Harry Boyte
[00:00:00] Bill Cleveland: Hi. This is Change the Story/ Change the World. My name is Bill Cleveland.
Our guest for this episode is activist organizer, educator, and author Harry Boyte. Now I don't usually rattle off the biographies of our guests, but because so much of Harry's history and adventures figure prominently in our conversation. I think some of his background is warranted here. So here are a few highlights:
Harry Boyte is a co-founder with Marie Strom of the Public Work Academy, and as a senior scholar of public work philosophy at Augsburg University. He also founded a much a claimed international youth civic education initiative called Public Achievement and established the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the University of Minnesota, which is now part of the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg.
Harry's most recent book [00:01:00] Awakening Democracy Through Public Work explores how public work animated by citizen democracy can find expression in many realms, from education to health, to business and government.
In the 1960s Harry was a field secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) then headed by Dr. Martin Luther King and subsequently was a community and labor organizer in the south.
Harry has authored 10 other books on democracy, citizenship, and community organizing, and his articles and essays have appeared in more than 150 publications, including the New York Times Wall Street Journal, Political Theory, Chronicle of Higher Education. Policy Review, Descent, and The Nation.
Before we begin. I should also note that this conversation with Harry Boyte took place in the fall of 2021 in the midst of the raging pandemic. I'm sure you'll agree that despite the significant volume of water that's passed under the proverbial [00:02:00] bridge, our discussion about the critical place of culture in the labor and civil rights movements, the power of what Harry calls, educational free spaces, and the inseparable nature of imagination and democracy is more than relevant for the rapids we find ourselves navigating today.
Part One: Free Spaces
So, Harry. Welcome to the show. I'm going to begin with a simple question. How do you describe your work in the world?
[00:02:34] Harry Boyte: Well, I would say we're promoting in practice, and in theory, the idea that democracy is the work of the people. It's not formal institutions I, that they have a role government and elections, but democracy is the work of the people. And so, I learned that in the civil rights movement. I worked for Martin Luther King's organization in the Citizenship Schools of SCLC.
That was basically the philosophy of the movement. It wasn't named that way, but it was a vernacular [00:03:00] understanding. Nobody thought democracy was mainly elections. so, you know, my work has been really trying to theorize and develop and build on the lessons I learned in the movement.
[00:03:10] BC: So, thank you for the articles you sent. They provide, I think a consistent through line for the argument that being a citizen is being an active participant in the democratic process. Not just with the structures of policy making, and voting, et cetera, but a hands-on involvement in democracy as a practice and a way of thinking.
In one of your papers, you quote, judge William Hastie. He said, “There's no more powerful idea than the thought that America is a commonwealth built through the labors of us all. Is that the gist of your thinking on this.
[00:03:53] HB: Yeah. Yeah. you know, along with the idea that democracy is a journey we never get there, a work in progress. [00:04:00] But yeah, that's basically it. And so, in that sense, democracy is not a western invention or created by the Greeks. Every society in the world has traditions of self-organizing work, and also connected liberation and conversation that are the roots of democracy.
So, you know, in the, in the settler case it was, barn raising, and quilting bees, and building bridges, and commons and meeting halls, and so forth. But it's every culture has those self-organizing, collective labor traditions.
[00:04:36] BC: I mean, one could argue that actually the human species wouldn't be, if in fact we were not able to adapt and evolve in such a way that our cooperation for the commonweal, allowed us to survive, let alone thrive.
[00:04:53] HB: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that is the, that is the talent and the capacity and [00:05:00] especially, and this goes to your work, you know, understood not only, in practical, but also in narrative terms. The stories of building the commons that, really mark the cooperative dimensions of human experience.
[00:05:13] BC: So, what got you into this? How did you come to it?
[00:05:17] HB: Well, I was shaped by the Civil Rights Movement. I grew up in Atlanta, working class, Scotch-Irish family from the south. Dad was the manager of the Atlanta Red Cross, and my mother was actually, although she has southern roots, her family was, she'd grown up in Chicago. They met in the Second World War in the Red Cross in Northern Africa.
And mother worked on dad's racial views. he was working class guy, but he was a populist. I, you know, send a sentiment, had been a newspaper reporter. So he came back and integrated the Red Cross, which was very controversial in the 1950s. Mother integrated the League of Women Voters so that..
[00:05:56] BC: Wow.
[00:05:57] HB: …it was controversial. But the Red Cross was a [00:06:00] major thing. And then he created a group in, 1958-59 to keep public schools open in Georgia. The politicians were talking about closing all the public schools, rather than allowed desegregation. So that was certainly a turning point. I was 12, well turning 13, and, you know, his name was in the paper, and we had 150 phone calls, threatening us.
[00:06:22] BC: In response to the Brown V. Board decision Georgia passed legislation requiring the closing of public schools that have been forced to integrate by court orders. And their conversion to private schools. After a federal judge ordered the Atlanta school board to submit a desegregation plan, Governor Ernest Vandiver established a committee to hold public forums on the issue. Here's a bit of what they heard:
[00:06:48] Georgia Citizen 1: The reasons for separation of the races are very important in the South. We want the Negros to have full opportunity for self-advancement but see no reason why this necessarily entails their forced inclusion into places where they are not suited.
Georgia Citizen 2: Our nation had the May 17th, 1954 Supreme Court decision translated into 42 languages and sent it around the world. The United States wanted the struggling, darker peoples to realize our sense of justice as we publish our good things. Russia propagandizes our mistakes. Number two, we need more and better education for all. Democracy requires a higher level of intelligence than any other form of government as the power is with the body Politic
Georgia Citizen 3: We believe that segregation is scriptural reading directly from the Bible. And we feel that integration, uh, is subversive it, uh, leads toward the, uh, communist goal of amalgamation of the races, promotes centralization of power, and uses the Negra to, um, set up a police state with the federal government policing the situation.
Georgia Citizen 4: I wish to say that the Negros are our own people, fellow human beings, and fellow Americans. And they are now practicing the traditional American virtue of taking responsibility for oneself by seeking to secure their rights as human beings. I am in favor of free non segregated schools for all our children, black and white, who are born equal in every respect, except in the lack of opportunity that we whites, to our shame, inflict upon them.
HB: So, that marked a pretty clear moment of transition in our life. and dad worked on school desegregation. It was very well, I mean, he was, you know, tough for him, almost killed, lost his connection with his family. and then he worked, he went on staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1963, right before the March on Washington.
[00:08:58] HB: So, I mean all of that, those years changed my aspiration from being an astronomer or astrophysicist to being involved in the movement, although I'd always had political and theological interests from the time, I was a kid.
So, I worked, went to Duke, decided to stay in the south. Not to go be a seafaring poet, and I went to, I was at the march on Washington, heard King practice “I have a dream,” the night before he gave the speech next door to my dad's.
BC: Wow.
HB: And so, you know, the movement was a very power, powerful shaping formative experience. I was in Duke (University) kind of majoring in the movement and then worked for the SCLC on and off as a field secretary in the citizenship education program. I, and that was a kind of wellspring of one of the key ideas we work with, which is concept of free spaces. I saw them all over the place. Sarah Evans, who was a colleague of my former wife names the places which were, centers where people could have a free intellectual life, interracial exchange, you know, turn upside down the Christian religion that had been taught to, docile slaves, and that didn't work --- a spectacular failure. So, the black church became really central to the movement.
But, you know, in thinking about the experience, and what made the movement, distinctively democratic, so I saw a lot of movements in the sixties and later which were not the spirit of the civil rights movement.
So, we named the, what we called free spaces as the places where people developed a democratic sensibility, a sense of discipline, and dignity. Citizenship Schools combined developing people's agency through literacy and basic organizing skills with non-violence.
That was a part of it. But, and then, we wrote a book called Free Spaces that, described not only the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Freedom Struggle, but also other movements that we saw as having a democratic spirit, like the women's suffrage movement, and community grounded labor, and the populist farmers movements, black and white farmers movements, so forth.
[00:11:00] BC: So, one of the reasons that I'm talking to you is that we crossed paths, at numerous times when I was in the Twin Cities around culturally based community organizing kinds of events and activities. And so, my question is, there's a strain, in your writing where you make regular reference to, historic events and, and, and other activities that, are not just around organizing, but culturally based community building, and organizing. And I'm wondering where that comes from and, how you came to that.
[00:11:40] HB: Yeah, I was in the movement. So, and the movement as I experienced it, there were different spans of the movement, was profoundly. cultural, and it was, you know, contesting the story of America.
Yes. So, it was contesting the story of America as a WASP creation. And it was contesting the idea of America as violent, and contesting the idea that America was, you know, a land of individual, get rich fast as you can achievement. And it was really the leading edge of an alternative story of America is about creating the commonwealth.
It was a work of the myriad of people, immigrants, native peoples. and it had moments of very powerful expression. So, the 1930s, for example, you know, the Harlem Renaissance, the public work artists of the WPA, mural projects and photojournalism, and Aaron Copeland's music and, you know, that had an effect on the larger culture.
