4 Don’t Just Study History—Make It
On the southeast corner of Greene Street and Waverly
On the east side of Washington Square
The street is still troubled, the sidewalk unsettled
Young voices still cry through the afternoon air
March 25th, 1911
This is the way she told it to me
A factory of immigrants, Jews and Italians
Are hard at their work when the fire breaks free
At the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory
Women fall through the bitter spring air
Their young faces turn to question me
I still hear their voices
As I walk through Washington Square
They rush for the doors, but the bosses have locked them
Lest someone step out for a breath of fresh air
Trapped in this wreckage, they run to the windows
Stare ten stories down to the street lying there
They stand on the ledges, the fire behind them
The wide air before them, they jump holding hands
They cry out in Yiddish, cry out in Italian
And plunge to the street where my own mother stands
Thirty years later, she still can’t believe it
She cries through her story, I sit at her feet
One hundred twenty three immigrant women
Twenty-three men lie dead in the street
This is our history, this moment that shapes us
My mother falls silent, tears frame her cheeks
She could never forget, I will always remember
It could have been her, it still could be me
Every once in a while, someone asks me, “So what did you study in college to prepare yourself to become an organizer?”
I’m sure I could name a number of fields that would cause the questioner to nod sagely and say, “Of course. I thought so.” I’m not absolutely sure what all those fields are, but I suspect economics, sociology, African American/ LGBTQ/Native American/women’s/U.S. history, political science, or even statistics would all earn that coveted nod of approval.
My undergraduate degree is in medieval history and literature.
“Medieval history and literature,” they repeat, trying hard not to make the sentence end with a combination question mark and exclamation point, to look impressed and fascinated rather than puzzled and disappointed.
Usually I just smile and let it go. But, if they’re persistent, I say, “It turns out that if you’re going to spend your life trying to organize the South, a working knowledge of feudalism is a very good thing to have.”
As it happens, I didn’t study medieval history and literature because I had decided on an organizing career and thought this was the best possible preparation. At that time in my life, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as an organizer. I chose to study it because I loved it.
I was particularly fascinated by the troubadours of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. With some notable exceptions, such as the wealthy and powerful William IX, twelfth-century ruler of the Kingdom of Aquitaine in what is now southern France, the troubadours were impoverished poet/musicians (they sang rather than recited their lyrics). They wandered the European countryside, picking up work and a handful of coins wherever they could, depending on the kindness and hospitality of friends and strangers for food, drink, and a bed for the night.
At some subliminal level, I must have known even then that I was going to become not only a community organizer, but a folksinger.
So my professional training is as a historian. But my mantra is not, “Those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it.” One thing I’ve learned by studying history is how rare it is to find agreement even on what happened, let alone what whatever happened actually means.
It follows that I don’t believe whatever lessons we can derive from history are particularly useful or accurate in predicting or trying to shape the future. It’s kind of like the Devil quoting scripture: Take any historical event or period, and you can use it to prove or predict pretty much anything you want to.
More importantly, I don’t think we’re doomed to repeat anything. I absolutely refuse to believe or accept that. Rather, I believe that, by the work human beings do, individually and collectively, we create our future—for better or worse.
What I believe history does teach us is that in the broad struggle for justice you never really know what’s possible and what’s not. So, as creative community organizers, we need to be very careful not to limit the hopes and dreams of the people we work with. If we are not careful, our hardheaded “realism,” historical “knowledge,” and strategic “sensibility” may hold people back from taking on apparently unwinnable fights—that, if they are wise enough to ignore our advice, may instead turn out to be critical, deeply significant victories.
Here’s one way this potential problem plays out. One of the first things you learn when you’re trained as a community organizer is the “stop sign principle.” Let’s say you’ve just started working in an inner-city neighborhood where several children have been hurt recently in a busy intersection with no stop sign. The people you’re talking with feel powerless and isolated. Insofar as their current status relative to the people and institutions that control the city, they’re not wrong.
But they do have dreams: Of city government that works for them, not against them. Of neighborhood schools that give their children both a real education and a fair chance at work and life. Of safety and security at home, at work, and on the streets. Of secure jobs with a living wage, solid benefits, and safe working conditions.
The problem, given the realities of power in the city, is that there’s very little chance that they will get any of these things any time in the foreseeable future. If they go after them and are soundly defeated, they’ll end up feeling even more powerless and discouraged than before.
So, as an organizer working in that community, you look for a “fixed fight” as a first effort—a campaign that would be almost impossible to lose.
While you and the people you’re working with try to figure out what to do, yet another truck speeds through the intersection. Moving too quickly, the driver doesn’t even see the neighborhood kid crossing the street.
