Rockaway Blues

Rockaway Blues

by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)

The destruction and isolation that has plagued the Rockaways in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, compounded by government neglect and the absence of official aid organizations, is not the first time that section of the city has been overcome with violence and fear. The wave of arson and disinvestment that swept through the Bronx, Harlem and large portions of Brooklyn during the early and mid 1970’s also took a terrible toll on the Rockaways, though I never saw it mentioned at the time, or for that matter in the historical literature about those difficult years in New York’s History.

I experienced this first hand in 1979 when I drove out to Rockaway to interview a former NYC school teacher and union activist, named Alice Citron, for my book Communists in Harlem During the Depression. Her address put her in a section of Rockaway, Edgemere, where I had spent many summers as a child staying in the bungalow of my grandfather, who was a garment worker. Although the bungalows were wooden, and in retrospect, extremely modest, I remember magical days and nights in that area in the early 50’s, running into the surf, playing ski-ball on the boardwalk, eating delicious knishes, and listening to the adults political arguments. The area had been packed with people, almost all of them Jewish, who had survived the Depression and were enjoying a first taste of prosperity and security. It was a joyous place.

Now, in 1979, it had the atmosphere of a ghost town. Alice Citron’s house stood on a beach block where 90 percent of the land consisted of vacant lots, with only three houses standing. Across the el tracks, near the bay side, stood a large public housing project. When I rang the door bell, Alice and her husband came to the door, accompanied by two huge dogs. Before we started her interview, which focused on the role Communist teachers played in fighting for better schools in Harlem and the teaching of Black history, she told me what the neighborhood was like today.

Rockaway had become the land that God , and the city of New York, had forgotten. In the housing projects across the street, senior citizens, most of them Black, were trapped in their apartments by fear of crime. The Citrons with their huge dogs, and their car, sometimes shopped for them, and brought them to the doctor when they were sick. The neighborhood had become a kind of urban concentration camp for the poor,, a place where the beauty of the surroundings was little compensation for fear, neglect, and the absence of basic neighborhood amenities. The Citrons, who had lost their jobs during the McCarthy area didn’t have the money to move out so they stayed and helped their neighbors cope. They were in their 70’s then, and had no where else to go.

For years after, I was haunted by what I saw that day, and what it told me about class and race in New York City. Ten years later, when I was coaching CYO basketball, I returned with a team from Park Slope play a game at a Catholic parish not far from the Citron home, St Rose of Lima, but I didn’t have the time to drive around. I never found out of the neighborhood had been rebuilt, or whether life had gotten better in the projects of the Rockaway Peninsula.

Now, with reports of residents living without power, food, and water, surrounded by piles of debris the storm had scattered, terrified of crime, the memories of that visit came rushing back , and along with it, the rage and frustration I had felt at the time.

Once again, the people of Rockaway were being neglected. Once again, they were reminded because of their color and economic status, they were not really “citizens.”And once again, they were living in the land that God, and the City of New York had forgotten.

***

Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

Hymn to Working Class New York

Hymn to Working Class New York 

by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)

 

As we struggle through the aftermath of the worst storm in New York’s history, my thoughts turn to the first responders- firefighters, police officers, EMS workers- and the role they played in the last great tragedy to strike New York, the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11.

The heroism these men and women displayed then, and in our current circumstances, is not a surprise to me. For the fifteen years I spent coaching and running youth programs in Brooklyn in the 80’s and 90’s, civil servants, especially fire fighters, were an integral part of the coaching cohort I interacted with daily, both in my own neighborhood, and throughout Brooklyn and Staten Island, and there was never a doubt in my mind, based on that experience, that they would sacrifice their health, well being and if necessary their lives if called on to rescue people in trouble.

My relationships with many of these individuals, especially those who represented opposing parishes—in CYO basketball—or opposing teams—in sandlot baseball—was  not always easy. They were, like me, stubborn, intimidating, over bearing and fiercely competitive and we had many arguments in the midst of closely contested games. But they were also selflessly devoted to their players, with whom they spent countless hours at games and practices, and whatever their private political or racial attitudes, were determined to maintain Brooklyn sports leagues as a place where young people from every neighborhood and racial and ethnic background could find an outlet for their talents.

