History's call to action
I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to concentrate these days, while what seems to be the ashes of my nation’s ideals settle around my ankles as I read the news. From the words in the U.S. Constitution to the words on the Statue of Liberty, so much of the text of our nation seems to be rejected by people who have the effrontery to call me and my friends unpatriotic. It’s infuriating but also enervating, in no small part because it’s so hard to see what might be the most constructive way to push back.
But it turns out that lots of people have felt the same way
in the past, and lots of them found ways to act nonetheless. This is why I so
enjoyed Erik Loomis’s new book, “Organizing America:
Stories of Americans Who Fought for Justice.” It’s easy to remember the
famous Americans who led successful fights for justice: Martin Luther
King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Cesar Chavez, and Mother
Jones. But what lessons do such heroic figures have for me, now?
The answer is more than I thought. The evidence is in Loomis’s book, where he tells the stories of other Americans who found themselves in the fight for human rights: against slavery, against lynching, for labor unions, for women’s suffrage, for gay rights, and more. Some of these are names you might have heard -- Ida B. Wells, Eugene Debs, Daniel Berrigan -- but many are not.
Maggie Walker was an
entrepreneur in the Black community in Virginia, Frank Little was
a union organizer in Montana mines, Robert Williams was a
not-terribly-peaceful civil rights activist in both North and South, and Richard
Oakes participated in the American Indian struggles of the 1960s and
1970s in New York and California.
Erik Loomis is a historian at the University of Rhode Island. In addition to his duties there, he participates in writing the excellent Lawyers, Guns, and Money blog, where he writes a series he calls “Erik Visits an American Grave,” which is more or less exactly what it sounds like. He visits graves of the famous, infamous, and almost famous, and writes short biographies of the people he finds there, with almost 2,000 visits under his belt, and still going.
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| Tom in 2012 |
EDITOR'S NOTE: Since we first published a column by Tom in February 2012, we've carried just under 60 of his always interesting essays on Rhode Island's politics and economy.
The book has the spirit of a bunch of his grave posts, expanded and sourced. The stories of the people in it are fascinating, enraging, inspiring, and astonishingly varied. And that’s the point. The stories often end with amazing tales of perseverance and work, but most start with mere irritation or indignation.
Some of them lead to achievement: Barbara
Gittings felt isolated and out of place, and in her search for friends
and community, wound up fostering the gay rights movement in the 1950s and
1960s. Mike Quill’s uncle found him a job on the New York subway in
the 1930s, and he eventually became the head of the powerful Transit
Workers Union in the 1940s and 1950s.
Several of the subjects played small but important roles in
a larger struggle. Lydia Maria Child was a nineteenth-century
writer against both slavery and the oppression of women, whose writing moved
many and paved the way for abolitionists to come. Myles Horton founded
the Highlander Center, a southern center of education and
organizing for labor rights, racial equality, and the environment in Tennessee,
where legions of activists trained and learned from each other.
And lurking in these stories are tidbits to say that the
heroic figures we know about did not start that way. Among the alumni of
Highlander was, for example, Rosa Parks, who Loomis quotes:
“At Highlander, I found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society, that there was such a thing as people of different races and backgrounds meeting together in workshops and living together in peace and harmony. It was a place I was very reluctant to leave. I gained strength there to persevere in my work for freedom, not just for blacks, but all oppressed people.”
Horton himself had known Jane Addams and
found inspiration in her Hull House, where she worked with the poor
of Chicago. So, the book is also useful for seeing how layered social movements
can be, with contributions large and small from many people building on each
other over time. The lesson for me is that there are lots of ways to make
multiple small voices into unified larger voices, and the opportunities are
more common than you might think.
So what can we do here in Rhode Island? I saw some
possibilities last winter, when Vice President J.D. Vance went
to Vermont for a winter ski
vacation. Hundreds of people turned out to make sure he could not enjoy
himself without seeing signs or hearing boos, and he wound up cutting his
vacation short.
I thought, Okay then, the plan is to remain ready to act, as
the Vermonters did. We may not all get the opportunity, but the work is to
organize and remain ready to go. Now that we see Trump’s heavy hand trying to
grip D.C. and Chicago, the next time might not be as funny as that was.
While we wait, perhaps the way to begin is by talking to your neighbors and family about what worries you. Maybe don’t bother with the hard-core MAGA, but many people out there don’t know what to think, and they are reachable. Bring them to a protest. A neighbor of mine asked to join me at a protest in March since she hadn’t gone to one herself and didn’t know what to expect, but felt she had to do something.
If protesting is old hat for you, next time you’re at one, find one of the organizers and ask how to help make the next one happen better. The lesson of Loomis’s book is that a successful movement is a collective act of many people and that all of us can play a part, even if it’s a small one. The important part is to act.
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