14

To Be an Organizer

After Lowell and my time with TPF in Dorchester, I wrestled with what changes I would have to make to be a more effective organizer.

As I thought about it, there was a major difference between being a mobilizer and someone who built effective organizations. The mobilizer gathers those who share a position, excites, energizes, and motivates them to spring into action and, hopefully, finds ways to sustain them throughout the actions and beyond.

The organizer, of course, builds organizations. I increasingly came to believe that an organizer should also be focused on changing people through the experience of collective action and organization.

Going back to my early experiences with the Boston Action Group, I thought people needed to realize that the problems that plague their lives, the problems that they have always believed were their fault, or were inevitable, or theirs and theirs alone, are, in fact, shared problems. Once they begin to realize their problems are not unique but shared, they can begin to look at how the source of those problems is not to be found in the stars, or within, or because of the “other,” but are rooted in structures of power and wealth. That realization can then lead to the belief that the solution to these problems lies in collective organization and action.

I wanted to become an organizer who could build large organizations that would contest for power, change policies, win structural reforms, and at the same time become great schools of democracy.

As I looked back over the years of antiwar organizing, there were some things that I had done well. I had always tried to reach out to students who did not agree with me. I had been empathetic, resonating to their doubts and fears. I had not, at least most of the time, been dismissive of those who disagreed with me.

I understood that if I wanted to be an effective organizer, I needed to be able to listen. I realized I had to have a deep-seated respect for those I wanted to organize, including those who initially disagreed with me.

That respect had to be expressed in a myriad of small ways. Off came the beard. I decided that clothes were only a costume. And those costumes are always chosen, unconsciously or deliberately, to communicate a message: difference, defiance, group membership, provocation, reassurance.

The changes I needed to go through, however, were far deeper than the external changes of clothes and haircut. I had to be able to go into an American Legion post with a deep appreciation for the lives and wisdom of men whose first instinct was to support the war. I needed to be able to sit in the home of a white family that might start a conversation about what was happening to their changing neighborhood by blaming the newly arrived people of color. While I could never agree with their position and would never accede to derogatory language, my job was not to pick a fight with them—that would only confirm stereotypes. Instead, I had to understand what led them to think Black people were causing their problems and find a way, respectfully and empathetically, to engage them in a manner that opened up the discussion rather than closing it down.

The more I worked to become an effective organizer, the more I realized I had to push myself out of my comfort zone and leave behind my “safe space.” Instead, I needed to listen, to learn, to see through the eyes of others. If you want to change people, you have no chance if you do not love them and respect them.

The challenge was to lose arrogance without losing passion and principle, to learn to hear without losing the vision of profound change, to become a radical who changed minds and created new possibilities.

There is nothing safe about being an organizer. There is nothing easy. There is nothing more challenging. And other than being a parent, there is nothing I have done in my life that was more rewarding.

Amy went to nursing school and became a licensed practical nurse working in hospitals and eventually neighborhood health clinics. She participated in organizing nurses against the war and in union organizing drives, as well as participating in the Dorchester work. We lived on the third floor of a classic triple-decker on Holmes Avenue in Dorchester, a few blocks down the hill from Ronan Park. Mark Dyen and Beth Reisen moved into the first floor. Mark had resurfaced after a stint doing things that I have never asked him about. He first returned to graduate school but then organizing drew him away from the university once again. Beth was an early SDS member who had organized with the Newark Emergency Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP). Now they were living together, soon to be married.

When I first arrived in Dorchester, all the “corners” along Geneva and Bowdoin had “spas” (small convenience stores). Outside of each a group of young men sat passing the time. They were all white. Most had served in Vietnam. Now they were back and having a hard time adjusting.

In a span of twenty-five years those very same corners would have a new set of young men and young women hanging out on the same streets, sitting on the same overturned milk crates, but they would be entirely Black and brown.

When we moved to Holmes Avenue that transition was just beginning. While we lived there the first Black family moved in. We had a stern conversation with the white kids that we knew, discussing how they would respond—or rather not respond. Otherwise, their first impulse would be to drive that family out of “their neighborhood.” Our TPF engendered credibility was enough to prevent that.

