A conversation between Juana Flores and Maria de Lourdes (Lulu) Reboyoso of Mujeres Unidas y Activas and Ana Pérez and Emily Goldfarb from RoadMap Consulting.

The following conversation is an excerpt from a video produced by RoadMap Consulting and Mujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA). Since 2014 MUA has worked with consultants from RoadMap to design and implement a capacity-building program called Futuro Fuerte (A Strong Future). The program strengthens leadership professional development and internal practices so that MUA can become an organization successfully led by its Latina immigrant women members. Over the course of several years, 16 immigrant women members took on paid staff positions and occupied key decision-making roles in the organization. MUA’s process shows ways that movement organizations can tackle internalized racism and structural barriers to change. The results are documented in the RoadMap published report Shifting Power from the Inside Out.

Ana Perez: Why have you come to center leadership of the immigrant women in MUA?

Juana Flores: I believe three things. If a woman does not support herself to be sure of herself,  if a woman of the base is not developed to take an internal role in the organization, then the woman will not be prepared to have an external political role. When a woman form the grassroots is truly at the table her voice will be heard. It is the immigrant woman who has the experience. There is a need for the leadership to come from the bottom up, and not from the top down.

Ana Perez: Many organization in the movement have good membership numbers. They go out and recruit them and involve them and build leadership, but when it come to major decisions, the strategic positions, are not occupied by people from the base. You Know? People like me, educated in the United States, or white people, not the base, are brought in and take too much power, take the most important positions and control the strategic direction of the organization. Although it is in collaboration with the members, it is different. What we see at the national level is that those are the same people who are speaking for the immigrants, for the woman are from the membership and not for the women themselves.

Lulu Reboyoso: For an organization led by its base, it is really the women of the membership, of the base whose voices are heard in the organization in setting the direction for the organization. Moving the organization forward with their own voice, their own experiences, as Juanita said. They are valuable and that is something very important.

Ana could you tells us about a tool that you thought about when you started working with us? In Futuro Fuerte you said “This is what Mujeres Unidas y Activas needs”

Ana: Systems of power impact us on a personal level and they take away our trust and make us doubt ourselves. When I was able to share the tool of how to overcome internalized oppression, I gave a new language to all the women on staff who began as members and they were able to say, “Oh I’m clipping my own wings,” right? or “You are enabling me.” (Rescuing me in a dysfunctional way.) I think it helped to change the women’s narrative and it gave them strength. I feel that this too is what helped transform how they felt. Therefore they could have more confidence in themselves to be able to speak, to be able to disagree, to be able to say what they felt.

Lulu: What Futuro Fuerte can achieve and has achieved in organizations is a deep change from within, even if it hurts, right? Although that change can hurt us. Although this step hurts so much, it is a step that we have to take to cleanse and heal, to heal ourselves, at be a guide for other organizations as well.   

Emily: We identified that one has to be able to give and receive feedback. One tool is how to show up for courageous and difficult conversations. We had another one about guidelines and agreements for meetings to ensure that in each meeting everyone agrees, that in this space we are going to talk honestly. We are going to listen well

Lulu: They gave Erica and I the roles of Wellness Coordinators (Coordinara de Bienstar) We are sharing and keep refreshing these tools These tools are not going to be put in a folder and put away in a desk, but we continue engaging. We revisit them, each meeting, although it times it can be difficult, because we get so caught up in being busy all the time. It is a bit difficult at times to make the time to continue implementing and practicing these tools. A little bit about the tool “El Pozo” (hole or mud pit), what we learned is that everyone will feel badly when something goes wrong, right? So the first reaction as a human being is to start blaming ourselves, to start saying that we were to blame, or that someone else did this or that, and “That’s why I am here.” And then we begin to sink deeper in the mud pit, because we are already in that pozo. So what we have learned is how to get out of that pozo by asking, “Why am I here, Why am I feeling this way?”

Ask yourself questions. “How did I get here? And now, what things can I do to start getting out of here?” because it’s not good to feel that way. It does not feel nice to be there in the pozo.

Futuro Fuerte has not only been for professional development, to provide training for us to do a good job, Futuro Fuerte has and is creating a space for us to identify the ways in which we’ve internalized oppression and to change and transform that internalized oppression.

That grassroots Latina immigrant women are leading. And that we don’t just give her a title but that she really is fulfilling the responsibilities of the position. We have power, we have strength, our rights as women, as workers, as immigrants, as domestic workers, we have strength and we also have the strength to make the change. We have the courage to make the change.  Something that I really like that is happening in the organization is that not only the grassroots woman is taking leadership in being for example, a supervisor. She is not only supervising other women from the base. No right now, women who came from the membership are supervising women who are not from the membership base. By this I mean that Futuro Fuerte is transforming the organization. Futuro Fuerte is creating a program that other organizations must implement.

Ana: People of color are 10% of all the leaders of non-profit organization sin the movement. I come with a university education from here. I speak English. So for a woman like you Juanita, a woman from the base who is learning to speak English, you are very rare in the leadership of the movements of this country. In reality there are thousand and thousands of Juanitas in this country, because there are thousands and thousands of immigrant women who might be playing leadership roles but they do not, because of racism, xenophobia, or classism, right?

Because they have to be educated in the university to be the leaders of the organizations, many of the job descriptions include this. So what we are doing is limiting the potential of immigrant women from the base. Imagine if we had thousands of Juanitas what would the immigrant rights movement be like now? What new strategies might be emerging? We need to be very aware that if we do not have people from the base at the forefront then we are not achieving our mission. We are simply replicating the same systems of oppression.  Therefore, organizations such as Mujeres Unidas y Activas must receive the support of the entire system so that they con continue to develop the leaders we need at the head of our movements.

Really the capacity is there, but there is a lack of development, investment, conscientization. If we don’t have this, yes there can be internal local movements but we will not get where need to go at the state national and international levels where the women from the grassroots base can be the ones creating the vision, the strategy, making the decisions at the tables where this work is done. Not only in the immigrant rights movement, bout women’s rights, in the right to live free of violence, the right to our own bodies, the right to everything we have and have had taken from us. n

For more information visit: www.Mujeresunidas.net/futurofuerte or www.roadmapconsulting.org/resources/shifting-power-from-the-inside-out. Juana Flores is the Executive Director of MUA, Maria de Lourdes (Lulu) Reboyoso is the Grassroots Fundraising Coordinator of MUA. Emily Goldfarb is the former director of RoadMap and Ana Pérez is a RoadMap consultant.

This section contains excerpts from Mujeres Mágicas - Domestic Workers Right to Writeby Las Malcriadas

The book is edited and translated by Karina Muñiz-Pagán and Argelia Muñoz Larroa.

Foreword

by Karina Muñiz-Pagán

I am a grandchild of immigrant domestic workers and a writer connected to la frontera, as if my ancestral umbilical cord is buried in the desert terrain of the U.S./Mexico border. I’ve spent the last several years excavating stories never told.

When my father was ten years old, he lived near in el barrio Val Verde, Texas. One day in 1947 he was playing stickball with his friends on a dirt road when the green border patrol trucks charged towards them. They scattered, praying la migra wouldn’t send them far away. Being born on the U.S. side of the border didn’t help. They ran past the evaporating traces of disappeared neighbors, family and friends. At that time, ten years had barely passed since the massive deportations of thousands of Mexicans and Chicanas/os, blamed for the U.S. Great Depression.

Today, migrants are scapegoated all over the world, and the U.S./Mexico border is ground zero for deadly and draconian policies. Stories of resilience and survival, such as the ones in this book, must be excavated with a newfound urgency.

As an immigrant rights activist, I first became familiar with Mujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA) in 1999. I heard Clara Luz Navarro, co-founder of MUA, speak about their work at a training for domestic violence counselors. Clara Luz had a vibrancy that filled the room. She had short, dyed blond hair and a passion in her voice that made you fix your posture and listen attentively. She spoke of the dignity and power of Latina immigrant women, cleaning homes in San Francisco, taking care of children and the elderly, making all other work possible and building their own power.

What Clara Luz shared resonated with me. My maternal great-grandmother, Karin, was a domestic worker too. She migrated from Sweden to San Francisco and worked for 30 years for a family on Russian Hill. My paternal grandmother, Candelaria, migrated to the U.S. from México and was pulled out of primary school to work as a domestic worker, washing the clothes of others on the El Paso/Juarez border. With grandmothers from both sides of my family, having done the often invisible and invaluable work of home care, I was drawn to community work that honored the dignity and value of immigrant women and domestic workers of today, as well as their legacy.

MUA is a Latina immigrant and domestic worker rights base-building organization in the San Francisco Bay Area. I worked there as the Political Director while I was also a student at Mills College, pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing. As a Community Engagement Fellow, Mills gave me the opportunity to teach creative writing and step outside our campaign work. This book includes writing from the participants in those workshops and reflects MUA’s accomplishment of their mission through art and literature. The MUA writers have also been at the forefront of preserving San Francisco as a sanctuary city. Together, we have fasted and engaged in civil disobedience. They’ve taught me what bravery looks like when they have risked their own safety to strengthen the #NotOneMore deportation campaign and led the domestic worker rights movement in the state of California.

In 2015 when this project began, my biggest fear was failing my compañeras. I wanted the class to be worth the sacrifices made to attend. For members who weren’t staff, attending class meant at times turning down a job. We didn’t have childcare the first year; participants had to arrange that as well. For MUA staff, the workload didn’t lessen; the 3-hour-a-week class plus homework was in addition to the responsibilities they held in each program.