The people in the community are grief stricken and outraged. How could “they” let this happen? This isn’t the first time a child has been hurt or killed on that corner. The city knew how dangerous the intersection was. It wouldn’t have cost them much of anything, in time or in money, to put up a stop sign.
If this had happened in a wealthy neighborhood, a white neighborhood, a middle-class neighborhood, the city would have been out there in an hour. But they’ve never paid attention to poor folks, to working folks, to immigrants, to people of color, to people like us. This time, we’re going to make sure that they do.
Under these emotional circumstances, it’s relatively easy to get people to come to a meeting, pass around petitions, go as a group to see the mayor, pack the city council meeting, and demand—not suggest—that the city immediately put up a stop sign on that corner.
Even a not very smart mayor is going to send out the street crew, if not first thing in the morning, then very soon. What do they have to lose? The city has a warehouse full of stop signs. The street crew is already on the municipal payroll, and it’s an hour’s work at best.
If the city doesn’t act, and another child gets hurt or killed at the same intersection, the mayor and city council members could be in real trouble, come the next election. It doesn’t take much for what started out as a fight over a neighborhood stop sign to escalate into a citywide racial issue, with electoral consequences.
So, from the mayor’s point of view: On the one hand, a relatively easy, pretty much cost-free fix, with some possible gratitude and votes from the people in the neighborhood—not enough to swing or sway an election, but, when you’re running for office, every vote really does count. On the other hand, a potentially embarrassing situation, with the wrong kind of media attention and the possibility of discontent spreading to other neighborhoods and groups in the city.
The stop sign goes up. Sure enough, people in the neighborhood are going to feel a new sense of pride, power, and possibility.
The stop sign principle is a useful community tool. But in any urban, suburban, or rural area today, with the limited financial resources available to local governments, you run out of fixed fights pretty quickly. It’s one thing to put up a stop sign: no real cost, no serious political risk. Other neighborhoods aren’t going to complain if the first one gets a stop sign at a corner where a child has been hurt or killed.
But as the stakes get higher, the fixes get harder. Now the neighborhood, empowered by its victory, wants a community center, a job training program, a public library, a publicly funded facility that creates jobs for local people.
Well, so do thirty-four other neighborhoods, and they’re going to fight for what they want. The pie gets a lot harder to slice. Your neighborhood keeps fighting, too, but now they’re losing instead of winning—again and again. The city is only going to build one new bus maintenance depot. One neighborhood is going to get the facility and the jobs that go with it—and thirty-four aren’t.
Over time, the pride, the sense of power and possibility, begin to slip away.
This doesn’t have to happen. The neighborhood can reach out to others and help organize a citywide neighborhood coalition that eventually builds enough collective power to push through policy changes that work for everyone.
But the danger in the stop sign principle is always there. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be applied, just that every community organizer needs to be aware of how complex, and how potentially risky in the long run, this apparently simple strategy really is.
Another problem with the stop sign principle relates to an insight that organizers can learn from history.
On the one hand, it’s true that when people get an early victory they begin to understand and believe in organizing as a way to make their lives better, individually and collectively.
On the other, one of the things that makes human beings so remarkable and wonderful is our capacity for visionary imagination, the ability to believe that something can happen when common sense says there is absolutely no way. Another amazing characteristic is our radical tenacity, the ability to fight for decades for something that is truly important to us, even when everyone around us is sure that what we so fervently wish and fight for will never come to pass.
The Southern Civil Rights Movement is an example of such a fight. As someone who came of age politically in that movement, I have great gratitude for it. It not only showed me what I needed to do with my life, it taught me who I really am. I had not in any true sense known that before. If not for the Movement, I might not know it today.
So as what was once daily life for me becomes history, I read as much about that period as I can. One of my favorite books is There Is a River, by the African American theologian Vincent Harding.
Harding describes the movement for Black liberation as a current that never stops flowing. Sometimes its path is as visible as the course of the Mississippi River, seen from thirty thousand feet up on a clear day. Sometimes it overflows its banks as a mighty flood, moving everything in its path. Sometimes the river runs underground, and people wonder where it’s gone.
But the river is always there. It overflowed into history on February 1, 1960, when four young African American students from Greensboro A&T, a historically Black college (now university) in North Carolina, sat down at a whites-only Woolworth’s lunch counter, ordered coffee, and refused to leave when ordered to do so.
The springs that fed that river began flowing in 1619, when the first Africans captured and transported by Arab and European traders are shoved off the boat and dumped into the slave market in Jamestown, Virginia.