So actually, there's a friend of mine, Larry May, who wrote a book on the movies called The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and The Politics of The American Way, great book. Larry shows the transformation of the narrative of movies.
But it was a real shift in the narrative of movies from the twenties, which was the world of the flapper and consumer culture. And right in the thirties, which was much more cooperative and, people focused and for the first time really on a national level, there was a kind of pluralism in American culture.
It was always contested. But, you know, the WPA Writers projects and the larger cultural scene. there's a good book on this by (Michael) Denning called Cultural Front.
Yeah. But those were… that was a great time of democratic cultural stirring and a different narrative. And then interestingly, World War II, which, you know, was a war against a great evil that, danger of Nazi-ism, but it also was a very, centralizing technocratic war.
So, May shows a shift from the, you know, even in journalistic terms from the GI Joes and the everyday citizens, and the work of the people to, the Flyboys and the elites. And so that fed a fifties, cultural reaction. The privatization, the consumer culture, you know, Nixon and in the kitchen debate and with the Khrushchev in Moscow right, argue that the meaning of American democracy was the right to buy all the things in a modern or US kitchen.
Richard Nixon: Uh, there are some instances where you may be ahead of us, for example, in the development of your, of the thrust of your rockets for the investigation of outer space. There may be some instances, for example, color television where we're ahead of you.
HB: Yes, oh, and, but then in my understanding of American cultural narratives the civil rights movement or the freedom Movement, which is what we called it on the ground, was a great challenge to, that it was a return to a democratic cultural story. I mean, America's always had a contested story, but it hasn't been simply that oppressive. nor has it been triumphed. It's been contested.
BC: Never more now than. Ever yeah, no, absolutely.
HB: We do, we see our work in cultural terms, as advancing a democratic cultural political story. And, in fact, we've created this new Institute for Public Life and Work. and one of our works is to operationalize the framework of educating for American democracy that, Danielle Allen, the black philosopher at Harvard started, but it became very pluralist.
We have a great colleague, Peter Levine, who's a co-chair of it. But it's a framework, it's not a curriculum, but our colleague, Trygve (Throntveit) who probably sent you a piece or two. Did you? Yes, he did. So, he, working with a couple of other schools has created an undergraduate curriculum, that embodies the framework. It's for college students, not K-12, but it's basically for preparation of teachers to think about American cultural and political and civic history in a different way.
And so that it's called Third Way Civics. So, Trygve’s curriculum, is wonderfully pluralist. and it's not didactic. I mean the teachers and the third way civics don't make a single declaration about what was the truth of America.
[00:16:49] BC: So, students draw their own conclusions, eh?
[00:16:51] HB: Yeah. And it's full of debates and kind of moments of controversy and students wrestling with the conflicting stories and narratives. And they do projects, and they do what we call public work projects. Yeah. That's what it's about.
[00:17:02] BC: I did a course for University of Massachusetts this last spring, and it was online. And I don't like not being with other human beings when you're in the process of learning. But we had no choice. And what we did was we invented a town and, appointed people to the various positions in the town. And then, sent them newspaper articles written about various things taking place in the town, all around a fairly simple cultural event that spun out of control and revealed the fissures in the society.
And then people got to write letters to the editor and all kinds of things. But that whole performative, you know, visceral collaborative…
HB: Yeah. about the identity and meaning and history.
BC: Yeah. and no easy answers. Right? So, I mean, that's the key piece
[00:17:57] HB: No, no, exactly. I mean, it sounds similar in sensibility, and actually most of our work now, so we've had some core concepts. Democracy is the public work of the people. That's a key concept. The way we understand democracy, translate it into professional work. We've done a lot of work with educational settings that's citizen professionals, but I would say citizen professionals they, they counter the technocratic top-down expert culture.
[00:18:25] BC: Part Two: Citizens
So, Harry, this idea of the citizen professional figures, prominently in your thinking about democracy building, could you say a bit more about that?
[00:18:42] HB: So, yeah, by holding open what we call free spaces people develop agency, a plural, sense of democracy, a different sense of possibility and hopefulness. and we have good stories of that. And so we're coupling, the third way civics, which is being piloted this fall in several colleges, with what we call educating for citizen professionals. Understood in that way, so citizen professionals have… and they certainly can be artists.
Did you know Artist Proof studio in South Africa?
[00:19:12] BC: Oh, yes.
[00:19:14] HB: Kim Berman, Marie’s friend co-founded it.
[00:19:17] BC: So, yeah, Kim's extraordinary. Artist's proof story is included in my book, Art and Upheaval, and I can't think of a better example of a citizen artist professional.
The citizen professional sees herself as part of the people not acting on the people. So, the term citizen, there is not a formal legal status. It's an identity. and they have a different understanding of power. It's not domination, it's collaborative, it's power to, not power over. We draw on the asset-based approach that every community has tremendous, resources and talents usually invisible and neglected. So, it's seeing people as full of rich, brilliance is part of the work of building a culture.
BC: Are there some examples that you could share?
[00:20:07] HB: We have our colleague, Bill Doherty, who's taken the Public Work into citizen professional practice in the health and the family fields, and,a lot of work in teachers.
We have a whole initiative called Public Achievement in which for it to really be sustained requires teachers to become citizen teachers who work with kids in a very different way --- turn classrooms into free spaces.
BC: Yes.
And we have, you know, city manager who. Stopped trying to be in control in Au Claire (Wisconsin) and catalyzed a citywide movement called Clear Vision, which has done remarkable things.
So it's pairing the Third Way Civics: A Cultural Pluralist view of American Democracy and History with, not simply a course, but preparation of students, learners to be what we call civic agents in their careers, in their communities.
[00:20:54] BC: Not dissimilar from my own work, community based, called Creative Community Leadership, which uses arts-based tools and strategies. as a participatory experiential way of engaging people in the hardest of all things to learn, which is working together in ways that are productive and inclusive.
And I think probably the thing that characterizes it most, at least for me, is that there's more sweat than there is, what I would call synaptic firing, or at least an equal amount of sweat, because it's embodied learning.
[00:21:34] HB: No, yeah. Learning is about not only the head, but the heart and the hand.
[00:21:38] BC: There’s a very interesting, book that I just heard Ezra Klein, interviewed the author. It's called The Extended Mind, and it's talking about how, current, pedagogy really focuses on, butts in seats and one, one muscle…
HB: Absolutely
BC: …and that is that is the brain. and actually, it leads me to… you talk about the civic muscle. I. and it's interesting because one of the, and you could think of it as a metaphor, I actually don't. And I have another muscle that is preeminent in my own thinking, and that's the imaginative muscle. Do you see those two connected, and in what way? If you do
[00:22:21] HB: Well, absolutely. So, I like Appadurai’s work here, who is a cultural anthropologist from India who worked with Shaq Fellers, who wrote a very important essay called The Capacity to Aspire. And there's a, it's in a collection called, Culture and Public Action. But Appadurai argues that people's sense of their own agency in the world, not only individual, but collective, has everything to do with how they imagine the possibilities and the future.
And the future is open to the extent that people develop a sense that they actually can have some shaping, power over their environments. So, I would say that's directly connects the idea of civic muscle, or civic agency is another term for it, a more academic term, with the idea of the imagination.
[00:23:08] BC: So, the through line for this podcast is, really, and especially in our contemporary moment, which is what use are and culture in these turbulent times. and, so a question to you is there a story, or are there stories that come to mind, where you saw creative practice and, the exercise of the civic muscle, as mutually supportive and effective?
[00:23:37] HB: Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, again, my formative experience was in the freedom movement. and so, several things happened in the movement that were about this. One is that the grassroots Citizenship Schools, they were…SCLC had 900 Citizenship Schools coming out of Highlander (Research and Education Center) first. But in 61’ it shifted over to SCLC, and the Citizenship Schools themselves were incubators for a democratic imagination and agency, and a different story of America.
So, people like Dorothy Cotton, and Septima Clark, and Ella Baker, who were really central architects of the Citizenship Schools believe that you had to have an intellectual dimension as well as people's own self-discovery and self-directed learning.
They had… Scandinavian Folk Schools were a very important influence. So, there was a vibrant intellectual conversation about the meaning of citizenship and democracy and the Citizenship Schools. And of course, it wasn't only the transformative impact on that of people who were also learning that they could learn numeracy.
So, you could know if the plantation owner was screwing you. Uh, literacy and numeracy were really resources for agency in the Citizenship Schools. They were also ways to prepare people to register to vote. But the cultural dimensions of the schools and the movement as a whole were full of poetry and history. There's a, the citizenship education curriculum was, had a section on black history as well as songs. As well as nonviolence.
[00:25:03] BC: Here's the Scandinavian Folk Schools in 1984, talking about the Citizenship Schools from the Literacy Project Documentary, You Got to Move.