Life for me was more settled than it had ever been. Late in the summer of 1973, Amy asked what I thought about us having children. I was ambivalent. Were we ready? Would movement work allow us to be good parents? How would our unsteady marriage make it through? We went off to a vacation in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, hiked the trails, and camped on a beach with a waterfall cascading onto the sands, the waves trilling in. While I wondered if we would ever be ready, we tiptoed around the question of a baby.

Eight weeks after we returned to Dorchester, Amy announced she was pregnant. Our entire universe was altered. Those nine months were, for me, the best months of our marriage. I was convinced we were finally achieving what I had ached for all my life: I could not wait for the baby. Amy and I agreed that we would rent a cottage on an island off the coast of Maine and escape for the entire summer once the baby was born. I was in love with the thought of a family with a new baby—and had no clue as to the reality of newborns and the frequent condition of mothers of newborn babies. I had never thought about postpartum depression. I had not thought about sleep deprivation.

The birth went well. We named her Emma, perhaps for Jane Austen’s Emma, perhaps for famed revolutionary Emma Goldman. Now with a child, Amy and I wanted a “real home.” We found a gorgeous Victorian house on Melville Avenue at the midpoint between Codman Square and Fields Corner in a community composed of remarkable one- and two-family homes. Each of the homes had wonderful detailing, intricate wood paneling, built-in cabinetry, and wide yards. In the 1920s with the construction of the Dorchester District Court House on Washington Street, the neighborhood became home to up-and-coming lawyers, judges, union leaders, and other successful second-generation Dorchester families. By the 1960s the homes were now proudly owned by large blue-collar families (such as those of Donnie and Mark Wahlberg and Jordan and Jonathan Knight, who would go on to form New Kids on the Block).

We teamed up with Tom Davidson and Lillian Shirley to buy the two-family house at 41 Melville Avenue. We had met Tom and Lillian through antiwar work. They too had just had their first child, Sean.

Without realizing it, we were part of a process that would bring change to urban centers across the country—gentrification. When we purchased our house, many of the longtime white residents thought we were crazy as they expected the neighborhood to become a totally African American area over the next five to ten years. They told us property values would plummet. We were part of a steady influx of young, middle-class families who drove up property values.

Groups of citizen activists were springing up all over the city and around the state, fighting highways, airport expansion, advocating tenants’ rights. The examples of the Civil Rights and antiwar movements had suggested a model for fighting for change even to people who disagreed with the goals of those movements.

A group of us created the Massachusetts Community Center and the Boston Community School, located in the old leather district near South Station. The school provided a wide range of classes for activists and leaders. The Massachusetts Community Center was what would now be called an “incubator.” We supported new organizations just starting out.

For the first time, I got serious about raising money. I was able to find some remarkably generous donors, particularly several wealthy Cambridge women, who supported the center. We paid people, including me, minimal but real salaries.

Among the more successful initiatives was an organizing effort of women clerical workers launched by Karen Nussbaum and Ellen Cassedy.¹ They had been antiwar activists who supported their activism by getting clerical jobs at Harvard. They quickly recognized that women office workers were underpaid, treated poorly, and, with feminism percolating everywhere, ready to organize. Fusing their feminist insights and their movement activism into a successful organizing effort, they created 9 to 5, which advocated for equal pay, more promotion opportunities, better working conditions, and an end to harassment at the workplace.

With energy prices surging, the center helped launch CAP-Energy, a coalition of low-income organizations, community groups and newly formed consumer groups which campaigned for lower utility rates. Mark became its director.

Miles Rapoport, another SDS veteran who had gone to Lynn as part of an effort to organize in blue-collar communities, now went to Chicago to work in a neighborhood organization that was part of a network started by Saul Alinsky. Alinsky was a brilliant former union organizer who had applied the skills of union organizing to community organizing. He trained dozens of organizers who built deeply rooted, carefully structured community organizations with an emphasis on leadership development and creative tactics. One of those organizations was a city-wide effort in Chicago, CAP, that had attracted Paul Booth, the former SDS national leader. If it was something Paul wanted to do, I wanted to learn about it. I started studying Alinsky’s strategies and the series of competing networks that evolved from his inspiration. Alinsky had died in 1972, so I met with his lieutenants and found them to be too arrogant and set in their ways. They dismissed me as a former student leader who had no real sense of how to organize. Despite that, I read everything I could about Alinsky’s work and started to follow what the organizers he had trained were doing. Miles periodically filled me in on his organizing work in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood.

