Chapter 6 - Activism
I grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, a racially segregated city, without really noticing the segregation.
Once I began to notice, I divided the world conceptually into those who were on the right side of societal issues and those who weren’t. For decades, I became involved in oppositional advocacy, advocating for what I considered the right side. However, I soon became doubtful about my intentions and, later in life, embarrassed by the side effects of my brand of activism. I then took a much more collaborative approach to changing the way things were. This chapter will explore that transition.
Social Justice
I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and at age 6, my family moved to Wilmington. About 15% of the 110,000 residents of that city were Black. They lived in their own part of town and went to their own schools. That’s just the way things were, and I never questioned why.
After graduating from my all-white high school, I went to all-white Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. After a year, I transferred to the University of Delaware, which had a few Black students as a result of a lawsuit, but I have no recollection of interacting with any of them.
But then, after graduating from college in 1960, I attended New York University (NYU) . in New York City, one of the most multicultural municipalities in the world. I accepted the egalitarian values of the integrated NYU Graduate School of Social Work, situated in Greenwich Village, where the lingering declarations of the beatnik generation echoed loudly, and the sensibilities of the sixties resounded with music, art, and, above all, ideas about what an enlightened society should look like. I lived and had my social work practical experience (called field work) at Henry Street Settlement, an agency on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, committed to social justice and equal opportunity. All this new exposure made me wonder why I had lived so indifferently in my segregated community, even while learning in school about slavery and the widespread practice of lynching. Why I had been so oblivious to the circumstances of being Black in America was a mystery to me. I knew I needed to change. New York embarrassed me into awareness.
I was appalled by a shocking and frightening incident that occurred in May, 1961. Seven Black and six white activists on a Freedom Ride boarded a Greyhound bus in Washington, D.C, and rode through the South to protest segregated bus terminals. When the bus reached Anniston, Alabama, a white mob set it on fire. The activists managed to get off but were severely beaten on the street. I wanted to do something in response, something dramatic.
Later that year, I joined approximately 700 activists on a Freedom Ride to restaurants along Route 40 in northeastern Maryland to test whether they would serve Black people. I was a little frightened, but with all the expected media coverage and the large number of people involved, I thought I would be relatively safe.
I rode with three others from my social work school, one of whom was Judi Wuntch, whom I later married. Each car was required to have at least one Black person aboard. Ours was a fellow student, a tall, slender, handsome, light-skinned Black man in his early twenties. To get to U.S. Route 40, we drove from New York City through Wilmington, my segregated hometown, which I thought was an ironic yet fitting overture to my budding journey.
The Ride organizers from CORE (Congress on Racial Equality) advised us to remain calm and courteous when entering restaurants and to avoid conflict. I recall feeling equal parts fear, disdain, and excitement during our first encounter. But the proprietor was subdued and polite as he explained that we could not be served. The second and third restaurants mirrored the first, and they seemed to know what to expect from us. The day, which seemed choreographed, went practically without incident. Newspaper coverage reported that the riders, restaurant owners, and police all got along very well. A few carloads of volunteers agreed to refuse to leave the restaurants, understanding they would be arrested. But even those encounters went non-violently.
It took us about four hours to cover the fifty-one miles from Elkton, Maryland, to Baltimore. No restaurants agreed to serve us. At the end of our Ride, we turned around and headed north. A half-hour later, at about 5 p.m., still in Maryland, we were hungry, and the four of us went into a chain restaurant. I was shocked and outraged when the owner said we couldn’t eat there. This was real, not some scripted performance. I was hungry. Why we thought this restaurant was different from the rest is beyond me. We left the restaurant in silence and continued driving north. There was a brief discussion about one of us going into the next restaurant to order take-out, but that would have meant keeping our Black companion in the car while ordering food from a bigoted and discriminatory restaurant owner. That was something we could not stomach.
Finally, when we were about twenty-five miles from Wilmington. I called my parents to describe our situation and ask if we could come there to eat. I explained that one person in our group was Black. As far as I knew, my parents related to Black people exclusively as hired help. My father was a foreman in a plant that made expansion joints, and there were Black people in his department. My mother had a small catering business and hired Black people as porters. My parents called them “colored people” or sometimes used the pejorative Yiddish word “shvartza.” When I called, there was a slight hesitation, but my mother said, “Sure, come on.”
