Making Change, That's You & Me, Baby, And It Can Be Done

On this disconcerting day, we put MLK into (human) context with a story about a small but significant victory that anyone could have pulled off...

What a strange day. Today we are honoring a true American hero and a true American villain, which one is which depends on your politics and sense of history. For those of us who look at Martin Luther King as a hero, today’s ceremony around the “sexual assaultist” Donald Trump is a depressing sign of this country’s cognitive dissidence, so much so that the noise around it easily drowns out MLK and all the positive things MLK represents. We retreat to cynicism, which even when presented with dark humor, denies hope. And, from the sidelines, we are sold stoicism, a sinister trap for those who struggle to gain some power.

It’s a good time for me to revisit one of my not-many political victories and retell a tale I’ve told before. Forget that I am a character in this story. Instead of focusing on the Who, zero in on the What and How, and then see the Who as people like you.

It’s the early 1990s and I am fresh off a transformative political experience. Just prior to the first Gulf War, I was hanging out at the Sacramento Peace Center when a few of us youngsters heard a news report that Iraq had invaded Kuwait, and that President George H.W. Bush was making war noises. For some reason, we felt a collective “Oh shit!” and decided to organize a march and rally protesting US involvement in what was then a regional border conflict. And we wanted to do this ourselves, not through what we saw was an ineffective, calcified peace establishment, mostly Baby Boomers talking to themselves.

Targeting youth, we papered Sacramento State, the local junior colleges, and a few high schools with flyers, calling people to a meeting at the Peace Center. We got about 15 people, which I learned is a great showing for these kinds of things. From that meeting, we organized the second No Gulf War protest in the nation, one which attracted more than 600 people, far more than the 40 we figured would turn up.

Our success led to many more protests, some of the biggest in Sacramento history, most of them organized by a group of high school and college students who were essentially learning activism and organizing as we were doing it. While this organizing campaign was extremely valuable to the people who participated in it, as far as stopping a war, it was a failure…and that failure hurt.

Our protest group – Adhoc for short – still wanted to do things, but what? I pushed us towards AIDS politics, but our lack of experience in that area and ACT-UP’s firm hold on AIDS activism, well, it wasn’t going to work. My friend Craig and I stumbled into Queer Nation. Others gravitated to Earth First! and animal rights groups, while some of us got really involved in labor organizing and coops. The center of our group didn’t hold, as we all went our own ways.

Besides doing support work for Queer Nation, I was pretty much lost as to what I was going to do the “change the world.” And then one day, reading the paper, I saw a story buried in the national news section. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons was looking for a site to build a federal “supermax” prison at Rancho Seco, the home of Sacramento’s decommissioned nuclear power plant, the first and only to be shut down by the voters (another good story, I’ll soon revisit). Every alarm bell in my head went off.

My first real bit of activism –doing the work, not just talking or going to a few protests – was stuffing envelops for the Prisoners Rights Union (PRU). Through the PRU, I discovered the Pelican Bay Information Project (PBIP), a group fighting to shut down the California supermax prison and security housing unit (SHU) on the North Coast.

The conditions at Pelican Bay State Prison were appalling, not just through abuse or neglect, but largely by design. Pelican Bay was supposed to house the “worst of the worst” and it did lock up a lot of gang members and certified psychos. Authorities also used Pelican Bay to silence and control activist prisoners and anyone that the establishment saw as troublemakers.

The worst of the worst of the worst – and the biggest troublemakers – were sent to the SHU, which was essentially solitary confinement mixed with harassment and torture. Without warning, cell doors were thrust open by club-swinging guards, who brutalized inmates and trashed their stuff. Those who protested were treated more severely, subject to long periods of restraint and living in artificial light 24/7. Contact with other prisoners was limited and access to the outside world – including books and newspapers - denied.

The Information Project was the sole source of information coming outside Pelican Bay. The information was provided by inmates who bravely smuggled the info out, probably with the help of a few prison employees who had seen enough. PBIP distributed the information in press releases – ignored outside the Left press and alt weeklies – and through other activist groups.

My PRU life was brief - a few clerical assignments and I was off organizing with Adhoc against the war – but I kept paying attention to prison issues while maintaining contact with activist, especially with PBIP, a contact that was valuable in the fight against the Rancho Seco supermax.

So, my very short stint as a prisoners’ rights clerical activist cued me in on prison issues. My Adhoc experience taught me that you didn’t have to be a pro at organizing to get involved. A friend who did anti-death penalty activism put the two together and challenged me to organize against a local supermax. She also reminded me that I worked for a Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) board member. SMUD not only controlled Rancho Seco and the land that the Bureau of Prisons wanted, it is a public utility with an elected board which is responsive to public pressure.

I talked to my boss, told him about the Bureau’s supermax wish list, something he was ignorant about, and asked him what he could do. He told me that he could do nothing unless I and the public did something. The first thing we should do, he said, was send him a letter with as many signatures on it as we could get, and a list of question of anything we wanted to know about the proposed prison at Rancho Seco and what was going down at other supermaxes.

