Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up. That’s what Jessie de la Cruz meant when she said, “I feel there’s gonna be a change, but we’re the ones gonna do it, not the government. With us, there’s a saying, ‘La esperanza muere última. Hope dies last.’ You can’t lose hope. If you lose hope, you lose everything.”
She, a retired farm worker, was recounting the days before Cesar Chavez and his stoop-labor colleagues founded the United Farm Workers (UFW). It was a metaphor for much of the twentieth century.
As we enter the new millennium, hope appears to be an American attribute that has vanished for many, no matter what their class or condition in life. The official word has never been more arrogantly imposed. Passivity, in the face of such a bold, unabashed show of power from above, appears to be the order of the day. But it ain’t necessarily so.
Letters to the editors of even our more conservative papers indicate something else, something that does not make the six o’clock news: a stirring show of discontent in the fields, a growing disbelief in the official word.
This is not a new story. It is a strain that has run through the century past, though not as in extremis as in this one… There was always pressure from below: from beleaguered and embattled farmers coming out of the woods; from big-city neighborhood alliances, defying evicting bailiffs; from a threatened march on Washington by black trade unionists, leading to the passage of the Fair Employment Practices Act; and even from some forgotten man who swung from a chandelier during a Waldorf-Astoria dinner of baffled industrialists, shouting “Social security!” It was the very first time I had ever heard that phrase. Naturally, he was subjected to psychiatric care. Of course, that loner didn’t cause social security to come to be, but he did help it along. At least I knew what it meant when, during the New Deal, it came to pass.
These troublemakers were, by definition, activists (active: 1. In action, moving. 2. Causing or initiating change. 3. Engaging, contributing, participating). They felt that what they did counted and that they themselves counted…
In the following pages are portraits of the inheritors of the legacy of those past. They range in age from nonagenarians to young ones in their twenties. Activism need not be a profession in itself, as it is in many cases here. It can be in the writing of a letter to the editor or to your congressperson; it can be in taking part in a local action or a national one or, for that matter, a worldwide one; it can be in attending a rally or marching in a parade; it can be in any form, freely expressing your grievance or your hope….
In all epochs, there were at first doubts and the fear of stepping forth and speaking out, but the attribute that spurred the warriors on was hope. And the act. Seldom was there a despair or a sense of hopelessness. Some of those on the sidelines, the spectators, feeling helpless and impotent, had by the very nature of the passionate act of others become imbued with hope themselves.
Today, from unexpected sources, comes a growing challenge to the official word. Not only among peace advocates, the silent as well as the outspoken, or among environmentalists, or among feminists, but also among small investors cheated by corporate Enronism, as well as those involved in other causes too numerous to recount. It may not be the stuff that makes a TV sound bite, but it’s the stuff of neighborhood. It’s the stuff set off by those who stepped forth and made the word activist a common noun in our vocabulary; a new vocation…
Activists have always battled the odds. But it’s not a matter of Sisyphus rolling that stone up the hill. It’s not Beckett’s blind Pozzo staggering on. It’s more like a legion of Davids, with all sorts of slingshots. It’s not one slingshot that will do it. Nor will it happen at once. It’s a long haul. It’s step by step. As Mahalia Jackson sang out, “We’re on our way”–not to Canaanland, perhaps, but to the world as a better place than it has been before.
Elaine Jones
She is the director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She has an air of ebullience and bonhomie that makes you feel immediately “at home.”
I’m an activist, from Norfolk, Virginia, one of three children, the middle child. Older brother, younger sister. My father was a Pullman porter, a member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first black trade union. The porters sometimes would come off the runs and sit around my kitchen table, talking about issues. This was back in the fifties. My father got to travel. He got railroad passes to take his three kids to Chicago. That was our first trip out of Virginia. When you’re traveling, you have to plan everything, especially if you were black in America. This is 1951, ‘52. He takes us to the YMCA, because he thinks we can sleep there. A woman at the desk looks at us, three little kids and my father, and says, “We don’t have any rooms,” without even checking the books! Daddy was crestfallen. He had it all figured out; he knew the Y would take us. So he ended up calling one of his Pullman car buddies, who put us up. I knew I wanted to be a lawyer then.
