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Yes, Biden Is Old -- But Let's Compare Him To The Alternative

Yes, Biden Is Old -- But Let's Compare Him To The Alternative

Many voters, including Democrats, think that 80-year old President Joe Biden is too old to run for re-election. A recent poll from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs found that 77 percent of Americans (89 percent of Republicans and 69 percent of Democrats) thought that, if Biden won re-election, his age would be a problem. In contrast, only 51 percent of Americans, and 29 percent of Republicans, said that Donald Trump’s age was a concern. Republican leaders, such as former South Carolina governor and presidential primary candidate Nikki Haley, are pushing that talking point. They warn that Biden might not be able to serve his entire second term and that the less popular Vice President Kamala Harris would wind up in the Oval Office.

Trump has been more direct, echoing online conspiracists who doctor videos to “prove” that Biden is already too old to be President. Speaking to a group of conservative religious leaders in Washington, D.C. on September 15, Trump called Biden “cognitively impaired.” Then, ironically, he warned that, if re-elected, Biden would lead the country into “World War II.” At another point, he boasted that he was beating President “Obama” (rather than Biden) in the 2024 election polls.

Unintentionally, Trump’s bizarre speech helped illuminate the debate over the two candidates’ ages.

Yes, Biden is the oldest president in American history. And he’s only going to get older. There is no younger candidate emerging, so in November 2024, voters who worry about Biden’s age will likely have to decide between him and Trump, who is three years younger and turned 77 in June. The good news? All signs suggest that Biden is still the best candidate. He is healthier, more vigorous, sharper, smarter, more mentally stable, more knowledgeable about how government works, has a clearer grasp of issues, and is more effective at getting things done than Trump.

First, Biden is healthy. In February, after he underwent a physical exam at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, his personal physician Dr. Kevin O'Connor issued the president a clean bill of health and cleared him to continue fulfilling his duties.

"The president remains fit for duty, and fully executes all of his responsibilities without any exemptions or accommodations," O'Connor wrote in his report. An echocardiogram showed that Biden’s heart is not only operating normally with no signs of failure, but also showed “excellent functional capacity."

Like many older people, Biden staves off the effects of age by taking care of his body. During the 2020 campaign, Biden biked regularly on both a traditional bike and a Peloton. Since becoming President, he starts his mornings by working out with weights—often with a trainer, according to the Washington Post. Although Biden likes to indulge in ice cream and chocolate chip cookies, he closely watches his diet.

Of course, this doesn’t stave off everything associated with aging. Before he took office, Biden had several localized non-melanoma skin cancers removed, a result of spending a great deal of time in the sun. And from time to time, he falls. In June, after handing out diplomas at the United States Air Force Academy graduation ceremony, he tripped over a black sandbag, got back up and walked back to his seat. Although the incident generated a flurry of media stories, encouraged by the Republican operatives who want to highlight Biden’s age, by all accounts he was fine.

Of course, many younger Americans also have cancerous cells removed. Similarly, many people across the age spectrum occasionally trip and then get up, but few do so in the national spotlight. Gerald Ford, who was much younger and was an All-American football player at the University of Michigan, tripped a few times while serving as president, including tumbling down Air Force One stairs in 1975 when he was a spry 61-year-old. On Saturday Night Live, comedian Chevy Chase frequently made fun of Ford’s mishaps. But the joke was about Ford’s alleged clumsiness, not his age, whether he was too physically infirm to govern, or unlikely to finish his term of office.

Many Americans have also noticed that Biden sometimes slurs his words when he speaks, but attributing this to his age is a mistake. In fact, it is a feature of his long battle with stuttering, not a symptom of any decline in mental or physical capacity. Most stutterers outgrow the disability in childhood, but others, like Biden, continue to struggle with it in adulthood. This is a topic he’s been very candid about and has used to mentor and encourage young people with the same speech disorder.

Biden’s occasional verbal gaffes also have nothing to do with his mental sharpness. Throughout his political career—he was elected to the Senate in 1972, at the age of 29—he’s been prone to blurting things out that he later regrets, often in response to a question that he answered too quickly.

Biden’s capacity to navigate an executive schedule should also not be a concern. During the 2020 campaign, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, he didn’t travel often, but since taking office he’s had a rigorous travel schedule at home and abroad. He’s already been doing a lot of traveling for his current campaign. Yes, Biden’s gait is slowing, but he has extraordinary stamina. He works long hours in a high-stress job and remains sharp when talking to members of Congress, his Cabinet, and the media about complicated issues. He reads his briefing papers carefully and often asks his staff to provide further information.

Trump, on the other hand, may be a few years younger, but he is truly an old man. He’s significantly overweight. He’s a fanatic for unhealthy fast food. While speaking, he often gasps for breath. He doesn’t do aerobic exercise, and even when he’s playing golf, he doesn’t walk the course; he rides on a cart. And reading? Forget it. Even as president, he boasted that he didn’t read his staff’s daily intelligence briefs. This is, in part, because he has a short attention span. "I like bullets, or I like as little as possible," he said.

Yes, the public occasionally receives an update that certifies Trump’s “superb” physical condition, but like much of the information that comes from his orbit, it’s hard to trust those reports.

The former President’s mendacity began early. In 1968, a New York City podiatrist claimed that Trump had bone spurs in his heels, providing him with the excuse he needed to get a medical exemption from military service during the Vietnam war. Dr. Larry Braunstein, the foot doctor who diagnosed the “bone spurs,” rented his office from Fred C. Trump, the former president’s father. Braunstein died in 2007, but when the New York Times looked into the matter, his daughters said that their father often recounted how he helped Trump avoid the draft as a favor to Fred. “I know it was a favor,” one daughter, Dr. Elysa Braunstein, told the Times.

Later, during the 2016 campaign, Trump rolled out obviously false assertions about his physical fitness, even as Republican conspiracists disseminated disinformation that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton had a degenerative disease. Trump’s personal physician, Dr. Harold Bornstein, wrote one report filled with hyperbole. “If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” Bornstein wrote in December 2015. Trump’s “physical strength and stamina are extraordinary,” he claimed, and his bloodwork was “astonishingly excellent.”

Three years later, Bornstein confessed that Trump had dictated the letter himself. “I didn’t write that letter,” Bornstein told CNN. He also said that Trump’s bodyguard had conducted a “raid” on his medical office in February 2017, taking all of Trump’s lab reports and medical charts.

Similarly, in 2018, the White House physician, Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, declared Trump to be in “excellent” overall health and in possession of “incredibly good genes” during a White House press briefing (although Trump talks about his genes constantly, medical doctors rarely do.) Jackson also announced that Trump was 6 foot, 3 inches and weighed 239 pounds, conveniently putting the President’s body mass index at 29.9—just below the 30.0 threshold officially described as obese, rather than merely overweight. But photos of Trump with others have raised questions about whether he is actually 6’3” (he’s actually 6’2”) or that he weighed only 239 at the time (estimates ranged as high as 267.)

Actual good health in one’s seventies requires effort, of course. Yet Jackson acknowledged that Trump didn’t have a daily physical fitness routine. He said he would encourage Trump to exercise and eat better. There’s no evidence that Trump ever took that seriously. In fact, he is apparently opposed to exercise on principle. In 2016, the Washington Post revealed that Trump gave up athletics after college because he "believed the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted." Experts, of course, understand that the human body actually becomes stronger with exercise.