I also connected with Heather Booth, Paul’s wife, who had started a new training center for organizers in Chicago. Two years older than me, her life had often paralleled mine. While in high school she had joined the Congress of Racial Equality and then when she went to the University of Chicago, had thrown herself into the Friends of SNCC. At nineteen she had gone to Mississippi for the Freedom Summer. Back at college she was active in civil rights and SDS. She and Paul met when he dropped into a sit-in at the University of Chicago against the draft. Heather became a leading feminist and organized the Jane Collective, clandestinely assisting women to access abortions.²

In 1973, as I was starting to organize the Massachusetts Community Center, Heather founded the Midwest Academy to train organizers. As I felt my way forward toward a new kind of organizing, she and I connected, and I felt immediately I had found a kindred soul. Over the next years we would send organizers to study with Heather and her team at the academy, share thoughts on strategy, and help each other. Our friendship and mutual support have lasted all these years.

With support and leadership from a special group of Catholic priests, we began to explore what it would take to organize a city-wide, neighborhood-based organization in Boston. They were a new kind of priest, focused on social justice. They had come of age during the Civil Rights Movement. They went into parishes in Roxbury, the South End, East Boston, and Charlestown and immediately participated in efforts such as stopping the proposed mega highway known as the inner belt which would have meant the bulldozing of thousands of homes and slicing up neighborhoods. They worked hard for more affordable housing.

Miles was confirming that we had a great deal to learn from the organizing that Alinsky organizers were doing. I also spent a significant amount of time, looking at the successes and failures of SNCC, SDS, and the antiwar movement. In that process I discovered an essay called “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” by Jo Freeman, a feminist and civil rights veteran, that clicked right away with me. While it was written initially about early women’s organizations and consciousness-raising groups, it was clearly descriptive of my experience in SDS and the movement generally. So often I had been able to be a leader, unaccountable to any democratic forms, just by dint of being articulate. We claimed that “we have no leaders here.” Yet we clearly had leaders—I had been one of them. We had few clear structures and rarely elected anyone to a position of leadership and thus could not replace them (or me). As Freeman wrote, “This apparent lack of structure too often disguised an informal, unacknowledged and unaccountable leadership that was all the more pernicious because its very existence was denied.”³ Her article went on to discuss the “star system” and elitism, then laid out principles of democratic structuring. I started sharing it with everyone I knew.

Three days a week I would bring Emma to my office where I had a “pack and play” set up. Soon it was normal to see me at work changing a diaper or quieting everyone during nap times. In May of 1975 the Boston Globe ran a long profile of me titled “The Evolution of a Revolutionary,” complete with a picture of me and Emma at the Mass Community Center.

That article was soon followed by an invitation to have lunch with Tom Winship, the longtime editor of the Globe and Charlie Whipple, the editorial page editor. After discussing politics for a while, Winship asked if I would write a column every other week. Surprised, I blurted out, “But Tom, you know I am still a radical!” His reply was immediate: “Michael, you may be a goddamn radical, but you are our radical.” By which he meant I was a Harvard radical. I wrote twenty columns before the pull of organizing drew me away.

The work progressed, 9 to 5 grew. With fuel prices high, CAP-Energy was gaining traction. I was meeting new people in Boston who were willing to help us build a large citizen’s organization rooted in neighborhoods. Miles was willing to return from Chicago to head up the organizing.

Then the city spiraled into the crisis of forced desegregation and the busing of children to new schools. Under a court order, Boston was busing white and Black students to integrate schools. That meant that Black students were for the first time attending schools in South Boston and Hyde Park and West Roxbury, then totally white communities. Louise Day Hicks, leading resistance to any desegregation of the schools, founded an organization to stop “forced busing.” Later that organization took on the name “Restore Our Alienated Rights,” or ROAR.

