Authors: Bill Ayers
We all experienced the corrosive and pervasive ideology of “American exceptionalism”—the concept that the United States was not simply a nation among nations like every other but rather the world’s last remaining superpower, the greatest country on earth, and the one “indispensable nation,” in Madeline Albright’s deathless phrase. No one outside our borders could be expected to buy the hype for a minute, but American exceptionalism was sold relentlessly to Americans as our common-sense birthright: we would never be subject to the rules and laws and standards that apply to others, because we were exceptional! The blinding illusion erased any resemblances between similar sets of facts: we condemned torture, assassinations, invasion and occupation, acts of terrorism, the use of hostages, forced labor, the bombing of civilians, mass deportations, and on and on, if they were the work of “bad guys,” while we applauded and condoned those same outrages and atrocities if they were the actions of “our” side—they were now proclaimed necessary operations, and their ethical merits were certified by a bipartisan nationalist-patriot chorus. A point of unity of our small activist formation was to try to act against the orthodoxy of American exceptionalism—the monkey business in our own minds as well as the troubles in the wider world—against our own blind spots and our own ignorance, and we would explore ways to advance authentic dialogue and real reflection.
We knew we couldn’t simply will a political or popular social justice movement into being based on the boldness of our actions or the clarity and the rightness of our cause, but we couldn’t sit idly by waiting for a movement to be delivered “overnight express” in a brightly wrapped package, either. So our eclectic gaggle, now calling ourselves A Movement Reimagining Change (ARC), met frequently to discuss books, ideas, and plans, and now to imagine how to link youth with grassroots struggles so that whatever young people chose to do around the elections would be grounded in something deeper.
Harish Patel, a twenty-three-year-old student at UIC, was ARC’s primary on-the-ground organizer. Wiry and wired, Harish was a marvel of energy and good cheer with the wisdom to admit gaps and needs and the courage to ask question after question. He was a well-known city-wide youth organizer working against the school-to-prison pipeline and the criminalization of youth and mobilizing for better schools and immigrant rights. He exuded self-reliance and confidence, and he knew how to get started, how to keep at it, how to solve problems and improvise on the move. His father had been murdered in India when Harish was just fourteen years old. He was thrust virtually alone into a new life in America, raising himself with little assistance or material resources, and he championed the idea that any justice movement must be a “love movement”—love and beauty scratched out of the ugly concrete and the muck and mud of the world as it is, love powered by anger and hope, passion and energy, thought and feeling, initiative and courage. His enthusiasm was entirely winning for me, and seemingly for everyone in all directions.
Harish was charged with connecting our wondrously weird and far-flung collective of students, teachers, academics, militants, and organizers who were engaged in a huge range of progressive campaigns, projects, drives, interventions, and everyday actions. That was a humongous job in itself, but there was more. Harish was the point person in creating events that pulled together and joined up smaller efforts, finding and building links, creating a common vocabulary, a language of love and solidarity. ARC was our effort to prepare the ground so that when hope and history once again rhymed, the movement would be on the move.
James Thindwa, the lead organizer for Jobs with Justice, was another ARC leader. Tall and handsome with a gorgeous smile and a generous spirit, James had the energy, the magic touch, and the skill set of a successful organizer: the capacity to listen to everyone, the ability to write an op-ed or give an inspiring speech at a rally, the talent to keep a thousand balls in the air at once, and the deep belief that fundamental social change will only come from the self-activity of the “extraordinary ordinary people.” James had come to the United States from Rhodesia/Zimbabwe a couple of decades before to attend Berea College in Kentucky, and the anticolonial struggle of his homeland lived deep within him—“activism is in my DNA,” he said. For James, community and labor organizing was a calling and an obvious vehicle for justice. All of us mobilized to support James’s living wage campaign and rallied at his side when workers occupied Chicago’s Republic Windows and Doors factory—we drew a line in the snow—and then moved on to picket Bank of America chanting, “You got bailed out, we got sold out!”