So, I called the people at PBIP and told them I was holding a public meeting. I asked if they would send someone down to talk about supermaxes. My friend found a meeting space. I set a date and advertised the fuck out of it. Two weeks later, I was standing in front of 50 people, telling them about the Bureau’s plans. The PBIP organizer spoke about Pelican Bay and the state of supermax prisons. I ended the meeting by focusing on the SMUD and how we had the opportunity to stop this thing before it started. Then I collected signatures.

I paired the petition with five pages of questions, prepared for the Bureau by me and PBIP. PBIP helping with the questions was like sending Mariano Rivera in to close a baseball game. Soon after the Bureau got the letter and questions from SMUD, Rancho Seco was dropped from the site list. So, what happened?

Forget the personalities; they don’t matter. What matters is this:

One person who read a disturbing story buried in the local paper thought, “This can’t happen” and decided to do something about it – albeit with prompting from a friend.

Two people identified openings and came up with a strategy. The two opening we saw were: SMUD and PBIP. SMUD has the land that the Bureau needed. SMUD is a democratic institution with a history of responding positively to public pressure. We knew someone inside SMUD. We knew PBIP and could pump them for information.

We thought about what we wanted to do, what we could do, and the resources we had available. Talk to people, not just experts on prisons but those who know how to work those in power. Identify the problem. Figure out solutions. Identify talents and resources, deficits and obstacles. Form a strategy. All of this was as deliberate as “I want A so I need to do B and then C…”

Organize a meeting. Book a meeting hall. Find speakers. Advertise. Show up. Talk. Get signatures. Get questions. Assemble everything and give it to Rancho Seco’s gatekeepers, who pass it on to our adversaries.

The Bureau sees that some Sacramentans oppose the Rancho Seco supermax at the very beginning of their prison placement process, not when the project was well under way but when it was little more than a wish-list of sites. They read five pages of exacting questions, ones that show a level of activist knowledge that is dangerous to the Bureau. They see that SMUD is willing to be a go-between for prisoners’ rights activists. Ultimately, the Bureau sees a huge fight if they try to push forward with a Rancho Seco supermax, so they give up. They drop Sacramento from the list and find another place for their hellhole (ADX Florence in Colorado).

Now I was part of this fight and what I brought to it that was unique – but not remarkable - was an interest in prisoners’ rights and my relationship with the SMUD board member. My interest set off alarms when I read about the supermax list. My relationship gave me a person to ask what to do. Anyone could have had that interest. Anyone could have approached that SMUD board member and he would have told them the same thing: Organize, do the work, and give me something that I can use.

I was a conduit, that is it. You could have been a conduit if you were in the right place at the right time. You could have notched that win if you did what you were advised to do. That’s not false modesty. That is the truth. “But you saw this coming before anyone else did!” Eh, I don’t know.

I was very well informed about prisons from a prisoners’ rights point of view. I recognized that there is a lot of bad in the word supermax. I saw Rancho Seco and Sacramento in the same article that had the supermax list. I was well-informed, I made simple connections, I was disturbed by what I read, and I decided to do something. If anything was “special” in all that, its that I decided to act instead of just complain.

And that’s all there is to this stuff. It’s acting to change what you don’t like. It’s informing yourself, talking to people, and strategizing. Its believing that you can change things and that even small victories and wins that few know about (then or now – like this supermax fight) are significant and important wins. Its knowing that these small wins build on each other and become much stronger collectively than one big win.

We don’t have to be Martin Luther King the Myth when we can be the Real Martin Luther King. With the Mythical King, we focus on Selma, the March on Washington, and a few “big” speeches, and we make them the essence of the man. We ignore or never learn the real history.

The real MLK was involved in hundreds of small victories and thousands of protests that seemed to result in defeat. The real MLK sat at tables with many people, thousands of times, talking things through and coming up with plans to act, meetings that often seems like a waste of time. The real MLK participated in protests and marches that were shut down by the cops and racists before they began. As long as people – including the man himself – were willing to fight for change, MLK was there to help. He understood that working for change is never static, its never insignificant, and it never stops. No action against American apartheid was too small for MLK to notice, support, or engage in. Every action and every person working for change was important, just as important as the March, just as important as MLK.

The real Martin Luther King, being a real person, used real person talents and skills to do real people things. Yes, the March on Washington was big, historic, impressive, mind-blowing, etc. but it was also “real people.” Forget how many people attended: March organizers did many of the things me and my Adhoc pals did to protest the first Gulf War – all the grunt work like permit pulling, dealing with the cops, printing flyers, renting port-a-potties, providing security, booking speakers, finding sound equipment, getting people to the stage on time, etc.

Yes, yes, yes, Martin Luther King is a very special human being, a true American hero. The March on Washington is a very special historic event, one of the highs of American history. And MLK is human, and the March was organized by humans. Right place, right time, right resources, different conditions, yeah, I really believe that we can do the same (or similar things). We also can do the many small things that can lead to big things but are just as important (or more so) as our heroes and the grand events that they are associated with.

If I can do this, you can do this, and we can do this.