But lying about Trump’s physical health has its rewards, whether it is a sweetheart office lease or a big career move. Two months after his 2018 physical exam, Trump nominated Jackson, who had no administrative experience, to be Secretary of Veterans Affairs. That nomination blew up after Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) released allegations that Jackson had overprescribed pills and drank on the job. So, in 2020, with Trump’s support, Jackson ran for and won a race for Congress from Texas’ 13th Congressional District.

Despite Jackson’s assurances, journalists have provided concrete evidence that it is Trump who may have serious health problems. In May 2017, at the G7 summit in Taormina, Sicily, the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan walked 700 yards to take a group photo at a piazza in a hilltop town. Trump chose to wait until he could ride in a golf cart, keeping the others waiting. And during a 2020 commencement speech at West Point, which he delivered haltingly, Trump needed two hands to lift a water glass to his mouth, suggesting some kind of tremor. After the speech ended, Trump walked very slowly down a ramp, keeping his eyes on his feet. That night he explained that for the “final ten feet I ran down to level ground. Momentum!" But videos reveal that Trump did not run the "final ten feet" to the ground. He walked at a normal speed for the last three or four steps.

In contrast to the many hours Biden spends on the job, Trump has also never been known as a hard worker. While campaigning for president in 2016, he said "I would not be a president who took vacations. I would not be a president that takes time off.” Once in office, however, he took more vacations than any of his predecessors. He spent 307 days, almost a full year, golfing during his presidency, mostly at his Mar-a-Lago property in Palm Beach, Florida, and his club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Fun fact: That is the most golf played by any sitting president in history.

And when it comes to mental health, is there any real controversy over which politician lacks the emotional stability to serve as president? While Biden is well known for privately upbraiding those who haven’t met his standards, he listens, is publicly affectionate, polite, and tirelessly greets the Americans he encounters. But numerous accounts of Trump reveal him to be thin-skinned, addicted to flattery, a megalomaniac, demagogic, impulsive, vindictive, a sociopath, and a narcissist who lacks empathy or a social conscience. During his presidency, two books—Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump, by Allen Frances, former psychiatry department chairman at Duke University School of Medicine, and The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, edited by Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist at Yale School of Medicine—heightened public debate about Trump’s psychological fitness to be president.

And what about the basic intelligence of these two men? Biden, like most people, rarely discusses his intelligence. But, on many occasions, Trump has claimed that he’s “really smart” and even a “ super-genius,” pointing to his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania. “My I.Q. is one of the highest,” Trump tweeted in 2013. During a CNN-sponsored Republican town hall in Columbia, South Carolina in February 2016, he reminded the audience that “I was a good student and all of this stuff. I mean, I’m a smart person.” In 2018, Trump wrote, “Throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.”

Yet, anyone who feels compelled to boast about how smart he is clearly suffers from profound insecurity about his intelligence and accomplishments. In Trump's case, he has good reason to doubt himself. Although he grew up in a wealthy family, he was not a good student. After high school he attended Fordham University, at the time a respected but not very selective Catholic institution, and certainly not where the sons of the super-rich expected to wind up. After two lackluster years at Fordham, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school.

But according to Gwenda Blair’s 2001 biography, The Trumps, Trump’s grades at Fordham were not good enough to qualify for a transfer to Penn. Blair wrote that Trump got into the university as a special favor from a “friendly” admissions officer who knew Trump’s older brother, Freddy. The college’s admissions staff also surely knew that Trump’s father was a wealthy real estate developer and a potential donor.

After graduating in 1968, Trump exaggerated his academic accomplishments at Penn, statements that no one fact-checked for decades: On at least two occasions in the 1970s, The New York Times reported that he “graduated first in his class.” Trump is the likely source for this assertion, and it isn’t true. He didn’t even make the Dean’s List, as the campus newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, reported it in 1968.

Many years ago, Biden also exaggerated his own academic credentials, but his long political life and several presidential runs meant that these statements were quickly debunked. The facts are admittedly unimpressive. Reporters discovered that at the University of Delaware, Biden graduated with a C average and was ranked 506th in a class of 688. At Syracuse University’s law school, he ranked 76th out of 85 in his graduating class. Perhaps because this is now public knowledge (Trump’s academic records have remained private) Biden has mocked Trump’s habit of boasting about his intelligence. “I’m clearly not as smart as Trump,” Biden said sarcastically in 2018, “the smartest man in the world.”

Of course, college grades and class rank aren’t the best test of someone’s potential to be an effective president. Good presidents have judgement, the ability to think strategically, to understand complex issues, and be adept at surrounding themselves with knowledgeable people. They hire, utilize, and keep good staff.

That’s Biden—not Trump. According to Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, “100 percent” of Trump’s closest White House aides questioned his intelligence and fitness for office. According to Wolff, both Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus derided Trump as an “idiot;” chief economic advisor Gary Cohn said that Trump was “dumb as shit;” and former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster considered Trump a “dope.” This came on top of early reports that former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had called Trump a “moron.”

It’s no wonder that the Trump White House had a revolving door.

Other observers have noted that Trump has a difficult time expressing himself and speaking in complete sentences. Tony Schwartz, who spent a great deal of time with Trump while ghostwriting his 1987 book The Art of the Deal,noted that Trump has a very limited vocabulary. A linguistic analysis by Politico found that Trump speaks at a fourth-grade level. When researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University compared the Republican and Democratic 2016 presidential candidates in terms of their vocabulary and grammar, Trump scored at a fifth-grade level, the lowest of all the candidates.

More important than grades, IQ, or vocabulary is the elusive quality of judgement. That involves learning from experience, sorting out what’s important and unimportant, hiring people who will question your ideas, making decisions when none of the options are very good or when the available data is incomplete, and having a keen moral sense of right and wrong.

Let’s see a show of hands when it comes to Biden or Trump in this category.

Finally, let’s compare Trump’s record of achievement between the ages of 70 and 74 to Biden’s between the ages of 76 and 79. Biden has passed more major pieces of legislation in two and a half years than Trump did in four years in the White House.

Granted, our 2024 candidates are both old men. But only Trump is physically, emotionally, and mentally unfit to be president. As Biden likes to say, “Don’t compare me to the almighty. Compare me to the alternative.”

Peter Dreier is the E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics at Occidental College. He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, The Nation, American Prospect, Dissent, The New Republic, and Talking Points Memo. He is also the author of six books, most recently Baseball Rebels: The Players, People, and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and Changed America (University of Nebraska Press, 2022.)

Reprinted with permission from Political Junkie, Claire Potter's Substack. Please consider subscribing here.


Heroes But Not Saints: Why We Shouldn't 'Cancel' Flawed Progressive Icons

Heroes But Not Saints: Why We Shouldn't 'Cancel' Flawed Progressive Icons

In a recent op-ed column for the New York Times, Alexis McGill Johnson, president of Planned Parenthood, wrote that "we're done making excuses for our founder," Margaret Sanger. Planned Parenthood began that reckoning last year when it removed Sanger's name from one of its New York City clinics. Now it is taking further steps.

"We have defended Sanger as a protector of bodily autonomy and self-determination, while excusing her association with white supremacist groups and eugenics as an unfortunate 'product of her time,'" Johnson wrote.

For decades, foes of birth control and abortion have attacked Sanger (1879-1966) as a racist.

In 2011, for example, Herman Cain, the late Republican presidential candidate and African American businessman, claimed in a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation that "when Margaret Sanger—check my history—started Planned Parenthood, the objective was to put these centers in primarily black communities so they could help kill black babies before they came into the world. It's planned genocide." Later that year, in an interview on Face the Nation, Cain insisted that "75 percent of [Planned Parenthood's clinics] were built in the black community."