Follow carefully, now. See the river run through slave revolts led by Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, and a hundred others. Walk along its banks with Harriet Tubman and the other angry conductors on the Underground Railroad, following the North Star toward freedom. Look on in admiration as former slave Frederick Douglass sets by hand the type on his Abolitionist newspaper The North Star. Watch as white Abolitionist women go door-to-door in their villages and along country roads, carrying petitions demanding that slavery end.
They are all there, following the river road. The Black veterans returning from World Wars I and II, who, having fought to defend the freedom of a country that will not allow them to be free, decide it’s time for a change. Ella Baker, organizing for the NAACP in Alabama in the early 1940s, when it was an illegal organization in that state, and you could be sent to prison for being caught with a membership card. Dedicated white Communist Party members, like Saul and Isabelle Auerbach, who go South under false names to help organize a Black national liberation movement within the states of the old Confederacy.
The Little Rock Nine, courageous young African American high school students, clutching their school books close to their chests, walking in carefully ironed dresses, pants, and shirts past rows of grim-faced white Arkansas National Guardsmen towards the entrance of Central High School in Little Rock in 1957 as furious white parents threaten and spit at them.
I imagine them, and I remember.
Late in the evening as light fades away
In silence we gather together
Searching the faces of those who are here
For those who have left us forever
Waiting for them, literally standing in the schoolhouse door to block their way, is Governor Orval Faubus. A graduate of Commonwealth College, a socialist school in Mena, Arkansas, he lost his first electoral race because he ran as a racial moderate, and he promised himself that would never, never happen to him again as long as he lived. Looking out at the crowds of angry whites, held back only by the guardsmen with their bayonets from overwhelming these Black students, who are only a few years younger than the soldiers, the governor is doing his best to keep his promise.
I stay up late at night, sometimes until dawn, reading about these brave, determined warriors. I wonder at their courage, their grace, their stubbornness over more than three centuries. I recall the brave students of Greensboro, of their nonviolent shot that was truly heard ‘round the world, and I say to myself: This moment was destined to happen, almost exactly when and as it did.
When you read the wonderful historians who have documented and analyzed the many events that led to the Southern Civil Rights Movement, what becomes clear is that movement’s inevitability. But at the time only a few people believed the visionaries of the 1940s and 1950s, whose predictions went something like this: “In the early 1960s, young southern African Americans, supported by their allies of many other races all over the world, will rise up by the thousands. They will deliberately break segregation’s unjust laws. Every possible lie will be told about them. But still they will stand up, they will sit down, they will sit in. They will throw their bodies against the wall dividing Black from white; they will take their bare hands and tear it down. They will be beaten; they will cry out. They will go to jail; offered bail, they will refuse. They will be beaten, murdered and lynched.”
Where are the ones who caught flame in the night
Fired up by the heat of devotion
Measuring their lives by the light of the truth
They burned like a lamp on the ocean
No one really knew for sure that it was coming, yet it had to come. When you consider how heavily the deck was stacked against them, that moment should never have arrived; and yet it came. The odds against them were so long that they should have gone down to defeat; and yet they won.
Who will remember the words of the brave
That lifted us higher and higher
Who will remember the price that they paid
For lives lived too close to the fire
There were people in the 1950s who had another vision: “The day will come when the doors of Robben Island Prison swing wide, to let Nelson Mandela and the leaders of the African National Congress walk out into the fresh air of freedom. Apartheid will fall. Mandela will be elected president of South Africa.”
Many people would have replied, “That’s crazy. Mandela and his friends will rot in prison before the white South African government ever lets them out. Apartheid is too deeply entrenched, too strongly defended, to ever be brought down. You need to get real. Organizing for things that will never happen only makes things worse. An end to apartheid, freedom for the ANC leadership, a racially integrated government—better stop dreaming. Let’s focus instead on eliminating the worst sins of apartheid, on making it a more humane, more manageable system. That might be within our reach.”
As organizers, part of our responsibility is never to forget this history lesson: You never know what is possible. We can never truly predict what human beings working together can accomplish—and therefore we can never compromise with injustice.
Yes, we should study history. But, as organizers, we should also help people make history.
Hearts of the ones who inherit your lives
Will rest in the truth you have spoken
Memory will echo the trust that you kept
Like you, it will never be broken
As creative community organizers, our job is to help people learn not just history, but also how to carry it on. If we fail to remember our roots, if we forget the lessons of the past, if we don’t remember and honor so many astounding victories won against unbelievable odds, we limit the possibilities of the future.
Whatever else, we must always be careful not to stand between the people we work with and their impossible dreams.