onesimus’ suggestion was a cure. One in seven Bostonians died from smallpox, but out of 240 people who were inoculated by a single local doctor who believed in “variolation,” only one in 40 died. The otherwise disastrous consequences of the smallpox outbreak in Boston, Wilkerson notes, was the absolute consequence of a caste system built on the notion that those at the top are inherently superior, those on the bottom are inherently inferior, and, by definition, are incapable of the intellectual brilliance necessary to advance development and solve social problems. “The investment in the established hierarchy runs sufficiently deep [in the United States],” Wilkerson concludes, “that people in the dominant caste have historically been willing to forgo conveniences to themselves to keep the fruits of citizenship within their own caste.”

 

That point ought to be among the most important arguments for dismantling white supremacy. Climate change has been creeping up on us all since the Industrial Revolution; it has been gathering mass and velocity at an accelerating rate since the middle of the last century, and it has become the most global of emergencies in the history of humankind. We cannot begin to manage that emergency in a society that throws people away from birth, that denies opportunity for human talent to develop, and that continues to foster inequalities of every description. We need to mobilize and fully employ every human talent that manifests itself in time to turn us toward a sustainable future.

 

 

A few proposals for action

 

The failure of presidential leadership over the last four years underscores the argument that the exclusive leadership of wealthy, white males is a recipe for disaster. We have waited far too long to open the way to the leadership of women and people of color. We are moving forward now in a nation that cannot depend on the leadership (or celebrity) of the newly elected president. We can hope that he will be a competent steward in a period of epic social and political transition, but the heroes of the effort to transform our world, with roots in previously excluded communities, are already stepping forward everywhere.

 

So, if the challenge is to dismantle white supremacy on the way to building an effective nationwide movement to address climate change, how do we do it? Where do we begin?

 

Building on the success of the electoral defeat of Donald Trump by a record-setting voter turnout seems like one of the more obvious places to start. Register more voters. Register millions more voters. Choose Stacey Abrams to lead the Democratic National Committee and to organize the largest and most effective voter registration effort in American history. This will accomplish two things. It will continue to build a multi-racial coalition capable of advancing an electoral and legislative attack on white supremacy. And it will acknowledge the leadership and accomplishments of an African American woman who has already directed the effort to turn Georgia, a deep-south red state, purple.

 

Here in Chicago, we need to act directly and relentlessly to confront developers and political leaders who have persuaded themselves that downtown and upscale and high-rise office and housing developments serve the interests of the city’s residents. In fact, not only do such subsidized developments fail to serve the interests of the vast majority of city residents, they fail to acknowledge the role that African American and Latinx labor has played in creating wealth in the city. Indeed, the continuing denial of educational, housing and career opportunities for people of color has forced minorities to compete for low-wage and dangerous jobs that expropriate the wealth generated by their own efforts (and exposes them disproportionately to health risks and to environmental toxins). The solution for Chicago begins with prioritizing development in the south and west sides of the city and in requiring all development projects to employ workforces that reflect the city’s actual population.

 

On an even more local level, we need to recognize that our homes and our neighborhoods are not ready to weather climate change. We should be retrofitting to make housing community-wide as energy efficient as possible. Moreover, we must advance green-energy development in the form of small-scale solar installations, green roofs, wind-powered generators, and neighborhood-based energy co-ops. Housing and building codes should be changed to guarantee that both developers and landlords play an appropriate role in improving energy efficiency.

 

While we are initiating and moving forward locally and globally, we should recognize that the two Senate runoff races in Georgia represent an opportunity to dethrone Mitch McConnell and to begin building a Senate that will not stand in the way of progressive legislation. To do so will be a sustained, multi-step effort. Long-term, it will mean electing senators who bring a more profound understanding of class and race issues to the work of legislating, but we must not neglect the immediate opportunity to elect two Democratic senators from Georgia. We have only two months—the runoff elections will be held January 5—to mobilize a Mississippi Summer-type intervention in Georgia aimed at electing Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the Senate. Winning either seat will be a challenge, but the urgent task is to win both. It’s time for the most energetic and adventurous among us to head to Georgia for an adrenaline-fueled election campaign that must end in a critically important victory.

 

And while volunteers head to Georgia, the demands for local action, including confronting police violence and misconduct, and building up anti-violence networks in our neighborhoods remain a priority. So, too, are organizing efforts that build capacity in Chicago neighborhoods and address continuing needs like hunger, made worse by the pandemic.