We began the class with ceremony. I learned the power of this intention from workshops taught by Cherríe Moraga, a mentor instrumental in my life and in so many others. La maestra pushed us to bring our whole selves to the space and page. One of the compañeras, Sylvia, was from a danzante indigenous community in Oakland. She and her daughter began by recognizing we were on Ohlone land and guided us through the four directions, keeping the copal burning on the altar as we each set our intention for ourselves and collectively. This is how we would hold and push each other through the process.  

One main goal was for each participant to discover stories inside themselves they never knew existed. They were there, waiting in the ethers to come to life. I opened our first class, after ceremony, with Gloria Anzaldúa’s “Letter to Third World Women” in the anthology This Bridge Called my Back published in 1981 and co-edited by Cherríe Moraga. As a queer Xicana, the book, and the letter in particular, have had such an impact on me over the years. Anzaldúa’s words exposed me, broke open my heart and put it all back together, as if her voice said to me, “Ándale, mi’ja, you’re meant to do this. We’ve got you, now get to work.” I hoped her words could move others as much as they had transformed me. So we read out loud parts of her letter translated into Spanish and printed to take home to read in its entirety:

“Rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you...
I say mujer mágica, empty yourself. Shock yourself into new ways of perceiving the world, shock your readers into the same. Write with your eyes like painters, with your ears like musicians, with your feet like dancers. You are the truthsayer with quill and torch. Write with your tongues of fire. Don't let the pen banish you from yourself.”

This is A Poem For You
by Kelly Curry

This is a poem for you
For your dreams 
the ones you gave to the stars 
in the night a long, long time ago

For the sweet breeze
that comes on the hottest day and relieves you when you thought it would be a day without relief 

This is for your Love that will be pure 
forever and ever 
no matter who or what conspires to pollute it 

For the cool, sweet strawberry in your mouth when your throat is parched, hot and dry 

These are words of love strung together, side by side, like a song sent down on particles of stardust trillions of years ago that have mingled in the cosmos to become sunlight and 
land on your skin today 

the sweat on your brow a kiss from the galaxies in between 

This is a poem For the prayers you pray while you 
are stirring your coffee 
or waiting on your ride
or watching your children play
Or wondering whether the rain will come behind the assembling clouds and claps of thunder 

This poem is for all the little things you do to keep shit together that nobody knows about...but you

this poem wants to soothe you when worries rattle you from sleep 

to remind you to rest in faith’s bosom so your angels can prove to you...again...that they never left you 

This is for the elegant beat of a heart that rises and falls inside a body that gives life to a Soul full of love and passion, healing sorrows and organizing  victory through a delicate but intense collaboration of your dreams and your hands and your mind to mold and shape a world safe and sound for everyone’s babies including your enemy’s

For your sisters who didn’t make it and for the ones who did...then broke your heart cuz they changed on you 

for my mother who left ahead of me to prepare a heaven and gives me glimpses of it here on Earth and shows me that it is in your heart in your hope in your love...in your dreams...in you.

This poem is for you

Este es un Poema Para Ti

por Kelly Curry  

Este es un poema para ti
Para tus sueños
los que le diste a las estrellas
en la noche hace mucho, mucho tiempo  

Para la dulce brisa 
que llega en el día más caliente y
te alivia cuando pensabas que sería un día sin alivio 

Es para tu Amor que será
puro
por siempre y para siempre
no importa quién o qué conspire para contaminarlo 

Para la fresca y dulce fresa en
tu boca cuando tu garganta está
sedienta, cálida y seca 

Estas son palabras de amor entretejidas, lado a lado, como una canción
enviada en partículas de polvo de estrellas hace millones y millones de años que se han mezclado en el cosmos para convertirse en luz solar y
aterriza hoy en tu piel
el sudor en tu frente
y en medio, un beso de las galaxias

Este es un poema Para las oraciones que rezas mientras
estás revolviendo tu café
o esperando un aventón  
o viendo a tus hijos jugar
O preguntándote si la lluvia vendrá
detrás de ese ensamble de nubes
y el estruendo de los truenos. 

Este poema es para todas las pequeñas cosas
que haces para mantener toda esa mierda junta de la que nadie sabe ... solo tú
este poema quiere calmarte
cuando las preocupaciones te agitan y te quitan el sueño
para recordarte que descanses en el seno de la fé
así tus ángeles puedan demostrarte ...
una vez más ... que nunca te dejaron 

Es para el elegante latido de un
corazón que se eleva y se cae dentro de un cuerpo que le da vida a un alma llena de amor y pasión, curando las penas
y organizando la victoria a través de una delicada pero intensa colaboración de
tus sueños y tus manos y
tu mente para moldear y dar forma a un mundo sano y salvo para los bebés de todos, incluidos los de tu enemigo

Para tus hermanas que no lo lograron
y para las que sí ... y luego
te rompieron el corazón porque cambiaron contigo
para mi madre que partió antes que yo
a preparar un cielo y darme un
vistazos de él acá en la Tierra
mostrándome que está en tu corazón en
tu esperanza en tu amor ... en tus sueños ... en ti. 

Este poema es para ti

By Kelly Curry

This is an excerpt from the book Until the Streets of the Hood Flood with Green co-published by Reimainge! and Freedom Voices.

My father was Horatio Alger… or at least the kind of character made famous by the Horatio Alger, the 19^th century writer who chronicled through his fiction the archetype of the poor boy who works his way up from very little to achieve great riches, respect and love from the community. When my dad was a kid, America was still a place where this could happen. America was a place where the ethos and consciousness of many of its citizens understood and valued equal participation.

Born in 1946 in Raymar Alabama, my father was the son of bona fide country beauty. Mama Baby, as she was known, was the daughter of African and Blackfoot Native American folk who sharecropped the land at Pine Level, a tiny, rural community a stone’s throw from Montgomery. They worked, lived, ate and breathed country life, country air and had simple down-home ways.

After a brief tryst with a handsome, married, middle class businessman from the neighboring town, once she found herself in the family way, Baby was promptly abandoned to deal with the situation on her own.

So though he would carry the Curry name, my father’s rearing, his loving, his spiritual development and common sense understanding of the world around him, would come from his mother’s people, the Guice clan. When my father was old enough for his mother to realize that he was “different” or “special”, as I’ve heard it called, it was with a broken heart  and a head held high with hope that she left him temporarily to go find work in Detroit, Michigan. Her intention was to sow the seeds of a life that held the promise of more opportunity than the meager existence she could eek out of Jim Crow, on the red clay of Alabama. She wanted to organize an environment where a boy like her son, Charles Henry, could be well educated and reap fully the benefits of what seemed to his family and community to be a sharp, gifted mind.

Like many young, single mothers, through her focused determination and hard work, she blazed a pathway for my father’s education and a future for him that would exceed anything she could ever dream of for herself.

While she was in Detroit, my father was left in the care of his grandparents, Mama Deah and Daddy Morgan. During the days he ran with his older cousins. One afternoon his destiny unfolded when on a short visit back home, Mama Baby put some money in the hands of my dad’s eldest girl cousin. “Ya’ll go on down to the store and get some candy n’ things. Make sure Charles Henry get some too.”

I imagine that my grandmother’s strategy was born of the idea that providing candy money for all of the kids, would mean that her own love, her only child at the time, who she missed terribly and was working diligently to be reunited with once things came together in Detroit, well he would definitely get some.

As fate would have it, things didn’t quite come together the way Mama Baby had planned. Instead of happily buying the candy and sharing with my father, his cousin bought the candy and passed some around to every one of the kids except my father. When he protested a squabble broke out and little Charles Henry was pushed and rolled down into a ditch.

While the other children continued on down the road back to the farm, eating, drinking and enjoying the fruits of his mother’s labor, their voices became distant echoes and my father was left to contemplate his lot.

He shared this story with me and I’ll share it with you in his own words.

“Lying in the ditch, crying over the fact that my cousins all had more stuff than I.

We’d just left the store and they had Igey Mikes and drinks and maybe even some candy. I got to drink a sip from them, if one of them felt like sharing. I had to ask them and they had the power to say no and often did. I cried in that ditch and said “one of these day I won’t have to ask nobody for nothin’. And then I proceeded to live my life intentionally with a plan to get to that point where I wouldn’t ever have to again.”

My father was probably four year old when all of this happened. And with the clarity and zeal we often experience when we are deeply wounded by the ones we love and trust, my father used his wound and his pact of to never have to ask nobody for nothin’ as rocket fuel to catapult himself from that ditch, to the highest ranking member of any and every school he attended. Charles Henry, who became Chuck or Charles once he moved to Chicago, had so much athletic, social and academic success by the time he graduated from college that he was courted by Oxford University to join the coveted Rhodes Scholarship program and also had invitations from the University of Chicago and Northwestern to complete his graduate education.

He chose Northwestern, where he completed his Masters in accounting and finance. When I asked him why he chose not to follow the path of Rhodes Scholarship (which must have been a thrilling opportunity for this child from the red dust of rural Alabama) he related this.

“Your mother and I had a son and you were on the way. I’d been so impressed with the impact of not having my father in my life or being raised by him, that there was no way I could even consider studying abroad and leaving my little family such a long distance. I wasn’t ever going to go live anywhere that I couldn’t take you all.”

Running into li’l homie on 7^th and Peralta made me think a lot about my father, the circumstances of his life, the players and agents that supported his opportunities, as well as my country. The United States of America.

Like many of us who get so caught up in the story of our day to day, I probably never would have thought about many of  the facts of my own lineage the choices and decisions of my mother, my father, my grandmother going to Detroit back in the 50’s… or the world that supported these choices… the USA attitude back in those days that said “if there was a will there was a way” and that it would be a waste, no matter what color or how impoverished, for a mind like my father’s to go to waste…he must have every opportunity to thrive and organize his energy into the great miracle of a healthy successful, positive life…raise a family if he wanted to and participate fully as a healthy, contributing member of society and the world.