 

Never did I see any of them participate in, or tolerate, the slightest amount of race baiting from their players and parents, even though some of them came from neighborhoods, such as Bensonhurst, Bay Ridge or Rockaway, then infamous for racial exclusivity. When push came to shove, they were as fair as they were loyal, and I never felt the slightest hesitation taking interracial teams from Park Slope into gyms or ball fields in all white neighborhoods because I knew we would always be protected.

This kind of quiet heroism, I felt, allowed for more dramatic forms of heroism when circumstances called for it. It surprised me not at all that some of my fellow coaches ran up the stairways of the World Trade Center to their death while other people were running down. Nor would it surprise me to see their counterparts today, some of whom might be their own children , run into flooded buildings to save a stranded families or risk being crushed when clearing fallen trees. This is the ethic of loyalty and sacrifice they grew up among, a New York working class tradition passed on from generation to generation among members of the uniformed services and among more than a few teachers, transit workers and other civil servants.

For quite a while, most of the attention by elected officials and the media have been bestowed upon financial and artistic elites who gravitate to our city. But it is the working people of New York who insure the city’s daily functioning, and in moments of crisis, sacrifice themselves for others so that the city can continue to survive, and when things improve, begin to grow and thrive.

We have always lived among quiet heroes, some of them immigrants working three jobs to support families her and in their home countries, some of them teachers and social workers serving people in the face of deep skepticism and contempt from the power that be; some of them members of our uniformed services who are asked to risk their lives for the rest of us.

I just wanted to take this moment to show some love for these people and hope you will do so as well.

***

Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

Two Protests Which Changed the Course of American History: Flint 1936, Birmingham 1963

Two Protests Which Changed the Course of American History:

Flint 1936, Birmingham 1963

by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan

Flint 1936

It’s December of 1936. America is now 7 years into the worst Depression in its history. At its peak over 1/3 of the labor force was unemployed, 1/3 working part time, and millions of people were without food and shelter. People all over the country rose in protest against forced impoverishment. There were hunger marches, strikes, protests against evictions and foreclosures, many of them organized by Socialists and Communists. but change came very slowly. It wasn’t until 1933, after the Franklin Roosevelt was elected president, that the first federal relief dollars came pouring into the states, and slowly began to reach individual families, allowing at least some of them to remain in their homes and apartments. This was soon followed up by programs of work relief, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Public Works Administration, and later the WPA, which created millions of jobs for unemployed Americas, many of them building roads and bridges, creating national parks in rural areas, even creating dams which gave people in poor rural area electricity for the first time in their lives.

On the labor front, though, things were still extremely tense. When the Depression began, only 3 million workers were members of unions, and none of the nation’s largest industries were unionized. The big steel, auto and electronics companies all had been successful in keeping unions out. After FDR passed the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933, unions all over the country began to organize again, a major strike wave broke out in 1934, leading to a significant growth of unions in transportation, particularly trucking and the mining and garment industries, but the nation’s biggest companies General Motors, Ford, US Steel, Westinghouse, General Electric, still refused to accept collective bargaining.

In 1935, John L Lewis of the United Mine Workers left the American Federation of Labor to form a new federation, the Committee for Industrial Organization, aimed at organizing workers in the biggest companies across lines of craft and skill, and FDR and Congress passed the Wagner Labor Relations Act aimed at providing for workplace elections which could confer union recognition, but not one major companies targeted ended up granting union recognition to its workers. The stalemate continued into 1936 even as organizers were sent into the nation’s biggest factories. Executives in those firms held out, hoping the Wagner Act would be declared unconstitutional and that all the tactics that they had used in the pasty to keep workers from organizing--including spies and private police--would continue to be effective.

One of the companies most infamous for use of spies and informers was General Motors. The newly formed United Automobile Workers decided to target GM by organizing its plants across the country, in cities ranging from Cleveland to Detroit to Atlanta, but much of its effort was focused on Flint, a General Motors company town, where the infamous Black Legion, Ku Klux Klan type organization had some influence in the plants. The organizers the UAW sent in first decided to create a secret organization of workers they could trust and then began doing actions in the plant to show workers that they could stop foreman and managers from intimidating workers on the job.

Then, after they built a following with small actions, the workers decided to do something dangerous and dramatic to force General Motors to come to the bargaining table. They seized and barricaded two plants and refused to leave. General Motors tried everything to evict them. They used private guards, they organized vigilante groups, they called on the local police. Nothing could get the workers inside, who had thousands of supporters outside, to leave. They even drove off the Flint police who refused to use guns, and when the police finally used guns against picket outside, it backfired. The occupation went on for several weeks.