[00:25:15] Bernice Robinson: Any community we went in, and operated citizenship classes, if there was no particular community organization in that area, we would organize that first class into an organization so that they would have some ongoing influence in the community, and an ongoing learning process.
“Well, what about you being the leader?” “Well, no, I'm not a leader”, they would say, but we’d say, “You know the problem, if you know the problem, you see the problem, you know what needs to be done to solve that problem. Then you are the one that have to take the ball and run with it.”,
It's like light coming into the darkness. Once they learn how to read and write, they always voted after.
[00:26:29] HB: And that was a seed for a different story of democracy that actually changed the country for a time. It was a challenge to the kind of consumerist individualist, you know, look out for number one culture of the fifties.
And it had ripples across the world. And so, King assigned me to organize poor whites. I had been caught by the Klan in St. Augustine working for SCLC and talked my way out of getting lynched. So, I think he figured if I could do that, whoa. I could, I could organize poor whites. And I hadn't really known this, but people like Bayard Rustin, and King and others, Vincent Harding, had been talking for a long time about the need for an inter-racial of movement of working people and the poor.
So, he sent me out to be a Guinea pig. But I did that in Durham, North Carolina from 66’ to 72’, with a year off in Chicago, working for the poverty program. But so, the direct translation of my experience in the movement into the community organizing I did was that we had a lot of cultural dimensions to the community organizing.
I mean, you can't build anything that's powerful without really rich cultural dimensions. So, we had. you know, we had music, we had, historical section in our newspaper. called The Action. we had, southern jokes, called Corn Corner. We had local, kids write about sports events, and we had stories about the times when there had been interracial work together.
In the… in Durham, it was the textile and tobacco factories in the 1930s had a lot of interracial organizing. And we made connections with the black community. and I saw that as all part of another story of America, a Democratic story of America.
So, I think the culture work comes together when it is integrated, infused into an that story, a collective story. And the most powerful organizing work I've seen and written about over the years, has been about organizing tied to development of a different story. So, an example you may know about, that shaped the Puget Sound region was the story of the house boats on Lake Union in the 1960s who were about to get wiped out.
And Terry Pettus, who was a great journalist, and also a cultural thinker. And he organized the houseboats, pushed back against being wiped out by the developers. But in the process, he realized he couldn't do that by just appealing to people's sympathy. So, they had to redefine the narrative of Lake Union, as a people's lake, as this image and symbol of the commonwealth.
[00:29:02] BC: Now here is Terry Pettus describing that Lake Union organizing strategy.
[00:29:07] Terry Pettus: So, we started to work with the city council to try to solve a problem. There was no sewer around this lake.
But worst of all, when we examined the problem with the health Department of Lake Union and it brought border of pollution, we discovered that the city had 13 sewer outfalls into this lake. It was a lesson to us, and fortunately you had a city government that would listen.
We, in a sense, saved Lake Union, and I'm proud of the houseboat people because they accepted the fact that we could not. Wage of battle just for houseboats on a very narrow issue of houseboats. But what we had to do was concern ourselves first with the entire lake because that is our community and it's something that belongs to all the people.
This movement, uh, led to the enactment of the shore lands, uh, management act in which we protect all of the shore lands of our state. These things, to me, are very important, and it seems to me that anyone who calls themselves a progressive or a radical. Is not concerned with the physical and, uh, wellbeing, with the preservation of these natural resources and simply not doing their job.
[00:30:18] HB: And he did a brilliant job of doing cultural organizing and getting the journalists in the Seattle region, and the school children, and the health department, and all sorts of actors talking about a different story. Which actually, I mean, it birthed other efforts like Pike Place Market, but the cultural vitality of that story was enormously important and actually in birthing the environmental movement. A friend, a great friend of mine is, John DeGraaf, who was a filmmaker. did a story on Terry Pettus.
[00:30:42] BC I think about every time the question gets called, it's not a question of who wins the intellectual argument. It also is about putting your heart and your soul and your body in the place that will make the most impact, both in terms of commentary, and in terms of presence, and witness, in a way that reveals the prevailing story, and offers a different one.
And you can't do that unless the people in the room, in the street together have a bond. Above and beyond that they all signed a petition. Right, right. Right. there's something that every person in a family understands that whether you name it or not, you have a family culture, you have a family story. You may love it or hate it, but it is a connective tissue that's pretty indelible.
[00:31:46] HB: Absolutely. And you need to claim it even if you hate it.
[00:31:49] BC: And the same goes for community. especially a community that seeks to, to alter the direction of the prevailing story.
Part Three: “These don't seem like such bad kids.”
It seems that one of the overarching themes of your work is that democracy is not just an idea. And certainly not just a theory. Rather, a community and personal life path and ongoing, evolving practice and often acontact sport. Are there stories that rise up for you that personify this?
[00:32:26] HB: You know, I did a piece, for the Kettering report, the collection of stories, basically, this last year. One of the things I wrote during the Covid, called Beyond the War Metaphor, which are basically stories of people organizing and also changing the narrative.
So, there's seven stories there that range from our youth initiative, Public Achievement. Stories like the kids who built a playground in a low-income neighborhood and, you know, changed a school in the process. we do have a… we have a website now in our institute and it has some of those stories.
BC: Yeah, that that was in Minnesota, right?
HB: Public Achievement was at, in a, yeah. St. Bernard School in north St. Paul Rice area. And they built a playground, and it became, a site that people came from all around the world had birthed the spread of Public Achievement to many other communities.
BC: And you told a story about skateboarders too?
HB: Yes, I did. Well, that was, we weren't responsible for that. But it was a good story of a politician who was a citizen politician, Elizabeth Katz. This was in Burnsville, and she ran her first race in 1994 for mayor on the platform that government doesn't have to be bad, but what that meant in practice was she couldn't fix the problems of Burnsville, and there were a lot of problems, but government could be a convener and a catalyst. So, she won. It was very controversial argument that the media couldn't get their heads to it.
But one of the first examples was that the skateboarders were skating through central Burnsville, and she went over to talk to him and said, “You know, you're getting in trouble. You're getting busted all the time. It's probably not gonna be good for you future, and it's creating great antagonism with the local businesses. So, what are you gonna do about it?”
And they said, “Well, we don't have any place to skateboard, so if you get us a skateboard park, we won't, skateboard to the businesses.” So, she said, “That's not my role. I'll open some doors; you see if you can organize to get a skateboard park.”
Yeah, and in 95, this was when my colleague, Nan (Nancy) Kari and I, were finishing our book, Building America. You know, the City Council, first of all saw them as just trouble making kids who should be put in jail or done something with, but they organized, and they had some support. And okay, they came, they filled up the city council chambers, which supported their effort, and they built the skate park, which is still going strong. it's like a center of the community.
[00:34:45] BC: But what one of the things that, that is to me so powerful about those kinds of stories is that the evolution from one story to another automatically includes the confounding of the prevailing narrative, which is deeply disturbing to some folks because their worldview is built…
[00:35:04] HB: It makes sense of the world.
[00:35:05] BC: Exactly. And so especially when young people, with their energy and enthusiasm become principal actors in the alteration of the current DNA of expectation, then you have people not able to fall upon the default, argument, good guy, bad guy,
HB: Absolutely.
BC: Kinds of thing. And to me it's such an important thing now because if we cast the other as, incurable, whoever we define as the other, then we're lost. And what those kids did was they gave people an opportunity to just hold their breath for a second and go, “These don't seem like such bad kids.” And from that point on, they become partners rather than adversaries.
[00:35:53] HB: Yeah, and also stories like the skateboard park, or the playground in North Rice, or stories around the world in Public Achievement --- a village where… like college students doing public achievement at Tokai University (Japan).We worked with a village which felt beleaguered by tourists, and they changed to learning how to deal with tourists in a way that built the whole community.
All of those stories also just disclose and reveal that tremendous talent and intelligence and energy of young people, which is usually completely invisible. People think young people are to be fixed or to be remediated or to be, controlled usually. One of the best parts of our Public Achievement work is, that, it's both a positive, a wonderful story and also a challenging story cuz it's so countercultural.
But we went, I took our center, to Augsburg. The faculty group that was most enthusiastic in the first instance was the special education faculty. So, they were shaped by the critique of special education, which, of course it's about remediation of kids, and it’s the critical disability studies school of thought.
But they didn't know what to do about the critique of special education. So, Public Achievement provided them ways to, work with a school and work with the kids and have coaches who were in special education, you know, preparing to be teachers. And there's a wonderful video that young people put together called, Public Achievement in Fridley: Transforming Special Education, which saw these kids who were locked away in level three in a room cuz it's like a prison. They couldn't even interact with the rest of the school in Fridley Middle School… become leaders in the community when they developed some skills.
And part of it was also cultural. They did murals and they did it at Citywide anti-Bullying campaign. And it's a wonderful story of kids who were seen in deficit ways becoming civic leaders.
[00:37:54] BC: Well, one of the interesting things about kids that I think they can teach adults, they understand that part of their evolving, journey into adulthood is, is a cultural journey.