My mother was a schoolteacher, my father was a country boy who came up out of the south side of Virginia. My mother had come down from the north; she was from New Jersey. So the Yankee and the southerner met. My mother had a college degree. My father was self-taught. My mother’s father was a big minister in Norfolk. When he died, they closed the schools.
I knew things were not as they should be. Black people were relegated to the back door, and I had a problem with that. I saw the white and colored water fountains. I would get on a crosstown bus and we had to sit in the back, all of that. I couldn’t understand why. Meanwhile, I had self-esteem from my parents. They made me think I could do anything. My father was the cook in the family. He could really cook. At that kitchen table we talked about the world, and we would have to defend ourselves. Our parents would throw out something at one of us, and all of us would jump on that one for that evening. I always wanted to be a lawyer. I was about eight. First, I would see Perry Mason and other lawyers on television using the court to right societal wrongs. The lawyer riding in on the white horse, changing the world. [Laughs]
People would say, “What do you want to be?” “I want to be a lawyer because I can change some of these things through the law.” As I got older, I learned more about Thurgood Marshall. My high school teacher was one of his plaintiffs in the teacher equalization case. When he came to the South in his thirties, Thurgood tried to equalize salaries. My high school chemistry teacher, in the fifties, had been one of his clients. She told us about him in chemistry class.
I ended up in court one day. I was in junior high school. I had a toothache, and I went to the dentist with no permission from my parents. He did full-mouth X rays and fixed my teeth. He sent a huge bill to my parents. A black dentist. My parents said, “We’re not gonna pay this! We did not give her permission to go, and you’ve done more work than was required.” So they came to the door and served the summons. My father said, “I have to go on the railroad. I’m not going to miss my money messing around with this.” My mother said, “I have to go to school. You, Elaine, have to go to court.” I was about thirteen.
I went to the court with a neighbor, an adult. The case is called up. The dentist is not there, but his lawyer is. So the judge asks me, “Did you go to the dentist?” And I said yes. He said, “Did you have the permission of your parents?” I didn’t know whether to say yes or no. If I said yes, that would make me look good. If I said no, it would make me look like a bad girl. I thought, Elaine, tell the truth. So I said no, I didn’t have their permission. And the judge turned to the lawyer for the dentist and said: “Case dismissed.” I won my first case! [Laughs] I won it, I won it. Oh, I knew that I was going to be a lawyer then, I knew it, yes!
I went to Howard for undergraduate school. My mother wrote me in college: Elaine, I know you want to be a lawyer one day, but I want you to take some education courses, so you have something to fall back on. You might have to teach. I said, “Mother, thank you, but…” I graduated, and guess who gave my commencement talk? Lyndon Johnson. It was a Great Society speech.
Stokely Carmichael was in my undergraduate class. My class was a cauldron at Howard. All the Freedom Riding going on. That’s why Lyndon came to Howard for the Great Society speech. On civil rights and social justice, LBJ was the right person at the right time. He knew more than Kennedy on that, he knew who he was dealing with. He understood those southern senators, he had spent time with them. Vietnam, that’s a whole different thing. So I finished Howard, and then I realized I didn’t know anything about any people other than black people. My world was too small.
I was twenty, coming out of college, and I don’t know anything about the bigger world. When I realized that, I went to the Peace Corps. I didn’t want to go to Africa, because I knew I would go to Africa later in life, on my own. I went to Turkey. For two years, I traveled all over. Turkey is situated so centrally. I spent a lot of time in a lot of the Arab countries. I was in Israel a few days before the Six-Day War. I went to Beirut when it was a place of beauty, in the mid-sixties. Different people, and nobody looking like me. I’m the only black person in my unit in the Peace Corps. Then I decided to go to law school. I applied to Howard and to the University of Virginia. Virginia hadn’t had black people, and I am from Virginia. I’ll be the first case, the first black woman. They had had three black men. If they don’t admit me, we’ll sue. It was in 1967. The university is in Charlottesville, a closed community. If I had gone to Charlottesville from Howard, I wouldn’t have made it, because it was intense. There were some real racial issues in Charlottesville. People mistook me for the cleaning lady when I arrived in law school. I was in the ladies’ room during my first week, and an older white lady came through. She saw me sitting on the sofa and she said, “I know you’re taking your rest break now, but when you finish, would you clean the refrigerator?” There were hardly any women in the law school. Seven women total, and me–the black one. We had one place to congregate, that was in the bathroom downstairs. We bonded over the years. Oh, yes. ‘Cause we got to know one another. We would meet in that ladies’ room. They were having a hard time, too, because of gender issues. I was having a hard time because of gender and race. I was double-duty. I tried to figure out, was whatever I was experiencing because of gender or race? At the end of the day I would listen to them, and when I heard their experience, I knew that was gender, and when I subtracted it, the rest was race.
