Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement

"As a young woman, I knew Bayard Rustin as a friend and mentor. Bayard was many things—a champion of peace, civil rights and economic justice, a writer, strategist and organizer—but most of all he was a teacher. On a personal level, he taught me about art and life, ideas and antiques and even the tango. But perhaps the most important lessons he taught for a lifetime were that words are not enough, that we must speak through the eloquence of nonviolent action, and that the struggle for civil rights and economic rights is indivisible.

"Daniel Levine's excellent biography of Rustin (Rutgers University Press) both brought back memories and taught me much that I had never known about my friend.

"Rustin was born in 1912 in West Chester, Pa., and raised by his maternal grandparents, Julia and Janifer Rustin. Julia, who had attended a Quaker high school and was active in the NAACP, was the greatest influence on his early life. In high school, Rustin was a star of the track team, valedictorian of his class and much admired as a singer. As a young man, he became a Quaker and set off for New York, where he soon joined a group of young intellectuals whose interests embraced literature and jazz as well as politics.

"By 1941 he was helping A. Philip Randolph, the legendary leader of the Brotherhood of Pullman Car Porters, organize a March on Washington to demand that President Roosevelt ban racial discrimination in defense contracts. Later in 1941, Rustin went to work for the pacifist leader A.J. Muste's Fellowship of Reconciliation.

"Rustin spent three years in a federal prison for refusing to serve during the Second World War. When a white prisoner attacked him with a mop handle for trying to integrate the prison, Rustin refused to defend himself or to let his friends defend him. He had already embraced nonviolence as a personal philosophy and he would continue to teach and preach nonviolent direct action for the rest of his life.

"After prison, Rustin returned to New York and nonviolent activism. In 1948 he helped organize a 'Journey of Reconciliation' bus trip across the South that challenged segregation in public transport, earned Rustin a term on a North Carolina chain gang and was a model for the Freedom Rides of 1961.

"In the early 1950s, Rustin was a leader in search of a movement. Then the Montgomery bus boycott created both the beginnings of a mass civil rights movement and a new national leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Rustin advised the Montgomery boycott, tutored King on nonviolent action and would work closely with him for the rest of King's life.

"The student sit-ins that began in the South in 1960 created the mass movement that Rustin had dreamed of, and in 1963, Rustin achieved his greatest success as the organizer of the historic March on Washington at which Dr. King delivered his 'I Have A Dream' speech. But by the mid-1960s, Rustin had broken with the young black activists who preached separatism and Black Power, because he was firmly committed to integration and coalition politics.

"By 1965, he envisioned a new organization that would act as a bridge between the civil rights and labor movements. That came to pass when AFL-CIO President George Meany and other labor leaders agreed to support the A. Philip Randolph Institute, with Rustin as its executive director.

"For the rest of his life, Rustin devoted much of his time and energy to bringing young African American workers into labor unions. I met him when I ran a special program that placed 2,000 minority women in skilled trades, and I cannot begin to say how much he taught me and inspired me.

"Bayard Rustin touched millions of other lives as he touched mine. He was a great moral leader, a great political strategist and a great human being, and it is gratifying to see his life receive the attention it deserves in this highly readable biography. Rustin was one of those rare individuals of whom we can say: He helped make the promise of America the practice of America."

—Alexis M. Herman, former U.S. secretary of labor

Black Workers Remember

"The freedom struggle and the union movement are a powerful, winning combination when they march together! That's the inspiring story historian Michael Honey offers in a wonderful collection of interviews and short memoirs with African American union pioneers. Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle (University of California Press, 1999) puts the spotlight on Memphis during the mid-20th century. Honey has interviewed scores of remarkable men and women who fought Jim Crow and struggled to build their union, often against the violent opposition of politicians, bosses and those white workers still entangled within the dark web of southern racism. Honey is a master oral historian who makes this collection a real page turner."

—Nelson Lichtenstein, author of Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit

A Personal Journey

"I came by my feelings about unions from my parents, who started out as blue-collar people in Butte, Mont. There are two things a self-respecting person never does, they taught me: one was to vote Republican and the other one was to cross a union picket line. My mother hinted darkly that her mother-in-law may have voted Republican—who knows? And both parents acknowledged that one grandfather had once crossed a picket line at the mines. My mother said he had to do it because, as a shift boss, it was his job to check on the pumps that kept the mines from flooding. My father said, hell, he was a scab. I didn't know what to think, but I learned that unions are about drama and passions that can last a lifetime and still be fresh enough to pass on to the next generation.