Skateboarding is a cultural behavior. Just like hip hop, and tagging, and muralism, and all those things. They're in the process of saying “Here's who I am and these are the things that matter most to me.”
And so, if there's anything that is an antidote in my mind to the cynicism of the world we live in, it's the authenticity that people of passion bring to the table when they say, “This is important to me, period. “Right? I'm willing to stand up here and be scared. and risk, being laughed at because I care so much about this.
[00:38:44] HB: Well and they have, they have boldness. they're not, they're not cowed, they have, you know, great deal of energy. they have, they want to hope for the future.
They have their future ahead of it. Now, we have learned that citizen professional idea is important here because, I would say Public Achievement in the United States was, expanding pretty rapidly until, No Child Left Behind, and teachers became themselves much more cowed by the structure of the high stakes testing regimes. Yeah, and so you could still find some principles who were bold and creative and could think out outside the box who would see Public Achievement as an important dimension? But in general, it became much harder to do that.
So, what we’ve seen in Public Achievement there's no doubt that young people have tremendous talent and energy and potential, but it needs to be developed. They weren't born knowing how to build a playground, right, …
BC: Right.
HB: …skate, skateboard park. So, those are the skills of public work and civic agency. But and you know, so in, in Public Achievement, young people take the initiative around issues they want to work on. They're coached. The coaching is really key. You need good coaching. and usually the college students, do the coaching. But the coach preparation itself is really important cuz coaches need to learn how to work in a different way. With kids, you don't tell 'em what to do, and you don't let 'em just run wild.
I mean, you have to be a coach, right? Coach was the term that kids came up with themselves, when we were first forming Public Achievement. But then you also need, what we would call citizen professionals, or citizen teachers in the school to sustain and keep open that space. Because there are a lot of pressures, you know, to shut it down.
I mean, how is this preparing kids to take the test? I mean, basically that's what teachers are inclined to ask, and the principals are inclined to ask, and school boards are inclined to ask. And the school superintendent is… so, so the everyday political skills of keeping open, what we would call free spaces. Public Achievement is a free space where young people develop their capacities to act in the world, and their imaginations in your terms. But you, but you, one has to think about how do you keep that open. and those are political skills of citizen professionals, citizen teachers.
[00:40:55] BC: Part Four: The Dignity and Value of Work
So, coming in for a landing here. probably one of the most critical questions that I've been asking in this chapter…
HB: In lockdown, yeah.
BC: Is that… and the way I've described it is it's turned, upside down and inside out. that's where we're at. And some people imagine that the next chapter is putting it back together. I don't hold to that. But in many ways. I think of it in terms of improvisational theater, you don't ever go back to the original script you're building on the one that you have…
HB: Right.
BC: …for good or for ill. So, the question I ask, so of what use is human creativity, cultural practice, the arts as we attempt to heal and move forward in these turbulent times?
[00:41:50] HB: Well, cultural work is really critical. And I would say, one of the most important positive features of the Covid era is the enhanced visibility of. essential workers but, it's not only health workers, but it's also truck drivers, and delivery people, and janitors, and so in my worldview the terrible thing that's happened, and this is not a right, left thing, but the terrible feature of modern, individualist, meritocratic society is that we've come to define as a society of dominant values, a few people as winners and most people as losers.
And for most people whose life for better and worse, often is defined by their work, it means that their work is invisible. And if people talk about its value, they mean just paying people more. You know, the… I mean, I was again shaped by the movement and King's last great speech in March 18th in Memphis was the dignity of labor.
Martin Luther King: Let me say to you tonight that whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity, and it has worth.
You are reminding not only Memphis, but you are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages.
HB: And everyone who makes a contribution to the uplift of humanity has, they work as dignity, and they work as value. And it's not a matter of what degrees you have or what credentials. It's the garbage workers in Memphis have not only dignity as human beings, but dignity through their work, they make a contribution to the city.
Well, that narrative has been, submerged. in fact, I think I've sent you this piece, from the Wall Street Journal. So, in 1997, I went to Washington and saw the National Archives Exhibit of Cultural work in the thirties, A New Deal for the Arts. Um, and then went across the way to the Roosevelt Memorial.
And the cultural messages, the stories embedded in those, artistic sites were radically in contrast. For all the difference of politics, partisan view they talked in the A New Deal for the Arts exhibit about the rediscovery of the common person, and the dignity of work and the, and the energy and the talent of all sorts of different American groups in dealing with the hardship of the Great Depression was really vivid. And then, across the way that Roosevelt Memorial, and was beautiful in the aesthetic sense, but the two sets of statues have common people by (George) Siegel showed them as pathetic basket cases needed to be rescued by the Government.
So, that's a, an example of this larger narrative problem. That the dignity of work, and the dignity of everyday citizens, and the talents and the energies have become really emerged in the celebrity consumer culture. So, I think the cultural work has to be to uplift the capacities and the talents and the intelligence of everyday citizens and work of people.
And so, I would say that Covid has created a moment just like, right before the Covid, the, the government shut down. And, you know, workers of all kinds said we wanna work, wasn't that we want a job, we wanna work, we are doing work of contribution, you know, I think that a great task of cultural workers is to make visible and vivid and central the dignity and the work of everyday people.
[00:45:08] BC: So, and the interesting thing about the contrasting stories you told is that one of the abiding characteristics of the WPA was not only artists engaging at the most hyper, hyper local level and in a participatory way --- and the people who were going to bear the consequences of the success or failure of the democratic experience were in fact the principal actors. It was their voices, their images, their ideas, totally.
And then in the Roosevelt Memorial, it is a monument, which is a singular work of art, which actually says there is a narrative, rather than thousands of narratives bubbling up in communities all across the country, and most people in this country are not aware of the extraordinary volume and depth and quality of the work that rose up over those few years during the WPA.
[00:45:50] HB: Absolutely. It was like an explosion of cultural energy.
[00:45:53] BC: Yep. So, last question. Any works, books, films, music, anything that have inspired you lately that you want to pass on to anybody else listening to this?
[00:46:03] HB: Well, three books.
So, one is a book called, Behind the Magic Curtain by Thorn, who is a writer and former police person in Birmingham, Alabama. It's the stories of whites, and especially large number of Jews in Birmingham, Alabama, which was seen as the violence capital of the country, and the civil rights movement, of course. Bull Connor and all that. Behind the Magic Curtain. is a story of all the people in the white community, in the Jewish community, in the college, and among young people who were actually allies of the freedom movement. And it radically confounds the dominant narrative of the south that most progressives have with blacks as victims and whites as racists. I think in general our cultural imaginations have become reductive, So that book by Thorn is wonderful.
A second book, by (Christina) Proenza Coles, a black historian, is called American Founders: How African Americans created Freedom in the New World. And first of all, it's the story about the racial complexity. There's no such thing as racial purity in America. It's all, we’re all mongrels. But she does a great job of that. But the American Founders is a remarkable story of the, especially the work of free Blacks before the Civil War. Although it continues after.
But you know, there were almost 500,000 blacks in America who were not slaves and they built communities and they built cultural institutions. And I mean, in a way it's like the Museum of African American History and Culture, which is a great counter to the simple victim narrative of West. This is a kind of book of the same spirit. it's about agency. It doesn't hide the terrible atrocities of slavery and Jim Crow and so forth. But it's a story of agency and creation.
And then the third, because I do think there's this kind of, the reductive narratives we have create a terrible US versus them conflictual culture. A new book by, Amanda Ripley called, High Conflict, How We Got Into It and How to Get Out of It.
But it's a book of stories. She's a very fine journalist and she spent a lot of time on these, stories from, you know, a gang to Colombian warfare to environmental guy who was simply us versus them. And then came to realize that it wasn't gonna solve the environmental problem.
[00:48:27] BC: Right, right.
[00:48:28] HB: So, it's… and then a story of a Jewish synagogue in New York, which was very liberal, and we had its own internal conflicts and became adept at working through conflicts. And then, created an exchange with a group of, you know, white prison wardens and people in Northern Michigan who were Trump supporters. Yeah. So, Ripley's book is very important.
[00:48:48] BC: So, Harry. Thank you for this great conversation.
Of course. The power of stories. Great. And small are the mother's milk of this podcast. And people like those who are listening, and hopefully passing them on are what keeps us going. So, thanks to you all out there for being part of the change, the story community. We appreciate your support and feedback, and particularly your willingness to share what we're doing here with your friends and colleagues. So please know every time you press share or give a mention in an email or a newsletter, you are helping us grow that community.
Change the Story / Change the World is a production of the Center for the Study of Art and Community, our theme and soundscape spring forth from the head, heart, and hands of the Maestro., Judy Munson. Our text editing is by Andre Nnebe. Our effects come from freesound.org, and our inspiration rises up from the ever-present spirit of UKE 235. So, until next time, stay well, do good, and spread the good word. And rest assured, this episode has been 100% human.