 

One nonprofit in Chicago, Just Roots, began development and operation of a community farm on 45^th Street in the Bronzeville neighborhood. In just three years, the Legends South Farm has distributed 20,000 pounds of produce grown at the farm and provided 1,000 hours of education and training for community farmers. Just Roots, in partnership with St. James Catholic Church, also established a second community farm this past summer at 29^th and Wabash. This model for community self-help could be replicated many places across Chicago with support from the city; another political challenge that local activists could take on.

 

The possibilities for action, for projects that will promote the changes we desperately require, are nearly infinite. Every individual, every family, every neighborhood, every community can work up a list of the possibilities. There will be dissenters, people who will not share in the tasks ahead; some will even stand in the way. But obstacles are not enemies. We must focus relentlessly on building a movement capable of flowing over or around whatever is in the way. 

 

 

Implacable forces have been building the world to come

 

The pandemic, itself an outcome of globalization and climate change, has taught us a lesson about traditional expectations and the pace of social, environmental and existential change. We live now in a world in which it is no longer reasonable to assume that tomorrow will be essentially the same as today. That means, in general, that everything about our personal lives, our families, our neighborhoods, and our communities, needs to be carefully reexamined. If we as a country are to dismantle white supremacy, manage and mitigate climate change, and successfully adjust to a new world in which our old assumptions about life trajectories are merely baggage we will have to discard, we are going to need to reeducate, retrain and reimagine ourselves. That will be very hard work. Mistakes are inevitable. We must get started now.

A Time to Make Change

As happened in the 1930s and again in the 1960s, the way is opening for fundamental social change. Police reform is in the air, but so much more is possible. We should be aiming at the defeat of white supremacy, and organizing for a Bill of Fundamental Human Rights that will frame domestic and global policy and programs for the next 25 years. It is a fight we can win.

When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in April 1968, I was living in Toronto. I was 20 at the time, just a couple months shy of my 21^st birthday.

A hot, personal anger over the Vietnam War had derailed my college career during the previous two years. I had turned toward a lifestyle based on occasional anti-war activism, confrontational politics fueled by adrenaline, part-time jobs, hours of playground basketball and regular use of marijuana and hallucinogenic drugs. In the process, I had quit school, burned my draft card, and regularly demanded that my draft board halt their complicity with the war crimes inherent in invading Third World countries.

Not surprisingly, they were unreceptive to my demands and hot to punish me for my insolence, so they drafted me. Believing that resistance to the war included refusing to acknowledge the authority of the board to draft me and of the state to prosecute me, I went to Canada.

King was shot at roughly 6 p.m. on April 4; but absorbed with the trivia of my life in somewhat voluntary exile, I knew nothing about his death on the day that it happened. When I woke up the next morning, I was stunned to hear that King was dead and cities, including Chicago, my hometown, were burning.

The Moral Authority and Visionary Leadership of Dr. King

I believed then, and I believe now, that King was the most important American leader in my lifetime. I also believed that racism was the original sin in American history and that the Vietnam War was the most extreme example of how militarism destroyed lives, shaped policy, and robbed the country and the world of the resources necessary to build a society based on reconciliation, redemption, equal justice and equity. King, I believed was the person who might lead us to such a benign place.

On April 4, 1967, exactly a year before his assassination, King delivered a speech at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned (CALC) at Riverside Church in New York City. The speech, which King titled “A Time to Break Silence,” was the first time that he publicly announced that the pursuit of civil rights in the United States required firm opposition to the Vietnam War.

As he spoke King noted that the gathering at the church was “…surely … the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history.”

But while celebrating the stirring of conscience as a new and positive factor in national politics, King was not kidding himself or his audience about the country’s failure to address the desperate needs of the poor. In explaining why he would no longer separate the struggle for civil rights from opposition to the war, he told his audience that, “there is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America.

“A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle,” he said. “It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor—both Black and white—through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”

There were others around at the time who were speaking out against the war and framing it as a very specific threat to African Americans. World heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali was drafted and refused to fight in the war, famously saying “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.”

The white radical group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), many of whose own youthful leaders were themselves schooled in their activism by the civil rights movement, routinely connected the destruction of Vietnamese villages to the ongoing destruction of African American neighborhoods in the United States. But no opponent of the war could bring to bear the combination of celebrity and eloquence that King could.

“We were taking the Black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor,” King said at Riverside Church.

