Preface

I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.

—James Baldwin

America seems to be on the verge of flying apart. Increasingly the conflicts over race, gender, culture, and politics are so profound that it seems hard to see how the country can survive. Decades ago, in a similar moment, the country riven and roiling, I was young, and I marched. Marched first in support of civil rights, marched then against the war in Vietnam. Marched and then organized marches of tens of thousands. Sat in and then organized sit-ins of thousands.

For over two decades I devoted myself to changing America. I felt part of a movement much larger than myself, a movement of the young attempting to shape a better future, our future, a future furiously resisted by the old men at the commanding heights of power. I moved from protest to resistance to seeking systemic change. I marched and marched but perhaps more importantly, fitfully, immersed in baptisms of fire, I learned the craft, the art of organizing.

Now, in another time of extreme polarization and backlash, the young have been marching again. African Americans are marching for the right to live, to not be killed by the police. A new generation of students, shaped by school shootings and “active shooter drills” are marching and organizing against gun violence. Young “Dreamers” are fighting for the right to stay in their own country, America. Thousands of young people are demanding that old people take responsibility and act now to save the planet from the catastrophes of climate change. Young people are again protesting wars in far-off lands. Young women and men are marching to protect reproductive freedom. Tens of thousands are working to preserve American democracy.

Once again, the young are fighting for the future, fighting to have a future. Once again, they are furiously opposed by old men desperately clinging to old ways, protecting the wealth and power of the few. Increasingly, in our America, those old white men, resisting change knowing that they are not in the majority, are doing what they can to create the conditions for minority rule.

More than the young have been marching and organizing. Vast marches of women. Thousands of suburban women creating Indivisible groups. Black women spearheading voter registration and mobilization. The amazing outpouring after the murder of George Floyd when twenty million Americans took to the streets.¹ Tens of thousands of women organizing to resist the rollback of their rights enacted by a Supreme Court packed with conservative judges. A new wave of union organizing.

I wrote this book for the activists of today and of tomorrow. I have little doubt that they will learn to organize and to struggle for power in new ways that I cannot even imagine. Still, my hope is that they can learn from my experiences.

This memoir is not a history of the sixties. Nor is it an activist guide. It is an intensely personal remembering of two decades of organizing and activism. I was privileged to be part of powerful movements: the Civil Rights Movement, the student New Left, the antiwar movement. I was able to learn the skills and craft of organizing and apply it to leading a community-based economic justice organization. I made many mistakes, learned painful lessons, and was part of memorable moments.

I did not take notes. I kept no papers. I have consulted contemporaneous newspapers, especially the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, and the Harvard Crimson. I have read histories and memoirs of the period. At times I have searched the internet. But this is primarily a work of remembering.

Much of the dialogue is a creative effort at reconstruction. A couple of scenes are amalgams; a very few are creative attempts at representation. I have done my best to remember as accurately as possible. Of necessity, I have had to be highly selective, leaving out many important events and people.

While this memoir is primarily a personal story, it is also grounded in the shared experiences of many of my generation. I was born in 1947, part of the foaming front edge of the demographic wave that would come to be known as the Baby Boom. Growing up in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust and the Second World War, we knew from an early age that evil walked our world. We were also the first generation to experience thirty years of exceptional, sustained economic growth. We were the first generation who grew up with the atomic bomb and with television.

As a boy, lying on the floor of my room at night, peering surreptitiously through the crack in the door as my parents watched Gunsmoke, Have Gun—Will Travel, or going to the movies to see Shane and High Noon, I absorbed the lesson that “being a man” meant standing up for others, taking that walk in the dust at high noon, overseeing the long winding wagon train. In 1956, watching young “freedom fighters” take on Soviet tanks in Hungarian streets, absorbing the deeply etched image of young people hurling Coke bottle Molotov cocktails at massive tanks, I absorbed the lesson that to rebel was good.

I also grew up earnestly believing in America, believing that we were the most democratic, most generous, the tallest, and most athletic people in the world. As did so many of my generation, I believed in the unique promise of American democracy. I took our history seriously and thrilled to the words of the Declaration of Independence, believing indeed that “all men are created equal … endowed with certain unalienable Rights … life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It was the remarkable inclusion of “the pursuit of happiness” that made me confident America was unique.

I realized everything was not perfect. Even at a young age I was aware of how Black people were treated—in Virginia, where I lived as a boy, there were still segregated schools despite the Supreme Court’s Brown decision. The shadow of nuclear weapons cast a pall over us. Living in a world of mutually assured destruction seemed the height of irrationality and madness.

Our generation was constantly made aware of our numbers and our power. We were a demographic bulge and as we progressed through time, we altered everything. Our sheer size drove markets, and hence the media, to focus on us. As we entered our teenage years many of us felt distant from the dominant culture. Our music was subversive, our attitude rebellious. Many of us were rebels without a clear cause but rebels none the less. We felt the strength of our numbers. We knew the future belonged to us.

Yet the future that we have now is radically different from any that we imagined. We succeeded in some ways, abolishing Jim Crow and opening doors for a new Black middle class, preparing the ground for profound change in the possibilities for women, laying the foundation for increasing freedom and equality for the LGBTQ+ community, seeding a long-lasting environmental movement. We have failed in larger ways, failing to stop ever greater economic inequality, never succeeding to drive a stake into the beating heart of American white supremacy, rarely creating a political force that could effectively fight for the more democratic future we once believed in.

Now it is up to those younger than me to fight for a better future, to save America and the world from catastrophe, to preserve American democracy and reinvent it in new ways. I want to provide them with a glimpse at the amazing experience that was the Civil Rights Movement. I want them to know how we built a large student movement, how we organized against a war that was originally supported by over 90 percent of the American public. How events and our efforts built a massive, sprawling, disruptive movement against that war. I want them to understand that it was organizing, engaging with people, countless discussions, connecting with people on a personal level, building relationships, constant outreach, and education, that made possible the demonstrations that most people associate with the 1960s.

I hope that the activists of today and of tomorrow can learn from our mistakes, particularly those made in 1968 and 1969 when we chose militancy over strategy, experienced a profound failure of political imagination. I hope they can also benefit from the story of how I learned the craft of organizing so that they may find their own way to reinvent organizing and change America.

This book, the story of one organizer and activist, is dedicated to all those who will march and organize, who dream of decency and a democratic future, who resist barbarism, racism, and hatred, who will create new movements that will, to adapt Theodore Parker’s phrase often used by Martin Luther King, Jr., bend the moral arc of the universe toward justice.