ROAR’s leadership included women from Boston’s white working-class neighborhoods. Among the most prominent was Elvira “Pixie” Palladino from East Boston, who thought nothing of cursing out a monseigneur or attempting to punch Senator Ted Kennedy. Slightly more restrained in manner, but no less fierce in commitment, was Fran Johene, from Hyde Park. While racism was front and center, these mothers articulated a powerful sense of class grievance. Why was it that the students from blue-collar and poor neighborhoods would be bused, while the affluent suburbs sat by and paid no cost?

The city was riven along racial lines, but we thought there were issues that could unite across those divides—if there were organizers and a creative strategy. We worked even harder to create the foundation for a new organization in Boston to do exactly that.

There were secret attempts to bring together these militant white mothers and African American leaders. I was part of four meetings with the ROAR mothers and the Black mothers who had fought for desegregation and created the voluntary metropolitan busing program (METCO) taking kids from Roxbury to attend affluent schools in the suburbs. The center of attention was always Mel King, a social worker activist at the South End Settlement House who I knew from the old BAG days.⁴ Mel attended these meetings wearing denim overalls, the uniform of a SNCC organizer. Tall, strong, head shaved, bearded, the effect he had on the ROAR mothers, especially Pixie, was bizarre. She and the others literally could not keep their hands off him. They would sit next to him, lean on him, put their hand on his arm, put their arm around his shoulders, gravitate around him. Mel just smiled and made the case for protecting children. Nothing came out of these meetings. I would later see Pixie and Fran speaking at public meetings, railing against Black leaders, and wish I had a video to show of them with Mel.

The busing crises went on, ugly and divisive, white mobs hurling stones and racist epithets at small children in school buses. There were physical attacks on Black people in numerous settings. The deeper the crisis became, the more convinced we were that we needed to create a new organization that could bring together white and Black families from the neighborhoods across the city. We hoped to make that part of a statewide effort. Using CAP-Energy, we would build statewide populist action around utility rates and other economic justice issues. In Boston we would dig deep into the blue-collar and low-income neighborhoods, mixing neighborhood issues and issues of economic justice. We put together a broad sponsoring committee, made up of existing neighborhood leaders and parish priests. Father Tom Corrigan of Holy Redeemer Church in East Boston quickly assumed a leadership role. Father Corrigan looked every bit a prototypical Boston Irish Catholic priest: thin to the point of almost haggard, his Roman collar too large for his narrow neck, his face habitually creased with concern. He had an immediate and innate sense of organizing and became passionate about our efforts.

Father Corrigan steered us to the Campaign for Human Development (CHD), a unique social justice arm of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. The spirit of Vatican II was still sweeping through the Catholic church. Liberation theology from Latin America resonated with some of the clergy in North America. CHD was funding organizations that sought to empower the poor, organizing for social and economic justice. Their funds came from a national collection in every Catholic church across the country on the Sunday before Thanksgiving. That collection produced millions of dollars that could go to address poverty and injustice.

We submitted a proposal to CHD to support our Boston Organizing Project. We did not know that they had also received a proposal from a group of former welfare rights organizers in Massachusetts.

Those organizers were part of a new effort, the Movement for Economic Justice, whose strategy was to find economic issues where the very poor and blue-collar families had a shared interest.⁵

The very first project of the Movement for Economic Justice was in Chelsea. Nestled across the Mystic River, cut off from Boston, dominated by the shadows of the huge Tobin Bridge, Chelsea has been one of the gateway cities for new immigrants entering Massachusetts for one hundred years. It has also consistently been one of, if not the, poorest community in the state. Lee Staples, Mark Splain, and Barbara Bowen Splain, all former welfare rights organizers, moved there to start Chelsea Fair Share. They were deeply committed to fighting for the needs of the poorest families.

They built a remarkable group of local Chelsea leaders. They won an end to the tolls for Chelsea residents on the Tobin Bridge, built in, over, and through Chelsea, that every Chelsea resident had to pay along with other drivers to get into the city of Boston. Realizing that Chelsea was too small to support three organizers, they expanded into nearby East Boston and the city of Waltham to the west of Boston, declaring the three chapters part of Massachusetts Fair Share.

The name “Fair Share” was inspired. It appealed to people who had always obeyed the rules, done what was asked of them, and paid their fair share—and had not received their fair share in return. It went quickly to the heart of economic justice but was not leftist lingo. Appealing to a basic American impulse toward fairness, it allowed the organization to attack those who did not pay their fair share.