General Motors asked the newly elected Democratic governor to send in the national guard, which he did, but he refused to use them to pull the workers out. He, and President Roosevelt, who refused to send in federal troops, thought the country would be better off if GM recognized the union. Then, at the fifth week of the Occupation, the Governor finally told workers in the plants he was going to use the guard to take the workers out. But the workers instead of leaving the plants, decided to up the ante. After half of those occupying the factories signed “Ready to Die” agreements, a phalanx of workers seized yet another factory in the 9 Plant General Motors complex and barricaded that.

The Occupation had now lasted six weeks, shutting General Motors production down almost completely on a national level. Half of the country wanted the workers in the plants taken out and shot; another half supported what they were doing. Finally, just as it looked like there was a bloodbath on the horizon as the National Guard prepared to take the plants, General Motors decided to negotiate with the UAW and give collective bargaining rights to workers in the occupied plants. Within two years, General Motors, the nation’s largest industrial corporation was completely unionized

But that wasn’t all, US. Steel the nation’s second largest corporation, which faced a similar organizing drive from the United Steelworkers Union, decided to voluntarily grant recognition in its plants to the USW rather than go through what General Motors just had. This meant that by the time the US economy started reviving in 1939, the nation’s two largest corporations were unionized, and workers in both of those companies were making far more money than they ever had in their lives, and could walk into factories knowing that foremen and managers would treat them with respect. This resulted, ultimately in those workers becoming bulwarks of a strong consumer economy that emerged right after WWII, and helped make the US a far more equal nation than it had been in the 1920’s.

Birmingham 1963

It is March of 1963. It has been nine years since the landmark Supreme Court decision, Brown V Topeka board of education which had declared the separate but equal doctrine, used to justify racial segregation in the South, unconstitutional. It was seven years since the Montgomery bus boycott, which ended bus segregation in that city, and two years since the student sit-in movement which ended segregation in some downtown business districts and two years since the Freedom Rides which ended segregation in terminals involved in interstate travel.

Yet despite these landmark events, the vast majority of the South remained segregated. Hospitals, parks, swimming pools, restaurants, theaters, department stores, gas stations, factories and offices buildings, in both the private and public sector, all kept whites and blacks totally separate, in the process subjecting Black Southerners to almost daily humiliation. President Kennedy, preoccupied with foreign policy issues, refused to put the prestige of his office behind Civil Rights legislation that would compel the South to end these practices. Lobbying and legislation couldn’t move him. Even a year long protest in Albany Georgia, where there were thousands of arrests, but no violence, could not prompt federal intervention.

Dr Martin Luther King, the most important leader of the non-violent protest movement was getting desperate. He saw the gains that Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam were making among frustrated blacks and feared that his entire movement could be disrupted unless he could force federal action to end segregation. So he decided on a gamble every bit as desperate as occupying the flint factories. He decided to lead a movement to desegregate the downtown business district of Birmingham Alabama, where the local sheriff, Eugene Bull Connor, would be almost certain to try to repress any protests with such extreme violence that it would create an international scandal. King moved to Birmingham and started mobilizing that city’s Black churches He persuaded hundreds of well dressed peaceful marchers to go into downtown Birmingham where they would enter Department stores and restaurants and demand to be served. Bull Connor, as expected, arrested them in enormous numbers, filling the jails, but avoiding for the most part, flamboyant acts of brutality for which he was known.

The movement dragged on for a month, with thousands of arrests, but no visible results. People in the Black community were getting tired and discouraged. King had trouble getting enough people to march downtown to sustain the momentum of the movement. Finally, he decided on a truly desperate strategy. In the face of several local criticism, he organized thousands of Black high school and junior high schools students to march with him downtown. This so enraged Sheriff Connor that he decided to unleash police dogs and hoses on the youthful demonstrators, creating scenes of brutality sent around the world. Not only did this enrage people around the globe, it so enraged people in  Birmingham's black community that they started throwing rocks and bottles at police in the city’s Black neighborhoods.

This unrest finally forced the Kennedy administration into action. The President not only sent his brother Robert, who was US Attorney General, to Birmingham, to negotiate an end to segregation in that city’s downtown business district, he decided to make a nationally televised address putting his full support behind the goals of the Civil Rights movement and announcing that he would submit an omnibus Civil Rights Bill to congress that would put the full weight of the Federal Government’s power behind ending segregation, a bill that ultimately passed, after President Kennedy’s death, in 1964.