In fact, according to the Guttmacher Institute, only about 110 of Planned Parenthood's 800 clinics are in areas where African Americans make up over 25 percent of the overall population. Planned Parenthood establishes clinics based on where medical needs—including a shortage of primary care providers and a high poverty rate—are the greatest. One fact that Cain (who died of COVID last year) and others have conveniently ignored is that none of Sanger's clinics, or Planned Parenthood clinics, performed abortions before Roe v. Wade made them legal in 1973.

In 2015, 25 House Republicans campaigned to have a bust of the pioneering family planning advocate removed from the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas declared that Sanger didn't belong there because of her "inhumane life's work," and because she "advocated for the extermination of African Americans."

These lies have been repeated so often that many people, including African Americans, now believe them.

There is no doubt that the Black community, and Black women, have for many years been mistreated by the nation's health care system. It is thus understandable that many Black Americans distrust many health care providers. For example, a recent survey by Kaiser Family Foundation found that Black Americans were more skeptical of the COVID vaccine than other groups.

Planned Parenthood is one of the nation's largest providers of health services – not only family planning and abortion, which constitutes a small part of its work – to low-income women and women of color. Its recent efforts to distance itself from Sanger are likely motivated in large part by its admirable effort to reach out to more African American women in need of first-rate health care.

But in doing so, Planned Parenthood need not reinforce the misconceptions about Sanger that the pro-life movement and right-wingers in general have been perpetuating for decades.

These misleading views about Sanger hinge on two aspects of her life that have generated considerable controversy and debate.

At one point in her life, Sanger flirted with the now-discredited eugenics movement, which sought to improve the overall health and fitness of humankind through selective breeding and which enjoyed widespread support from mainstream doctors, scientists and the general public – including many liberals and radicals -- in the early 1900s. Some leaders of the eugenics movement were vicious racists who viewed eugenics as a means to create a "superior" white human race, reflected in Paul Popenoe's widely-read and deeply-racist 1918 book, Applied Eugenics. Sanger was not among them, but her embrace of some aspects of eugenics understandably damaged her reputation.

In Sanger's day, many scientists believed that – in the words of that period -- "feeble minded" and "mentally unfit" people were more likely to become criminals and rapists. Reflecting those views, Sanger argued that eugenics might help reduce the incidence of babies born with physical or mental handicaps. She wrote: "If by 'unfit' is meant the physical or mental defects of a human being, that is an admirable gesture, but if 'unfit' refers to races or religions, then that is another matter which I frankly deplore." Sanger herself later repudiated her views about sterilization of the so-called "feeble-minded." Sanger's statement demonstrates that she did not subscribe to the use of eugenics in racist ways.

As a young nurse in New York City, Sanger met poor women, mostly immigrants, who had had several children and were desperate to avoid future pregnancies. She opened the nation's first birth control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916, went to jail to defend women's right to contraception, and founded the organization that later became Planned Parenthood. She believed that access to family planning would liberate many women from poverty and suffering.

In 1919, after she had opened her first clinics in New York, William Oscar Saunders, editor of the Elizabeth City Independent, invited Sanger to give a talk in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, where African Americans comprised about 37 percent of the population. Saunders was known as an outspoken opponent of racism and anti-Semitism and was an advocate for birth control.

In November of that year, she spoke on "Woman's Place in the 20th Century" to an audience of about 800 people in Elizabeth City, the first public meeting about birth control in the South. Given the South's fierce Jim Crow laws, it is likely that the audience was mostly or all white. Her talk was so well-received that other groups in the city asked Sanger to stay an extra few days and give additional lectures. She gave one impromptu talk to elderly women concerned about their daughters' and granddaughters' unwanted pregnancies. She also spoke at an African American church, at a Black high school, and to a group of Black women about birth control. Sanger's talks catalyzed an effort by the town's residents to establish a birth control clinic for local mill workers.

"Never have I met with more sympathy, more serious attention, more complete understanding than in my addresses to the white and black people of this Southern mill town," Sanger later wrote about that trip. "All in all, these audiences were a striking demonstration of birth control's universal message of freedom and betterment."

In 1930, with the support of the prominent black activist and intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois, the Urban League, and the Amsterdam News (New York's leading black newspaper), Sanger opened a family planning clinic in Harlem, staffed by a black doctor and black social worker. Then, in 1939, key leaders in the black community encouraged Sanger to expand her efforts to the rural South, where most African Americans lived. Thus began the "Negro Project," with Du Bois, Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of Harlem's powerful Abyssinian Baptist Church, anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, educator Mary McLeod Bethune, and other black leaders lending support.

Like her African-American supporters, Sanger viewed birth control as a way to empower black women, not as a means to reduce the black population. Sanger explained that the project was designed to help "a group notoriously underprivileged and handicapped…to get a fair share of the better things in life. To give them the means of helping themselves is perhaps the richest gift of all. We believe birth control knowledge brought to this group, is the most direct, constructive aid that can be given them to improve their immediate situation."

The other aspect of Sanger's life that has raised concern is a one-time talk she gave to the women's auxiliary of a Ku Klux Klan chapter in New Jersey in 1926. In her 1938 autobiography, Sanger wrote that she was willing to talk to virtually anyone to gain support for the birth control movement. "Always to me any aroused group was a good group, and therefore I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan at Silver Lake, New Jersey, one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing."

Sanger had no more meetings with any Klan-affiliated groups and may have had second thoughts about the wisdom of giving that talk in New Jersey. But that incident did not stop Black leaders from inviting her to establish the Harlem clinic four years later or to undertake the subsequent Negro Project in the South. They trusted Sanger as an ally to the cause of Black freedom, despite what some might consider her occasional lapses in judgement. Planned Parenthood's current efforts to forge stronger alliances with Black women is actually an extension – not a repudiation – of Sanger's work.

If Planned Parenthood leaders think that distancing the organization from Sanger will immunize it from attacks from Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, or other right-wing opponents of abortion who wrongly claim that Sanger and Planned Parenthood were engaged in "black genocide," they are wrong. As Katha Pollitt wrote in her Nation column last year, removing Sanger's name from its flagship clinic in Manhattan "only helps abortion opponents" and "[buys] into anti-choice propaganda." Pollitt, a well-known feminist, went even further: "Margaret Sanger did more good for American women than any other individual in the entire 20th century."

But there's a larger issue involved not only in Planned Parenthood's effort to lower Sanger's profile but also in wider efforts to take stock of racism among many progressive leaders and movements over the past century or more.

Where should we draw the line with regard to our progressive icons who said or did things in their day that we now find unacceptable?

In 1918, Eleanor Roosevelt described Harvard Law professor Felix Frankfurter, then serving as an advisor to President Wilson, as "an interesting little man but very Jew." That same year, after attending a party for Bernard Baruch when her husband Franklin was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, she wrote to her mother-in-law, "I'd rather be hung than seen at" the party, since it would be "mostly Jews." She also reported that, "The Jew party was appalling." By the 1930s, however, she became a crusader for Jewish causes, a foe of anti-Semitism and racism, and a powerful (though unsuccessful) advocate for getting her husband, by then the president, to do more to save Jews from the Nazi holocaust. She was also a powerful ally of the civil rights and feminist movements and the leading figure in drafting the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Should we strip Eleanor Roosevelt's name from high schools named for her in Maryland, New York, and California?

Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, is justifiably admired for orchestrating the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling that outlawed school segregation and many other path breaking liberal Supreme Court rulings. But as California's Attorney General at the start of World War 2, he played a leading role in rounding up Japanese Americans, putting them in internment camps, and confiscating their property and businesses. Only in retirement did Warren acknowledge that the relocation was a mistake based on hysteria. Should we rename the California State Building in San Francisco, schools in California and Texas, and the fairgrounds in Santa Barbara named for Warren?