That afternoon on 7^th and Peralta and meeting that bright, beautiful boy…li’l homie, made me deal with the fact that that time had come and gone.  Somewhere, somehow, something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.

My father chose to pursue a career in marketing and advertising. I guess because it was competitive and interesting enough, while still being super stable and potentially lucrative. In the seventies, while we lived in Chicago and he worked at Proctor and Gamble, my father would come home every night and we’d have dinner at a large dining room table my mother’d procured from an antique shop and brought home to accommodate me and my brother’s school buddies.

Back in those days, our classmates were from parts of the world where the US government was making mischief, doing the things that tear up communities, families and homes, entire countries, under the name of “freedom and American ideals.” Some were from Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, others from Cambodia, Vietnam, Burma, and other occupied zones.

Like a lot of kids do after school we gathered to do home work. Since our mom was one of the only mom’s who didn’t work and was cool with them chillin’, our place was the spot. Our friends would end up staying for board games and at some point my mom would get a request from one or all of us about them staying for dinner. Mom was ahead of us, she’d already talked to their moms .

The night would culminate with all of us eating together as a family at that table.

Those were great times.

It was at that table, on a street called Belle Plaine, where I heard the stories of an American community, South Chicago, all bundled up in a neat package as seen by my mom and dad—young parents, two kids really, who had been childhood sweethearts—who grew up during a time when folks  believed that anybody could achieve anything in this country, as long as they rolled up their, sleeves, worked hard and stayed late. The only way you couldn’t make it in America, is if you were lazy. Of course Black folks and people of color had to work harder to make it, but you could still make it.

To me, that was America.

And it seemed, at least to me, from mom and dad’s stories, because people had come from so many places to enjoy a better world and here we were, enjoying that better world, it seemed to me, that America was a place that would continue to feel that way. Continue to feel that everyone deserved an opportunity and that everyone in this country felt that way. After all, there was so much movement in the 50s, 60s and 70s. People like my grandmother were migrating every day from one part of the US to the other, knowing that where they were going held one thing they could count on, hope. There was an agreement that America would become more inclusive, more prosperous, more egalitarian—at least it seemed that way.

So there we were at that table, the motley lot of us and we’d all listen as my parents transported us back to their world, Post-World War II, Baby Boom Chicago. It was a living, breathing, mystical moment where for a time, America was beautiful and proud and hopeful and strong. Not because of its army or its stupid meddling wars, but because of the people who agreed that this place would be better. My parents would share the most beautiful, funny and uplifting tales, the way they did with anyone who visited their home, especially at the dinner table, especially about the neighborhood they grew up in.

South Chicago was a small multi-ethnic enclave that ran along Lake Michigan towards the end of Illinois and bumped up against the Indiana State Line. It was a bustling, thriving and upwardly mobile community that stood in the long shadows of the Chicago Steel Mill.

“You had everybody,” my mother would say. “The Greeks, German folks, Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Hungarian, and of course our folks were pouring in everyday because of the lynchings Down South. And there were all kinds of food. On one side mama owned a BBQ restaurant and bar, and on the other you had Frank’s tacos. We all lived there together and everybody got along. You had the rail lines, the steel mill, the port. You never had to leave unless you wanted to because anything you needed was right there. It was like we existed in our own world. You were every neighbor’s child, you didn’t talk back to grown people and you had respect. I mean, we had a neighborhood drunk who would fall down in the street, I mean pass out DRUNK with a capital D and somebody, a neighbor or one of the guys comin’ home late from work at the mill, would cover him up so he wouldn't get sick. We weren’t even really a part of the rest of Chicago. We were South Chicago. It was beautiful.”

One of these nights, long after we’d finished eating, my mother shared with us the story of a sunny afternoon where she and her little girlfriends were playing on her porch. An elder neighbor, who’d been enjoying watching them play with their dolls, jump hopscotch and skip rope, called my mother over and asked her to sit down next to her.

 “I have something to tell you.”

She told my mother about a man, who came to her city and made sure that everyone of her family was taken away, including her.

“They came and put us on the trains and we walked. They put us in long houses...no heat...it was cold, everyone slept in the same area, there was so little food...so many got sick...so many died. Then she rolled up her sleeve and showed me a tattoo of numbers, permanently inked into her skin. This was a very bad man and this is what he did to me.” 

The man’s name was Hitler. That was how I learned about the genocide of the Jewish people during World War II. My mother’s neighbor had survived the camps and had come to the US to start a new life.

I met my own life lessons at this table as well.  I’ll never forget prepping the condiments for mom’s delicious tacos, with the recipe she got from Frank’s Taco Stand. It’s a combination of chorizo and ground beef. Nowadays it can also be made with vegetarian ingredients, just as delicious. Anyway, it was my job that night to prep the lettuce, tomato, onions and cheese with my dad. Everything was goin’ good until I pulled the lettuce out of the fridge. It was soft. I knew that if the lettuce was soft then I was gonna be dispatched to “run to the store”...CHE...across the street.

CHE was short for CHECKER. Story was the painter had run out of red paint so instead of CHECKER, it was known as CHE, so was the owner.

My mother and her favorite command “Run across the street right quick to CHE,” was looming someplace in my not too distant future. I didn’t wanna put on my shoes and coat and go to CHE’s. So I decided to do it my way. I would wing it. Winging it meant hustling the lettuce to the faucet past my dad so he didn’t see it AND rinse it so well that a miracle would occur and I’d bring the lettuce back to life. If I couldn’t bring the lettuce back to life with the ice-cold-winter-Chicago-tap-water, I’d have to employ some magical thinking and hope no one noticed the wilted, melting lettuce on the platter of otherwise hearty, robust vegetables and cheeses.

When the resurrection did not occur, undaunted, I put the lettuce on the platter and started sliding the knife through green layers of wilt. My father who’d been watching me organize this nonsense the whole time, unbeknownst to me, finally took pity on me and stopped the show. The kitchen rumbled with the boom of his voice, Moses-like, from the other side of the room “Kelly, what are you doing? That lettuce is gone.”

What followed was a verbal chain link of “B...b..b..but I, ..it’s just...umm...ya’ know…” I was busted and embarrassed. Not only was I caught,  but I’d let my dad down and I was probably still gonna have to go to the store. My father took my hands in his and pulled my embarrassed chin up to meet his eyes.

 “I want you always to remember that whenever you put food in front of someone to eat, that it must be wholesome, these aren’t ornaments, the food we serve is for the nourishment of their Body and Soul.

I can’t remember whether I had to bear the elements and march off “right quick” to CHE’s, but I never forgot my dad’s words. I realize now that Belle Plain Avenue and that fabulously large table of my mother’s was where I received 90% of my spiritual development as a kid.

It was around that time that my dad shared with us his first experience making money, picking cotton in the fields of a neighboring farm back in the country, at Pine Level.

“I was the first one on the truck. Wasn’t even daylight. Soon as we got to the farm, I was off and running, so excited to make some money, make my contribution. I worked all through the day, never took a break, picked more cotton than any of the boys, or men for that matter and when it came time for work to end, I stood there with all my bushels, I was so proud because I had more than anyone, so naturally I assumed I would get more or at least as much. So I waited as he made his way down the line and I saw him pulling out dollars to pay the other men, everyone got a dollar or two, when it came to be my turn he looked down at me and reached down into his pocket, when he pulled a coin out, I knew it must have been a special coin, but when I saw it... I looked at it twice because I thought that my eyes deceived me.

It was a dime. 

I was five and I spent alot of time trying to figure out why, if I’d worked just as hard...harder... why I didn’t get paid just as much, I’d done just as much...more.”

I’ll never forget the look on my father’s face which expressed the disharmony of the experience and this new feeling I had in my belly that my father had been hurt as a young boy.  That he’d been hurt and exploited. That he’d been betrayed by the adults in his life, all of them—the neighboring farm owner and the other men from his family who didn’t stand up for him. It was the first time I felt that way, but it wouldn’t be the last. It made me so sad and angry and for the first time I felt true helplessness. Something in me wanted to be the person that went back in time and protected him.

In my world, every adult in my life was looking to protect me, not exploit me or trick me or steal my energy. It was through these stories that I realized how unlike my life was compared to the two people who had brought me into the world and what a complex place America was. There were parts of their stories that I loved. Trust me, I would have traded anything to be a part of that world they lived in as kids.  But things like that farm story or like my mom’s mother having mistreated her or the other things... It seemed to me as a kid hearing these stories, it was my belief that we were moving towards a world where there would be more protection for children and community.

Not less.

The safety around me said so, the safety of my community said so. And the fact that we were living in my parents vortex of positivity and baby boom abundance said so.

In 1979, everything in my life attested to it.

And I think that somehow, so many years later, when I ran into little homie on the corner of Peralta and 7th, the same corner that Marcus Garvey organized on in the 30’s and the Black Panthers organized on in the 60’s and 70’s, I think all the lessons and the stories that I’d heard at that table, and my own my little buddies... kids whose families were taking refuge here from all over the world whose moms were struggling to make ends meet...like my grandmother had...so my Pop could make something of his life... something about those stories, that training that I received at that table... all the love, our laughter... what I believed America was… and what it certainly was not... made me make a promise to li’l homie that had its roots in justice, common sense and love.

About a year or so after we moved to Belle Plaine, Ronald Reagan was elected to the highest office in the land. He announced on TV one afternoon that ketchup was a vegetable.

So was relish.

So was mustard.