"My father also became a shift boss, and at the unusually young age of 20. He was proud of this first promotion in a career that eventually carried him out of the mines and up into executive status. But he would get pensive at times and tell me about his best friend—"the best damn worker in the mines"—who had turned down the same promotion because it would have put him more on management's side and away from the men he worked with. Sometimes I think I owe a great deal—starting with my college education and other middle-class advantages—to dad's willingness to accept this early promotion. Sometimes, recalling the drinking and bitterness that disrupted our family and finally destroyed my father's life, I think maybe not.

"This is what I learned from my parents, their lives as well as their stories: That you can rise up alone, just with your spouse and your kids. Or you can rise up by banding together with hundreds—potentially millions—of others. Neither way is easy, but the road not taken, in my father's case, has always looked more promising to me."

—Barbara Ehrenreich, author of more than a dozen books on politics and society, most recently, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

The Jungle

"More than 40 years ago, I read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. While I do not list interpretation of literature as one of my strongest points on my risumi, I am pleased to note that I am apparently one of the minority who got Sinclair's message right. He lamented at some point that his description of the extraordinarily degrading conditions in which people worked in the meat packing industry had more impact in gaining support for the regulation of food safety than it did in improving working conditions. As he put it, he aimed for America's heart but wound up hitting the country in the stomach.

"The emotional impact of the book with me was precisely where Sinclair intended it—in his graphic description of the terrible lives forced upon the workers, who had no option if they were to survive other than long hours in deplorable conditions. I realized in reading that book that no matter how much a worker might try to improve his or her life after work, the centrality of the work experience was such that no one could achieve an appropriate quality of life in the absence of decent working hours and conditions. And the description of the outrageous maltreatment imposed on the hero of The Jungle is relevant not only in reminding us of the horrors of the pre-NLRB, pre-OSHA days. The Jungle is written about the period of emergent capitalism in the United States. Today, it is workers in many poor nations who are being told that concern about the quality of their lives must be subordinated to the need to develop economically. Thus The Jungle serves to remind us today of the importance of fighting against the absolute dominance of capital in the world market, just as it was important to fight against its unchallenged rule in the U.S. one hundred years ago."

—Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.)

Workers' Cultural Renaissance

"What really affected my view of working people was living every day of my life with them...growing up in poverty in Harlem, surviving the Depression and observing the working-class consciousness among the men and women in my family—in particular my mother, who was most committed to social and political change.

"There was much in the world of art that shaped, in powerful ways, how I viewed the struggles of workers during the Great Depression. The Roosevelt administration created the Works Projects Administration (WPA), which supplied critical resources that subsidized the culture of America. Consequently, the world of art flourished into what became America's greatest cultural renaissance. Workers' theatres were everywhere there was a union. Broadway became the beneficiary of working-class consciousness with works like Clifford Odets' 'Waiting for Lefty' and the establishment of theatre companies such as Orson Welles' Mercury Players and the Federal Theatre. These theatrical companies came to Harlem and presented plays along with our own Lafayette Players. Katherine Dunham, from Chicago, created a dance company of African Americans that became world-renowned.

"The cinema, which was a relatively new art form, touched everyone's fancy. For me, Charlie Chaplin was the supreme working-class hero. We were rewarded with his humorous, witty and very precise films about the struggles of working-class people. Then there were touching pieces such as Steinbeck's 'The Grapes of Wrath,' with Henry Fonda's portrayal of the lead character done with strength and dignity that made us all feel that the Joad family was our family.

"Then there was the great burst of folk culture that gave us artists such as Woody Guthrie, who wrote great songs and poetry that spoke for working-class folks. Perhaps for all of us trapped in the abyss of poverty, the voice that resonated the most for us was that of Paul Robeson and all the songs he sang that inspired us—especially 'Joe Hill.' "

—Harry Belafonte, born in Harlem and raised in Jamaica, whose career spans motion pictures, television, Broadway, recordings and concerts. He has been involved in several humanitarian and civil rights struggles, working with John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela, and serving as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador

Lessons, Warnings and Vision from Old and New Classics

"Choosing one book to cite is damn hard, as four great ones come rushing to mind: Murray Kempton's classic 1955 study of the 1930s, Part of Our Time, keeps relevant lasting lessons about working lives from the struggles of Lee Pressman, Joe Curren, Paul Robeson and the Pullman Porters and the Reuther boys. Futility and achievement mix artfully in Kempton's deep-reaching account. Similarly daring in its revelations is Ben Hamper's searing 1991 memoir, Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line. Composed of dark dispatches from the auto plant trenches, Hamper's material nevertheless affirms the human spirit. Comparably bold, and no less challenging, is labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan's 1992 memoir, Which Side Are You On? Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back. A fascinating insider's tale, it prods working people to do much more with their unions. Topping my list is a book that has had the greatest recent impact on me, Eric Lee's fascinating and prophetic 1997 call-to-arms, The Labour Movement and the Internet: The New Internationalism. Lee insists new information technologies offer Labor unprecedented cross-border clout. Were we soon to act creatively on this we would be farther along with the lessons Kempton offers, the warnings Hamper provides and the vision Geoghegan shares."

—Arthur B. Shostak, Ph.D., professor of sociology, Drexel University, and author of Cyberunion: Empowering Labor Through Computer Technology

Regulating the Poor

"I believe that Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward's Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, first released in 1971, is perhaps one of the most important books to read for anyone trying to understand the relationships between welfare policy, poverty and coerced labor. Piven and Cloward expose how welfare policy not only does not give poor people "relief" from poverty, but forces them to accept low-wage, exploitative, dead-end jobs. In fact, Piven and Cloward suggest, poverty policy and practice have historically been coupled with labor practice to accommodate local employers' demands for cheap labor, particularly in service work and in agriculture. Poverty policy is designed and implemented to serve two basic functions. In times of economic downturn, welfare can be expanded to prevent or quell uprising by unemployed masses. Or, in times of relative economic and political stability, welfare can be contracted to expel people from the rolls, thus ensuring their availability to do low-wage work for local employers. Piven and Cloward describe this second function of welfare policy as 'enforcing' low-wage work, and the term is just as useful today in describing the use of so-called 'welfare-to-work' policies to coerce working poor people into ever more exploitative low- and no-wage jobs."

—Grace Chang, Oakland, Calif., writer, activist and mother of two, and author of Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy; co-editor of Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency; and author of essays and articles on immigrant women and work that have appeared in Radical America, Socialist Review and the anthology Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminist Breathes Fire.

Emma Goldman: Living My Life

"So many experiences, relationships, books, movies, et al., have shaped my perceptions of working life in this country over the years that singling out one for special emphasis should be understood as a highly artificial exercise. That said, I'll join the game and choose Emma Goldman's autobiography, Living My Life, which I first read in the early 1960s. Her passionately intelligent, often harrowing descriptions of the conditions of work that she and her friends had to endure—from factory sweatshops to prison labor—were for me, a privileged, middle-class, white man, eye-opening. Unlike many people who give way to despair or cynicism under such conditions, Emma Goldman committed herself to changing them. And that, too, I learned from her life and her book: that organization and struggle are the essential prerequisites for creating a more just society, and that these efforts must be relentlessly persistent over time, undeterred by fluctuations in public opinion, discouraging downslides or governmental suppression."

—Martin Duberman, historian, playwright and author of several books, including Stonewall; Paul Robeson: A Biography; About Time: Exploring the Gay Past; and Left Out: The Politics of Exclusion. His plays include "Mother Earth: An Epic Drama of Emma Goldman's Life."

In Dubious Battle

"My father and mother were great readers, as were many of the people in the little coal camp of Coalwood, W.Va., where I grew up. I guess I picked up on reading at a pretty early age, too, and was never happy unless I had a book going. One of my father's favorite writers was John Steinbeck, a bit surprising because Steinbeck made no secret of his love for the labor movement in the United States while Dad, Coalwood's mine superintendent, was pretty much a staunch company man. One day when I was 12 years old and picking around the book shelves in the upstairs hall, I found a book by Steinbeck titled In Dubious Battle. I noticed it was pretty well-worn, a good sign that Mom and Dad had appreciated it, so I took it back to my room and settled down to read it. I found it to be a novel about some men trying to get a union started among the fruit pickers in California. It wasn't too long before Dad found me with it. He took it from me, thumbed through it familiarly, and asked me what I'd learned so far. 'Fruit picking's pretty hard,' I allowed.