These two examples show how protest movements that involved grave risk, that broke the law, and that used extremely controversial and disruptive practices, helped organize America’s workers and significantly raise their standard of living and bring an end to legal segregation in the American South.

***

Mark Naisonis a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project(BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

“We Need Leaders Among The People, Not Leaders Of the People”

“We Need Leaders Among The People, Not Leaders Of  the People” 

by Mark Nasion | special to NewBlackMan

For those  on the left who don’t understand  my willingness to work with whites they regard as conservative or racist, let me tell you a little bit about my political mentor, Rev. Claude Williams. Rev. Williams, with whom  I spent four summers with during the early 1970s organizing his personal papers, was a Presbyterian minister brought up in the hills of Tennessee in an evangelical tradition ( a credo he described as “God said it, Jesus did it, I believe it, and that settles it) who  had a conversion experience in his late thirties and became an advocate of the social gospel and an opponent of southern segregation.

Williams had an opportunity to put these principles into action when he became a minister in a mining town called Paris Arkansas during the Depression, and devoted his ministry to strike support, moved to Commonwealth Labor College when he was forced out of  Paris and there became a supporter of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, an interracial organization that fought for the rights of sharecroppers and tenant farmers being forced off the land by Depression conditions and New Deal agricultural program.

When organizing for the STFU, Williams developed a unique strategy for organizing  southern blacks and white for progressive unionism by employing biblical imagery common to both.  His fiery preaching and innovative charts and posters, using quotes from the bible to promote interracial solidarity and a cooperative commonwealth, made him one of the South’s most effective organizers,  and a hated figure among local elites, who literally ran him out of Arkansas in the late 1930s.

From there, Williams moved to Memphis, where he helped organize interracial locals of the Food and Tobacco Workers Union and in North Carolina and then was brought up to Detroit during World War II by the UAQ to help preach to the Southern Blacks and Whites working in easy proximity during that city’s auto plants.

After the war, Williams moved back  to farm South of Birmigham where he began working with interracial locals of the Mine Mill and Smelters Union and holding meetings on his property to help people register to vote.  When a wave of McCarthyite reaction set in, Williams became a target of the local Klan, who set fires on his property, killed his dogs, and forced him to stop holding interracial meetings on his farm. But his white neighbors, who had been the recipient of many acts of generosity on the part of Williams and his wife Joyce, refused to let the Klan kill him, so he remained on his farm through the worst days of Klan and Citizen’s Council Terror until and opening came in the middle 60’s and a strong civil rights movement came to the Birmingham area.

I had learned about Williams amazing work when writing my Master’s essay on the Southern Tenants Farmers Union, but meeting him in person, an being given responsibility for organizing and filing his personal papers was a transformative experience.  Williams was a big, powerful, hard drinking  man  who held a deep conviction that Southern working class whites, when they could overcome their racism, were far more reliable allies to Blacks than northern white liberals because they had a common religious heritage as well as a common class interest. He had shown the potential of this approach in labor struggle after labor struggle before McCarthyism had sidelined him and believed it was the only one that would allow progressives  to challenge domination of American politics by the  rich and powerful.

Having the opportunity to live with a person who not only articulated such a view with great eloquence, but  practiced it every day, and survived pressures that would have silenced most people, made a tremendous impression on me.  Williams challenged me, as he did all leftists to relinquish elitist contempt of working class people and meet them on their own ground, using arguments rooted in their own culture and traditions, and providing and example of courage and generosity they would respect. As he told me on countless occasions “ We don’t need leaders  of the people, we need leaders among the people.!”

Throughout my life of political activism,, I have tried to take that message to heart and reach out to people of diverse political perspectives while fighting for racial and economic justice.

Nothing I have experienced in 40 plus years of activism, including my experience with the Occupy Movement and the 99 Percent Clubs in the last 6 months, has convinced me this approach is wrong.

***

Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

Where is the Love? Thoughts on Teachers, Teaching and Assessment

Where is the Love? Thoughts on Teachers, Teaching and Assessment

by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan

I have been teaching for 45 years. My first students, in the Columbia Upward Bound Program, included a 15 year old who was destined for greatness and a 15 year old who wouldn’t say a word to me or his peers. Being able to connect to both of them, using very different methods, hooked me for life on the challenge of  building the confidence and trust required to make  learning possible among a diverse group of people.