Relish and ketchup and mustard would replace the vegetables that the American government had promised public school breakfast and lunch programs when the Black Panthers shamed them into feeding children school lunches and breakfasts just a few years earlier.

My mother shook her head and sighed, “Lord have mercy. I’ll just be damned...”

That was when another America started to take shape for me. One where every night, on television, from the nightly news and Mork and Mindy, people who looked like me, my brother, my friends were profiled as criminals, lazy, lawbreakers and losers.

The steady stream of propaganda coached anyone who would listen on the terrors of “inner cities,” “Black Crime,” “black-on-black crime” and the evils of somebody called “The Welfare Queen.” She lived in Chicago, cheated the system, bought Cadillacs and Mercedes with her welfare checks and had more and more children at the expense of hardworking taxpayers. Anyone with any sense should resent her because she was lazy, liked to lay up and have babies, so she could collect more welfare... so she could drive her Mercedes to the market and buy steak and lobster for her “welfare babies.”

This was the nightly news—American media—shaping the opinions and thoughts of one citizen against the other, building fear and sowing the seeds of discord, weaponizing race and class when less than twenty years years prior, Dr. King had shared his dream of folks coming closer together.

The federally funded “bootstrap” programs in our Chicago neighborhoods that had sent folks back to school and gave people a second chance at participating if they were high school dropouts or had had struggles with drugs or otherwise peripheralizing circumstances were cut and replaced with, get this, nothing.

People were left out in the cold and the energy in the country not-so-slowly started to change. Reagan would come on TV and say things like, “We are going to take things back to the good old days,” and my mother would get that same tone in her voice that she had when the ketchup as a vegetable thing happened and she'd look at me and say, “You know what he’s talkin’ bout baby don’t you? The good ol’ days?”

When I didn't answer, she’d school me. “He's talkin’ about Jim Crow. He's talking about slavery. Lord have mercy.” This seemed outlandish to me, but he had said that ketchup was a vegetable and I knew that was nonsense. So maybe mom had a point...but slavery? Jim Crow? How could they do that? Jim Crow was when my father, a child laborer had received a dime for before sun-up to sun-down labor. I couldn’t picture me or my brother doing that, or my mom and dad  or Michael Jackson or James Earl Jones on an auction block.

 Could my mother be right, could they put us back in chains and find a way to pay us nothing for our work?

Could you even make kids work?

Not in America...

The beat continued and the nightly news was doing plenty of reporting about how aimless and lazy Black Americans were and if we could just stop being so paranoid in thinking that there were “conspiracies” working against us that we would truly be able to join the American middle class and things would get better for us.

The mood at our dinner table started to change too. I started hearing words like “propaganda” and we would discuss, especially my parents and their friends, “look how ignorant they make us look on TV these days,” and “Why do they always choose the most ignorant Black person in the crowd to comment whenever something happens?”

After Reagan had taken office there were alot of changes in the community too.  A depression of spirit hit.

Very quickly, communities and cities in our country that had been organizing and fighting for equity and human rights were flooded with crack cocaine and a gap, a large void began to take shape that created gulfs as big as the Great Lakes that would further disconnect Black folks from white, middle class from poor, and everyone else from everyone else.

That other America, the one where you could roll up your sleeves and work hard and make something of your life, even if you were poor, the one where folks could safely care about one another was receding and the one where folks were being seduced by one of the richest opiate—fear—loomed.

And the poor, they were pariahs, to be discarded, couldn’t be trusted.

They were poor because they were wastes of time and energy and belonged at the bottom.

The poor were poor because they were lazy losers and deserved to be poor.

The America of my parents dreams, the beautiful, idyllic stories of their Baby Boom community seemed further and further behind us, as distant and unrealistic as the promise of a job with a great future with US Steel, which slowly downsized until it announced its closing in 1992.

I didn’t know it back in those days, as a kid sitting at that table, but all of these things were forming and coloring and shaping and shading the outlines of the world and circumstances of a little boy who would  appear on my horizon... and that I would meet thirty plus years later on a street corner in West Oakland.

Somehow,I would enter, the intolerably bleak void that he stood in, called out from and dwelled within and meeting him would change the world for me. It would be that gleam in his eyes, the sound of his voice, his laughter and the fact that my heritage and teachings and ancestral traditions told me that even though we’d only met once, that he was my brother, my cousin, my nephew... my son....

I’d see all too clearly how Reagan’s promise and my mother’s fears had come true.  He said “We are going to take things back to where they used to be.” They made good on that one..

That boy, that child, was mine... he belonged to me and every other American that had been convinced of his worthlessness. The programming and propaganda of the nightly news and America's original, shameful wounds of land theft and enslavement of the African had slowly and methodically coerced Americans into a solid hatred and fear of poverty and Blackness.

Once and for all... obliterating any sense that this place would be different... that this place would be better.

As my father shared with us at our dinner table, from his training at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, “All you have to do to make something the  truth is repeat it over and over and over and over again. One day, people wake up believing it is true and that it has always been true..”

Programming.

That’s what commercials are. That’s what advertising does. Program us.

Smoking is sexy.

Indians are red.

Drink Cow’s Milk for Calcium

Coca Cola is good for you.

Trust a man in a white coat.

Beware the Welfare Queen.

Beware Black youth.

By the time I run into li’l homie on 7th and Peralta, Reagan's peeps are reaping the dividends on their promise to “take things back to the good old days.” and I see what I could not have imagined when I was eleven and my mother pronounced the outcomes... Jim Crow... Slavery.

Neo-slavery would not be a public auction  block in the public square. It would happen behind God’s back and manifest through an elaborately tight weave of manufactured consent on behalf of Americans who forgot all about Martin Luther King’s vision of equal economic participation for all races. His poor people’s campaign had been flipped to the war on the poor launched by Reagan and his boys.

The tools:

1. A completely chemicalized, weaponized food system that makes people sick, disorients them and dumbs them down.
2. School systems that organize youth into despair, despiritualization, and hopelessness.
3. Corporate sponsored, locally run correctional facilities and police forces who  act as herders for youth into local justice systems as first step to a life of free labor behind the bars of state and federal prisons. Neo slavery.
4. An American populous that through corporate control, media, advertising, and materialism is being herded and does not have time or resources to unravel the truths of the manipulation and the reasons for it all: control of energy and resources in order for a few folks to control most of the wealth and resources in the land.

In 1974 Gil Scott Heron released his prophetic Winter In America.

It took us a while. But Gil knew that we’d make it. Now here we are. 44 years later, we are living it. Our children stand within the void and Horatio Alger is long gone.

By Gabriel Agurcia
Source: Golden Gate Xpress

“When we say black, what does that mean?”

Phillips said he got the idea for this layout from his Christian upbringing. He said although he no longer has any religious affiliation, he’s fond of the ideology of a heaven-like realm being the birthplace of everything around us. He likened it to Creationism, with his chosen quotes sparking new ideas and discussions, the way god’s words created the world.

“The idea of space,” Phillips said. “Where from that infinite nothingness, everything becomes.”

Phillips also got a musical performance for the opening reception of the exhibit. Edward Jackson, a member of Urban Funk Machine and longtime favorite of Phillips’, performed a tap dance routine to Bruno Mars’ “That’s What I Like” and showcased his iPad and Intel-driven music production technology. He said he was interested in being part of Phillips’ creation almost immediately.

“I said to myself, ‘That young man is so heavy,’” Jackson said upon his first conversation with Phillips. “What we talked about had to do with god, art, the ancestors. I want to pay homage to Jarrel, because I normally don’t come out [for events]. But this has been such an honor and privilege to support the community here.”

Phillips mentioned that a young girl who had originally agreed to participate in the exhibit later declined, stating that she couldn’t think of anything positive to say about being black. Phillips said he fully understands what “Black Lives Matter” means, but he knows that there are some people who simply don’t, which could even be a black child.

“How do we magnify that significance that is there but sometimes overlooked?” Phillips said. “How are you mindful of just saying, ‘There are no black people.’ Say that to the black person at this exhibition who needs to see black people. It’s important that we create the narratives as much as the narratives create us.”

---

Editor's Note: I Am San Francisco: Black Past & Presence (IAMSF) explores social and cultural values and concerns through the depth and diversity prevalent within Black life and culture in San Francisco. From past to present, IAMSF honors Black existence, voice and insight that transcend, both, time and place.

This project captures the depth, beauty, complexities, and abundance prevalent within ‘Black life,’—culturally, communally, and individually—through the personal reflections of its contributors.

Premiering at City College of San Francisco in April 2016 – November 2016, then at SF State University in 2017, it is the second installment of two multi-media art exhibitions themed “I Am San Francisco.” It will unfold with a short film, a print version, and a culminating event, a collaboration between Reimagine! — a grassroots cooperative of writers, editors, artists and designers based in Oakland and AVE. AVE is dedicated to youth and community by integrating meaningful experiences through play, work, art and learning.

I Am San Francisco for Reimagine! RP&E
Lead Artist Jarrel Phillips (AVE Founder), with collaborating artists Kheven LaGrone, and Christine Joy Ferrer and Jess Clarke from Reimagine!

This interview and the excerpts that follow are portions of an on-going project called I Am San Francisco: Black Past & Presence (IAMSF). Created and curated by Jarrel Phillips, IAMSF was presented as an art exhibition at City College of San Francisco’s Rosenberg Library. The purpose of IAMSF is to recognize the depth, beauty, complexity and abundance prevalent within ‘Black Life’ in San Francisco—culturally, communally and individually.

The stories we tell showcase what humanity’s all about because we are a part of humanity.
—Thomas Simpson, AfroSolo Theater Company, Founder and Artistic Director

IAMSF was first featured at City College of San Francisco in 2016 and is an ongoing project in collaboration with Kheven LaGrone and Reimagine! RP&E, the national journal for social and environmental justice.