With the organization growing, they added a brilliant young lawyer, Jim Katz, to do issue research and campaign strategy. To increase their support and expand further, they—as we had done—submitted a proposal to CHD.

Confronted with two proposals that seemed so much alike, CHD did something remarkable—they reached out to both groups of organizers and said, if you merge into one organizing effort, bringing the Boston Organizing Project, Mass Fair Share, and CAP-Energy into one single organization, we will fund you with a commitment of $100,000 per year for two years or more. If you do not, we will not fund either proposal.

The two organizing groups were unfamiliar with each other. While our strategies seemed to converge, the welfare rights organizers were skeptical about our commitment to the poorest of the poor. They were humble and dedicated. When they looked at us, they saw former campus radicals, people who had been part of the New Left with an appetite for, and a daring to do things on a large scale, that attracted them but that they distrusted. Yet our strategies converged. Our plans were compatible.

We brought the capacity to organize throughout the neighborhoods of Boston and through CAP-Energy, the possibility for statewide efforts around spiking energy costs. Following the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) embargo of 1973, the price of oil more than quadrupled in less than twelve months and kept rising.⁶ That oil shock rolled on through the economy, boosting the price of gas at the pump, jumping up the price of home heating oil, and sending electricity prices shooting upward. This was producing significant pain, especially for the poor and anyone on fixed incomes.

There were weeks of difficult meetings. More funding for organizing than we had ever imagined was too strong a carrot to be resisted. Both groups of organizers wanted to merge. Discussions edged into negotiations. We agreed on many details. We would keep the name Mass Fair Share. Mark Dyen would become statewide coordinator of energy work. Miles would direct the organizing in Boston. Staples would direct the organizing in the ring of cities surrounding Boston. Katz would be research director.

The remaining issue was who would be the executive director of the merged effort. Mark Splain, sounding profoundly uncomfortable, asked to meet with me privately. He told me the merger could only happen if he was the executive director. I immediately agreed. I would be in charge of fundraising and play a role in the statewide campaigns.

Certainly, I had wanted to be the executive director. I was still young and cocky. However, the chance to build an organization fighting for economic justice that was both deep and statewide was too important to throw away over who was the executive director.

With this shotgun wedding, Mass Fair Share was created and launched.

One of the earliest campaigns was around electric rates. Mark Dyen and his team produced a detailed analysis of what was driving up costs, proving that among other factors, new construction of electric plants now produced no gains in efficiency. We demonstrated that building to meet peak demand meant that there was unused, extremely costly capacity sitting idle so that the electric producers could respond to periodic demands of the largest users. But the costs of this were not reflected in the rates for larger users. We pushed for pricing that guaranteed a low price for the minimum usage most families needed and provided strong incentives for conservation.

We discovered that the Department of Public Utilities (DPU) had a rule that a family could dispute their bill and until the dispute was resolved, the electric company could not turn off the power. That allowed us to organize people to refuse to pay their electric bills, disputing the charges and sending the payments to us. Over 10,000 people sent their payments to Fair Share creating a powerful boycott of the electric companies and forcing the DPU to act.

As the campaign ramped up, we encountered a serious strategic dispute. Mark Splain insisted that, since the legislature was unlikely to pass our proposals, the best path forward was a referendum campaign to pass our radical proposal for flat rates which would have made large users pay their fair share. He argued that since there was going to be another attempt to pass a graduated income tax by referendum, pairing the two would make sense. Mark Dyen and I felt strongly that we would lose both referenda. We were not ready, and taking our proposal into a referendum campaign was likely to unite the entire business community, as well as all large users of electricity, including the media, hospitals, and universities. We were unable to persuade Mark Splain, and so we launched referendum campaigns pushing for flat rate electric rates and the graduated income tax.

Both went down to crushing defeats, losing by over a million votes.⁷ In the closing weeks of the campaign, there was a massive advertising blitz against us. Then hundreds of thousands of workers received a notice in their paycheck envelopes saying that if our electric rate proposal, Question 7, passed, they would receive their layoff notice. (This was back when employees received a paper paycheck.) Hospitals, universities, even churches, all major users of electricity with huge discounts, urged a no vote on Question 7. The Boston Globe urged its readers to vote yes on referendum questions one through six but at all costs, to vote no on Question 7. We did not just lose: we lost two to one.