King’s address to CALC on that April day was heavily covered by the mainstream media and earned him new celebrity and unusual criticism from both longtime allies in the civil rights movement who rejected his broader focus, and from high-level national politicians who greatly feared the possibility that the civil rights and anti-war movements might join forces in an all-out attack on the status quo. Undaunted, King was relentless in articulating a comprehensive critique of US politics and policies that mobilized overwhelming force against developing countries, denied fundamental human rights domestically and globally, and distributed social benefits unequally.

Welding evidence, economic analysis, history lessons and moral perspective into continuous teaching on what the country could become, his persistence was an inspiration and a consolation for activists of all sorts. He reminded us all to stay the course and of the new world we could build.

The Elements of Movement and the Obstacles in the Way

Waking up to the somber reports of King’s death and the images of cities on fire shattered me emotionally. I made my way to a pay phone on a corner near my basement apartment. In tears, I called my father.

He and I were often at odds politically and would continue to be in years to come, but it was my father’s love for Chicago, and his refusal to live anywhere else, that shaped my own strong feelings for the city. I don’t remember much of what he said to me. It is my own incoherence and uncontrollable sobbing, the images of burning cities and the abject misery I felt, that stands out in my memory. What was I doing in Toronto while King died in the struggle for a cause I believed in? And what would we do without him?

At the time, I was too inexperienced and too unversed in the history of the United States to recognize that the civil rights movement from 1955 to 1965, of which King was the most prominent leader, had been arguably the most successful organized effort to rollback white supremacy in all of United States history. And even though I was demoralized by King’s assassination, I did not yet grasp that by that time the radical movement for social change that began with a decade of civil rights activism and was promising to grow into a force that would radically transform the culture and the economy had already come undone.

After all, as King reflected at Riverside Church, the poverty program, an effort to finally begin addressing the most severe examples of income and wealth inequality in the United States, was already “broken and eviscerated” by a government decision to spend a billion dollars on the “War on Poverty,” while simultaneously appropriating 50 times as much on weapons and expanding military capacity. That disparity guaranteed that the poverty program would stagger forward to swift failure. The War on Poverty lost almost at the same moment it had been declared.

Further, John Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 had made Lyndon Johnson president. I will make no argument here that Kennedy might have pursued a more radical political course in the latter part of his presidency, but despite Johnson’s decades of political experience, he became deluded by his own power. On his way to absolutely routing conservative Republican Barry Goldwater in his reelection campaign, Johnson also engineered the defeat of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in its struggle to be seated at the 1964 Democratic convention as a replacement for the old school Mississippi Democrats who for years had blocked full participation by African Americans in Mississippi politics.

Such outcomes were the very beginning of the 50-year counterattack by both corporations and the right against the victories of the civil rights movement and the liberation movements that followed. Yes, the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, and the Voting Rights Act would pass a year later, but they represented the furthest advance of the movement and would be undermined and undone in numerous ways in the decades to follow.

Small Victories and Unfinished Business

By August of 1968, Johnson’s miscalculations had saddled him with responsibility for an unpopular war. Reelection was out of his reach.

Meanwhile, I was back in Chicago, unpursued by a government that could not corral the thousands who had refused to serve. But I felt a new call to action in the anti-war organizing effort aimed at confronting delegates to that summer’s Democratic convention as they gathered to nominate Hubert Humphrey as their standard bearer against Republican Richard Nixon. Accordingly, I showed up to join the crowds that massed in Grant Park and Lincoln Park in preparation for a number of actions, including a massive protest in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, where many convention delegates were housed.

But the protests deteriorated into a police riot when cops beat and chased protesters throughout the downtown and the north side. Unable to effectively express the rage we felt against the escalation of the war, many of us threw ourselves into the pitched battles with the police, or into smashing windows and setting cars on fire through the downtown. Though the escalation of the use of force by police had already become a common element in confrontations with protesters in Chicago and in other cities across the country, few white protesters were prepared for such brutality. It was, however, just a taste of the police brutality that African Americans experienced in their own neighborhoods on a daily basis.

But all the assassinations, the police beatings, the political counterattacks—like the passage of right-to-work laws in many southern states (undermining the power of the big industrial unions), the institutional obstacles to voting rights and ballot access, and the increasing limits on women’s right to control their own bodies that swept through various states—have failed to erase all the gains of the 50s and 60s. Grassroots understandings of fundamental human rights denied, of the unrealized promises of democracy, and of memories of movement mobilizations endure, even if such persistent awareness was not enough on which to base successful resistance to the right-wing counterattack.