Featured Artists/Storytellers:
Dr. Amos C. Brown; Ahmad Jones; Aliyah Dunn-Salhuddin; Alma Robinson; Dr. Andrew Jolivette; Emory Douglas; Sophie Maxwell; Dr. Joseph Marshall; Thea Matthews; Virginia Jourdan; Kali O’ray; Stewart Shaw; Blanche Brown; Bongo Sidibe; Ras K’dee; Carol Tatum; Edward Jackson; Isiah Ball; Joanna Haigood; Maya Rogers; Liz Jackson-Simpson; Marco Senghor; Megan Dickey; Sydney “Sage” Cain; Sabrina Lawrence; Dr. Toye Moses, Theo Ellington; Thomas Simpson; Wanda Holland-Greene; Jacqueline Francis; Wanda Sabir; William Rhodes; Michael Ross; Rhiannon MacFayden; Devorah Major; Gregory Harden; Virginia Marshall; Xavier “Chavi Lopez” Schmidt; Tania Santiago; Samoel “Urubu Malandro” Domingos; Halima Marshall; Careem Conley; Mohammed Bilal; Kristine Mays; Michole “Micholiano” Forks; Katherine Connell; Mark Harris; Assata Conley; Francine Shakir; Jamila Turalba-Khalil; Malik Turalba-Khalil; Seneca Jackson; Ruby Jasmine; Madison Moody; Kairi Hand; Zylah Coleman; Vievon Coleman; Diyari Vander Linden; Zade Vander Linden; Asha Romesburg; Kheven LaGrone

Lead Exhibition Graphic Designer, Christine Joy Ferrer

By Jess Clarke

Amazon, long known for its low pay and bad labor practices at the company’s fulfillment centers, is starting to feel some heat. One of the largest trade unions in the United Kingdom, GMB, is staging ongoing protests, the SEIU has launched a “Warehouse Workers Stand Up” campaign in New Jersey and Sen. Bernie Sanders has introduced the Stop BEZOS Act. The legislation would recapture the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars provided by the US Treasury for health coverage, food stamps and other government payments to Amazon workers.

But Amazon is also wreaking havoc on the environment, and its delivery vehicles are generating untold amounts of greenhouse gases, ozone and particulate matter. California environmental advocates are taking on this challenge to protect the air quality in communities living with these warehouses in their backyards.

The US alone has more than 124 million square feet of fulfillment centers already built and another 41 million square feet in the planning stages, according to logistics industry trade publication MWPVL. Amazon is expanding its footprint at the expense of communities already overburdened by pollution and traffic of the dirty diesel trucks that move goods to and from the centers. From New Jersey to California, Amazon warehouses are remaking the physical environment.

As the real estate boom in California drives gentrification and displacement to even more remote suburbs, communities on the periphery that are already burdened by toxic landfills and pesticide-driven agriculture are battling a new source of poisoned air and water: warehouse distribution centers.

California is home to 18 of Amazon’s huge distribution complexes. The newest is the 855,000-square-foot facility in Fresno, a town located about halfway between Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area. One of the top three, coming at over 1.1 million-square-feet, is a facility built in San Bernardino County in 2016, directly east of Los Angeles.

The stakes are high for California’s once-rural suburbs. Life expectancy in West Fresno is more than 20 years lower than in the unpolluted East Side neighborhoods. The Inland Empire, which includes San Bernardino, has some of the worst ozone pollution in the country, according to the American Lung Association, and it has worsened over the last two years. Things have gotten so bad that Southern California’s South Coast Air Quality Management District voted in May to regulate warehouses as indirect sources of pollution because of the truck and locomotive traffic they attract.

Two California residents — Leo Macias and Dania De Ramon — both say they have experienced firsthand the impact of Amazon’s expanding footprint. Macias, who has owned a home in Fresno since 1967, describes the high rates of cancer he has observed on his street. De Ramon, a high school student in San Bernardino County, describes the widespread respiratory problems afflicting her classmates.

“Two of my family members have developed cancer, I have cancer, asthma and a lot of other respiratory problems,” said Macias. “My neighbors right next door to me passed away due to cancer, and another two neighbors on the other side. Yeah, this is very hard for us because we’re dealing with a lot of [contamination] in the air, in the water, in the soil, everything.”

De Ramon feels similarly frustrated. “We live in a toxic cycle where we depend on a supply and logistics industry that does little to curb its emissions and exploits folks in low-income communities for low pay. Most of us don’t even realize the harmful impacts on our health. I grew up believing that asthma was normal because I had so many classmates who had it,” De Ramon said.

Ashley Werner, senior attorney with Fresno-based Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability echoes these concerns. “It’s worth noting that this Fresno neighborhood has been identified under CalEnviroScreen as the most pollution-burdened census tract in California. That’s because, in addition to the new facilities the city is permitting, this area also has several hazardous waste sites, a landfill … and farming that uses hazardous pesticides.”

Macias has been working with the Leadership Counsel to fight locally against a huge expansion of warehouses for unknown new tenants, now planned at over 2 million square feet, but he says, “They want to build with no input from the community. When we talked to the city council, they ignored us and laughed at us.”

Macias and Leadership Counsel decided to take their fight to the Sacramento Legislature and are pushing AB 2447, a bill currently awaiting Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature. AB 2447 would give communities advance notice of developers’ plans to build or expand industrial facilities in environmentally burdened communities.

“In the past year and a half, the City of Fresno has approved millions of square feet of industrial warehouse space across the street from my neighborhood and near our local elementary school,” said Macias in testimony on AB 2447 in Sacramento. “We were never told about these projects while the city was planning them, and now the dust from construction is choking us and triggering our asthma.”

Allen Hernandez, executive director of the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice, based in Southern California’s Inland Empire region, has also called on Governor Brown to take action. “The trucks that travel to and from warehouses contribute dangerous air emissions which causes more traffic congestion and that means more air and noise pollution near our homes and schools.”

The Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice is leading the fight against a new warehouse that would be built 70 feet away from a residential community and less than a tenth of a mile from a high school in the small town of Bloomington in San Bernardino County.

“The residents of Bloomington demand transportation justice for their health. California must re-shape our land-use planning to promote investments without displacement and move away from a culture that relies on fossil fuels.” said Hernandez.

For De Ramon, air quality isn’t the only impact. “When I was younger, my mother would work two jobs to financially support us,” he said. “Many times her work was in warehouses — where some days she would work up to 16 hours. There was a period of time in my childhood where I would see my mother only for a couple hours a day because she was constantly working to get the two of us by.”

The California Environmental Justice Alliance, a statewide environmental group, is supporting AB 2447 and also calling for much broader change.

“AB 2447 is a crucial first step to addressing long-standing pollution in many low-income neighborhoods and communities of color by creating ‘Green Zones’ — places where community-led visions and solutions are transforming toxic hot spots into healthy neighborhoods,” says Tiffany Eng, Green Zones program manager for the alliance.

The California Environmental Justice Alliance has also released a new report, “Green Zones Across California,” detailing community-led transformations in nine regions of the state. In addition the organization has set up a petition calling for statewide support to encourage Governor Brown to sign the bill.

And of course, all the groups have been turning out their members for the many demonstrations and actions being organized in response to Governor Brown’s Global Climate Action Summit that begins September 12 in San Francisco. The kick-off march Rise for Climate Jobs and Justice drew tens of thousands to the streets of SF and to protests across the US. Educational sessions at multiple locations and direct action at the summit itself are planned for the rest of the week.

By Marcy Rein, Vicki Legion and Mickey Ellinger

This article is a preview from the book Free City! Reclaiming College of San Francisco and Free Education for All.

Community colleges serve more than 40 percent of all US college students and provide a crucial entry point to post-secondary education for working class students and students of color. California teaches an outsize share of community college students, and City College of San Francisco (CCSF) is one of the state’s largest. Since its founding in 1935, CCSF has grown deep roots in the community. It teaches firefighters, chefs, medical techs and scores of other essential workers; its English as a Second Language department, the school’s largest, has taught English to generations of new immigrants; it has opened paths to four-year colleges, second chances, and lifelong learning. Sometimes called “the most important working class institution in San Francisco,” it stands firm on the 1960s legacy of open admissions.

The education reform project, jumping the fence from K – 12 to community colleges, takes aim at this legacy. Reformers seek to narrow the mission of community colleges to completion of degrees and certificates for the corporate workforce, pressuring students to take heavy course loads and channeling them toward taking out student loans.

City College students, teachers, administrators, and trustees united against the reform agenda and led the California opposition to it. The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC)——one of six regional bodies authorized by the US government to ensure educational quality in community colleges——was a vocal reform supporter.

In 2012, ACCJC slapped City College with the harshest sanction short of closure, though the school had never been sanctioned before and was widely regarded as one of the best community colleges in the country. A year later, the commission said it would terminate accreditation, which would kill the school.

The ACCJC sanctions set off the crisis that brought “shock treatment” to the school. A new interim chancellor created chaos with mass firings and drastic “reorganization” schemes. She bullied the elected trustees into shrinking the school’s mission and closing campuses, as well as accepting both a special trustee with veto power and a fiscal review that mandated “structural adjustment” policies, including attacks on wages, benefits and job security.

Supporters of City College fought on every front possible. San Francisco voters passed the Proposition A parcel tax to support the school financially. American Federation of Teachers Local 2121 (AFT 2121), CCSF’s faculty union, mounted legal, regulatory and political challenges to the Accrediting Commission’s authority, as well as an internal organizing effort. Save CCSF, a feisty faculty/staff/student/community coalition, dug into the roots of the crisis and pulled people into the streets. Militant students held teach-ins, rallied, and occupied campus buildings and the mayor’s office.