Albert Einstein, a socialist, co-chaired the American Crusade to End Lynching, backed the campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys (nine black teenagers who were wrongly framed of the rape of a white woman), gave talks at historically black universities, was a close friend of the Black leftist Paul Robeson even during the Red Scare, and wrote articles in support of civil rights – all unusual activities for a well-known scientist. But historians recently uncovered Einstein's personal travel diary from the 1920s, in which he wrote some racist slurs against the Chinese people. Should we tear down the 12-foot high statue of Einstein at the entrance to the headquarters of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.?

Theodor Geisel's racist depictions of Japanese Americans in his editorial cartoons (under his pen name Dr. Seuss) for the radical newspaper PM during World War II contradicted his lifelong opposition to racism and anti-Semitism, and his effort to teach children to stand up to bullies and tyrants. Should we boycott his books or remove the statue of Geisel on the campus of the University of California-San Diego, or rename the nearby Geisel Library?

Jackie Robinson not only broke baseball's color line in 1947, he was also a civil rights activist during and after his playing career, a frequent presence on picket lines and at marches. But in 1949 — at the height of the Cold War — he allowed Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey to persuade him to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee so that he could publicly criticize Robeson at the height of the Cold War. As expected, Robinson challenged Robeson's patriotism, but he also denounced American racism. The press focused on the former and ignored the latter. In 1960, he endorsed Richard Nixon for president, believing he was a stronger civil rights supporter than John F. Kennedy. Robinson later apologized for both actions. Should Major League Baseball cancel Jackie Robinson Day and should the Dodgers remove the statue of Robinson at the front of Dodger Stadium?

Betty Friedan, founder of the National Organization for Women was homophobic and expressed her concern that the involvement of women she called "mannish" or "man-hating" lesbians within the movement would hinder the feminist cause. Should we burn our copies of The Feminine Mystique?

Martin Luther King, Jr. plagiarized parts of his Ph.D. dissertation at Boston University. Should we cancel Martin Luther King Day and rename all the streets and schools named after him? Should Planned Parenthood rescind its Margaret Sanger Award, which it bestowed on King in 1966?

Paul Wellstone, the left-wing Senator from Minnesota, voted in favor of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which outlawed federal recognition of same-sex marriage. He later said he regretted his stance on the issue. Should the St. Paul, Minnesota school board take Paul Wellstone's name off an elementary school dedicated to the late senator and his wife Sheila

During his early days as an activist with the railroad workers union in the late 1800s, Eugene Debs told jokes in black dialect, supported keeping blacks out of jobs in the South, and favored segregation on trains. He also had bigoted views towards Jews, Italians, Chinese. and other immigrant groups, according to historian Nick Salvatore's Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist. But Debs' views evolved. As the leader and five-time presidential candidate of the Socialist Party in the early 1900s, Debs challenged his fellow unionists and Socialists who sought to keep blacks out of their movement. He told them that "white workingmen would be exploited so long as the Negroes were held in an inferior position," according to Ray Ginger, author of another Debs biography, The Bending Cross. Should the Democratic Socialists of America stop giving its annual Eugene Debs Award?

Cesar Chavez, the leader of the United Farm Workers movement, was opposed to employers who used undocumented workers as strike breakers. As a result, he initially opposed illegal immigration and occasionally even reported undocumented workers to immigration authorities so they could be deported. But in step with other Mexican American civil rights groups, he later revised his views and supported amnesty for immigrants who had crossed the border without legal documents. Should California repeal its Cesar Chavez Day as a state holiday?

None of these people is like Klan leader David Duke, anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly, hate-monger Rush Limbaugh, or all-purpose right-winger Ted Cruz -- reactionaries who devoted their lives to promoting oppression and injustice.

Any fair-minded understanding of Margaret Sanger and other progressive activists and thinkers needs to consider the totality of those people's contributions to the struggle for social justice. We shouldn't ignore their offensive views or behavior. But we should also not judge people by their worst moments. We need to recognize that they — like many other reformers and radicals — were human beings who were both trapped by and sought to escape the social and political straitjackets of their times.

If we require our progressive and radical heroes to be saints — if we eliminate leaders from the progressive pantheon because they held some views or engaged in behaviors that were conventional in their day but problematic today — we won't have many people left to admire.

Peter Dreier is professor of politics at Occidental College and author of The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame. His next book, Baseball Rebels: The Reformers and Radicals Who Shook Up the Game and Changed America," will be published in 2022.

Joe Biden Quoted Ella Baker In His Acceptance Speech -- Who Was She?

Joe Biden Quoted Ella Baker In His Acceptance Speech -- Who Was She?


Joe Biden opened his acceptance speech Thursday night by quoting someone whom most of the audience -- indeed, most American -- have never heard of.

"Ella Baker, a giant of the civil rights movement, left us with this wisdom: Give people light and they will find a way," Biden said. "Give people light. Those are words for our time."

He might have also drawn on another Baker quote from 1964: "Until the killing of black men, black mothers' sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother's sons, we who believe in freedom cannot rest."

Baker's words continue to resonate today, as we witness the resurgence of a new civil rights movement, sparked by the police killings of young black men, but rooted in the underlying grievances of racial injustice around jobs, housing, schools, and the criminal justice system. The four-day Democratic convention shined a spotlight on Black Lives Matter and on Donald Trump's efforts to repress the nationwide upsurge of protest in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, in Minneapolis in June.

As these protests persist, activists can learn much from Baker. Working behind the scenes, she helped transform the Southern sit-in protests into a powerful movement for racial justice, led by young people with lots of anger and determination, but little political experience. Baker also has much to offer Democrats hoping to regain the White House, Congress, and important local offices like mayor and District Attorney in November, because she understood the importance of combining nonviolent protest, grassroots organizing, and electoral politics, including voter registration and turnout.

Baker was a mentor to several generations of activists. One of them was John Lewis, the beloved Georgia Congressman who died last month. Lewis first encountered Baker in 1958 at a workshop at the Highlander Folk School, an inter-racial training center for activists in rural Tennessee. Lewis, a student at Fisk University in Nashville, was 18. Baker, then 54, was a veteran organizer. As Lewis described her in his autobiography Walking With the Wind, "Baker had become a legend of sorts during the previous twenty or so years for her knack of relating to young people." After hearing Baker speak, and participating in training sessions with other young idealists, "I left Highlander on fire," Lewis recalled.

Lewis returned to Nashville and joined forces with other students to develop plans to desegregate the stores in downtown Nashville by engaging in sit-ins, a form of civil disobedience. Baker, along with James Lawson, conducted workshops to prepare them to respond nonviolently upon being harassed, spat upon, beaten, and arrested by white thugs and police, and held in jail, where they were also beaten. She did the same thing for students in cities throughout the South, particularly those at historically black colleges.

The first sit-in occurred in Greensboro, N.C. late in the afternoon of Feb. 1, 1960, when four young black men—Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain, and Joseph McNeil, all students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College —visited the local Woolworth's store. They purchased school supplies and toothpaste, and then they sat down at the store's lunch counter and ordered coffee. "I'm sorry," said the waitress. "We don't serve Negroes here."

The students refused to give up their seats until the store closed. The local media reported the sit-in on television and in the newspapers. The four students returned the next day with more students. By Feb. 5, about 300 students had joined the protest, generating more media attention and inspiring students at other colleges.