That loss taught us important lessons about what would be needed to pass a referendum, lessons we would use a few years later to win on tax issues. Still, it was a significant setback.

Many of our other organizing efforts went very well, however. We launched the Boston organizing effort with a press conference where twelve Catholic and Protestant clergy, along with fourteen neighborhood leaders, announced support for the new organizing effort. Mel King of the South End joined John Regan of South Boston. Frank Manning, the most well-known senior activist in the state, urged seniors to join the new effort. Anna De Fronzo, the leader of the East Boston Maverick Street Mothers who had campaigned against the expansion of Logan Airport, spoke and said, “Just imagine if all the neighborhoods got together, there isn’t anything we can’t win.”

There had been nothing like what we were proposing: a city-wide effort that was rooted in all the neighborhoods and that was not beholden to any politician. The changes besetting so many neighborhoods made it imperative that residents find ways to have their voices heard, their needs considered. The rage and violence of the antibusing movement had confirmed that not only was racism virulently alive in Boston but also that the city was in fundamental ways broken. The proposed new organization offered a path forward.

Under the guidance of Miles, organizers in Boston were trained and assigned to most blue-collar and low-income neighborhoods. Under Lee and Barbara, organizers were placed in a growing list of communities across the state. We hired young people, most of whom had been active as students and now wanted to learn the “profession of organizing.” Each day they came into the office for seminar style training on how to think about the neighborhoods they would be organizing, how to meet one on one with community leaders, and how to think about the stages of building an organization. They would role play door knocking and one-on-one meetings until they were confident. We stressed repeatedly that they were not selling, that they needed to listen and engage.

We had a clear organizing methodology. We borrowed a lot from the farm worker organizing in California. Fred Ross, trained by Alinsky, had gone to California to build an organization for farm workers. Out of his work would emerge Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers union. The key to his organizing process was the house meeting that allowed an organizer to train and test potential leaders. People who could bring ten to twenty people to their home and lead a discussion were good candidates to become leaders.

Miles would walk people through how to analyze a neighborhood. He would challenge them: “Okay I want you to chart out the institutions and leadership in your neighborhood.” The organizers would then make a list of the churches, the existing neighborhood associations, sometimes unions, small business associations, veterans’ organizations, local papers, sports leagues, and parent organizations. Miles would push them to look deeper, to explore more. “Go work on this and come back at our next session with the names of the actual leaders filled in and a plan for you to visit with them.”

In the next session, each organizer would share their analysis of the neighborhood and the names of the leaders that they were going to visit. Miles would patiently push and educate. “Okay you have the parish priest but who are the lay leaders in the parish? Who are the people who make bingo nights so successful? Look not just for the formal leaders but look for those people who are making things happen. Who is the head of the local parents’ organization but also who are the ones that make the bake sales really happen?”

Then the organizers would work through the process of visits to established leaders. Then they would discuss the need to do door knocking to discover new people who could be cultivated into leadership.

Miles would walk them through how all of this would lead to the creation of an organizing committee. “Look,” he would say, “we don’t want to immediately lock in a formal leadership structure. First, we need to test people, to see who the real leaders are by seeing who can actually bring people to a house meeting or to a first action. You often know the top person, say the lay leader in a parish, but they are too busy with what they are already committed to and so won’t make an effective leader for Fair Share. And often the guy who talks great and you think that’s my guy, will turn out to have no follow through. So, you have to go slow and be flexible at first. The organizing committee allows you to test people and see who can really produce. Your job right now is to learn and listen. Learn who the leaders are. Learn the issues that people really care about. Discover both the issues and the people that will build the organization.”

After the discussions, every day the organizers would be out in the afternoon and evening, knocking on doors, meeting people face to face, holding their “one on ones,” and setting up house meetings. Later in the night, they would all get together for a debrief and then head to a local bar to drink and talk and talk. The days were long. The camaraderie was immediate and strong.

Despite the great divisions tearing at the city from the fight over school busing, the organizers specifically said that people in these diverse neighborhoods had more in common than what divided them.