It is precisely the importance of building trust which is absent from the dominant discourse about education today.  Achieving mastery of a fixed body of material is prioritized; opening minds, healing hearts, and building confidence are widely neglected as “soft” attributes not amenable to measurement and evaluation.

Che Guevara once said “ The true revolutionary is guided by feelings of great love.” I would say the same about teaching; “The true teacher is guided by feelings of great love.”

How do you measure love? How do you assess it?

Governments are now spending billions of dollars on complex mathematical formulas to rate teacher effectiveness.  Every single measure they have created circumvents the attributes that make teachers love their jobs and which influence students the most.

A great teacher gets inside a student’s head, becomes part of the student’s conscience, becomes a moral compass that may offer guidance ten, twenty years after the student was in their class.  Things the teacher said during a lecture, wrote in the margin of a research paper, whispered to the student in a private meeting,  may come up in the most unexpected times and places. Books, films and songs the teacher recommended may be ones passed on to friends, co-workers and children.

I am saying this from experience as well as inference.   I had teachers who inspired me to do things I never dreamed were possible.   They did this not only modeling a passion for learning in their lectures and the way they comported themselves, but by  letting me know that despite my rough edges and uneven writing stills,, there was nothing I couldn’t achieve as a scholar if I dared to give myself wholly to the subject I was investigating and kept trying to hone and refine my  prose style.

Those teachers—and I will name them because they are all worth honoring: Edward Said, Paul Noyes, Walter Metzger, James Shenton—provided me with a model of the teacher and scholar I wanted to be. They are with me every time I walk into a classroom.

How do you measure that?

I know so many great teachers and they are all filled with love for their students and love for their jobs.  Every single reform measure introduced in the last ten years is crushing and demoralizing them

Someday, we will realize that if we really want to instill a passion for learning in young people, we have to honor and support our best teachers and encourage our most talented and idealistic young people to be teachers for life.

And that means we have to leave room for intangibles like love and trust in how we judge what goes on in schools and understand that the results of great teaching are experienced over a life time, not by tests you administer three or four times a year.

***

Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

My Barack Obama Problem

My Barack Obama Problem

by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan

Like many people on the Left, I have become disillusioned with the Obama Presidency.  As one of those people who devoted huge amounts of time, money and energy to getting Obama elected, and who cried on election night when his victory was assured, I found myself hoping against hope that there was some redemptive quality to his leadership amidst expansion of foreign wars,  attacks on public school teachers, bailouts of banks unaccompanied by serious controls, and a host of other policies that appeared to contradict everything he stood for during his campaign.

Although my heart wasn’t in it, I tried to justify his policies as the result of a powerful congressional opposition that refused to support policies that brought the full power of the federal government behind job creation and income policies designed to ease the pain of the  nation’s  struggling working class and middle class, along with those long trapped in poverty.

But recently, I have started to think that the “real” Barack Obama is not the community organizer pictured in Dreams from My Father or the fierce defender of the middle class that emerged on the campaign trail, but a cynical, ambitious, politician who loves spending time with the rich and the powerful and who has tied his administration’s and his own future to gaining their support.

The straw that broke the camel’s back, after many disappointments, was the image of the President regaling a $2,500 a plate dinner in San Francisco while Occupy Oakland was being attacked by an army of police using tear gas, rubber bullets, pepper spray and bulldozers.  The Obama of Dreams from My Father would have rushed across the Bay to stand with the Occupiers, but this Obama didn’t so much as give the protesters a second thought. 

The President was totally relaxed and in his element with the hedge fund and dot com executives, and media moguls, supporting his campaign. THEY, not the Occupiers, were now his real constituency. Not only were they the ones funding his presidential campaign, they were the ones who were going to be employing him after he left the Presidency, assuring that he, and his family would be part of the 1 Percent for the foreseeable future.

As a young man, who like the President, grew up in a lower middle class family and went to an Ivy League college and graduate school, I can understand the lure of great wealth and power to someone who grew up with neither.  When you are a talented person from a family of modest means, it can be very heady to be courted by and praised by some of the nation’s smartest, wealthiest and most powerful people.   And if you are so talented and charismatic that these people decide to groom you to become one of them, it can definitely persuade you to make compromises that end up affecting your conscience and your social consciousness.

For very personal reasons, I never enjoyed hanging out in the clubs and restaurants and vacation houses of the wealthy as much as the times I spent in neighborhood ball fields, schoolyards, and community centers interacting with working class and middle class people. I keep my feet in both worlds but I consider “the hood” to be my moral compass, the place where I have to go to find out if my life’s mission has any real traction, any real meaning.