'What else?'
'The union guys have to work like the devil just to get people to join them.'
'Do they seem like good men?'
I shrugged. 'Sometimes. Not always.'
'How about the farmers? The ones who own the fruit and fight the union men. Are they good men?'
'Most of them are real mean, I guess. But others seem OK.' I wasn't sure what he wanted me to say.

"Dad gave me a thoughtful look and then handed the book back to me. 'Keep reading. I want to hear what you think at the end of it. Mr. Steinbeck's a fine writer and a pretty good teacher, too. That's why, every so often, I'll read this very book.'

"I was intrigued that this was a book that held my father's interest enough to read it more than once, so I kept reading, learning a lot about the early days of union organizing in the United States and the difficulties the union men had in doing it. Passions ran high on both sides, and sometimes there were even bloody battles. After I finished the book, I went to Dad and told him that's what I had gotten out of it.

"Dad heard me with a subtle smile. 'Well, that's what the book's story is about, all right,' he said. But what else did you learn? What about the union? Would you ever join one?'

"Even though I believed my dad to be anti-union, I told him I sure would have if I was as bad off as those fruit pickers. The only way they could stick up for themselves was to band together.

"Dad nodded. 'That's right. I'd have done it, too. But what if you were on the other side, had a company you were trying to keep going? Would you be mad at the union guys for what they were trying to do?'

" 'I might,' I confessed, 'but I think I'd understand them better because I'd read this book. I could kind of put myself in their place.'

"Dad gave me a rare grin. 'Mr. Steinbeck has done himself most proud then,' he said. 'He has let you put yourself in another man's place. There's nothing better an author can do. And that's why every so often, Sonny, I pick up this book and read it again. It reminds me to put myself in the other man's place when the union comes around. I think we get along better because of it.'

"So that was how a book taught me a little about labor's formative years and also gave me some insight into my father's secret admiration for unions, even while he was representing the company. I also never forgot that to understand a man, you have to first be able to put yourself in his place. A book can't get much more powerful than that."

—Homer Hickam Jr., author of October Sky and aerospace engineer. Hickam belonged to the Mine Workers when he worked in the mine during his college summers, joined AFGE while at the Army Missile Command and belonged to the Marshall Engineers and Scientists Association (part of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers) while at NASA

"Battle of Algiers"

What is your starting point? Either you believe in man or you don't. Both views are equally valid. My starting point: complete faith in man.

—Roberto Rossellini

"I saw Gillo Pontecorvo's 'Battle of Algiers' in 1968, a few years after it came out. I was at that time living in New York City. I worked as a part-time cashier at Cinema 5 theaters and got in free. I was for Civil Rights, against the Vietnam War and wanted to make films.

'Battle of Algiers' follows the activities of a group of revolutionaries in the city of Algiers—and the French efforts to destroy them. It is realistic, a blueprint for urban guerrilla warfare, but its violence is not glorified.

"The film has no individual heroes or villains. The main characters—Ali la Pointe (played by a nonactor Pontecorvo found in a marketplace) and Colonel Mathieu, elegant, cultured, and technical—represent collective identities. Drama comes not from individual triumph and defeat, but through history, class struggle and the opposition of collective wills. There is nothing grim or doctrinaire about the film. Instead we feel courage, passion and energy throughout. This is a joyous film about liberation.

'Battle of Algiers' steals from reality in order to create active opposition to the fictions imposed by the establishment, and establishment films. It forces us to question the system. I remember some of us felt that what was wrong in Vietnam was the use of napalm on children, and not the war itself. This film forces us to confront that kind of sentimentality. In a more recent example, the fact that we didn't see people dying on TV in the Persian Gulf War makes the war and its causes no less shocking.

"At the end of the movie, the National Liberation Front is crushed, Ali la Pointe and his political family killed, all is in ruins. Then, 'like the cries of birds, of thousands of wild birds, the ju-jus invade and shake the black sky.' In a series of short scenes we see a stream of Algerians that cannot be stopped. Two years later, we are told, the revolution was won.

"At this point, the entire theater audience got up out of their seats and began yelling. Our victory felt as though it lasted forever."

—Anne Lewis, independent documentary maker who focuses on the lives and struggles of working class women and men. Her documentaries include "Justice in the Coalfields," "On Our Own Land," "Fast Food Women," "Evelyn Williams" and "Belinda." Anne is a part of Appalshop, an arts and education center in eastern Kentucky, and a member of NABET Local 6186