Author: Mary Beth Jarrad

By Dave Backer, author of As Public as Possible

Organizers in New York City have been calling for an elected school board, and Zohran Mamdani, the newly elected Mayor, announced his support for the idea during his campaign. Activists say that opening the body up to elections would be more democratic and thus make it more accountable. The right and center are pushing back.

Over the last few years, big cities like Chicago have considered and made the switch from appointed to elected boards. In Montclair, NJ voters overwhelmingly chose to have an elected school board a few years ago. It’s a controversial topic, lots of people have lots of feelings about it—why does it strike such a chord?

Most school boards in the country today are elected, but this hasn’t always been the case. Appointed school boards are a governance strategy that takes education policy power away from groups like teachers unions and facilitates a transition to non-profit and for-profit firms. Mayoral control in the most recent era, starting with Boston in 1992, was part of the larger effort to break up networks of influence that had formed during the 1940-1970 period. Of course, there’s a risk of moneyed interests winning school board elections, but there’s also the possibility of labor fighting back even harder. Democratic socialists were recently elected to school boards in Hamden, Connecticut, for instance, and democratic socialists–not to mention other varieties of leftists–have held school board positions throughout US history.

Over the years, we can see the push-pull of this issue. Mayors were very involved in education in the early 20th century, as the Gilded Age saw wealthy elites wresting power over education away from more community-based and worker-led organizations as industrialization and urbanization took hold.

There’s a simple way to understand this dynamic: there’s a class struggle between capital and labor when it comes to school boards. Whereas elected school boards have been associated with labor (majoritarian, community-oriented, ‘machine politics’), appointed and mayoral-control gets associated with capital (elites, business leaders, philanthropists, ‘reform’).

A report published in 2013, by the Center for American Progress and the Broad Foundation, is a case in point. Here you have arch-neoliberal organizations arguing for mayoral control. It’s conservatives and neoliberals who want to take control of the city’s school governance. Mayors in New Jersey gunning for appointed boards in the 1990s immediately pointed to teachers’ unions having too much influence, for example.

Neoliberal education reformers are on their heels now. After several decades of power, what do they have to show for their efforts in urban education? Confusion, frustration, and corruption. Even if you’re pro-market reform, you’re tired of what’s been happening. The energy is swinging left on this question as we see in Chicago and Montclair, and now New York City.

The thing is, everyone can use a school board election to advance their own goals. If progressives and socialists organized it, the school board could also reflect their tendencies. So, part of making sure that the board doesn’t get captured by conservatives and neoliberals is organizing (which worked in Long Island and Connecticut).

Research indicates that having an elected vs. appointed board of education doesn’t have an impact on educational outcomes.  More troublingly, these reviews show there’s no real increase in accountability, either.  The data point that does seem to matter is district size.  This makes sense: smaller districts mean more accessibility to leadership and fewer students to take care of. As an example, the Twin Cities have four school districts, and it’s one of the most cooperative regions in the country in terms of resources. But that decision should be made by a body elected by the people it’s meant to serve.

What we see from history is that school board elections are better for the diverse working class because it makes decision-makers accountable to constituencies, although what really matters in terms of outcomes is responsiveness and decentralization.

Luckily, New York City’s is a district of districts. The city has upwards of 35 unique school districts, each with its own superintendent and school board equivalent (known as community education councils). The structures for more community control are in place the city, the question is whether Mayor Mamdani’s administration will return power to these communities and open up public education to the public itself.

By Dave Kamper, author of Who’s Got the Power?

In Milwaukee, in 1886, just a day after the infamous Haymarket Bombing in Chicago, a group of workers and their families, demanding the eight-hour day, marched on the Milwaukee Iron Company. The state militia, directed by the Wisconsin’s Governor, Jeremiah Rusj, opened fire and killed at least seven. None of the militia were charged with a crime, and Governor Rusk was made Secretary of Agriculture a few years later.

In 1914, Colorado National Guardsmen, who were being paid by John D. Rockefeller, opened fire on a tent city of striking miners in Ludlow, killing13 women and children who burned to death while they hid in pits dug underneath tents that had been set on fire. None of the Guardsmen were ever indicted or convicted of a crime. Rockefeller died peacefully in his bed twenty-three years later.