But I fear the President is different.  The people who come to the White House, whether the professional basketball players who show up at his birthday parties, the talented musicians who come to entertain, or the CEO’s and political kingmakers who come to discuss policy, are always a cross session of the most successful people in whatever field they are in. The President never tries to bring in ordinary people to talk to him privately and find out what is going on in their workplaces and neighborhoods. Those are not the people he trust, those are not the people he is comfortable with; those are not the people he wants to spend time with when he leaves the Presidency.

A real cue to the President’s character came when he decided to host an Education Summit. To this event, he invited CEO’s of the nation’s largest corporations, and executives in some of the nation’s wealthiest foundations, but not one teacher.   This is the real Barack Obama—someone who has left the world he grew up in, and the communities in Chicago he organized in, and who craves the company and advice of people, like himself, who have accomplished great things or accumulated great wealth.

In some ways, he is the perfect President for a country where ambition is honored above loyalty, generosity, and concern for those who have fallen in hard times and where we honor those who have overcome great obstacles to “rise to the top.”

But whether he is the right President to lead us through the worst economic crisis in seventy years and stand up for all the people who have lost jobs and homes and hope is another matter entirely.

***

Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

This is What Democracy Looks Like: The Occupy Movement Will Reinvent Itself

This is What Democracy Looks Like:   

The Occupy Movement Will Reinvent Itself

by Mark Naison | NewBlackMan

The tent cities have been bulldozed and the parks have been cleared.  Big city mayors see clean spaces, washed and sanitized, and hope that the Occupations were a bad dream. Obama supporters hope that the three months of protest represented a brief detour in a progressive movement that will ultimately come to its senses and concentrate on re-electing the president and campaigning for Democratic candidates for congress, realizing- with the help of a collection of bizarre and frighteningly ill informed Republican presidential aspirants--, that the most important initiatives to achieve a more just society take place at the polls, not in the streets.

It’s a plausible scenario, to be sure, neat and rational. As many liberal pundits have pointed out, taking practical steps to address the economic inequality issues Occupy Wall street has raised- such as shifting the tax burden from the working class and middle class to the very wealthy- can only be done by creating electoral majorities in favor of such policies that don’t currently exist, and that can only be achieved through the “grunt work” of voter registration an organizing election campaigns in behalf of progressive candidates. And there is no question that many constituencies who were uneasily allied with the Occupy movements, particularly labor unions, plan to do just that in coming months and coming years.

But I am not sure that the experience of the last three months can be nearly excised from the national consciousness and the energy of Occupy supporters nearly directed into electoral activity.

First of all, the experience of direct democracy in the Occupy movement has had a profound, even transformative effect, on those who have participated; one that will not be so easy to persuade those who have experienced it to relinquish.  The young people in this movement—part of an entire generation facing a stagnant job market and crippling debt—discovered  they had the power to make the whole world pay attention to what they were saying by occupying public spaces, working outside normal political channels and refusing to anoint leaders to speak for them. 

But it was more than the reaction of the outside world that was transformative. It was the transformation of the Occupy spaces themselves into places where free discussion and debate could flourish in ways that existed nowhere else in the society, certainly not in increasingly corporatized and bureaucratized universities, stressed filled public schools under pressure to deliver higher test scores, or workplaces ruled by dictatorial managers cognizant that a tight job market assured them of worker compliance.  

When Occupiers chanted “This is what democracy looks like,” they were proclaiming what few people have been willing to acknowledge—that lived democracy and freedom of expression have been eroding in the United States for some time, as institutions become more hierarchical and wealth has been more concentrated at the top.  What the Occupy movement created was a space for a no holds bar discussion of a huge array of issues where people, thanks to the mic check method of repeating comments, actually listened to one another.  Do such free zones exist in our schools,  universities and workplaces?  If they did, the Occupy movements would not have generated the levels of participation they did!  There is a reason why Occupy movements sprung up in over 300 towns and cities and that is because they embodied a deeply felt need for freedom of expressions as well as a hunger to address issues of economic inequality and the mal-distribution of wealth.