My parents were gracious. They served us a sit-down dinner in our dining room. The table conversation was pleasant, respectful, and relaxed. I don’t remember what else we had for dinner, but I do recall that my mother pulled some of her prized, locally famous blintzes from the freezer for a festive dessert. I was impressed with and gladdened by my parents’ openness to something very new for them.
I have often returned to that day in my mind. The dinner did not erase the stereotyping and prejudices I had grown up around, but it complicated them. I’m sure the ride down Route 40 began to erode the romanticism I had been developing about activism. The two-hour ride from Wilmington back to New York City must have been troubling. I say “must have been” because I have no recollection of the ride. It’s gone. I might have examined the disparity between my dispassionate role-playing at all those restaurants and the visceral and poignant reality of not being served at our last one. I might have examined whether I was angry about that final act of discrimination or just frustrated about not being able to eat when I wanted to. I might have examined how I really felt about Black people and if, underneath it all, I had more in common with the bigoted restaurant owners than I did with our Black companion. I might have examined whether this Freedom Ride was simply an adventure rather than an attempt to remedy wrongs. I might have asked myself if I had changed from who I was while growing up in Wilmington.
That night, I must have had some doubts, but the experience seemed to have affected me. After earning my master’s degree, I took a job in segregated Louisville, Kentucky, at a Jewish Community Center and developed an intergroup relations program called Contact, which periodically brought kids from my program together with Black kids from a Settlement House. That was not activism, just good programming, but it had a positive effect.
Self-Advocacy
The next activist activity I remember took place in 1964 when I was doing group therapy at Hull House in Chicago. It happened when I applied for group health insurance. The application asked about medical conditions. I responded to the application that I had been in psychotherapy, and my application was rejected.
I had been in psychotherapy to deal with a variety of personal issues, but primarily, like many other social workers, to gain self-awareness in order to be a better therapist. That rejection was outlandish because the organization sponsoring the plan was the National Association of Social Workers (NASW). When I stood up to speak at a meeting of the Chicago Chapter of NASW in opposition to that policy, I said that the national organization should be ashamed of itself. The Chapter officially objected to the policy, and the national organization, almost immediately, changed the insurance carrier. My advocacy activity took fewer than five minutes and accomplished precisely what I was aiming for, but looking back, I think what mattered most to me was being seen as effective by others. It turned out to be an ego trip, similar to the time I began carrying a torch for personal reasons as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago.
In Chapter 4, I described being offended by how I was initially treated at the school. I felt distanced from former colleagues who had previously seen me as competent. Now I had to prove I knew what I was doing by passing tests. Throughout my educational experience, thinking in opposition to what was being taught was discouraged and sometimes punished. I thought the way I had been taught was repressive, and I carried that belief into my early experience at the University of Chicago. I began to speak out, sometimes before large groups of students, about my concerns, and I began to see many other aspects of my life as similarly repressive. School became the stage on which those tensions played out, and I gave them a political meaning and vocabulary.
The Protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention
In August 1968, toward the end of my first year at the school, the infamous reaction in Chicago to those who were protesting the Vietnam War occurred before and during the Democratic National Convention. I was against the war and had participated in previous demonstrations, but not these protests. However, I was observing the activities in Grant Park while standing in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, where the Convention was being held.
What I perceived was disturbing, and I thought the mayor and police force were excessively repressive. I identified with the demonstrators, many of whom I later saw on television being severely beaten. Eight of the leaders and prominent participants in the protests were put on trial, charged with conspiracy and crossing state lines to incite riots.
The trial became political theater. Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, both self-described Yippies, were mischievous, disruptive, and deliberately provocative toward the judge. One of the defendants, Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, was ordered by Judge Julius Hoffman to be bound and gagged for his repeated outbursts and disruptions. Seale’s case was severed from the others, and the Chicago Eight became the Chicago Seven.