As SDS founder Tom Hayden wrote in his essay “The Way We Were”: “The idea [of participatory democracy] was to challenge elite authority by direct example on the one hand, and on the other to draw ‘ordinary people,’ whether apathetic students, sharecroppers, or office workers into a dawning belief in their own right to participate in decisions.

“This was the method—call it consciousness-raising—of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which influenced SDS, the early women’s liberation groups, farm workers’ house meetings, and Catholic base communities, eventually spreading to Vietnam veterans’ rap groups and other organizations. Participatory democracy was a tactic of movement-building as well as an end in itself. And by an insistence of listening to ‘the people’ as a basic ethic of participatory democracy, the early movement was able to guarantee its roots in American culture and traditions while avoiding the imported ideologies that affected many elements of the earlier left,” Hayden wrote.

I do not mean to suggest that there were no real and unreversed achievements of the ‘60s and ‘70s struggles for full human rights for women, working people, African Americans, Native Americans, Chicanos, lesbians, gay men, immigrants and others. However far voting rights and choice have been rolled back, the record shows that some changes are irreversible.

The Radical Mission to Reclaim a People’s History

One milestone has been the field of African American Studies, which did not exist as anything but an activist vision in the early ‘60s but is now institutionalized as a fully accredited course of academic study at most universities and colleges across the country. Perry A. Hall described the decades of collective activism and relentless scholarship it took to fully legitimize African American Studies in his book In the Vineyard, Working in African American Studies.

“The issue of whether to work within or outside of ‘the system,’ intensely debated among militants and activists in the 1960s, resolved in the 1970s to a commitment to change from the ‘inside.’ Our aim was to make the system work for us rather than against us—that is, to make it function more legitimately by broadening its foundations to include African Americans,” Hall wrote.

In beginning the work of agitating for curriculums in white universities that acknowledged the social and cultural contributions of African Americans as an equal and fundamental element of American history and culture, Hall and his peers were following in the work of the civil rights movement, in the footsteps of King, Malcom X, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer and others. And they, too, would permanently advance the struggle for human rights in the United States.

Writing about his experience as acting director of the Black Studies Center at Wayne State University in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Hall notes that “the established faculty [of the university] denied the center the ability to grant tenure to its own faculty. Structurally, it was neither a real department nor a real field of study in institutional terms … Later it presented serious career problems for those who became more than nominally involved with the development of African American Studies. The competing interests created by the ‘contradiction of double aims’ presented the alternatives of either marginalizing oneself within an established discipline or ignoring, deferring, or subordinating the objectives of the new academic enterprise.”

Hall, of course, neither marginalized himself nor compromised the work. When he died this past April, he had spent the last two decades as a tenured professor in the African American Studies department at the University of North Carolina. He also lived to see the publication of the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” a comprehensive history of African American achievement and struggle against 400 years of white supremacy in the United States. 

And, just as Hall and his colleagues had built on decades of civil rights struggle and the spirit of Black pride and Black power to create and solidify an entirely new field of scholarly production, the 1619 Project owes its ability to tell a coherent and comprehensive story of oppression and resistance to their scholarly efforts to “mainstream” the study of African American history and culture. The lessons that the Black studies movement taught over the last 50 years will never be unlearned.

[I tell my story of a lifetime of adult friendship with Perry in “Perry Hall, Restless Seeker,” and in “The Spirit of Phyllis Hall.”]

The Gathering Elements of a New Movement

Now, in 2020, we are living once again in a period of open rebellion that bears real similarities to the ‘60s; similarities that include the continuous outrages of police brutality toward and police murders of African American men and women, and mass expressions of political rage and, sometimes, violence. Many more protests are guaranteed as is the possibility of further and, even, premeditated violence.

But there are welcome and important differences between the two eras. Perhaps the most important is the role that Generation Z will play going forward. Gen Z is the largest and most diverse generation in American history, eclipsing the Baby Boomers in both size and diversity, and is just now coming of political age. I am not suggesting that a majority of that cohort is done with the status quo, ready to resist white supremacy, and to carry the fight for social justice and equity forward; but the Boomers were by no means united in support of civil rights or opposition to the war in Vietnam, either. And history (including polling data) does suggest that a far larger percentage of Gen Z is ready for an entirely new social contract.

Into the bargain, the percentage of older white folks who recognize that white privilege has been a major cause of the unfair distribution of the fruits of the country’s great wealth is growing. Covid and the higher infection and death rates in black and brown communities connected to the fact that so many people of color are essential workers, are underpaid and often uninsured, has highlighted the costs of white privilege.