Which brings us to the next point about why this movement is likely to persist and that is the reaction of authorities, whether mayors, or college presidents, to its emergence. The size, technological sophistication, and at times the astonishing violence of police mobilizations against Occupy protests dramatized to the nation, and the world, the degree to which the United States has become a police/national security state willing to go to extraordinary attempts to intimidate its own citizens.  To immigrants, and to people living in minority and working class communities, particularly young men, this insight is nothing new—they have experienced intimidation by police forces and other government authorities on an almost daily basis, not only in their neighborhoods, but in prisons and detention centers. But until the Occupy movement, most middle class Americans including college educated youth, could ignore abuses of police power or pretend that the most extreme examples (the police murder of an unarmed Sean Bell in Queens NY) were more the exception than the rule.

But now, for three months, the people of the United States have been exposed to a steady array of images of police forces using helicopters, bulldozers, sound cannons, tear gas and pepper spray not only against protesters peacefully assembling in universities and public parks, but against representatives of the press covering these events, and doing so with the collusion of the federal office of Homeland Security.  Not only were such police tactics borrowed from the playbook used by police in gentrifying cities to intimidate and contain minority youth, they drew upon post 9/11 National Security protocols used to combat terrorism such as closing bridges and subways and placing limits on what photographs might appear in the press.

In the repression of the Occupy movement, images of free speech under attack were created that cannot be neatly excised from the national imagination any more than pictures of Bull Connor unleashing police dogs and water hoses on teenage marchers  in Birmingham in 1963.

If the Occupy movement’s showed us, in words and deeds, “This is What Democracy Looks Like” those attacking the Occupations showed the world, albeit unintentionally “This is What a Police State Looks Like.”

It would be nice, our liberal friends tell us, if we could forget all of this unpleasantness and go back to the days of the first Obama presidential campaign when youth idealism and energy were directed to electing the first black president. Now, they say, it’s time to give him a second term, with a strong Democratic congress, so he can finish the job he started.

But the given what is happened in the last three months, I don’t think that is likely to happen. The genie has been let out of the bottle. Young people who have had a tasted of lived democracy of a kind they had never experienced and then watched it snuffed out by highly militarized police units using war on terror tactics will not become obedient doorbell ringers for a president who ignored their protest and may have secretly encouraged its suppression.

The Occupy movement may not take the same form as it did this fall, but it is very likely to reinvent itself in forms that will not please its liberal would be controllers, or its conservative critics.

And that is a very good thing for the country.

***

Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depressionand White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

What Occupy Wall Street Has Accomplished in Two Short Months

What Occupy Wall Street Has Accomplished in Two Short Months

by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan

Many people in the media, as well as many citizens, complain that Occupy Wall Street has no leaders and no goals.   While Occupy Wall Street and its spinoffs around the nation have certainly not developed “leaders” who articulate its goals to the media or negotiate with public officials, it has already registered a formidable list of accomplishments for a movement this young.

Here is my list of some of the important things this movement has done, with more to come as it grows and matures:

1. Put the question of economic inequality in the center of national discourse for the first time since the 1960’s, even though such inequality has been growing dramatically for the last 20 years.  The vocabulary the movement has developed to describe this inequality “ the 1%  and the 99%” have become a permanent part of our political discourse and has focused great attention on how the mal distribution of wealth has undermined democracy and eroded the living standards of the great majority of Americans.

2. Called attention to the stifling impact of student loan debt on  young college, professional  and trade school graduates   who face the double whammy of a stagnant job market and crippling debt.  The attention given this issue inspired President Obama to marginally ease the loan burden of current recipients. In the future, it might well prompt a radical reconfiguration of the debt or a major program of loan forgiveness.

3. Created political pressures that prompted the postponement of a decision by President Obama to begin construction of the controversial Keystone XL natural gas pipeline.

4. Inspired  a wide variety of actions to prevent foreclosures and evictions and to bring relief to beleaguered home owners and tenants.

5. Put the undemocratic character of many education reform policies, particularly school closings, under much greater scrutiny, creating pressures on policy makers that will make these closings much more difficult to implement  without more consultation and input from parents, students, teachers and community members.

6. Given the labor movement a new vocabulary to challenge attacks on collective bargaining and union recognition, providing added ammunition to the successful campaign to defeat an anti-collective bargaining bill in the state of Ohio.

7.  Focused  attention on the issue of police brutality and the militarization of urban police forces in ways that reinforces longstanding complaints of police misconduct and abuse in Black and Latino communities.

This would be an impressive list of accomplishment for a movement that has lasted two years, but Occupy Wall Street has only been with us for two months.