At the end of the trial, all the defendants were acquitted of the conspiracy charge. Still, five were convicted of crossing state lines with the intent of inciting a riot, convictions that were subsequently overturned. However, Judge Hoffman cited all seven, and their two attorneys, for criminal contempt of court. I considered the contempt citations excessively and inappropriately despotic. That radicalized me, and that night I marched around the Federal Courthouse, initially by myself, holding a protest sign. Eventually, others joined me, and the following day, I began leading demonstrations that grew quite large. Again, I was on a big ego trip. While leading a demonstration, a police officer came within 10 feet of me and took my picture. I imagined he was trying to intimidate me, but I was not intimidated; I considered it thrilling.
I considered myself the personification of effective activism. That attitude influenced my behavior with the National Conference on Social Welfare, which was scheduled to take place in Chicago the following year. I wrote to the Director of the Conference, explaining that I was a social worker, and suggested they move the Conference to another city because of the repression that had taken place against the demonstrators. He said that was out of the question because they had deposited a considerable amount of money at the location where the Conference was to take place. I then asked if I could organize a large session at the gathering about repression. He refused. Miffed, I recruited many volunteers to attend small Conference sessions and ask questions about repression related to the speakers' subjects. For example, they might have suggested that psychological, sexual, or familial abuse was a form of repression and asked questions about how to deal with such behavior. Some of the speakers resented what we were doing, and some even ended their session after a single series of questions. In retrospect, I’m embarrassed about what we did. The speakers were not involved in the Director’s decision, and disrupting their session was both disrespectful and counterproductive.
I later heard a podcast by Jack Kornfield, an American writer who trained as a Buddhist Monk and has taught mindfulness meditation worldwide since 1974. He said that compassionate protesting is a necessary and spiritual act in a troubled world. He supported peaceful, respectful protests. I wish I had heard Jack Kornfield's opinions before my National Conference on Social Welfare activism, and now I wish that all my activist experiences had been compassionate, necessary, and spiritual. But I didn’t, and they weren’t, but they became more appropriate in my next series of activist activities.
Cycling and Street Safety
When I lived in Brooklyn. I was an enthusiastic bicycle enthusiast, mainly because of a very long bike I took in 1981, which I will describe in Chapter 7.
Riding at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn
In June 2010, I went to a meeting of the Brooklyn Volunteer Committee of Transportation Alternatives (T.A.), a New York City cycling and street-safety advocacy organization. My original purpose was to find people I could ride with. However, I became swept up in the group’s activism. One of the committee’s goals was to get the city to establish a safe bike lane on Brooklyn’s 5 th Avenue, a half block from our house. The Chair of the committee, Paco Abraham, asked the members to write letters to their elected officials to get support for that initiative. I had been a public official and knew what kinds of letters could be effective. I wrote a letter to my City Council Member, Sara Gonzalez, and shared it with Paco, who distributed it as an example of what he called terrific advocacy writing. He then asked me to lead the 5 th Avenue initiative, which ultimately succeeded.
It wasn’t long before I became Vice Chair of the Committee. The staff of T.A. became aware of my advocacy skills and frequently asked me to speak at press conferences and testify before the City Council and Community Boards. They particularly valued my involvement because I was 73 years old at the time, and serious cycling was rare among people my age. In addition, I had severe problems with both knees, which made walking difficult and running impossible. Riding was my road to health, and I was in an excellent position to say so. T.A. wanted an enhanced bike lane network throughout the city to reduce cyclist and pedestrian fatalities, and they put me out front in that effort. A year later, because of all my advocacy activity, I was profiled in T.A’s Reclaim Magazine and was later honored to be named their Volunteer of the Year. Since there were about 1000 volunteers, I considered that an honor of considerable significance.
Volunteer of the Year Award Certificate
I continued riding my bike until 2015, when it, too, became painful because of my knees. I had both knees replaced that year. After six months of rehab, I finally got back on my bike and, to celebrate, rode on the 5 th Avenue shared bike lane we had championed. Unfortunately, within five minutes, a van drove past me, close enough to hit the mirror on my handlebars, nearly knocking me over. I thought about my new knees and possibly brittle hips and considered the collision a sign that I had become too old to risk a fall on the streets of New York City. My bike riding days, and, as it turned out, my days as an activist, were over as well.
So during my activist career, I moved from oppositional advocacy, advocating through advocacy hesitation because I became embarrassed by the side effects of the type of activism I practiced, to a more collaborative approach. I was most successful when I adopted collaboration as the best way to change minds.