Citizen Solution: How You Can Make A Difference

1. Working Together

1Working Together The emerging civic movement changes the way we see citizens, professionals , government, and democracy itself. It teaches respect for the talents and intelligence of all men and women. It involves a renewed appreciation for places. All are necessary if we are to build civic agency, that is, the capacity to work with people of different political parties, faiths, races, incomes, ages, and cultures. T         the talents and intelligence of regular citizens. I participated in such a movement once before. The civil rights movement that shaped me as a young man was full of faith in the capacities of people without degrees, formal credentials, or celebrity status—in this case, African Americans in the South, radically devalued by segregation. It was also full of leaders who illustrated the substance of this faith. Oliver Harvey, a janitor at Duke University where I went to college, organizer of a union of nonacademic employees for better pay and improved working conditions, was a great public intellectual and a mentor. He taught me about the black community, musical traditions, and decades-old struggles for civil rights. 11 For some time I worked for the Citizenship Education Program of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (), the group headed by Martin Luther King. Although the citizenship efforts of  are relatively invisible in most public histories of the movement, the program was crucial—Andrew Young once called it “the foundation of the whole movement.” We organized citizenship schools, informal training in church basements, community centers, beauty parlors, and elsewhere that conveyed the skills of community action. Our message was simple: people have capacities to take self-reliant, cooperative, bold action. It was expressed in a song, “We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For,” sung by  activist Dorothy Cotton, composed by Bernice Reagan, and inspired by a line in June Jordan’s poem, “For South African Women.” The song, in turn, inspired untold numbers of people. I learned how the civil rights struggle was connected to earlier movements, when ordinary people were valued in the public culture and seen as the foundations of democracy. I had a dramatic experience of it in St. Augustine, Florida. One day I encountered a group of Ku Klux Klan members. I had gone out to the Old Jail because I was worried about a friend who had been arrested in a demonstration—the brutality that the jailors displayed toward civil rights demonstrators was a constant topic of conversation among  staff members. Many people were held without water all day long, packed in an outdoor wire enclosure called “the pen.” The hot Florida sun beat down relentlessly. Some passed out. I talked to my friend, Cathy, through the bars. She was inside the jail and was fine. But when I came back to the car five men and a woman suddenly surrounded me. I realized that they must have followed me out from town. I was terrified. One said, “You’re a goddamn Yankee communist. We’re going to get you, boy.” I took a breath. Then my southern roots flooded back. I said, “I’m a Christian and the Bible says ‘love your neighbor.’ I love blacks, like I love whites. But I’m not a Yankee. My family has been in the South 12 • T H E C I T I Z E N S O L U T I O N since before the Revolution. And I’m not a communist.” Searching for a word to describe my confused identity—and remembering an occasional remark of my father—I tried on a different label. “I’m a populist ,” I said. “I believe that blacks and poor whites should get together and do something about the big shots who keep us divided and held down.” There was silence. The group looked at an older man, dressed in coveralls, wearing a straw hat, to see what he would say. He scratched his head. “There may be something in that,” he said. “I don’t know whether I’m populist. But I read about it. And I ain’t stupid. The big shots look down on us. The mayor will congratulate us for beating you up. But he’d never talk to me on the street.” He continued, “I ain’t a Christian myself. I’m a Hinduist. I believe in the caste system.” For a few minutes, we talked about what an interracial populist movement...