***

Mark Naisonis a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project(BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

Why Teachers Must Become Community Organizers and Justice Fighters

Why Teachers Must Become Community Organizers and Justice Fighters

by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan

There is a long history of Teacher Activism in the United States. In New York City, the tradition goes back to the late 1930s when teachers associated with the Communist Party and the New York City Teachers Union fought to have Negro History Month honored in the NYC Public schools, to force the replacement or reassignment of racist teachers and to challenge the placement of Black students in the lowest tracks and most decayed schools in a highly tracked school system. This legacy of anti-racist activism, always done in collaboration with civil rights organizations and community groups, lasted into the late 50’s when many of the most effective teacher activists were pushed out of the New York school system during the Cold War. This forgotten tradition is described in depth in Clarence Taylor’s new book Reds and the Black Board: Communism, Civil Rights and the New York City Teachers Union.

After the old Teachers Union faded from the scene, another group of teacher activists, drawing upon a broad coalition of liberals, Socialists and moderate trade unionists, won recognition for the United Federation of Teachers as official bargaining agent for New York City School teachers, winning them decent salaries,  job security, and some level of freedom of expression inside and outside their schools.  The UFT from its outset worked to improve conditions in schools for all students and supported the non violent civil rights struggle in the South and the North. Unfortunately  in 1968,  the UFT found itself engaged in a conflict with some community leaders in Harlem and Ocean Hill Brownsville during a series of brutal strikes challenging community control of school policies in those neighborhoods. These strikes not only created a fissure between UFT and civil rights organizations, it created fissures within the UFT between supporters and opponents of the strike that left a legacy of bitterness that lasted for years to come. 

In the wake of that strike the UFT proved powerless to resist a devastating attack on the New York City Public schools orchestrated by bankers who dominated the Emergency Financial Board which took the city into financial receivership following the Fiscal Crisis of 1975. The Board of Education was forced by this unelected body to make budget cuts which closed down the world class music programs in the city’s junior high schools      (most junior high schools had upwards of 200 musical instruments which were lent out free of charge to anyone who had made their bands or orchestras) and ended the after school programs and night centers which were a fixture of every public school in the city in the 1940’s 1950’s and 1960’s. These programs were never fully replaced, leaving children in the city’s schools, from the late 1970s on, with far less in the way of arts and sports and after school mentoring than their parents generation had enjoyed in those very same schools

Nearly 40 years have passed since the Fiscal Crisis budget cuts and our public schools now face a challenge more insidious and perhaps, more formidable. All across the nation, a poisonous coalition of multi billionaire business leaders, test and technology companies, charitable foundations and elected officials are pushing a nationwide education agenda that involves the introduction of high stakes testing at all grade levels, evaluation of teachers and schools based on student test scores, and the introduction of “competition” into public education by the creation of independently managed charter schools given special advantages in funding and recruitment.

This Education Reform agenda, embraced by both the Bush and Obama Administrations and embodied in No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, represents a formidable assault on teachers hard won collective bargaining rights as well as their classroom autonomy and freedom of expression, but it also represents a devastating attack on children in America’s working class and poor communities at a time when our nation is experiencing a devastating redistribution of wealth upward and a sharp increase in poverty levels. Not only does corporate education reform reduce schooling in the nation’s poor communities to test prep and obedience training , squeezing out critical thinking and the arts, it divides those communities against themselves by transforming charter schools into privileged enclaves which promise passage out of the neighborhood to a few lucky children and view the remaining public schools, and their students, with aversion and contempt.

Given the complex challenge corporate education reform poses, today’s teacher activists cannot just have a strategy which is solely school or teacher centered. They must become community organizers who fight school closings, the proliferation of tests, and the weakening of teacher bargaining rights as attacks on the ability of working class people and people of color to fight for better opportunities for themselves and their children. In this setting, Teacher Activists must put forth a vision of Radical Democracy which envisions an education which empowers students as critical thinkers and agents of historical change, not just as obedient test takers and which envisions schools playing a central role in neighborhoods united and mobilized to get a fair share of the nation’s resources.

Occupy Wall Street has provided a language and an example to put that model of Radical Democracy into practice. But it cannot work unless teachers link their own fate to that of the students they work with and the people in the communities where their schools are located. Unless Teacher activists become community organizers and justice fighters in the broadest sense, they will lose the battle to defend their classrooms from the incursions of corporate interests.

***

Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.