[00:00:00] Bill Cleveland: Hi. This is Change the Story/ Change the World. My name is Bill Cleveland.
Our guest for this episode is activist organizer, educator, and author Harry Boyte. Now I don't usually rattle off the biographies of our guests, but because so much of Harry's history and adventures figure prominently in our conversation. I think some of his background is warranted here. So here are a few highlights:
Harry Boyte is a co-founder with Marie Strom of the Public Work Academy, and as a senior scholar of public work philosophy at Augsburg University. He also founded a much a claimed international youth civic education initiative called Public Achievement and established the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the University of Minnesota, which is now part of the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg.
Harry's most recent book [00:01:00] Awakening Democracy Through Public Work explores how public work animated by citizen democracy can find expression in many realms, from education to health, to business and government.
In the 1960s Harry was a field secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) then headed by Dr. Martin Luther King and subsequently was a community and labor organizer in the south.
Harry has authored 10 other books on democracy, citizenship, and community organizing, and his articles and essays have appeared in more than 150 publications, including the New York Times Wall Street Journal, Political Theory, Chronicle of Higher Education. Policy Review, Descent, and The Nation.
Before we begin. I should also note that this conversation with Harry Boyte took place in the fall of 2021 in the midst of the raging pandemic. I'm sure you'll agree that despite the significant volume of water that's passed under the proverbial [00:02:00] bridge, our discussion about the critical place of culture in the labor and civil rights movements, the power of what Harry calls, educational free spaces, and the inseparable nature of imagination and democracy is more than relevant for the rapids we find ourselves navigating today.
Part One: Free Spaces
So, Harry. Welcome to the show. I'm going to begin with a simple question. How do you describe your work in the world?
[00:02:34] Harry Boyte: Well, I would say we're promoting in practice, and in theory, the idea that democracy is the work of the people. It's not formal institutions I, that they have a role government and elections, but democracy is the work of the people. And so, I learned that in the civil rights movement. I worked for Martin Luther King's organization in the Citizenship Schools of SCLC.
That was basically the philosophy of the movement. It wasn't named that way, but it was a vernacular [00:03:00] understanding. Nobody thought democracy was mainly elections. so, you know, my work has been really trying to theorize and develop and build on the lessons I learned in the movement.
[00:03:10] BC: So, thank you for the articles you sent. They provide, I think a consistent through line for the argument that being a citizen is being an active participant in the democratic process. Not just with the structures of policy making, and voting, et cetera, but a hands-on involvement in democracy as a practice and a way of thinking.
In one of your papers, you quote, judge William Hastie. He said, “There's no more powerful idea than the thought that America is a commonwealth built through the labors of us all. Is that the gist of your thinking on this.
[00:03:53] HB: Yeah. Yeah. you know, along with the idea that democracy is a journey we never get there, a work in progress. [00:04:00] But yeah, that's basically it. And so, in that sense, democracy is not a western invention or created by the Greeks. Every society in the world has traditions of self-organizing work, and also connected liberation and conversation that are the roots of democracy.
So, you know, in the, in the settler case it was, barn raising, and quilting bees, and building bridges, and commons and meeting halls, and so forth. But it's every culture has those self-organizing, collective labor traditions.
[00:04:36] BC: I mean, one could argue that actually the human species wouldn't be, if in fact we were not able to adapt and evolve in such a way that our cooperation for the commonweal, allowed us to survive, let alone thrive.
[00:04:53] HB: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that is the, that is the talent and the capacity and [00:05:00] especially, and this goes to your work, you know, understood not only, in practical, but also in narrative terms. The stories of building the commons that, really mark the cooperative dimensions of human experience.
[00:05:13] BC: So, what got you into this? How did you come to it?
[00:05:17] HB: Well, I was shaped by the Civil Rights Movement. I grew up in Atlanta, working class, Scotch-Irish family from the south. Dad was the manager of the Atlanta Red Cross, and my mother was actually, although she has southern roots, her family was, she'd grown up in Chicago. They met in the Second World War in the Red Cross in Northern Africa.
And mother worked on dad's racial views. he was working class guy, but he was a populist. I, you know, send a sentiment, had been a newspaper reporter. So he came back and integrated the Red Cross, which was very controversial in the 1950s. Mother integrated the League of Women Voters so that..
[00:05:56] BC: Wow.
[00:05:57] HB: …it was controversial. But the Red Cross was a [00:06:00] major thing. And then he created a group in, 1958-59 to keep public schools open in Georgia. The politicians were talking about closing all the public schools, rather than allowed desegregation. So that was certainly a turning point. I was 12, well turning 13, and, you know, his name was in the paper, and we had 150 phone calls, threatening us.
[00:06:22] BC: In response to the Brown V. Board decision Georgia passed legislation requiring the closing of public schools that have been forced to integrate by court orders. And their conversion to private schools. After a federal judge ordered the Atlanta school board to submit a desegregation plan, Governor Ernest Vandiver established a committee to hold public forums on the issue. Here's a bit of what they heard:
[00:06:48] Georgia Citizen 1: The reasons for separation of the races are very important in the South. We want the Negros to have full opportunity for self-advancement but see no reason why this necessarily entails their forced inclusion into places where they are not suited.
Georgia Citizen 2: Our nation had the May 17th, 1954 Supreme Court decision translated into 42 languages and sent it around the world. The United States wanted the struggling, darker peoples to realize our sense of justice as we publish our good things. Russia propagandizes our mistakes. Number two, we need more and better education for all. Democracy requires a higher level of intelligence than any other form of government as the power is with the body Politic
Georgia Citizen 3: We believe that segregation is scriptural reading directly from the Bible. And we feel that integration, uh, is subversive it, uh, leads toward the, uh, communist goal of amalgamation of the races, promotes centralization of power, and uses the Negra to, um, set up a police state with the federal government policing the situation.
Georgia Citizen 4: I wish to say that the Negros are our own people, fellow human beings, and fellow Americans. And they are now practicing the traditional American virtue of taking responsibility for oneself by seeking to secure their rights as human beings. I am in favor of free non segregated schools for all our children, black and white, who are born equal in every respect, except in the lack of opportunity that we whites, to our shame, inflict upon them.
HB: So, that marked a pretty clear moment of transition in our life. and dad worked on school desegregation. It was very well, I mean, he was, you know, tough for him, almost killed, lost his connection with his family. and then he worked, he went on staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1963, right before the March on Washington.
[00:08:58] HB: So, I mean all of that, those years changed my aspiration from being an astronomer or astrophysicist to being involved in the movement, although I'd always had political and theological interests from the time, I was a kid.
So, I worked, went to Duke, decided to stay in the south. Not to go be a seafaring poet, and I went to, I was at the march on Washington, heard King practice “I have a dream,” the night before he gave the speech next door to my dad's.
BC: Wow.
HB: And so, you know, the movement was a very power, powerful shaping formative experience. I was in Duke (University) kind of majoring in the movement and then worked for the SCLC on and off as a field secretary in the citizenship education program. I, and that was a kind of wellspring of one of the key ideas we work with, which is concept of free spaces. I saw them all over the place. Sarah Evans, who was a colleague of my former wife names the places which were, centers where people could have a free intellectual life, interracial exchange, you know, turn upside down the Christian religion that had been taught to, docile slaves, and that didn't work --- a spectacular failure. So, the black church became really central to the movement.
But, you know, in thinking about the experience, and what made the movement, distinctively democratic, so I saw a lot of movements in the sixties and later which were not the spirit of the civil rights movement.
So, we named the, what we called free spaces as the places where people developed a democratic sensibility, a sense of discipline, and dignity. Citizenship Schools combined developing people's agency through literacy and basic organizing skills with non-violence.
That was a part of it. But, and then, we wrote a book called Free Spaces that, described not only the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Freedom Struggle, but also other movements that we saw as having a democratic spirit, like the women's suffrage movement, and community grounded labor, and the populist farmers movements, black and white farmers movements, so forth.
[00:11:00] BC: So, one of the reasons that I'm talking to you is that we crossed paths, at numerous times when I was in the Twin Cities around culturally based community organizing kinds of events and activities. And so, my question is, there's a strain, in your writing where you make regular reference to, historic events and, and, and other activities that, are not just around organizing, but culturally based community building, and organizing. And I'm wondering where that comes from and, how you came to that.
[00:11:40] HB: Yeah, I was in the movement. So, and the movement as I experienced it, there were different spans of the movement, was profoundly. cultural, and it was, you know, contesting the story of America.
Yes. So, it was contesting the story of America as a WASP creation. And it was contesting the idea of America as violent, and contesting the idea that America was, you know, a land of individual, get rich fast as you can achievement. And it was really the leading edge of an alternative story of America is about creating the commonwealth.
It was a work of the myriad of people, immigrants, native peoples. and it had moments of very powerful expression. So, the 1930s, for example, you know, the Harlem Renaissance, the public work artists of the WPA, mural projects and photojournalism, and Aaron Copeland's music and, you know, that had an effect on the larger culture.