The Nashville students began their lunch counter protests on Feb. 13. By the end of March, sit-ins had spread to 55 cities in 13 states. Many students, mostly black but also white, were arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct, or disturbing the peace.

Baker understood that the sit-in movement would eventually fizzle out unless the young activists came together to forge a common vision and organization. She persuaded Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. to co-sign a letter inviting the sit-in participants to a meeting over Easter weekend, April 16 to 18, at her alma mater, Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C., to discuss how to capitalize on the growing momentum. Baker expected 100 participants to attend, but more than 300 activists showed up.

In her closing speech, "More Than a Hamburger," Baker pushed the students to dream of how their sit-ins could develop into larger efforts to challenge racism in "every aspect of life." As Lewis recounted, Baker "praised our success so far but warned that our work had just begun. Integrating lunch counters in stores already patronized mostly by blacks was one thing. Breaking down barriers in areas as racially and culturally entrenched as voting rights, education, and the workplace was going to be much tougher than what we had faced so far."

The fruit of the meeting was the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which would expand the sit-in campaign, but also use other tactics, including freedom rides and voter registration drives, to dismantle segregation. SNCC reinvigorated the civil rights movement. The 20-year old Lewis was elected SNCC's first chairman.

Baker had spent decades traveling throughout the South for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Long before there were Rolodexes, email, and Facebook, she was famous for her vast social network. She gently encouraged the young activists to build a movement from these isolated local protests.

Many of the young civil rights activists called her "Fundi," a Swahili title for a master technician who oversees apprentices, to acknowledge Baker's role as their mentor. She eschewed a visible role, concentrating on patiently training the next generation of social change leaders.

Born in 1903, Baker grew up in rural North Carolina. As a girl, Baker listened to her grandmother tell stories about slave revolts. Her mother, a deeply religious former teacher, tutored Ella at home and coached her in public speaking. As a child, Ella was part of a supportive and tightly knit black community, where friends, relatives, and neighbors helped each other out. Her grandfather mortgaged the family farm to help feed families in need. For high school, Baker's parents sent her to the boarding school affiliated with Shaw University. She remained at Shaw for college, edited the student newspaper, and graduated as class valedictorian in 1927.

She moved to Harlem, hoping to get a graduate degree in sociology., Financial hardship forced her to set aside her dream, but she got another kind of education by attending lectures and community meetings and devouring books and periodicals in local public libraries. Despite her college education, her race and gender limited her job prospects. While waiting on tables and working in a factory, she began to write articles for the American West Indian News. In 1932 she found a job as an editorial assistant and office manager for the Negro National News.

Harlem was a hotbed of radical activism, and Baker soon got involved with local groups working on behalf of tenants and consumers. In 1931, she became national director of the Young Negroes' Cooperative League, which sponsored cooperative buying clubs and grocery stores designed to reduce prices and bring people together for collective action. In her next job, funded by the New Deal's Works Progress Administration, she organized consumer cooperatives among housing project residents. In 1935, she wrote an exposé of the exploitation of black domestic servants for the NAACP journal Crisis.

Baker started working for the NAACP in 1938 and three years later became its assistant field secretary. For five years, she traveled throughout the South, recruiting new members, working with local leaders to strengthen their chapters, and helping them organize campaigns against lynching, for equal pay for black teachers, and for job training. Rosa Parks, an active NAACP member in Montgomery, Alabama, attended one of Baker's leadership-training workshops.

At the time, the NAACP's leadership was dominated by middle-class black businessmen, male professionals, and ministers, but most of its grassroots activists were working-class women and men. Baker's experiences convinced her that "strong people don't need strong leaders." She worked to cultivate what she called "group leadership" in contrast to leadership by charismatic figures or the professional class.

Soon after the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott began, Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Stanley Levinson (a close adviser to King) used their connections with northern liberals and unions to establish In Friendship, which raised funds for the boycott campaign. They talked with King about establishing a new organization to build similar campaigns throughout the South. This was the genesis of the SCLC, which catapulted King from local to national leadership. Rustin convinced Baker to run the new organization.

Baker bristled at the sexism and outsize egos of the ministers who dominated SCLC and treated her as if she were the hired help. She was on the brink of resigning when the student sit-in movement began in early 1960.

As Baker guided SNCC's young activists, she reminded them of her belief in radical democracy: "People did not really need to be led; they needed to be given the skills, information, and opportunity to lead themselves."

In 1964, Baker went to Mississippi to participate in SNCC's Freedom Summer project that brought over a thousand college student volunteers to the state to register black voters and help lead "freedom schools." That summer, hundreds of volunteers were arrested; racist thugs bombed 67 churches, homes, and stores. Three of the volunteers—black Mississippian James Chaney and white radicals Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner—were murdered by segregationist vigilantes.

The murders drew national media attention. When Baker was asked her reaction, she said: "The unfortunate thing is that it took this…to make the rest of the country turn its eyes on the fact that there were other (black) bodies lying in the swamps of Mississippi. Until the killing of a black mother's son becomes as important as the killing of a white mother's son, we who believe in freedom cannot rest."

The summer campaign culminated in a mock election organized by SNCC. Blacks elected an integrated slate of 68 members, under the banner of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), to challenge the official all-white delegation at the Democratic Party's national convention in Atlantic City in August. Baker helped enlist support from liberal delegates from around the country, but President Lyndon Johnson, fearful of alienating southern white voters, rejected the MFDP's plan. Instead, he offered MFDP two seats in the state delegation. Led by sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer and Bob Moses (another Baker protégé), the MFDP rejected the compromise. But the controversy pressured the party to change its rules for subsequent conventions to require more women and minority delegates. And despite its frustrations with the Democratic Party, SNCC and its Freedom Summer project – along with the march from Selma to Montgomery the following March -- played a key role in pushing LBJ and Congress to pass the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Baker continued her political activism—working on school desegregation efforts with the Southern Conference Educational Fund, supporting independence struggles in Puerto Rico and in Africa, and allying herself with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and other women's rights groups—until her death on her 83rd birthday, Dec. 13, 1986.

Baker would surely be impressed by the current wave of protest against racial injustice. She would also urge the activists to make sure they transform their outrage into an ongoing movement that can survive beyond the immediate reaction to the epidemic of police abuses. That means building strong organizations that can identify and train young leaders, mobilize people around both short-term demands (such as videotaping police activities and ending local stop-and-frisk practices), and conduct campaigns for longer-term policy changes (such as repealing Stand Your Ground laws, sentencing reform, felon disenfranchisement, voter suppression, and living wages) at the national, state, and local levels.

On Thursday night, Biden enlisted Baker's words to inspire Americans to take the country back from the forces of reaction and racism. As Baker understood, the first step is to elect good people to office who support progressive causes, but the equally important next step is to build and sustain a powerful movement for social justice that can hold both your allies and your adversaries accountable.

Peter Dreier is professor of politics at Occidental College. His books include The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame, We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism, American Style, and the forthcoming Baseball Rebels: The Reformers and Radicals Who Shook Up the Game and Changed America.

‘Smart’ Trump Speaks With Vocabulary Of Fifth-Grader (At Best)

‘Smart’ Trump Speaks With Vocabulary Of Fifth-Grader (At Best)

Many Americans complain that Donald Trump has a tiny vocabulary. But he disproved his critics Wednesday during an impromptu press conference on the South Lawn of the White House.

In the past, Trump has repeatedly reminded people about his keen intellect by insisting “I’m smart.” Wednesday, he dug deep into his massive personal word bank and uttered a five-word sentence, “I’m a very intelligent person.”