RP&E  Volume 21-1, “Power in Place,” included a package of articles that set the unfolding struggle for City College in the context of both education “reform” and the displacement sweeping San Francisco. In a forthcoming book tentatively titled Free City! Reclaiming City College of San Francisco, RP&E contributor Marcy Rein collaborates with Vicki Legion and Mickey Ellinger to tell the story of the successful 2012-2017 campaign to keep CCSF open, accredited and community-centered. Free City! is due out from PM Press in Fall 2020. The preview that follows takes place in 2013, just after the ACCJC announced its intention to shut down the school in a year’s time, and the state of California put it under emergency management with the special trustee in charge.

All the Work Matters

The July 9 rally at the US Department of Education (DOE) office felt and sounded like a revival city college student trustee. Shanell Williams kicked it off: “We are not here to mourn; we are here to fight!” It was a call and response crowd: “We did everything we were told by the special trustee Bob Agrella, who has sole power over our college now and makes a thousand dollars a day”—boos—“shame on him!”  The crowd echoed “shame, shame, shame!” 

“They want to steal our right to a quality affordable education.  Are we going to let that happen?” 

“No. No. No!”

And the crowd’s favorite, State Assembly member Tom Ammiano, joking, pointing upward: “Look in the sky—it’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s SuperTrustee!” The crowd roared and clapped, and Ammiano turned serious.

“I spent two years in Viet Nam and the mantra then was, ‘We destroyed the village to save it.’ Well, fuck you! ...There’s another agenda here and I want every elected official from the mayor on down to protect our family.

“They’re punishing the wrong people and who the fuck are they to punish anybody? I’m tired of Mommie Dearest the executive director and them not respecting our diversity, not respecting our gender diversity, not respecting anything San Francisco stands for. City College is a success. City College is a treasure. What’s the real agenda here? …

“They have not the right to say to us that the people we elected, whether we love them or not, are not our representatives. That is tyranny!” he yelled. “That encourages a revolution here in San Francisco.”

The New Blow to the School

A year earlier when the accreditation commission slapped the show cause order on City College, people were stunned and fearful.  When, after a year of work to meet the standards, the ACCJC moved to close the school, they were furious.

The crowd had begun massing in front of Downtown Campus at Fourth and Mission Streets at 4pm on Wednesday, July 9. The Brass Liberation Orchestra backed up the boisterous chants that buoyed the crowd down Market Street: “Whose college? Our college!” “Education is our right/that is why we have to fight,” and of course, “Save City College!” By the time it reached the DOE offices in the heart of the Financial District, it was 4,000 strong. Unions and community groups joined CCSF students and faculty, and homemade signs sprouted everywhere.

“If you looked down Market Street, you couldn’t see an end to the march,” Williams remembered. You saw “streams of people all with the same energy and same feeling of frustration, an uprising of San Franciscans saying ‘You’re not going to take this away from us.’”

The termination letter jolted people into action who’d been on the sidelines before. One was Thea Matthews, who’d just started studying at City College. “When the news dropped that City College may go under I just broke down and cried….[T]he woman I am today is because of City College, the relationships, the bonds that people make there. It’s a really magical space,” Matthews said.

“I was bawling my eyes out,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, what am I going to do?’ and I called my counselor Sarah Thompson, ‘What am I going to do, City College is going to go away!’

“And she just said, ‘You get up and you fight. Don’t let them take this from you. No, you take a stand and you fight back.’ Like, ‘Whose city? Our city!’ And that really helped take the snot and tears off my face and get me up off the carpet floor in my bedroom. And that was the turning point of, ‘OK time to get involved.’” So she went to the march, linked up with the Save CCSF student organizers, and began helping with outreach to summer session students.

The day after the march, Save CCSF brought former CFT president and ACCJC expert Marty Hittelman to speak at their open meeting. Before a packed house at CCSF’s Mission campus, Hittelman forcefully argued that the ACCJC’s extraordinary sanction rate was driven by a predetermined agenda, not a legitimate educational critique. A week later AFT 2121, with help from Assembly member Ammiano, pulled together another packed community forum in a large auditorium at the California State Building. That event highlighted the college’s deep roots in communities of color, with moving testimony from students and community members about programs ranging from certificates in health care interpreting and drug and alcohol counseling to post-prison support programs. Local politicians and leaders who had been hanging back, like Supervisor John Avalos, stepped up to speak in support of the college. The State Building forum was also the first time the Save CCSF Research Committee mass leafleted a discussion paper about the roots of the crisis in corporate education “reform.”

Organizers sought to capture people’s energy, offering involvement as an antidote to despair. But the full weight of the moment crashed down on AFT 2121 in its contract talks.

Bargaining With Their Backs to the Wall

Three people sat across from the AFT 2121 bargaining team at their first session since the termination notice: SFCCD’s longtime employee relations officer Mickey Branca; Jeff Sloan from the corporate law firm Renne, Sloan, Holtzman, Sakai, LLP—and the California Community Colleges Executive Vice Chancellor and General Counsel Steve Bruckman, who played a key role in putting the state takeover in place.

Since March 2012, contract talks between AFT 2121 and the San Francisco Community College District (SFCCD) had been jolting along like a car with worn shocks on a rocky road. Even before the ACCJC’s show cause order, the district’s tight finances posed a major obstacle. The cancellation of the 2010 summer session, the aging facilities and faulty computers frustrated teachers as well as students. Faculty had not had a raise since 2007. They had even agreed to temporary pay cuts totaling 4.3%, in the cooperative spirit of the bargaining that brought union gains in better times.

“They went through two or three administrations when they actually got some stuff, they got job security and 80% pro-rata pay for part-timers,” said Joe Berry, a labor studies instructor, long-time organizer of part-time faculty, and Local 2121 Executive Board member.

Previous chancellors, though they didn’t take part in negotiations, did talk with union leaders “off the record.” Interim Chancellor Fisher refused to even chat with the union without an attorney present.

Talks had already been bumpy when Local 2121’s contract expired in June 2012. The two sides agreed to a six-month extension, but bargaining only got gnarlier after the show cause order and the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) report.1 FCMAT tagged three decades of union gains as threats to fiscal responsibility. Its report slammed City College for its high percentage of full-time teachers, as well as the health benefits and pay scale for part-timers.2

Just nine days after San Francisco voters supported Prop A’s $14-16 million per year lifeline, the district administration sent a letter to the union demanding a new raft of givebacks, including permanent wage cuts, lower pay rates for part-time faculty, and—for the first time—worker contributions to retiree health care. Employee Relations Manager Steve Hale prefaced this list in his Nov. 19 letter with the comment, “The issues identified below address accreditation recommendations and long-term structural deficiencies identified by FCMAT.”

By the new contract expiration date of December 31, 2012, the two sides were farther apart than ever. Interim Chancellor Scott-Skillman put coal in the faculty’s Christmas stocking with her Dec. 20 letter announcing that the district was imposing a 4.4% pay cut effective Jan. 2, 2013, with another 5% scheduled for July. The union filed a grievance with the California Public Employment Relations Board, and went back to bargaining.

The spring saw little progress. Then came the ACCJC’s termination letter and the state takeover.

The takeover galvanized members. “People were upset and kept coming to the office to see what they could do to help,” said AFT 2121 Organizer Athena Waid. The local channeled some of that energy into ongoing community outreach and organizing, and harnessed some to support the bargaining. It invited members and community supporters to come to bargaining sessions. The district wouldn’t allow observers at the negotiating table, so the union asked people to come, sit in another room, and caucus with the negotiating team on breaks. The local also expanded the team; one of the new members was Jessica Buchsbaum, an ESL teacher at the Downtown Campus.

When she heard about the termination, Buchsbaum said, “My first thought was, ‘What the heck?’ and my second thought was, ‘Well, AFT2121 will take care of it,’ and then my third thought was, ‘Well, where’s AFT 2121?’” She laughed sheepishly. “That was my moment of awakening.”

Still, she said, “Becoming a union activist was not on my to-do list.” She was the mother, of two boys, aged two and seven, and her mother had Parkinson’s disease.

“I was in a world of imminent crisis between the kids, my mother and my job in 2013, everything falling apart. The fact that it was this existential crisis really pushed me to become more involved, because our family depended on the job.” First she helped organize the July 18 forum at the State Building, and then Alisa Messer invited her to be part of the bargaining team.

The union called for a week of intensive negotiations in early August 2013, just before the beginning of the fall semester. Members turned out to bolster the negotiating team.

“I’m here to see with my own eyes what these guys are doing, and I want the people in the negotiations to know they have faculty union and community support,” said Malaika Finkelstein who taught in Disabled Students Programs and Services.

The bargaining sessions themselves proved excruciating. The two sides met in the small, windowless conference room at 33 Gough St. “I still get the heebejeebes going in there. It smells so bad,” Buchsbaum said.

“It was super-emotional, full days—eight hour, sometimes 10-hour days, and we were having to make these terrible decisions. They wanted to get rid of rehire rights, any kind of rights for part-timers, cut our pay by 10–12%. One of the hardest things I remember bargaining over was prescription drug co-pay reimbursements” for full-timers. “That benefit didn’t affect very many people…. but for people with a chronic illness, it was thousands and thousands of dollars every year. For the very few, it would make a huge, huge impact… and we decided to let it go, because we decided it would be better to have a smaller pay cut for everybody.

“We were over a barrel. It was the low point of the whole thing. It was awful. I remember Alisa Messer basically didn’t eat that whole time. She would drink these tea things but she couldn’t actually put food in her mouth…everyone who was at the bargaining table or supporting us felt brutalized by that process,” Buchsbaum said.