Barbara Ransby, the brilliant historian, exhorted us to develop analysis in order to power a popular movement, as well as a moral vision of an alternative to war and empire, materialism and environmental catastrophe, white supremacy, racism, and poverty. “We need a church of the Left,” she would say with a smile, knowing that everyone saw her as an open atheist who insisted that organized religion consistently dropped the ball when it came to ethical action. Her partner, Peter Sporn, a professor of medicine active in the Arab-Jewish Partnership, reminded us to keep Palestinian rights in our consciousness and explicitly in our public advocacy. And Alice Kim, a death penalty abolitionist, pushed us to see mass incarceration as essentially linked to militarism and war and economic crisis.
Whenever our movable feast landed at Alice Kim’s for potluck or picnic or backyard barbeque, her little dog Mazy—her “true love”—took center stage, racing from person to person, begging for snacks, performing, cuddling, and chilling out. Even the most unlikely dog-people had to admit she was a sweetie and give up a little Maz-love.
It was at Alice’s that we gathered with the remarkable mothers of men on Death Row to celebrate birthdays and mobilize support; it was at Alice’s that we got to know several of the exonerated prisoners—Ronnie Kitchens, Darby Tillis, and Mark Clements; and it was at Alice’s where we gathered one night with Martina Correa, the crusading sister of Troy Davis, the internationally known Death Row inmate in Georgia, to talk with Troy when he called Martina’s cell phone and she put him on speaker, and there he was: Live from Death Row! Several of the men spoke to him with an intimacy that was beyond the rest of us, and Darby pulled out his guitar and sang two songs to Troy. Our young spoken-word artist and friend FM Supreme spit a poem written for him with her partner Deja, and Troy spit a poem right back at them. We hugged, we prayed, we vowed to keep fighting for Troy’s life, which we did, even though a few years later the State of Georgia had its way and murdered him anyway.
When Alice applied for a special fellowship for organizers, Ransby and I wrote letters of support, and so did one of the exonerated Death Row inmates. My letter was formal and long, typed on letterhead and designed to impress, but when I saw his down-to-earth letter in her packet I had a new understanding of what grace was. If it hadn’t been for Alice Kim, he said, I’d be dead today, murdered by the State of Illinois. “This may not get you the fellowship you’re applying for,” I told Alice, but it will get you into heaven. “After decades of struggle and defeat and small victories, one letter like that puts an activist life in perspective.”
Bernardine and I had worked for months with the coalition to greet the combined NATO and G-8 meetings in Chicago with massive demonstrations and militant resistance focused on opposition to preemptive war and permanent war, nuclear proliferation and threat, the militarization of societies through an unaccountable and shadowy group with a gigantic budget and a great PR front. The coalition was broad and welcoming and included civil rights groups and labor unions, socialists and anarchists, Black Bloc and the Band of Sisters, peace people and vets against the wars, and in every meeting the folks we felt closest to on issue after issue were the vets and the pacifists.
Bernardine attended every planning meeting, fighting to stay engaged and alert (and awake) through the interminable discussions of process, always trying to focus on the substance of why we opposed NATO and the need to reach out and organize more people, and even becoming fond of several of the radicals in spite of the fact that most were operating out of disciplined caucuses that had clearly called some invisible and less generous pre-meetings where the important business had already been conducted, and were now prepared to wait out the less conscious mortals in the room. We’d done that sectarian shit so very long ago, drank the live virus and survived, and now she and I were allergic to the whole thing, but still she persevered and hung in there till the bitter end. We’d worked for years with the vets—men and women, mostly young, of every race, creed, and background—who would lead the march against NATO and everything it stood for, and we remained in awe of their courage and their moral clarity in opposing the US aggression and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere. The biggest surprise for us was Sister Kathleen of the 8th Day Center for Justice, a tiny, soft-spoken, white-haired nun who sometimes wore shout-y T-shirts: LIVE OUT LOUD! REVEL IN REVOLUTION!
Bernardine and I signed up with Sister Kathleen to be “Peace Guides,” a gentler name for what we used to call demonstration marshals, folks prepared to keep order on the route, buffer demonstrators from counterdemonstrators or the police forces if necessary, and maintain the integrity of the march. We attended a three-hour training that she and her colleagues led in a church basement a few weeks before the scheduled action. I’d been through workshops on nonviolent activism and trainings on peaceful resistance dozens of times over forty years, and I knew the drills and protocols pretty well: keep your hands down and don’t raise your voice, listen actively, look people in the eye, anticipate problems, and set a tone of calm seriousness and respectful but determined dissent. And have fun! I knew how to de-escalate the rhetoric and how to go limp, how to breathe deeply and administer first aid while awaiting the medics, and how to summon the Lawyer’s Guild observers wearing their particularly garish but unmistakable bright-green baseball caps.