Not only is that sentence three words longer than “I’m smart,” it is also three words longer than the phrase “f**king moron,” which is what his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson allegedly called him not long ago.

Wednesday’s boast came in response to a reporter who asked Trump if he should be more civil.

“Well I think the press makes me more uncivil than I am,” the president said, and then quickly switched the topic from his manners to his mind.

“You know, people don’t understand, I went to an Ivy League college. I was a nice student. I did very well. I’m a very intelligent person.”

Even long before he started running for president, Trump repeatedly claimed that he’s both well-educated and brainy. Each time, it isn’t clear if he’s trying to convince his interviewers or himself.

In a 2004 interview with CNN, Trump said, “I went to the Wharton School of Finance. I got very good marks. I was a good student. It’s the best business school in the world, as far as I’m concerned.”

In 2011, in an interview with ABC, Trump said, “Let me tell you, I’m a really smart guy. I was a really good student at the best school in the country,” referring once again to Wharton, the University of Pennsylvania’s business school, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1968.

“I went to the Wharton School of Finance,” he said during a speech in Phoenix in July 2015, a month after announcing he was running for president. “I’m, like, a really smart person.”

The next month, in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Trump described  Wharton as “probably the hardest there is to get into.” He added, “Some of the great business minds in the world have gone to Wharton.” He also observed: “Look, if I were a liberal Democrat, people would say I’m the super genius of all time. The super genius of all time.”

During a CNN-sponsored Republican town hall in Columbia, South Carolina, in February 2016, Trump reminded the audience that he had gone to Wharton and repeated the same boast: “Look, I went to the best school, I was a good student and all of this stuff. I mean, I’m a smart person.”

Even after winning the White House, Trump couldn’t help reminding people about his mental muscles. He did it a few days after his inauguration during a visit to CIA headquarters. Trump’s handlers staged the event so he could demonstrate his full support for the agency (despite having spent much of his campaign bashing the nation’s intelligence community) and to divert media attention away from the 750,000 Americans who had come to Washington, D.C., that day to protest Trump’s presidency. But Trump’s scripted remarks turned into an impulsive rambling rant that included attacks on the media and his insistence that as many as 1.5 million people attended his inauguration (despite photos revealing no more than 250,000).

Many Americans complain that Donald Trump has a tiny vocabulary. But he disproved his critics Wednesday during an impromptu press conference on the South Lawn of the White House.

In the past, Trump has repeatedly reminded people about his keen intellect by insisting “I’m smart.” Wednesday, he dug deep into his massive personal word bank and uttered a five-word sentence, “I’m a very intelligent person.”

Not only is that sentence three words longer than “I’m smart,” it is also three words longer than the phrase “f**king moron,” which is what his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson allegedly called him not long ago.

Wednesday’s boast came in response to a reporter who asked Trump if he should be more civil.

“Well I think the press makes me more uncivil than I am,” the president said, and then quickly switched the topic from his manners to his mind.

“You know, people don’t understand, I went to an Ivy League college. I was a nice student. I did very well. I’m a very intelligent person.”

Even long before he started running for president, Trump repeatedly claimed that he’s both well-educated and brainy. Each time, it isn’t clear if he’s trying to convince his interviewers or himself.

In a 2004 interview with CNN, Trump said, “I went to the Wharton School of Finance. I got very good marks. I was a good student. It’s the best business school in the world, as far as I’m concerned.”

In 2011, in an interview with ABC, Trump said, “Let me tell you, I’m a really smart guy. I was a really good student at the best school in the country,” referring once again to Wharton, the University of Pennsylvania’s business school, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1968.

“I went to the Wharton School of Finance,” he said during a speech in Phoenix in July 2015, a month after announcing he was running for president. “I’m, like, a really smart person.”

The next month, in an interview on Meet the Press, Trump described Wharton as “probably the hardest there is to get into.” He added, “Some of the great business minds in the world have gone to Wharton.” He also observed: “Look, if I were a liberal Democrat, people would say I’m the super genius of all time. The super genius of all time.”

During a CNN-sponsored Republican town hall in Columbia, South Carolina, in February 2016, Trump reminded the audience that he had gone to Wharton and repeated the same boast: “Look, I went to the best school, I was a good student and all of this stuff. I mean, I’m a smart person.”

Even after winning the White House, Trump couldn’t help reminding people about his mental muscles. He did it a few days after his inauguration during a visit to CIA headquarters. Trump’s handlers staged the event so he could demonstrate his full support for the agency (despite having spent much of his campaign bashing the nation’s intelligence community) and to divert media attention away from the 750,000 Americans who had come to Washington, D.C., that day to protest Trump’s presidency. But Trump’s scripted remarks turned into an impulsive rambling rant that included attacks on the media and his insistence that as many as 1.5 million people attended his inauguration (despite photos revealing no more than 250,000).

Peter Dreier is professor of politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. His most recent book is The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (Nation Books).

Where Are The Monuments To Real American Heroes?

Where Are The Monuments To Real American Heroes?

Reprinted with permission from  BILLMOYERS.COM

The current controversy over whether to dismantle statues of some prominent Confederate figures is a battle over whom we admire and consider as heroes. It is also a battle over who has power to shape how we view our history.

“Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee,” President Donald Trump said last month after the struggle in the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia. “So this week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?”

In May, the New Orleans City Council declared monuments of Lee, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate Gen. PGT Beauregard public nuisances and had them removed. In August, Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh ordered Confederate monuments removed from the city’s public spaces. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, directed the dismantling of a statue in front of the State House of Roger Taney — a Supreme Court justice who was chief author of the 1857 Dred Scott decision that ruled that African-Americans could not be American citizens. Earlier this month, in response to student protests, Yale University renamed Calhoun College — a residential complex named for John C. Calhoun, a senator from South Carolina, vice president and influential advocate for slavery — Hopper College, after Rear Adm. Grace Murray Hopper, a computer pioneer and naval officer. To buttress the symbolism, Yale removed a portrait of Calhoun from a dining hall.

The New York Times recently published a list of the Confederate monuments that are now subject of controversy in cities across the country.

Not surprisingly, most monuments celebrate political, business and military figures. You can criss-cross the country and find statues, schools, government and university buildings, museums, parks, and streets celebrating presidents, senators, governors, jurists, inventor-entrepeneurs, founders of major corporations, generals and fallen soldiers. But our veneration of them often comes at the expense of recognizing other citizens who had a major role in shaping our nation’s history.

Shouldn’t we also honor the organizers, activists, artists, writers, athletes, judges, and occasional elected officials who fought to make the United States a more humane and inclusive country? What about the pioneers who built movements and gave voice to the struggles for women’s suffrage, protecting the environment and consumers, putting an end to lynching, giving workers the right to form unions, and pushing for a progressive income tax, a federal minimum wage, old-age insurance, the 8-hour workday and government-subsidized health care and housing?

Statue of Harriet Tubman in Harlem New York. (Photo by denisbin/ flickr CC 2.0) 

When they first advanced their ideas, they were considered impractical idealists, utopian dreamers or dangerous radicals. Now we take these ideas for granted. We all stand on their shoulders.

To create a partial catalogue of monuments celebrating progressive figures, I’ve drawn on the people profiled in my book, The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame. I’ve identified statues located in public places (but not busts of heads or paintings, parks or public buildings), celebrating these progressive figures.

The list focuses on people whose influence was primarily during the 20th century — so Tom Paine, Daniel Shays, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, William Monroe Trotter, William Lloyd Garrison, Mother Jones, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Henry Demarest Lloyd, John Muir, Ida Wells, Terrence Powderly, Thorsten Veblen and Jacob Riis, among other radicals and reformers, are not included.