Some Local 2121 members believed a strike could right the imbalance of power at the negotiating table. AFT Organizer Alyssa Picard helped the local think through this strategy.

“The local had a good activist base but not a wide reach,” said Picard, a veteran of graduate student and adjunct faculty organizing who’d been deployed by AFT’s national office to help Local 2121 through the crisis. “They [the local] had a core of about 50–75 people whose commitment to the union and the progressive values of the union was a mile deep,” many more members they’d never talked to, and sharp disagreements in the ranks.

“There was the left flank, people who would show up and say, ‘We should’ve gone on strike six months ago, you’re a crappy union leader for not having taken us out on strike,’ and some people, including some very reasonable people…. whose initial posture was, ‘We need to figure out how to do these things the ACCJC is asking us to do.’…. It was a weird gamut of opinion among the faculty about what ought to be happening and who ought to be doing it, and just a pretty fractured situation,” Picard said. She helped Local 2121 launch a serious internal reorganization. It reinvigorated its precinct rep structure and set out to talk with all its members. The tool it used to open the door was a petition to Special Trustee with extraordinary powers Robert Agrella.

Just after the intensive negotiations wrapped up, CCSF supporters got their first bits of good news.

First Turnings

State Chancellor Harris addressed the CCSF faculty in the Flex Day assembly Aug. 13, 2013, the day before fall semester classes started. “I remember he gave this ridiculous speech about how he was working with us to save the college,” Tarik Farrar said. But Harris left out one critical bit: DOE had just sent a letter to the ACCJC upholding some key elements in AFT 2121’s complaint.3

The DOE agreed with the union that appointing Barbara Beno’s husband to the visiting team created the appearance of conflict of interest, and that the team didn’t include enough faculty members. The department also found fault with the ACCJC’s evaluation process. It noted that the commission used “recommendation” to mean both recommendations for improvement and the much more serious “non-compliance with standards,” which could trigger sanctions. The commission’s failure to identify deficiencies “impacts the agency’s ability to provide institutions with adequate due process,” the DOE letter said.

Also, the DOE noted, ACCJC identified two serious issues in its 2006 “action letter” to CCSF and required two interim reports. But the agency didn’t comply with the “two year rule,” which would’ve required CCSF to come into compliance within two years or face sanctions. “The ACCJC cannot treat an issue [as] serious enough to require reporting and to be part of the rationale for the show cause letter, but not serious enough to enforce the timeline to return to compliance, as required by federal regulation,” the letter stated.

The DOE could have taken action against the ACCJC right away. Instead, it gave the agency a year to come into compliance. The department’s finding also sidestepped the questions of political agenda, conflict of interest over the retiree health benefit prepayment, and anti-union bias that the union included in the complaint.

As the wheels of the regulatory process began to grind, student activists once again took direct action to highlight the high stakes in the fight.

Students Take City Hall: ‘Where’s Ed Lee?’

Student activists had been trying to get a meeting with Mayor Ed Lee since the state takeover seven weeks earlier. Several times they politely asked the mayor’s office for an appointment.

“We wondered if Ed Lee or a representative would meet with us,” Eric Blanc said. “Some people were really hoping he would. They just systematically ignored us.” The students carefully prepared to escalate their request. When they started talking civil disobedience, they made the risks quite clear.

“We were really conscious that we weren’t putting anybody—in particular without papers or who had priors—at risk,” Blanc said. “We did a forum and [during the action we] made a lot of announcements suggesting that people leave if any of these things applied to them. We knew it was politically important not to put people at risk without their having full knowledge.” Newly engaged students stepped up at this point; others who’d already been involved took more leadership.

The Aug. 20 action began with a rally in front of San Francisco City Hall. “A number of people were there who were outside supporters of City College students,” Windsong said. “We had passed the bullhorn around and talked about ourselves and our involvement and it was just really cool to hear other people’s stories. That’s one of the inspiring things about rallies.

“Different characters stuck in my mind… it was so beautiful, the different kinds of people: elders, a mother who talked about how taking classes had helped her. There was a big presence from VIDA with the undocumented perspective and that was incredibly inspiring. There were other people who were City College alums and had moved on to [San Francisco] State and were now doing organizing at State, and they were talking about the importance of Diversity Studies. A lot of people were shouting out to the Diversity Studies departments how learning about their cultural background really empowered them as people.”

As the rally ended, students filtered in to City Hall. Someone even managed to smuggle in a banner.

“We went to bring the rally inside, because ‘we deserve for you [the mayor] to hear us’,” said Thea Matthews. This was one of her first protests ever. The attack on City College politicized her, she said: “I learned that…what I’m living in this present moment, what I’m being impacted by, is political and is connected, inherently connected, to the systemic infrastructure of this society, the systemic lines of oppression, and it’s not just some macro-level bullshit in the ether.”

The students planted themselves in front of Mayor Lee’s office and hung their banner over the wrought-iron balustrade facing the marble staircase that sweeps up from the lobby to the second floor. They came in just before the end of the workday, and their last request for a meeting with the mayor went unheeded.

In the measured language of their press release, the Student Committee of Save City College said the mayor “has the political and moral responsibility as the leader of San Francisco to throw his weight behind the effort to overturn the ACCJC attacks on City College.” But once inside, they sent their chant ricocheting off the building’s dome.

“Where’s Ed Lee? Where’s Ed Lee?”

They held the space until almost midnight. In between chanting and singing, they played “the type of games that you would play at camp, silly ice-breaker type things,” Blanc said. “I remember being pretty goofy and it being a funny contrast between this lighthearted almost festival type spirit of the occupation, with the periodic police announcements that we were going to be arrested.”

They got hungry, too, and tired; the wooden benches and marble floors didn’t lend themselves to comfortable naps.

Around midnight the police finally carried out their arrest threats.

“When we were getting arrested, when the sheriffs gave the disperse order, we said ‘no,’ and they started arresting us one by one,” said Matthews. “We sat down, and as we got up one by one, we sang civil rights songs—Windsong is a singer—it was beautiful, we had smiles on our faces, we were happy because we knew we were doing the right thing. Thank God there was no confrontation or agitation between students and police. It was like they understood what we were doing.

“And they took us into this little hidden area in the City Hall building. We all got ticketed and discharged. The tickets had court dates on them, but we had lawyers and thankfully the charges were dropped.”

Standing, daring and laughing together forged strong bonds among the new and more seasoned activists. “Everybody came out of that as friends. You made friends in an intense way overnight. It’s hard to imagine in any other context that happening so rapidly,” Blanc said. And coming when it did, the sit-in helped weight the narrative towards the supporters of City College. A surprise announcement from an obscure body in Sacramento nudged the needle further.

 ‘I have never met with a more arrogant, condescending or dismissive individual’

A markedly bi-partisan “good government” consensus triggered a state investigation of the ACCJC.

State Sen. Jim Nielsen (R-Yuba City), a long-time right-wing stalwart, represented rural north-central California. On his Senate web page, he proudly identified as a rancher and a defender of private property rights against “overzealous government bureaucrats.” Lifelong liberal Sen. Jim Beall (D-San Jose) spent his career advocating for affordable housing, better transportation, and support for foster youth. These two co-authored a letter requesting that the Joint Legislative Audit Committee formally ask the California State Auditor’s office to look into the ACCJC.

Sen. Beall led off their Aug. 21, 2013 presentation to the committee. Bald and broad-shouldered, Beall rose to the mic to declare the ACCJC a “monopoly…The stakes are high and the commission’s power is absolute,” he said. “We believe it is imperative that the commission be audited by the state auditor.” 

Sen. Nielsen spoke from his seat, shock of iron-gray hair vibrating with indignation. He stressed that the audit request would apply to community colleges around the state. Complaints from various schools, the ACCJC’s lack of accountability, and the DOE complaint had thrown up red flags for him, he said. Then he and Sen. Beall had met with Barbara Beno.

“In all my career, in my thousands of meetings with agencies and individuals, representatives, secretaries, etc., I have never dealt with a more arrogant, condescending and dismissive individual,” Nielsen said. ”That attitude in such a senior person raises huge red flags for me… And we had asked for lots of information, Senator Beall and I. We had previously and formally asked for it and we asked for it in this meeting. 

“Three days after meeting with these individuals from the ACCJC, President Beno released a commission statement—I have a copy of it here—directing members of the evaluation team to shred confidential documents, personal notes, evaluation team reports, committee reports and evidentiary documents provided by an institution. Shredding of documents! Talk about red flags, ladies and gentlemen, that certainly is one. What have they got to hide?” Nielsen said.

The audit request passed the committee by a 10-1 vote, with three abstentions.

The next day would see the biggest crack in the gloom yet, with City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s announcement that his office was suing the ACCJC to keep City College open.

The People Challenge ACCJC

Ever since CCSF’s crisis began, people had been coming to San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera asking what he could do. “There were a lot of conversations that were happening,” Alisa Messer said. “I don’t know everybody who talked to Herrera but I know Tom Ammiano talked to Herrera. [Newly elected City College trustee] Rafael Mandelman got a meeting with him,” she said.

In the beginning Herrera didn’t see much of a legal hook. “People approached me more as a politician than as a lawyer,” he said.

San Francisco is one of only 11 California cities that elects its top lawyer, and voters have favored aggressive advocates. Herrera’s predecessor, Louise Renne, sued the swanky Olympic Club for excluding women and people of color, and was one of the first city attorneys in the country to sue tobacco companies to recover the costs of medical treatment for smoking-related illnesses.