So actually, there's a friend of mine, Larry May, who wrote a book on the movies called The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and The Politics of The American Way, great book. Larry shows the transformation of the narrative of movies.
But it was a real shift in the narrative of movies from the twenties, which was the world of the flapper and consumer culture. And right in the thirties, which was much more cooperative and, people focused and for the first time really on a national level, there was a kind of pluralism in American culture.
It was always contested. But, you know, the WPA Writers projects and the larger cultural scene. there's a good book on this by (Michael) Denning called Cultural Front.
Yeah. But those were… that was a great time of democratic cultural stirring and a different narrative. And then interestingly, World War II, which, you know, was a war against a great evil that, danger of Nazi-ism, but it also was a very, centralizing technocratic war.
So, May shows a shift from the, you know, even in journalistic terms from the GI Joes and the everyday citizens, and the work of the people to, the Flyboys and the elites. And so that fed a fifties, cultural reaction. The privatization, the consumer culture, you know, Nixon and in the kitchen debate and with the Khrushchev in Moscow right, argue that the meaning of American democracy was the right to buy all the things in a modern or US kitchen.
Richard Nixon: Uh, there are some instances where you may be ahead of us, for example, in the development of your, of the thrust of your rockets for the investigation of outer space. There may be some instances, for example, color television where we're ahead of you.
HB: Yes, oh, and, but then in my understanding of American cultural narratives the civil rights movement or the freedom Movement, which is what we called it on the ground, was a great challenge to, that it was a return to a democratic cultural story. I mean, America's always had a contested story, but it hasn't been simply that oppressive. nor has it been triumphed. It's been contested.
BC: Never more now than. Ever yeah, no, absolutely.
HB: We do, we see our work in cultural terms, as advancing a democratic cultural political story. And, in fact, we've created this new Institute for Public Life and Work. and one of our works is to operationalize the framework of educating for American democracy that, Danielle Allen, the black philosopher at Harvard started, but it became very pluralist.
We have a great colleague, Peter Levine, who's a co-chair of it. But it's a framework, it's not a curriculum, but our colleague, Trygve (Throntveit) who probably sent you a piece or two. Did you? Yes, he did. So, he, working with a couple of other schools has created an undergraduate curriculum, that embodies the framework. It's for college students, not K-12, but it's basically for preparation of teachers to think about American cultural and political and civic history in a different way.
And so that it's called Third Way Civics. So, Trygve’s curriculum, is wonderfully pluralist. and it's not didactic. I mean the teachers and the third way civics don't make a single declaration about what was the truth of America.
[00:16:49] BC: So, students draw their own conclusions, eh?
[00:16:51] HB: Yeah. And it's full of debates and kind of moments of controversy and students wrestling with the conflicting stories and narratives. And they do projects, and they do what we call public work projects. Yeah. That's what it's about.
[00:17:02] BC: I did a course for University of Massachusetts this last spring, and it was online. And I don't like not being with other human beings when you're in the process of learning. But we had no choice. And what we did was we invented a town and, appointed people to the various positions in the town. And then, sent them newspaper articles written about various things taking place in the town, all around a fairly simple cultural event that spun out of control and revealed the fissures in the society.
And then people got to write letters to the editor and all kinds of things. But that whole performative, you know, visceral collaborative…
HB: Yeah. about the identity and meaning and history.
BC: Yeah. and no easy answers. Right? So, I mean, that's the key piece
[00:17:57] HB: No, no, exactly. I mean, it sounds similar in sensibility, and actually most of our work now, so we've had some core concepts. Democracy is the public work of the people. That's a key concept. The way we understand democracy, translate it into professional work. We've done a lot of work with educational settings that's citizen professionals, but I would say citizen professionals they, they counter the technocratic top-down expert culture.
[00:18:25] BC: Part Two: Citizens
So, Harry, this idea of the citizen professional figures, prominently in your thinking about democracy building, could you say a bit more about that?
[00:18:42] HB: So, yeah, by holding open what we call free spaces people develop agency, a plural, sense of democracy, a different sense of possibility and hopefulness. and we have good stories of that. And so we're coupling, the third way civics, which is being piloted this fall in several colleges, with what we call educating for citizen professionals. Understood in that way, so citizen professionals have… and they certainly can be artists.
Did you know Artist Proof studio in South Africa?
[00:19:12] BC: Oh, yes.
[00:19:14] HB: Kim Berman, Marie’s friend co-founded it.
[00:19:17] BC: So, yeah, Kim's extraordinary. Artist's proof story is included in my book, Art and Upheaval, and I can't think of a better example of a citizen artist professional.
The citizen professional sees herself as part of the people not acting on the people. So, the term citizen, there is not a formal legal status. It's an identity. and they have a different understanding of power. It's not domination, it's collaborative, it's power to, not power over. We draw on the asset-based approach that every community has tremendous, resources and talents usually invisible and neglected. So, it's seeing people as full of rich, brilliance is part of the work of building a culture.
BC: Are there some examples that you could share?
[00:20:07] HB: We have our colleague, Bill Doherty, who's taken the Public Work into citizen professional practice in the health and the family fields, and,a lot of work in teachers.
We have a whole initiative called Public Achievement in which for it to really be sustained requires teachers to become citizen teachers who work with kids in a very different way --- turn classrooms into free spaces.
BC: Yes.
And we have, you know, city manager who. Stopped trying to be in control in Au Claire (Wisconsin) and catalyzed a citywide movement called Clear Vision, which has done remarkable things.
So it's pairing the Third Way Civics: A Cultural Pluralist view of American Democracy and History with, not simply a course, but preparation of students, learners to be what we call civic agents in their careers, in their communities.
[00:20:54] BC: Not dissimilar from my own work, community based, called Creative Community Leadership, which uses arts-based tools and strategies. as a participatory experiential way of engaging people in the hardest of all things to learn, which is working together in ways that are productive and inclusive.
And I think probably the thing that characterizes it most, at least for me, is that there's more sweat than there is, what I would call synaptic firing, or at least an equal amount of sweat, because it's embodied learning.
[00:21:34] HB: No, yeah. Learning is about not only the head, but the heart and the hand.
[00:21:38] BC: There’s a very interesting, book that I just heard Ezra Klein, interviewed the author. It's called The Extended Mind, and it's talking about how, current, pedagogy really focuses on, butts in seats and one, one muscle…
HB: Absolutely
BC: …and that is that is the brain. and actually, it leads me to… you talk about the civic muscle. I. and it's interesting because one of the, and you could think of it as a metaphor, I actually don't. And I have another muscle that is preeminent in my own thinking, and that's the imaginative muscle. Do you see those two connected, and in what way? If you do
[00:22:21] HB: Well, absolutely. So, I like Appadurai’s work here, who is a cultural anthropologist from India who worked with Shaq Fellers, who wrote a very important essay called The Capacity to Aspire. And there's a, it's in a collection called, Culture and Public Action. But Appadurai argues that people's sense of their own agency in the world, not only individual, but collective, has everything to do with how they imagine the possibilities and the future.
And the future is open to the extent that people develop a sense that they actually can have some shaping, power over their environments. So, I would say that's directly connects the idea of civic muscle, or civic agency is another term for it, a more academic term, with the idea of the imagination.
[00:23:08] BC: So, the through line for this podcast is, really, and especially in our contemporary moment, which is what use are and culture in these turbulent times. and, so a question to you is there a story, or are there stories that come to mind, where you saw creative practice and, the exercise of the civic muscle, as mutually supportive and effective?
[00:23:37] HB: Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, again, my formative experience was in the freedom movement. and so, several things happened in the movement that were about this. One is that the grassroots Citizenship Schools, they were…SCLC had 900 Citizenship Schools coming out of Highlander (Research and Education Center) first. But in 61’ it shifted over to SCLC, and the Citizenship Schools themselves were incubators for a democratic imagination and agency, and a different story of America.
So, people like Dorothy Cotton, and Septima Clark, and Ella Baker, who were really central architects of the Citizenship Schools believe that you had to have an intellectual dimension as well as people's own self-discovery and self-directed learning.
They had… Scandinavian Folk Schools were a very important influence. So, there was a vibrant intellectual conversation about the meaning of citizenship and democracy and the Citizenship Schools. And of course, it wasn't only the transformative impact on that of people who were also learning that they could learn numeracy.
So, you could know if the plantation owner was screwing you. Uh, literacy and numeracy were really resources for agency in the Citizenship Schools. They were also ways to prepare people to register to vote. But the cultural dimensions of the schools and the movement as a whole were full of poetry and history. There's a, the citizenship education curriculum was, had a section on black history as well as songs. As well as nonviolence.
[00:25:03] BC: Here's the Scandinavian Folk Schools in 1984, talking about the Citizenship Schools from the Literacy Project Documentary, You Got to Move.