In 1937, Chicago police opened fire on unarmed steelworkers and their families marching peacefully on Memorial Day. Ten died. No one was ever prosecuted.

You might look at those examples and conclude they are an example of the Bad Old Days, and that America is long past that. We’re not. While outright massacres in the US are now few and far between, breaking labor law without consequence is alive and well. It’s no surprise that the billionaires, like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, have long records of violating labor laws. They spend millions to defend themselves when they illegally fire workers for organizing, and millions more filing lawsuit after lawsuit challenging the basic tenets of American labor law.

No example is more ironic than that of Howard Schultz, former CEO of Starbucks. Starbucks has been found to be in violation of labor law literally hundreds of times as it fights off unionizing baristas, whose courage and strategic skill have made them heroes to workers everywhere. It’s not just that Starbucks has yet to face any serious legal consequences for its actions;  it’s also that, as recently as just a few years ago, Schultz was considered such a friend of the supposedly pro-worker Democrats that he reportedly was Hillary Clinton’s pick to be Secretary of Labor had she won in 2016.

At least, Starbucks claims that it hasn’t broken the law – there’s a tiny amount of comfort in the company’s showing a fig leaf of shame. But oftentimes, capitalists don’t even pretend to care about such niceties.

In 1978, a management-side lawyer named Leonard Scott handwrote a memo to clients on how companies should respond to union drives. On the bottom of the first page, he jotted out a little timeline of a union campaign. Right before “Petition filed” in the timeline, he wrote, with a little arrow pointing to where it should go: “Violate the law here.”

Fans of HBO’s The Wire know that you don’t take notes on criminal conspiracies, but here was a sitting member of the bar, on paper, openly advising a client to violate the law, and so unconcerned about the consequences of that unethical advice that he later included the memo in the papers he donated to the Cornell University archives.

When you look, therefore, at the lawlessness of the Trump administration, remind yourself that it’s nothing new.

The second Trump administration, much more so than the first, has a steadfast contempt for the rule of law. It’s not just that the administration skirts the rules or plays on the margins of the law. It outright defies it, openly and proudly, and dares us all to try to stop them.  What would be new is if, once (if) we manage to put this nightmare behind us, the bullies and billionaires who showed such disregard for the rule of law were held to account for it.

By Erik Loomis, author of Organizing America

Anyone reading this site knows how messed up America is today. Most of us also know something about our organizing past. We know that great leaders of the past created amazing social movements that institutionalized long-lasting change.

But what if we learn the wrong lessons from our activist past? When I talk to my students and teach them about this history, they often find themselves really depressed about the present. The young are supposed to be the ones who think change is going to come, but that has not been my experience as a professor in the last several years. Instead, I find myself giving them pep talks, showing them more details about how people make change, and trying to lead them to understand how they can make the change they want in their own lives.

Too often, we teach our history as one filled with heroes. People like that—from valorizing the so-called Founding Fathers to the rise of superhero culture, there’s something really appealing about the hero in society. People on the left have created their own heroes—Martin Luther King. Rosa Parks. Malcolm X. Harriet Tubman. Cesar Chavez.

But does creating a Mt. Rushmore of Social Change help our students understand how to organize and fight for justice in the present? I don’t think it does. People see the world today and they wonder where our heroes are. Why don’t we have a Martin or Rosa or Malcolm today? My students know plenty about these legends. It does not help them because they don’t know the full story.

The problem with creating heroes is that these were not perfect people. In fact, they screwed up all the time. Campaigns failed. Personal beefs got in the way of organizing. They made tactical errors. They had blind spots in their lives that meant they did not always see how they personally oppressed others. At the same time, for people who are doing the hard work of social change themselves, it’s easy to believe that they themselves need to be perfect people. This contributes to losing sympathy with the complexities of people in our lives and movements, demanding perfection in their positions instead of helping people to grow. In other words, we call them out instead of call them in.