Herrera won his first term in 2001; in 2004, he filed the first suit defending lesbian and gay couples’ right to marry, and his office litigated on the issue until the Supreme Court upheld marriage equality in 2013.

When he heard the ACCJC planned to close the school, he was “outraged,” Herrera said, “and I was outraged by what I perceived to be just sort of a go-along to get-along approach by some elected officials and regulators. Instead of focusing on the importance of City College and how we could keep it open and serve San Franciscans, they took it almost as a fait accompli….

“Considering the history of this office and its independence and the ability we have to use the power of the law to fight injustice, I felt we had a real opportunity if we could find the right legal hook.” He called on the “complex and special” litigation team to investigate.

No one on the team knew anything about accreditation and its arcane rules. “We started with Google, embarrassingly enough…. We start there more often than we’d like to admit, when we don’t know the lay of the land at all and are trying to get our minds around a completely new thing,” said Sara Eisenberg, the deputy city attorney who led the City College work. Then the team members read everything they could find, including all the ACCJC’s reports about City College and other schools and AFT 2121’s complaint to the DOE.

“We dug in quickly, and got up to speed as fast as we could. The more we dug in, the more we found there was something there that was not right,” said Eisenberg. About seven weeks of research convinced the team they had a strong case.

At an Aug. 22, 2013 press conference, Herrera—with Eisenberg standing just behind him—announced that his office was suing the ACCJC in state Superior Court on behalf of the people of California. People of the State of California ex rel. Dennis Herrera v. Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, et al charged the ACCJC with bias and flawed process.

“The accreditor withdrew accreditation in retaliation for City College having embraced and advocated a different vision for California’s community colleges than the ACCJC,” Herrera said at the news conference.

In quick strokes the complaint painted a picture of City College, its commitment to open access, and its strong role in opposing the Student Success Task Force and the proposals that flowed from it. The case exposed the corporate roots of the “student success” agenda and the ACCJC’s aggressive advocacy for it, which put it in direct conflict with City College.

The complaint contended: “By evaluating City College while embroiled in a public political fight over the proper mission, vision and role of community colleges in California, and in specific ways detailed below, the ACCJC violated both its own conflict of interest policy….as well as California’s Unfair Competition Law, Business and Professions Code Section 17200 et. seq., which prohibits unfair, unlawful and fraudulent business acts and practices.”

Citing the Department of Education’s findings, the complaint also objected to the lack of academics on the ACCJC visiting teams, the appointment of Barbara Beno’s husband to the 2012 team, and the Commission’s failure to distinguish between “noncompliance with accreditation standards” and “areas of improvement.”

The suit sought to overturn the show cause and termination decisions against City College and block the ACCJC “from engaging in accreditation evaluations at any of California’s 112 community colleges in a manner that violates applicable federal or state law.”

The filing brought immediate blowback.

“I remember the beef with the mayor’s office,” Herrera said. “They called me down there and were, like, ‘Who’s your client?’

“My client? The people of the State of California. I don’t need to represent the City and County. It’s a 17200 action, I can do what I want…. We got into it. We got into it hard,” he said.

The San Francisco Chronicle blistered Herrera for filing the suit. Its editorial titled “Off target” charged him with “playing with fire.”

“When you have a losing argument, change the subject,” the Aug. 23 editorial began. “That’s been the approach of certain City College defenders who want the (sic) attack an accreditation commission instead of the serious problems it has identified. Now City Attorney Dennis Herrera has put his imprimatur and legal muscle behind this dubious tack of distraction that is raising the risk of a shutdown.”

People kept emailing the editorial to Sara Eisenberg. She was sitting at her desk biting her nails when Herrera rang. “In some really colorful language, he said ‘forget those guys, we’re doing the right thing, you’re doing a great job, keep going’,” Eisenberg said.

Herrera also heard from CCSF administrators. “In the beginning it’s fair to say that there were folks there who thought that our litigation would impede ongoing political and other issues at City College,” Herrera said. 

“There was a feeling I was taking one side, on behalf of teachers, labor, against administrators and others that were trying to impose reforms on City College to get it on better financial footing…where I was just focused on keeping the place open and making sure ACCJC was playing by the rules,” he said.

Still, having the city attorney act on such a strong critique of the ACCJC sent the strongest signal yet that the activists defending City College might yet prevail.

An email tipped African American Studies Department Chair Tarik Farrar off to Herrera’s press conference, and he pulled a news site up on his computer. “I just sat there and started crying,” Farrar said. He likened it to the climactic moment in the third Lord of the Rings movie.

“Minas Tirith is under siege and the army was coming from Mordor, and its forces have broken the wall, and Gandalf is pulling back the forces, and they’re running up to the top tower. It seems all is lost and then you hear this horn off in the distance (da-nuh, da-nuh he hummed softly) and if you’ve seen the second movie you recognize that horn. That’s the horn that they brought from Rohan.

“Gandalf looks out and you see this ledge out in the distance and suddenly you see these horses coming up to the edge of the ledge. Rohan had been called three days earlier, and there they were, all massed on the hill. The battle wasn’t over by any means but somebody with some strength and determination [had arrived]…

“Ed Lee had been doing nothing but criticize and here’s Dennis Herrera. I guess when that happened I felt, ‘We’re going to be OK’,” Farrar said. n

© 2018 by Marcy Rein, Vicki Legion and Mickey Ellinger

ENDNOTES

1.          The state legislature established the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) in 1991 “to help California’s local educational agencies fulfill their financial and management responsibilities by providing fiscal advice, management assistance, training and other related school business services.” (from http://www.fcmat.org) In the guise of offering technical assistance, FCMAT has helped push privatization and austerity. In 2003, it played a key role in the takeover of the Oakland Unified School District. Ten years after the takeover, one in four Oakland students attended a charter school.

2.          Before AFT 2121 made “equal pay for equal work” a priority, part-time faculty got paid on a lower scale than full-timers teaching the same classes. Over more than two decades, the local organized and bargained to put all faculty on the same scale, with part-time pay set at a percentage of full-time—“pro-rated,” so it is called “pro-rata” pay. Full-timers have some non-teaching duties that part-timers do not, hence the higher pay.

3.               The US Department of Education authorizes accrediting agencies. AFT 2121, along with the California Federation of Teachers, filed a formal complaint against the ACCJC with the department in April 2013. The complaint charged the accrediting commission with violating federal and state laws and its own internal rules, and asked the DOE to order it to rectify the abuses. For more information, see http://cft.org/accjc.html.

Subscribe to Reimagine Podcasts:RSS FEED  | ITunes
 

by Jess Clarke

It’s tempting to blame Donald Trump for the fact that the US was woefully underprepared for this pandemic, but getting caught up in a manufactured made-for-TV surreality show could kill us. Our most urgent task is to reimagine our social order, our economic policies and our relationship to planet earth.

The fact that Italy, Spain, France and England have all made the same derelict choices as the buffoonish US administration, that Brazil and India are on the cusp of following the same path and that Africa lies essentially unprotected in the face of COVID-19, are proof positive that the global capitalist system cannot serve human needs. We are on a path toward environmental and economic collapse of an order of magnitude even greater than what we have now begun to experience.
 
The cumulative injustices of segregation in housing, education, health care and employment that are showing up in public health department body counts across the country are part of this larger process. African Americans and people of color are dying at twice the rate of other populations—just as they were before this crisis. The searing statistics for the elderly, prisoners and immigrants that are just beginning to be published should be a wake-up call that we have to go much deeper in challenging the current order of things to survive.
 
The wildfires in Australia and California that dominated the news cycles last year are harbingers of the same message. There is no need to recount the many other climate disasters already underway. While the current wave of death and illness is sweeping across continents at unprecedented speed, environmental justice advocates are all too aware that frontline communities, those least responsible, are bearing the brunt of the destruction visible in New York, Detroit, New Orleans and Milwaukee.
 
Thirty years ago on Earth Day 1990 a group of racial justice advocates created the journal Race, Poverty & the Environment (RP&E). They were motivated by an emerging analysis of how toxic pollution in certain communities was killing African Americans and other people of color at disproportionate rates. Over the succeeding decades the advocacy groups of which they were a part formed a national network of organizations to defend our communities.
 
Five years ago, when Urban Habitat shut down the journal, we relaunched it. We have won some and lost some. But I think it’s fair to say that we are better off for the effort. We posted the entire thirty-year archive for free download on reimaginerpe.org where we serve 60,000 plus monthly visitors over a million pages a year. We also make back issues available to university researchers through JSTOR and each year over 1,200 different universities and colleges download our articles. In addition to publishing RP&E, Reimagine! has also co-published two books from our contributing editors. Unfortunately, we have not managed to generate a real revenue stream despite ongoing readership. Our business model relies largely on volunteerism and donated labor. But we are keeping at it. We of course welcome your donations and will offer a premium level membership that gives you the gift of printed copies of either our books or the journal.
 
I think the words that inspired us to found Reimagine! are worth revisiting. This is what Grace Lee Boggs said in 2012:

“We are at the stage where the people in charge of the government and industry are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. It’s up to us to reimagine the alternatives and not just protest against them and expect them to do better.

I'm still convinced that’s as good a call for our times as we will find. And at RP&E and Reimagine! we are carrying on in this spirit.  What we will do next, I don’t know. But I do know that we have to do it together. And that we can’t count on the ruling class to get us to the next stage, no matter how well-meaning and liberal they might say they are. Grace Lee Boggs also said the following, and I will close with this:

We invite you to take a free read of the current issue. No release party. No promise of free appetizers and an open bar. What we can offer this issue are great stories by committed and creative workers. Hope you will join us.

Earth day is here. Mother earth is pissed. We need to get busy. Hope you will join us.