[00:25:15] Bernice Robinson: Any community we went in, and operated citizenship classes, if there was no particular community organization in that area, we would organize that first class into an organization so that they would have some ongoing influence in the community, and an ongoing learning process.
“Well, what about you being the leader?” “Well, no, I'm not a leader”, they would say, but we’d say, “You know the problem, if you know the problem, you see the problem, you know what needs to be done to solve that problem. Then you are the one that have to take the ball and run with it.”,
It's like light coming into the darkness. Once they learn how to read and write, they always voted after.
[00:26:29] HB: And that was a seed for a different story of democracy that actually changed the country for a time. It was a challenge to the kind of consumerist individualist, you know, look out for number one culture of the fifties.
And it had ripples across the world. And so, King assigned me to organize poor whites. I had been caught by the Klan in St. Augustine working for SCLC and talked my way out of getting lynched. So, I think he figured if I could do that, whoa. I could, I could organize poor whites. And I hadn't really known this, but people like Bayard Rustin, and King and others, Vincent Harding, had been talking for a long time about the need for an inter-racial of movement of working people and the poor.
So, he sent me out to be a Guinea pig. But I did that in Durham, North Carolina from 66’ to 72’, with a year off in Chicago, working for the poverty program. But so, the direct translation of my experience in the movement into the community organizing I did was that we had a lot of cultural dimensions to the community organizing.
I mean, you can't build anything that's powerful without really rich cultural dimensions. So, we had. you know, we had music, we had, historical section in our newspaper. called The Action. we had, southern jokes, called Corn Corner. We had local, kids write about sports events, and we had stories about the times when there had been interracial work together.
In the… in Durham, it was the textile and tobacco factories in the 1930s had a lot of interracial organizing. And we made connections with the black community. and I saw that as all part of another story of America, a Democratic story of America.
So, I think the culture work comes together when it is integrated, infused into an that story, a collective story. And the most powerful organizing work I've seen and written about over the years, has been about organizing tied to development of a different story. So, an example you may know about, that shaped the Puget Sound region was the story of the house boats on Lake Union in the 1960s who were about to get wiped out.
And Terry Pettus, who was a great journalist, and also a cultural thinker. And he organized the houseboats, pushed back against being wiped out by the developers. But in the process, he realized he couldn't do that by just appealing to people's sympathy. So, they had to redefine the narrative of Lake Union, as a people's lake, as this image and symbol of the commonwealth.
[00:29:02] BC: Now here is Terry Pettus describing that Lake Union organizing strategy.
[00:29:07] Terry Pettus: So, we started to work with the city council to try to solve a problem. There was no sewer around this lake.
But worst of all, when we examined the problem with the health Department of Lake Union and it brought border of pollution, we discovered that the city had 13 sewer outfalls into this lake. It was a lesson to us, and fortunately you had a city government that would listen.
We, in a sense, saved Lake Union, and I'm proud of the houseboat people because they accepted the fact that we could not. Wage of battle just for houseboats on a very narrow issue of houseboats. But what we had to do was concern ourselves first with the entire lake because that is our community and it's something that belongs to all the people.
This movement, uh, led to the enactment of the shore lands, uh, management act in which we protect all of the shore lands of our state. These things, to me, are very important, and it seems to me that anyone who calls themselves a progressive or a radical. Is not concerned with the physical and, uh, wellbeing, with the preservation of these natural resources and simply not doing their job.
[00:30:18] HB: And he did a brilliant job of doing cultural organizing and getting the journalists in the Seattle region, and the school children, and the health department, and all sorts of actors talking about a different story. Which actually, I mean, it birthed other efforts like Pike Place Market, but the cultural vitality of that story was enormously important and actually in birthing the environmental movement. A friend, a great friend of mine is, John DeGraaf, who was a filmmaker. did a story on Terry Pettus.
[00:30:42] BC I think about every time the question gets called, it's not a question of who wins the intellectual argument. It also is about putting your heart and your soul and your body in the place that will make the most impact, both in terms of commentary, and in terms of presence, and witness, in a way that reveals the prevailing story, and offers a different one.
And you can't do that unless the people in the room, in the street together have a bond. Above and beyond that they all signed a petition. Right, right. Right. there's something that every person in a family understands that whether you name it or not, you have a family culture, you have a family story. You may love it or hate it, but it is a connective tissue that's pretty indelible.
[00:31:46] HB: Absolutely. And you need to claim it even if you hate it.
[00:31:49] BC: And the same goes for community. especially a community that seeks to, to alter the direction of the prevailing story.
Part Three: “These don't seem like such bad kids.”
It seems that one of the overarching themes of your work is that democracy is not just an idea. And certainly not just a theory. Rather, a community and personal life path and ongoing, evolving practice and often acontact sport. Are there stories that rise up for you that personify this?
[00:32:26] HB: You know, I did a piece, for the Kettering report, the collection of stories, basically, this last year. One of the things I wrote during the Covid, called Beyond the War Metaphor, which are basically stories of people organizing and also changing the narrative.
So, there's seven stories there that range from our youth initiative, Public Achievement. Stories like the kids who built a playground in a low-income neighborhood and, you know, changed a school in the process. we do have a… we have a website now in our institute and it has some of those stories.
BC: Yeah, that that was in Minnesota, right?
HB: Public Achievement was at, in a, yeah. St. Bernard School in north St. Paul Rice area. And they built a playground, and it became, a site that people came from all around the world had birthed the spread of Public Achievement to many other communities.
BC: And you told a story about skateboarders too?
HB: Yes, I did. Well, that was, we weren't responsible for that. But it was a good story of a politician who was a citizen politician, Elizabeth Katz. This was in Burnsville, and she ran her first race in 1994 for mayor on the platform that government doesn't have to be bad, but what that meant in practice was she couldn't fix the problems of Burnsville, and there were a lot of problems, but government could be a convener and a catalyst. So, she won. It was very controversial argument that the media couldn't get their heads to it.
But one of the first examples was that the skateboarders were skating through central Burnsville, and she went over to talk to him and said, “You know, you're getting in trouble. You're getting busted all the time. It's probably not gonna be good for you future, and it's creating great antagonism with the local businesses. So, what are you gonna do about it?”
And they said, “Well, we don't have any place to skateboard, so if you get us a skateboard park, we won't, skateboard to the businesses.” So, she said, “That's not my role. I'll open some doors; you see if you can organize to get a skateboard park.”
Yeah, and in 95, this was when my colleague, Nan (Nancy) Kari and I, were finishing our book, Building America. You know, the City Council, first of all saw them as just trouble making kids who should be put in jail or done something with, but they organized, and they had some support. And okay, they came, they filled up the city council chambers, which supported their effort, and they built the skate park, which is still going strong. it's like a center of the community.
[00:34:45] BC: But what one of the things that, that is to me so powerful about those kinds of stories is that the evolution from one story to another automatically includes the confounding of the prevailing narrative, which is deeply disturbing to some folks because their worldview is built…
[00:35:04] HB: It makes sense of the world.
[00:35:05] BC: Exactly. And so especially when young people, with their energy and enthusiasm become principal actors in the alteration of the current DNA of expectation, then you have people not able to fall upon the default, argument, good guy, bad guy,
HB: Absolutely.
BC: Kinds of thing. And to me it's such an important thing now because if we cast the other as, incurable, whoever we define as the other, then we're lost. And what those kids did was they gave people an opportunity to just hold their breath for a second and go, “These don't seem like such bad kids.” And from that point on, they become partners rather than adversaries.
[00:35:53] HB: Yeah, and also stories like the skateboard park, or the playground in North Rice, or stories around the world in Public Achievement --- a village where… like college students doing public achievement at Tokai University (Japan).We worked with a village which felt beleaguered by tourists, and they changed to learning how to deal with tourists in a way that built the whole community.
All of those stories also just disclose and reveal that tremendous talent and intelligence and energy of young people, which is usually completely invisible. People think young people are to be fixed or to be remediated or to be, controlled usually. One of the best parts of our Public Achievement work is, that, it's both a positive, a wonderful story and also a challenging story cuz it's so countercultural.
But we went, I took our center, to Augsburg. The faculty group that was most enthusiastic in the first instance was the special education faculty. So, they were shaped by the critique of special education, which, of course it's about remediation of kids, and it’s the critical disability studies school of thought.
But they didn't know what to do about the critique of special education. So, Public Achievement provided them ways to, work with a school and work with the kids and have coaches who were in special education, you know, preparing to be teachers. And there's a wonderful video that young people put together called, Public Achievement in Fridley: Transforming Special Education, which saw these kids who were locked away in level three in a room cuz it's like a prison. They couldn't even interact with the rest of the school in Fridley Middle School… become leaders in the community when they developed some skills.
And part of it was also cultural. They did murals and they did it at Citywide anti-Bullying campaign. And it's a wonderful story of kids who were seen in deficit ways becoming civic leaders.
[00:37:54] BC: Well, one of the interesting things about kids that I think they can teach adults, they understand that part of their evolving, journey into adulthood is, is a cultural journey.