The leadership of the antibusing campaign vehemently opposed our efforts, but some of their supporters became involved. New Fair Share chapters formed in neighborhood after neighborhood. The organizers followed a careful approach: first meet and learn from the existing leaders in a community, listen to them, find the people who may not be in the most prominent leadership positions but still were of real substance, the quiet woman who holds together the parish activities including the bingo nights, the welfare mother who has also been talking about the state of housing, the neighborhood leader who is concerned about redlining. Then go door to door, whenever possible with local leaders, talking to people, learning about them and their issues, as well as talking about the issues others have raised. Find people who will agree to host a house meeting in their home. Work with them to see who is able to turn out twelve to twenty-five friends and neighbors. After a dozen or more house meetings and several hundred conversations, build an organizing committee, at every point testing to see who can actually lead people. Don’t be fooled by the people who talk the best game. Look for the people who deliver. Don’t lock in leaders too early—leave room at the table for the people who emerge. Offer training sessions in leadership, issues, skills, and strategy. Take several direct actions around the issues that excited the most people. Collect memberships and dues to produce local ownership and financing of the organizing drive. Finally, there would be a founding chapter meeting of one to two hundred residents. After that the organizers and the organizing committee would keep reaching out, keep starting new campaigns, with each campaign having its own leadership committee. Over time there would be chapter elections for local leaders and then of statewide leaders.

Across the city and the state Fair Share chapters blossomed and thrived. Organizers built teams of volunteers. In each neighborhood dozens of house meetings brought in several hundred active members. Soon the local group was engaging the city on community issues, as well as working on statewide issues. The community issues could be as narrow as winning a stop sign or stop lights at an intersection where there had been repeated accidents. Or working to get more foot patrols in an area where the residents were feeling fearful. Or getting the city to repair a rundown school or clean up a neglected park. Soon the issues were taking up larger economic issues of taxes, insurance, and utility rates. There would be meetings of 300 to 400 people. Elected officials were invited and found themselves suddenly confronted with well-prepared local residents who made demands of them and held up a big score card to grade their response—“Yes, No, and Waffle.” Rapidly Fair Share was becoming known and popular in almost every neighborhood in Boston and in dozens of neighborhoods across the state.

In Dorchester, Lew Finfer who had organized the Dorchester Community Action Council (DCAC) became convinced that Fair Share offered a rare opportunity. Lew convinced the leaders of the DCAC to merge into Dorchester Fair Share, immediately increasing the size and depth of the organization.⁸

In South Boston, however, our organizers were totally unsuccessful. Even though they were brought into South Boston by John Regan, a longtime community leader and head of the South Boston Small Business Council, as well as several South Boston priests and even though two dozen local residents responded enthusiastically to forming a South Boston Fair Share chapter, Jimmy Kelly, then the leader of the South Boston Marshals, the well-organized antibusing group, made it clear that there would be no organizing in South Boston by those “n----- lovers.” Kelly would go on to a long political career as a twenty-year city councilor. In those days, however, he was coming out of the Sheet Metal Workers Union and the conservative building trades. Even though we had the active support of Joe Joyce, the president of the Sheet Metal Workers Union, we could not dissuade Kelly. He and the antibusing South Boston Marshals delivered a clear message: there would be no founding meeting of Fair Share in South Boston. I wanted to proceed but all our South Boston people dropped away when it became clear that Kelly had been delivering a message from the mobster Whitey Bulger. Everyone in South Boston knew that if Whitey Bulger said that he was not allowing a meeting to happen or an organization to form, that threat would be backed up by whatever level of violence was needed to stop it. As much as they wanted a Fair Share chapter, they wanted to live more.

At the same time that the organizing in Boston was proceeding, across the state Fair Share organizers, following the same approaches, started chapters in neighborhoods in Worcester, Lowell, Lynn, Revere, Malden, Somerville, Fall River, New Bedford, Springfield, Holyoke, and Chicopee.

Our first year had been a wild ride. By the end of 1976, we felt a little battered, but we could see the potential of the organizing. We had not yet broken through, but it seemed possible. Then Mark Splain once again asked to meet with me privately.

He looked uncomfortable. To my surprise he asked me to become the executive director, saying he was far better at training organizers than leading the whole organization. He would stay as director of organizing if I took the job. I was delighted.