A Short Tour of Monuments to Progressives

Tom L. JohnsonStatue of Tom L. Johnson in downtown Cleveland’s Public Square (Photo by Scazon/ flickr CC 4.0)

A statue of Tom L. Johnson, the progressive mayor of Cleveland from 1901 to 1909, is located in Cleveland’s Public Square.

A statue of Robert M. La Follette Sr., the progressive Wisconsin governor and senator, sits in National Statuary Hall in the US Capitol. A number of public schools throughout Wisconsin are named for La Follette.

Crusading lawyer and Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis adorns the campus of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Besides the university, many public schools — including high schools in New York City and San Antonio — are named for Brandeis.

Attorney Clarence Darrow spent most of his career defending radicals and labor activists, but he’s most famous for defending evolution in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial. A statue of Darrow sits on the lawn in front of the Rhea County Court House in Dayton, Tennessee. It was dedicated on July 14, 2017 and sits opposite the statue of William Jennings Bryan, who beat Darrow in that controversial case.

Theodore RooseveltStatue of Theodore Roosevelt at Theodore Roosevelt Island in Washington DC. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons) 

This statue of Theodore Roosevelt on Roosevelt Island in the Potomac River across from Washington, DC is one of many statues and schools named for the trust-busting president. You can also visit three national parks in honor of the environmental president.

The name of progressive philosopher and school reformer John Dewey adorns public schools in Denver; New York City; Warrensville Heights, Ohio; Flint, Michigan and elsewhere, but there are no statues with Dewey’s likeness.

A sculpture of urban reformer Jane Addams, the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (1931), can be found on the campus of Cal State University in Fresno. Schools in Seattle; New York City; Bolingbrook and Moline, Illinois; Long Beach, California and other cities are named for the founder of modern social work.

Students in Sacramento can attend Hiram Johnson High School, and the public can visit the state office building in San Francisco named for the progressive governor, but there are no statues celebrating his life.

W.E.B. DuBoisBust of W.E.B. DuBois at Clark Atlanta University. (Photo by Hildabast/Wikimedia Commons) 

A statue of scholar and activist W.E.B. DuBois is located at his alma mater, Fisk University. The main library at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, a physics building at Fisk University, and dormitories at the University of Pennsylvania and Hampton University are named for DuBois. Public schools is Chicago, Baltimore, Wake Forest, NC, and elsewhere are named for him, too.

This statue of Alice Hamilton, a crusading physician who founded the modern field of occupational health, sits in Headwaters Park in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

A middle school in New York City is named for Robert F. Wagner, the progressive New Deal senator who led fights for workers’ rights and public housing, but there are no statues erected to honor him.

These statues of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt at the Roosevelt National Historic Site in Hyde Park, New York are among the many statues and schools named in their honor. A stunning recent addition to the collection of memorials is The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial along the Potomac in Washington, DC.

Franklin and Eleanor RooseveltStatues of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt at Hyde Park, New York. (Photo by Alexisrael/Wikimedia Commons) 

A 12-foot-high, 4-ton statue of Albert Einstein is set at the entrance to the headquarters of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC. Einstein is holding a paper engraved with the equations for his major scientific contributions. There are dozens of other Einstein statues in the US and around the world and many schools named after the famous scientist and socialist.

This statue of the pioneering and fearless birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, with a gag over her mouth, stands in Old South Meeting House in Boston. There are no schools named for the controversial socialist and feminist.

Margaret SangerStatue of Margaret Sanger at the Old South Meeting House in Boston, Massachusetts. (Photo by MarissaHuber/ flickr CC 4.0) 

A monument to John L. Lewis — leader of the mine workers union and later the Congress of Industrial Orgnizations (CIO) — sits in Monongahela Township, Greene County, Pennsylvania, on a site where 37 coal miners lost their lives in a mine explosion in 1962. There’s another statue of the brilliant orator and labor leader at the John L. Lewis Mining & Labor Museum in Lucas, Iowa.

Several statues of Helen Keller portray the socialist, feminist and pacifist as a young girl learning how to speak, like this one located in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, of Keller and her teacher, Anne Sullivan. The Keller statue in National Statutory Hall in the US Capitol in Washington, DC shows her at a pump, where she spoke her first word, “water.” There are many schools around the country named for the founder of what is now called the disability rights movement.

There’s no sculpture of consumer and labor activist Frances Perkins, but the US Department of Labor building and the Frances Perkins Academy in New York City are named for the first female Cabinet secretary and a crusading New Deal reformer. However, the governor of Maine recently tried to have the Frances Perkins Conference Room in the state capitol renamed in view of her pro-labor stance.

Helen KellerAnne Sullivan and Helen Keller Memorial in Tewksbury, Massachusetts. (Photo by Daderot/Wikimedia Commons) 

Famed New York City Mayor and congressman Fiorello La Guardia sits in the Greenwich Village section of New York City. New York’s La Guardia High School is one of the premier arts high schools in the country.

Norman Thomas High School in Manhattan and the Norman Thomas ’05 Library at Princeton University are named after the leader of the American Socialist Party and frequent presidential candidate, from the 1930s through the 1950s. A plaque at the Princeton library reads: “Norman M. Thomas, class of 1905. ‘I am not the champion of lost causes, but the champion of causes not yet won.’”

Swarthmore College named a dormitory after suffragist leader Alice Paul, a graduate of the college. Montclair State University in New Jersey has also named a building in her honor. And you can pay homage to Alice Paul and other women’s rights luminaries at the National Park Service’s Belmont-Paul National Historic Site.

An apartment building in Philadelphia bears the name of Sidney Hillman, the founder and president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and a key backer of FDR’s New Deal program.

A. Philip Randolph, civil rights and labor leader and leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, sits in Boston’s Back Bay Train Station. Another statue of Randolph was erected in the concourse of Union Station in Washington, DC. Schools in Jacksonville, Florida; New York City; Philadelphia and Atlanta are named in his honor. Jacksonville renamed one of its streets A. Phillip Randolph Boulevard and an A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum is located in Chicago’s Pullman Historic District.

Statues of the radical Minnesota Depression-era Farmer-Labor Party Gov. Floyd Olson, including one in front of the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul, have been constructed throughout state.

Dorothy DayDorothy Day statue at St Mary’s Church in Colts Neck, New Jersey. (Photo by Jim Forest/ flickr CC 4.0) 

Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, sits outside St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Colts Neck, New Jersey. Another Day statue can be found in front of the Solanus Casey Center in Detroit. Dormitories at Lewis University in Romeoville, Illinois, the University of Scranton in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Loyola University in Maryland are named in her honor. Broadway Housing Communities, a supportive housing project in New York City, opened the Dorothy Day Apartment Building at 583 Riverside Drive in 2003.

The name of actor, activist, singer and linguist Paul Robeson adorns public schools in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, and New Brunswick and Trenton, New Jersey. In 1976, the apartment building on Edgecombe Avenue in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan where Robeson lived during the early 1940s was officially renamed the Paul Robeson Residence, and the street was renamed Paul Robeson Boulevard. The main library at Rutgers University, Robeson’s alma mater, is named for him. There are no statues, but many busts of Robeson, including this one at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio.

The people of Yakima, Washington honored their native son, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, with a statue in front of Davis High School, his alma mater.

The Los Angeles Unified School District named a school in Wilmington after Harry Bridges, the longtime left-wing leader of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. There’s a bust of Bridges in San Pedro, Los Angeles’ waterfront district, and the union is currently seeking a home for a newlycompleted statue.