Kathleen gave us a set of scenarios to role-play—someone on the march is provoking people to break away to charge the police lines, or the police come charging through our lines attacking us—and we debriefed our choices and decisions thoroughly. The high point for me was when Kathleen demonstrated typical techniques for assisting and creating a calm space of solidarity around someone singled out for attack by the police or the crowd—a noisy anarchist, say, wearing the signature black mask, or an Arab man in a keffiyeh, or anyone for any reason. She said, “Now of course I’m an old white nun, so I’m unlikely to be targeted on the street by anyone.” She paused a couple of beats for maximum comedic effect, and added in the voice of a woman surprised by a sudden revelation, “Oh, unless of course the Vatican shows up—then I’ll be targeted for sure, and I’m counting on all of you to know what to do!”
On the march itself, Bernardine and I kept drifting over to the Black Bloc because we liked their militancy, and we thought they had the most unifying slogan: “Shit’s Fucked Up! Shit’s Fucked Up!” Who could quarrel with that? As our friends from the Vets for Peace completed their dignified and moving ceremony, symbolically throwing their war medals back at the commanders who had made them fight and presenting an American flag to the mother of a vet from their group who had recently taken his own life, the bloc began to chant, “Burn that fucking flag!” Bernardine had been a perfect Peace Guide till then, but she lost it with the bloc and flew into the middle of their circle to shut them up: “Don’t you tell them what to do! Burn your own fucking flag, but show some respect for these young people.” I tried to remind her that we were to keep our voices low and avoid conflict, but to no avail.
We’d lived for decades in a wildly diverse Chicago neighborhood. The film director and Second City veteran Mike Nichols once famously called Hyde Park the most racially integrated neighborhood in the city; then he paused and added a little meanly (but not entirely inaccurately), Black and white, shoulder to shoulder against the poor. Our kids played for years in the dazzling Hyde Park–Kenwood Little League, led by a dynamic core of leaders and coaches, multiracial women and men, and whenever our teams traveled beyond the community borders they were regarded as a marvel—in white parts of town we were seen as a Black team, and in the Black neighborhoods we seemed to be awfully white. People saw whatever they saw through the powerful lens of race, but for parents and kids alike it was an unmistakable point of pride—this was the world we wanted to live in, beyond the world as such.
In spite of one stolen car and three break-ins over the years, I’d always thought that our street was the safest in the city. Minister Louis Farrakhan, of course, lived across the park, and the Fruit of Islam with their standard uniform of dark suits, white shirts, cute little bow ties, and close-cropped hair were an intense and ubiquitous presence. I imagined the FBI and Chicago police were keeping tabs on the minister and his Fruit, as well as on Jesse Jackson, a couple blocks further on. Mayor Harold Washington had lived a couple blocks south, Tim and Zenobia Black and Carole Mosley Braun were nearby, and a rogues’ gallery of Chicago politicians and troublemakers was in easy reach. When Barack Obama became Senator Obama and, soon after that, presidential candidate Obama, that virtual Green Zone descended upon us all.
Every time I made the claim of city safety to anyone, Bernardine would remind me that our first Thanksgiving in the house was interrupted by a frantic couple ringing our doorbell having just been held up by a couple of teenagers right out front. My mother became faint at the sight of a bloody nose, and my brother Juan reassured her: “Mom, it’s just the Hyde Park equivalent of your suburban Welcome Wagon.” Furthermore, Bernardine added, “If you’re ever mugged, the Chicago cops, the university police, the FBI and CIA, the Secret Service, and the Fruit might all watch from a safe distance and never lift a finger—they might blow you a collective kiss good-bye, happy to see you go.” “No, no, not the Fruit,” I would say, “the Fruit always nod at me politely when I bike past them with my friendly wave. The Fruit are my neighbors and my brothers.” “In your dreams,” she would say.