I have some lifetime friends from UVA, a few, a handful. For the most part, they were Virginia gentlemen: civil, and kept their distance. But I wore my Afro, my Nehru jacket, and my sandals from Turkey as I walked through the school. It was an adjustment for everybody. Virginia took a chance, and I took a chance.
I finished law school in 1970 and I did very well. I was in the upper quarter of my class. For more than twenty years I didn’t go back to class reunions or anything. But two years ago, the University of Virginia called me back and gave me the highest honor: the Thomas Jefferson Medallion of Law at Monticello. Monticello!
Here’s the hope. I got a job offer on Wall Street. Nixon’s law firm! [Laughs] Woodrow, Guthrie, and Alexander. Wall Street was paying eighteen thousand dollars a year in 1970. They came to me my third year of law school. I accepted the offer ‘cause the money looked so good. But before I graduated, I said, “This is not what I want to do. I don’t want to go to Wall Street. I did not come to law school to go to Wall Street. I came to law school to practice civil rights law.” After accepting the job, I turned it down. I went to the dean of the law school and said, “I do not have a job.” He said, “Go to New York. See my friend Jack Greenberg”–of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. I came to New York and sat down with Jack, who hired me on the spot. Offered me a job as an assistant council to the Legal Defense Fund when I graduated!
When I first arrived, the offices were empty. There was a bomb scare. I spent the first four or five years litigating death penalty cases throughout the South. This was ‘70 to ‘74. I had some good successes. I worked with the lawyers in Alabama. The Ku Klux Klan would come out and surround the courthouse in full dress regalia. This was Cullman, Alabama. It had a reputation. The hope was the law. I felt that we could use the law to get some justice. I believed that. So I was feeling optimistic because I was winning some of these cases. I thought the law is the way to go, that we’re a nation of laws. I felt all this.
I went into government for two years. Bill Coleman was secretary of transportation, the second black cabinet officer. I was his special assistant. My project was to get women in the Coast Guard, and so we did: women, white and black. When I left, Jack Greenberg came back into my life. He was the general counsel, the position I hold now. It continues to be a struggle for a nonprofit law firm, because people don’t like lawyers. [Laughs] For fourteen years, I stayed in Washington with the Legal Defense Fund. We were monitoring Congress, looking at judicial appointments, getting civil rights laws passed. Using the political clout of African Americans to make congress more responsible. In 1993, I came to New York as head of the Legal Defense Fund.
The counterattacks started in the eighties, with Reagan as president. Mr. Bush’s policies aren’t very different from Mr. Reagan’s. We’ve got problems with the civil rights division. It’s very important that the government enforce the civil rights laws that people have died and bled to put on the books. The government is not doing the job. There are African Americans in positions of authority, but the policies remain the same. I’m talking about the Department of Justice.
Now, the basic question is, how much can the law alone do? I still believe in the power of law. We can’t ignore the courts. We have to fight. But you have to have community pressure and involvement. There must be public pressure to make people respond. There has to be mobilization. Grassroots. Law is vitally important, but it alone is not the answer. [Sighs] It’s a struggle, because we’re coming up now on the fiftieth anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education, and we have not lived up to the promise of that decision. This is fifty years later. But I’m still hopeful, because I’m in the courts. We are making some of the same mistakes we’ve made in the past. Consider the criminal justice system. It’s an abomination, the way we are taking these nonviolent black and brown people and penning them up in prison and giving them these horrendous sentences for nonviolent drug offenses. And it’s a mistake, it’s a mistake, it’s a mistake. I believe the system can change, but it’s only if those of us who understand these issues stay involved in them. That’s the only way change comes.
There’s a Swahili warrior song that I like: “Life has meaning only in the struggle / Triumph and defeats are up to the gods / So let us celebrate the struggle.” I think we can eventually win. Otherwise, otherwise I would not get up in the morning. [Laughs]
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