The Shifting Media Environment

Fifty-two years ago, an overwhelming majority of seniors voted for Richard Nixon in a decisive repudiation of the liberal social agenda. Yes, many of them voted for Donald Trump four years ago, but polls now suggest they are increasingly disenchanted with Trump’s divisive political style and his failure to productively address the pandemic we are suffering through now. Moreover, it seems that many no longer believe that occasional vandalism and looting destroys the credibility of the protests. And though somewhere around 40 percent of poll respondents (most of them white, to be sure) continue to support Donald Trump, contrast this to the fact that 61 percent of poll respondents opposed the Freedom Riders in 1961.

And with the exception of Fox News, no major networks or prominent publications are using their influence to effectively terrorize moderate voters into applauding Trump’s law and order rhetoric. On the contrary, it has become a commonplace to hear both politicians and talking heads defend the legitimacy of protest even when they are condemning looting and vandalism.

Activists annoyed by the media’s coverage of, say, Black Lives Matter, should contrast the refusal of major media to blanketly condemn the current protests to Life Magazine’s major two-part coverage of “the critical new phase of the Negro revolution” in June 1966. The second issue in that series featured a lurid cover headline: “Plot to Get Whitey: Red-Hot Young Negroes Plan a Ghetto War.” Of course, there are plenty of legitimate critiques to aim at reporting on contemporary activism, but coverage today is downright tame compared to the headlines that helped to transform white Americans into “law and order” voters in 1968.

From the mid-50s through the end of the '60s, there was an infrastructure of progressive social organizations, most particularly civil rights groups. That infrastructure was key in developing strategy, mobilizing resources and sustaining momentum for the long fight. There were also a variety of liberation movements that developed in the '60s, but not many that built solid or enduring organizations to carry the work forward.

Though it is far from clear which organizations will grow in stature and the capacity to lead and sustain a movement against white supremacy and economic injustice, there are groups, like Black Lives Matter, that are direct descendants of the liberation movements of the 1960s. The North Carolina NAACP, the second largest NAACP chapter in the country, led by Rev. William Barber, has organized and sustained a network of 93 activist and advocacy organizations across the state. As a result, the NAACP’s  110-year history of struggle and long reach are available to help sustain a new movement capable of taking on the challenge of this moment.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), with roots in the ‘70s, has grown recently into an organization capable of electing its own members to Congress and swinging substantial weight in the Democratic party. And though some labor unions played critical roles in getting the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act passed in the ‘70s, they will need the changes a new movement can achieve to restore the right to organize and the strength they once had. DSA and other groups will play necessary roles in moving the Democratic party out of the way, if not into becoming reliable allies of a new movement for social change.

I have neither the knowledge nor the ability to come up with a comprehensive list of the broad range of organizations that could provide significant leadership in what is shaping up to be a historic struggle; but the point is that every movement must rely on a variety of organizations to help it to grow and mature, gather resources, develop strategy, and capture hearts and minds. In the ‘60s and ‘70s some of those critical organizations exhausted themselves, SDS for example; others, like the Black Panthers, came under withering attack from police and the FBI and found themselves struggling to survive. And many big labor unions found themselves shrunk by a declining manufacturing base and legal assaults on the right to organize.

The Counterattack of Capital

But one other factor is critical in assessing the opportunity to make fundamental change: The role of capital and the capacity of capital and major corporations to drive the counterattack against any significant gains by a social change movement.

In the ‘30s capital was unable to effectively resist New Deal programs that created Social Security, jobs programs, income subsidies, and new areas of social investment. It took a war to finally restart the economy, but the New Deal persuaded ordinary Americans for the first time that government could work for them.

Capital’s capacity to fight back was far less limited in the ‘70s. The early part of that decade was characterized by something of a stalemate between capital and labor, but the big corporations in major sectors of the economy had the wealth to whether that standoff. By the end of the decade, the purchasing power of the average wage had eroded considerably, and factory jobs were disappearing or beginning to move to right-to-work states in the south. It was at that time that big cities in the north, where working families had been supported for almost two decades by wages and benefits earned in union jobs, began experiencing a decline in their standard of living that has lasted into the new century.

But Covid, which has revealed the high cost of white privilege, has also unbalanced significant sectors of the economy. Working people, of course, will suffer the consequences worst and first; but if an electoral strategy develops that focuses on turning red districts purple and purple districts blue, a more progressive majority in Congress could help the developing movement fight off the counterattack of capital.