It’s no wonder that these are problems when we don’t learn the right lessons from our organizing history. Organizing is messy. But, examining actual organizers in all their complexity helps provide greater understanding of how movements really developed.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was an amazing young woman who became known as “The Rebel Girl” due to her passionate speeches as a teenager in support of the worker struggle. She rose to become perhaps the Industrial Workers of the World’s most famous organizer in the early 1910s. But she lived a life of struggle of her own. She was kicked out of the IWW after a failed campaign led to some workers being sentenced to prison, became a defender of free speech, and then disappeared from the public for a decade, being dominated by a friend and possible romantic partner. She became a communist later in life, and defended Stalin until the day she died. Flynn was a complicated person. Her fight for justice took her places that do not always align with contemporary left-liberal values. But future activists will almost certainly look at the early twenty-first century left with the same skepticism. What we can take from Flynn’s example is her righteous struggle and deep-seated beliefs that led her to a lifetime of amazing action.

Let’s think about Eugene Debs as well. Today, many of us see Debs as a hero. That’s for good reason. But Debs was also complicated.  The early Debs had many positions that would get him canceled today. He was a racist in his early years. In fact. he loved telling racist jokes for much of his life. He tolerated whites-only unionism even during the Pullman strike. He urged his fellow railroad unionists to not support the Great Railroad Strike in 1877 and criticized the anarchists at the Haymarket bombing in 1886 using the same language as the capitalists who wanted them executed. But Debs grew. He realized the error of his ways. He developed new ideas of industrial unionism. He began to urge solidarity between the races and became an anti-racist later in his life. He wasn’t born the great man that many of the left see him as today. He spent a lifetime growing to become that.

Too often today, we demand perfection of our activists and we do not give them a chance to grow. Organizers also need to be organized. Lots of people influenced Debs over his life and made him rethink those positions. Rather than call people out for their regressive positions today, let’s find common ground, call them in, and work with them to create more progressive positions. We might learn a lot from them too, for none of us are anything like a perfect person.

As we seek to organize in our horrible present, remember that we are all flawed humans. When we organize, we build movements that include a diversity of people, from different backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas. Solidarity requires working with and for people who might not think as you do. That was true in the past and it is true in the present.

Telling real stories of the past complicates narratives. It doesn’t lead to simple solutions. But it does help us realize where we are on the path to justice. Only with that future path clear for us, armed with the tools of our real past, can we organize the number of people we will need to fight fascism in the U.S. and globally. We all have a part to play. Reading histories of organizers might not seem like the first step, but without understanding our history, we will be lost when the path gets rocky, as it inevitably will.

By Stefan M. Bradley, author of If We Don’t Get It

At this time of intense state repression and government overreach, we have much to learn from the young leaders of the Ferguson Uprising of 2014-2015.  Without formal political experience, those bold organizers and activists forced a spotlight on policing and injustice in Black and brown communities.  The body-snatching, gas-lighting, blame, and brutality of militarized police are recognizable to those who were there for the Uprising.  Like those scooped up by masked ICE agents toting semiautomatic weapons, the most powerless in Ferguson, meaning those without firearms and with hands in the air, became targets of the state.  Optically, the residents of the sleepy suburban city just outside of St. Louis did not stand a chance.  That was until they manifested the most effective weapon against governmental imposition:  people power.

On August 9, 2014, a young American perished at the hands of law enforcement, igniting an unexpected year-long uprising.  Historically, August has always been a significant month in terms of Black rebellion. In the sweltering heat of August, the nation has been reminded that when justice is denied, the fires of reform and resistance burn hottest. The Haitian Revolution started in August 1791, and it led to the creation of the first Black republic in the western hemisphere.  Nat Turner led a revolt in August 1831 continued the tradition of putting slaveholders and supporters of the peculiar institution on notice that enslaved people were not satisfied in bondage. Black Chicagoans took to the streets in 1919 in protest of the drowning death of 17-year-old Eugene Williams, whom white segregationists stoned in the water at a beach near 29th Street.  In 1943, a white police officer in Harlem shot a Black soldier who had attempted to protect a Black woman from the police who were aggressively restraining her. Later, in the midst of WWII, Black Harlemites rebelled in such a way that the mayor called on the U.S. Army to quell the uprising, which listed six people dead and 500 arrested.

Mamie Till, in August 1955, made the unlikely decision to allow pictures of her son, Emmett Till, whom two white vigilantes mutilated after the boy allegedly flirted with a white woman in their family, to circulate widely.  To show what racism did to her “Beau,” Mamie Till released to the universe the gruesome image of her boy’s body that the white vigilantes tortured.  It set the civilized world ablaze.