Skateboarding is a cultural behavior. Just like hip hop, and tagging, and muralism, and all those things. They're in the process of saying “Here's who I am and these are the things that matter most to me.”
And so, if there's anything that is an antidote in my mind to the cynicism of the world we live in, it's the authenticity that people of passion bring to the table when they say, “This is important to me, period. “Right? I'm willing to stand up here and be scared. and risk, being laughed at because I care so much about this.
[00:38:44] HB: Well and they have, they have boldness. they're not, they're not cowed, they have, you know, great deal of energy. they have, they want to hope for the future.
They have their future ahead of it. Now, we have learned that citizen professional idea is important here because, I would say Public Achievement in the United States was, expanding pretty rapidly until, No Child Left Behind, and teachers became themselves much more cowed by the structure of the high stakes testing regimes. Yeah, and so you could still find some principles who were bold and creative and could think out outside the box who would see Public Achievement as an important dimension? But in general, it became much harder to do that.
So, what we’ve seen in Public Achievement there's no doubt that young people have tremendous talent and energy and potential, but it needs to be developed. They weren't born knowing how to build a playground, right, …
BC: Right.
HB: …skate, skateboard park. So, those are the skills of public work and civic agency. But and you know, so in, in Public Achievement, young people take the initiative around issues they want to work on. They're coached. The coaching is really key. You need good coaching. and usually the college students, do the coaching. But the coach preparation itself is really important cuz coaches need to learn how to work in a different way. With kids, you don't tell 'em what to do, and you don't let 'em just run wild.
I mean, you have to be a coach, right? Coach was the term that kids came up with themselves, when we were first forming Public Achievement. But then you also need, what we would call citizen professionals, or citizen teachers in the school to sustain and keep open that space. Because there are a lot of pressures, you know, to shut it down.
I mean, how is this preparing kids to take the test? I mean, basically that's what teachers are inclined to ask, and the principals are inclined to ask, and school boards are inclined to ask. And the school superintendent is… so, so the everyday political skills of keeping open, what we would call free spaces. Public Achievement is a free space where young people develop their capacities to act in the world, and their imaginations in your terms. But you, but you, one has to think about how do you keep that open. and those are political skills of citizen professionals, citizen teachers.
[00:40:55] BC: Part Four: The Dignity and Value of Work
So, coming in for a landing here. probably one of the most critical questions that I've been asking in this chapter…
HB: In lockdown, yeah.
BC: Is that… and the way I've described it is it's turned, upside down and inside out. that's where we're at. And some people imagine that the next chapter is putting it back together. I don't hold to that. But in many ways. I think of it in terms of improvisational theater, you don't ever go back to the original script you're building on the one that you have…
HB: Right.
BC: …for good or for ill. So, the question I ask, so of what use is human creativity, cultural practice, the arts as we attempt to heal and move forward in these turbulent times?
[00:41:50] HB: Well, cultural work is really critical. And I would say, one of the most important positive features of the Covid era is the enhanced visibility of. essential workers but, it's not only health workers, but it's also truck drivers, and delivery people, and janitors, and so in my worldview the terrible thing that's happened, and this is not a right, left thing, but the terrible feature of modern, individualist, meritocratic society is that we've come to define as a society of dominant values, a few people as winners and most people as losers.
And for most people whose life for better and worse, often is defined by their work, it means that their work is invisible. And if people talk about its value, they mean just paying people more. You know, the… I mean, I was again shaped by the movement and King's last great speech in March 18th in Memphis was the dignity of labor.
Martin Luther King: Let me say to you tonight that whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity, and it has worth.
You are reminding not only Memphis, but you are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages.
HB: And everyone who makes a contribution to the uplift of humanity has, they work as dignity, and they work as value. And it's not a matter of what degrees you have or what credentials. It's the garbage workers in Memphis have not only dignity as human beings, but dignity through their work, they make a contribution to the city.
Well, that narrative has been, submerged. in fact, I think I've sent you this piece, from the Wall Street Journal. So, in 1997, I went to Washington and saw the National Archives Exhibit of Cultural work in the thirties, A New Deal for the Arts. Um, and then went across the way to the Roosevelt Memorial.
And the cultural messages, the stories embedded in those, artistic sites were radically in contrast. For all the difference of politics, partisan view they talked in the A New Deal for the Arts exhibit about the rediscovery of the common person, and the dignity of work and the, and the energy and the talent of all sorts of different American groups in dealing with the hardship of the Great Depression was really vivid. And then, across the way that Roosevelt Memorial, and was beautiful in the aesthetic sense, but the two sets of statues have common people by (George) Siegel showed them as pathetic basket cases needed to be rescued by the Government.
So, that's a, an example of this larger narrative problem. That the dignity of work, and the dignity of everyday citizens, and the talents and the energies have become really emerged in the celebrity consumer culture. So, I think the cultural work has to be to uplift the capacities and the talents and the intelligence of everyday citizens and work of people.
And so, I would say that Covid has created a moment just like, right before the Covid, the, the government shut down. And, you know, workers of all kinds said we wanna work, wasn't that we want a job, we wanna work, we are doing work of contribution, you know, I think that a great task of cultural workers is to make visible and vivid and central the dignity and the work of everyday people.
[00:45:08] BC: So, and the interesting thing about the contrasting stories you told is that one of the abiding characteristics of the WPA was not only artists engaging at the most hyper, hyper local level and in a participatory way --- and the people who were going to bear the consequences of the success or failure of the democratic experience were in fact the principal actors. It was their voices, their images, their ideas, totally.
And then in the Roosevelt Memorial, it is a monument, which is a singular work of art, which actually says there is a narrative, rather than thousands of narratives bubbling up in communities all across the country, and most people in this country are not aware of the extraordinary volume and depth and quality of the work that rose up over those few years during the WPA.
[00:45:50] HB: Absolutely. It was like an explosion of cultural energy.
[00:45:53] BC: Yep. So, last question. Any works, books, films, music, anything that have inspired you lately that you want to pass on to anybody else listening to this?
[00:46:03] HB: Well, three books.
So, one is a book called, Behind the Magic Curtain by Thorn, who is a writer and former police person in Birmingham, Alabama. It's the stories of whites, and especially large number of Jews in Birmingham, Alabama, which was seen as the violence capital of the country, and the civil rights movement, of course. Bull Connor and all that. Behind the Magic Curtain. is a story of all the people in the white community, in the Jewish community, in the college, and among young people who were actually allies of the freedom movement. And it radically confounds the dominant narrative of the south that most progressives have with blacks as victims and whites as racists. I think in general our cultural imaginations have become reductive, So that book by Thorn is wonderful.
A second book, by (Christina) Proenza Coles, a black historian, is called American Founders: How African Americans created Freedom in the New World. And first of all, it's the story about the racial complexity. There's no such thing as racial purity in America. It's all, we’re all mongrels. But she does a great job of that. But the American Founders is a remarkable story of the, especially the work of free Blacks before the Civil War. Although it continues after.
But you know, there were almost 500,000 blacks in America who were not slaves and they built communities and they built cultural institutions. And I mean, in a way it's like the Museum of African American History and Culture, which is a great counter to the simple victim narrative of West. This is a kind of book of the same spirit. it's about agency. It doesn't hide the terrible atrocities of slavery and Jim Crow and so forth. But it's a story of agency and creation.
And then the third, because I do think there's this kind of, the reductive narratives we have create a terrible US versus them conflictual culture. A new book by, Amanda Ripley called, High Conflict, How We Got Into It and How to Get Out of It.
But it's a book of stories. She's a very fine journalist and she spent a lot of time on these, stories from, you know, a gang to Colombian warfare to environmental guy who was simply us versus them. And then came to realize that it wasn't gonna solve the environmental problem.
[00:48:27] BC: Right, right.
[00:48:28] HB: So, it's… and then a story of a Jewish synagogue in New York, which was very liberal, and we had its own internal conflicts and became adept at working through conflicts. And then, created an exchange with a group of, you know, white prison wardens and people in Northern Michigan who were Trump supporters. Yeah. So, Ripley's book is very important.
[00:48:48] BC: So, Harry. Thank you for this great conversation.
Of course. The power of stories. Great. And small are the mother's milk of this podcast. And people like those who are listening, and hopefully passing them on are what keeps us going. So, thanks to you all out there for being part of the change, the story community. We appreciate your support and feedback, and particularly your willingness to share what we're doing here with your friends and colleagues. So please know every time you press share or give a mention in an email or a newsletter, you are helping us grow that community.
Change the Story / Change the World is a production of the Center for the Study of Art and Community, our theme and soundscape spring forth from the head, heart, and hands of the Maestro., Judy Munson. Our text editing is by Andre Nnebe. Our effects come from freesound.org, and our inspiration rises up from the ever-present spirit of UKE 235. So, until next time, stay well, do good, and spread the good word. And rest assured, this episode has been 100% human.