Five Factors That Open the Way

These five factors:

1.     A new generation agitating for realizing the promise of democracy, and

2.     Older generations woke to how damaging their privilege has been, and believing that a new social contract could improve their quality of life as well as the lives of the exploited and left behind, and

3.     The development of new organizations and the revitalization of older organizations with a commitment to fundamental social change and the capacity to sustain a movement, and

4.     A national media that is actually showing signs of a new commitment to journalistic integrity,

5.     And fundamental weaknesses in capital’s ability to fight back,

suggest that we have arrived at a moment when a movement can build a new society organized around equity and equal justice. Such a thing cannot possibly be achieved instantly. It will take time. And energy. Patience. And a strategy that mobilizes millions.

Imagine the Democratic Impact of Elections in Which Everybody Votes

It would seem that in the United States that any strategy that could dismantle white supremacy and fundamentally change governance must include democratic elections. And not the familiar kind, in which somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of eligible voters show up to vote. But a strategy that aimed to get, say, 70 percent of all voting age adults invested in the real value of participating in the electoral process, organizing, registering, educating, voting, holding elected officials accountable, and engaging each other constantly, would be elections with outcomes far different than the ones we live with now.

Over time, elections like that could be the force that dismantles structures like the Electoral College and the US Senate, institutions created to limit democratic governance by a constitution that specifically declared that African Americans were only 3/5 of a person and only white men of property could vote. How to get to such a place? Again, such a thing cannot possibly be achieved instantly. It will take time. And energy. Patience. And a strategy that mobilizes millions.

So, even if we are talking of changes years in the making, we are also talking about a country shaped by 400 years of racism and dominated by wealth and privilege. Getting there in our lifetimes would be a monumental achievement and would honor the patience and struggle of the 20+ generations that preceded us.

It’s worth noting that the Left in the United States has been divided for decades over whether the Democratic party can be a vehicle for social change. A significant percentage of white leftists has sat on the sidelines during national elections, including the 2016 election, which ended with the catastrophic victory of Donald Trump. Many of those on the sidelines have argued that only a third party, a true workers’ party, can change a system that favors capital over labor, and victimizes especially communities of color and low-wage workers. But it seems clear that Trump is among the worst presidents in American history and that his presidency has been a disaster for every group that a left-wing third party might aspire to organize and serve.

In any case, dreams of building a third party do not make a strategy. But a mass movement for social change that endures could also create educational and organizing structures that pursue vastly increased participation in elections and provide a means to push elected officials to enact legislation that invests in underserved communities, ends the unequal distribution of income and wealth, and invests in universal health care, quality public education, affordable housing and ending poverty. Such a movement could easily transform the Democratic party into a political force that serves the vast majority of Americans. The movement that gets there must necessarily set goals that include 70 and 80 percent participation in elections by all voting age adults in the United States, not the kinds of elections we are familiar with now in which records are set if the participation needle reaches 50 percent of registered voters.

And when the opportunity develops to secure equity and equal justice for everyone, enduring as long as those who came after us continue the struggle to maintain that happy state, we could pass a Bill of Fundamental Human Rights that would serve as a declaration of permanent intent and would guide policy and program both domestically and globally.

What would a Bill of Fundamental Human Rights look like? Well it might look like the United Nations Declaration of Universal Human Rights, which was passed in 1948.

The first one on the last is “Innate Freedom and Equality,” elaborated this way:

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

The declaration outlines 30 basic (and unalienable) rights altogether. The twenty-fifth is “The Right to an Adequate Standard of Living,” which is described this way:

“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.”

By this point, it is likely that most people who read this will have concluded that such goals are too idealistic and beyond our collective reach. But the notion that such goals are unachievable, it turns out, is a measure of the true genius of our wealthy, white founding fathers. They designed a system that would hold up for hundreds of years against the work of individuals and movements who struggled for more and better.

But if there were not flaws in their design than the slave regime would not have been brought down, women would not own property or vote or hold office, and everyone would not have the right to marry and raise children. Of course, there is so much more to do. And it is a very heavy lift. But we are at a moment of opportunity. A moment where we might collectively be the instrument for realizing the dreams of the liberation movements whose work got us this far.

The Earth Itself Is Waiting For Us

How urgent is the work of this moment? So urgent that without equity and equal justice, we will not be strong enough to do what comes after the revolution—the challenge to save a planet from the worst of climate change and the damage that populations world over, especially poor communities and countries of color, are and will sustain.

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