On August 28, the same date white racism killed Till, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1963, gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Justice.  Two years later, Black people in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, pushed back against the police who they observed brutalize 21-year-old Marquette Frye and his mother after a traffic stop.  This August marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Watts Uprising.

America’s solution to Black rebellion was incarceration.

On August 7, 1971, in a Marin County (California) courthouse, Jonathan Jackson led an effort to free members of the Black Guerilla Family,.  In the altercation, Jonathan Jackson took the judge, attorney general, and three jurors hostage.  As he fled with the hostages, police killed him on the scene.  Two weeks later, Jonathan Jackson’s revolutionary brother, George Jackson, was in San Quentin penitentiary facing murder charge for the killing of a prison guard.  George Jackson, on the way to his cell, produced a pistol, took a guard hostage, and initiated a rebellion in which other inmates participated.  Three white guards were killed, along with two white inmates; another three guards survived, sustaining gunshot and stab wounds.  George Jackson was killed in the prison yard.  Jackson, in his will, stipulated the royalties from the books he had written be donated to the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.

High school graduate Michael Brown, Jr. of Ferguson, Missouri may not have known the history of Black rebellion in the month of August, but he and his peers had certainly heard what happened to Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis in 2012, when they did not comply with white vigilantes.  Brown lived in a city and country where law enforcement focused heavily on submission and compliance when it came to Black people.

On August 9, after taking a box of cigarillos and pushing past an employee of a local convenience store, Brown found himself in one of the most fateful struggles of the new millennium.  Darren Wilson, a white Ferguson police officer, confronted the teenager in the street, and a physical altercation ensued, with Wilson shooting the unarmed Brown dead in proximity of his mother’s apartment.  The community response to the death of Brown altered the history of St. Louis and situated Brown and Ferguson squarely in the legacy of what radicals know as Black August.

The moment called for leadership, and the unlikeliest of patriots stepped into their roles as rescuers of democracy.  They cursed, sagged their pants, sported neck tattoos, wore colored dreadlocks, smelled of weed, and did not need anyone to tell them the brutal response they met was wrong  Some were homeless, some queer, others misunderstood, but all were believers that the U.S. Constitution applied to them.  They understood that, as long as they operated in fear, the state could bully them, and so they reframed their approach, taking to the streets.  They chanted: “If we don’t get it, shut it down!”  The “it” was the highway, mall, airport, theatre, and the “whole damn system,” which they described as “guilty as hell.”  Without fear and concern about the feelings of those oppressing them, these non-traditional leaders consolidated power with members of the working class and young professionals, as well as those organizers who had established deep roots in the community.

Their campaign was effective.  They motivated the Department of Justice to investigate the Ferguson Police Department.  That resulted in the city’s consent decree for the reform of biased patterns and practices.  Additionally, democracy in Ferguson and St. Louis expanded to include higher numbers of elected Black officials, some coming from the ranks of Uprising organizers.  It manifested in the city’s revision of traffic fining systems and the employment of higher numbers of Black law enforcement officers.  Area institutions and companies also invested capital into “urban” programs in ways they had not in the past.

The lessons that we can learn from the Ferguson Uprising and the Black rescuers of democracy are easy to write but difficult to execute. First, psychologically, we must value the people above all else, and that includes systems and policies.  Second, the leaders of the Uprising taught us that we have to be willing to put our physical bodies on the line to protect one another from a heavily armed and overbearing opponent.  Young organizers showed that commitment to the cause, resilience in the struggle, and innovation in accessing resources are recipes for success in a battle against empire.  Ferguson taught that we must allow the most vulnerable to lead and organize.  When they are safe and properly cared for, everyone else will thrive as well.

Finally, and perhaps most important, we learn from the freedom fighters of Ferguson that there will be consequences for asserting the rights of Black and marginalized people.  There are those who have died mysterious deaths after their work in Ferguson and some are still incarcerated.  Then, of course, there is the psychological trauma associated with constant struggle.  Victory does not come without scars. Democratic institutions will not survive authoritarian impulses without active, informed, and collective resistance.  As contemporary policies, from voting restrictions to expanded surveillance and punitive policing, threaten the rights of marginalized communities, engaged scholarship and public action is imperative.  We must translate the insights of Ferguson into strategies that challenge inequity in schools, courts, legislatures, and the streets.  If we do not, the unfinished project of American democracy will necessarily crumble.