A statue of Langston Hughes — poet, novelist, playwright, short story writer and columnist— sits in the Watkins Community Museum of History in Lawrence, Kansas. Schools in Lawrence; East Orange, New Jersey; Baltimore; Chicago; New Orleans and Fairburn, Georgia are named for Hughes.

New York City named a school after left-wing congressman Vito Marcantonio, who represented Harlem in Congress from 1934-50.

The Ella Baker School in Manhattan, serving pre-K to eighth-grade students, is named for the civil rights organizer.

Elementary school children crowd around a sculpture of Theodor Geisel at the opening of the Dr. Seuss Memorial Sculpture Garden in Springfield, Massachusetts. The $6.2 million garden honors the creator of the Grinch, the Lorax and the Cat in the Hat. Geisel, known as Dr. Seuss was born in Springfield. (Photo by William B. Plowman/Getty Images) 

There’s a statue of Theodor Geisel — whose children’s books, under the pen name Dr. Seuss, took aim at bullies, hypocrites and demagogues — on the campus of the University of California-San Diego, not far from the Geisel Library.

In 2010, fans of William J. Brennan, Jr., unveiled a statue of the Supreme Court justice in front of the Essex County Hall of Records in his hometown of Newark, New Jersey. William J. Brennan High School, named for the author of many far-reaching decisions including Roe v. Wade and the Miranda rulings, is located in San Antonio, Texas. The historic Hudson County Courthouse in Jersey City, New Jersey, which had opened in 1910, was named the William J. Brennan Court House in 1989.

Schools named for Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the theologian who was active in the civil rights and anti-war movements, are located in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto.

A statue of environmental crusader Rachel Carson was dedicated in Woods Hole on Cape Cod, Massachusetts in 2013. Schools named for Carson are located in New York City; Chicago; San Jose, California; Herndon, Virginia; Gaithersburg, Maryland; Sammamish, Washington and Beaverton, Oregon.

Rachel CarsonA statue of environmental crusader Rachel Carson was dedicated in Woods Hole on Cape Cod, Massachusetts in 2013. (Photo by bug_g_membracid/ flickr CC 4.0) 

Riverfront Park in Wheeling, West Virginia is home to a statue of Walter Reuther, longtime president of the United Auto Workers and a founder of the modern labor movement. Walter Reuther High School is part of the public school system in Kenosha, Wisconsin and Walter Reuther Middle School is located in Rochester Hills, Michigan.

A statue of Thurgood Marshall —the courageous leader of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, lead lawyer in the Brown v. Board of Education case and the first African-American justice on the US Supreme Court, stands in front of the State House in Annapolis, Maryland. Another Marshall statue stands in front of the federal courthouse in Baltimore. High schools in San Francisco; Dayton, Ohio; and Missouri City, Texas are named for Marshall.

There’s probably no progressive American with more monuments in his honor than Martin Luther King Jr. His name adorns many schools, streets, buildings and statues, including this one on the University of Texas campus in Austin. You can also visit the National Park Service memorial to Dr. King along the banks of the Potomac.

The West Chester (Pennsylvania) Area School District named its newest high school after native Bayard Rustin, a key organizer in the civil rights movement who coordinated the 1963 March on Washington.

Okemah, Oklahoma honored its most famous native, folk singer Woody Guthrie (who wrote “This Land Is Your Land”) with a statue in its downtown area. Another Guthrie statue is located in Washington state near the Grand Coulee Dam, the subject of several Guthrie songs.

A statue of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer was unveiled in her hometown of Ruleville, Mississippi in 2012. Fannie Lou Hamer Middle School and Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School are located in the Bronx section of New York City.

The Los Angeles Dodgers unveiled a statue of baseball legend and civil rights activist Jackie Robinson outside Dodger Stadium in April 2017. There are also statues in Brooklyn; Pasadena, California; Jersey City, New Jersey; Daytona Beach, Florida; and Los Angeles on the UCLA campus honoring the Hall of Fame player who broke baseball’s color line in 1947. Schools in Milwaukee, New York City and elsewhere also are named after Robinson.

A statue of Malcolm X can be found in the former Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, the site of his 1965 assassination.

Malcolm X statueMalcolm X statue in the lobby of the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center in Harlem, New York. (Photo By Raymond Boyd/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) 

Chavez Plaza at California State University San Marcos includes a statue dedicated to Cesar Chavez as does the University of Texas at Austin. There are public schools named for the leader of the farmworkers movement in Portland, Oregon; Coachella, California; Phoenix and many other cities.

New York City is home to Harvey Milk High School, named after San Francisco supervisor and the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the United States. A bust of Milk is located in San Francisco City Hall.

Missing Monuments

You won’t find statues of some of the nation’s most influential radicals and reformers. We may stand on their shoulders, but we can’t stand on their statues, because they don’t exist.

Here are just a few of those who aren’t commemorated in any substantial way: Eugene V. Debs, Florence Kelley, Victor Berger, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lincoln Steffens, Bill Haywood, Emma Goldman, Lewis Hine, Upton Sinclair, Rose Schneiderman, Roger Baldwin, Myles Horton, Harry Hay, Saul Alinsky, Virginia Durr, Carey McWilliams, C. Wright Mills, I.F. Stone, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Arthur Miller, Jane Jacobs, Jerry Wurf, Barry Commoner, Pete Seeger, Howard Zinn, Michael Harrington, William Sloane Coffin, Allard Lowenstein, John Kenneth Galbraith, Ted Kennedy, Muhammad Ali, Tom Hayden, and Paul Wellstone.

Peter Dreier is professor of politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. His most recent book is The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (Nation Books).

 

This Labor Day, Remember That Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign Was For Workers’ Rights

This Labor Day, Remember That Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign Was For Workers’ Rights

Reprinted with permission fromCommonDreams.org 

Most Americans today know that Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968, but few know why he was there. King went to Memphis to support African American garbage workers, who were on strike to protest unsafe conditions, abusive white supervisors, and low wages — and to gain recognition for their union. Their picket signs relayed a simple but profound message: “I Am A Man.”

Today we view King as something of a saint, his birthday a national holiday, and his name adorning schools and street signs. But in his day, the establishment considered King a dangerous troublemaker. He was harassed by the FBI and vilified in the media. He began his activism in Montgomery, Alabama, as a crusader against the nation’s racial caste system, but the struggle for civil rights radicalized him into a fighter for broader economic and social justice.

As we celebrate Labor Day on Monday, let’s remember that King was committed to building bridges between the civil rights and labor movements.

Invited to address the AFL-CIO’s annual convention in 1961, King observed:

“Our needs are identical with labor’s needs: decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old-age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children, and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor’s demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.”

He added:

“The labor movement did not diminish the strength of the nation but enlarged it. By raising the living standards of millions, labor miraculously created a market for industry and lifted the whole nation to undreamed of levels of production. Those who today attack labor forget these simple truths, but history remembers them.”

Several major unions reciprocated King’s support. When he was jailed in Birmingham for participating in civil disobedience, it was Walter Reuther, the charismatic leader of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, who paid his bail.

Several major unions, especially the UAW and the International Ladies Garment Workers, had donated money to civil rights groups, supported the sit-ins and freedom rides, and helped organize the massive 1963 March on Washington, where King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

We often forget that its official name was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and that its manifesto called on Congress not only to pass a civil rights bill but also “a national minimum wage act that will give all Americans a decent standard of living.” The manifesto pointed out that “anything less than $2.00 an hour fails to do this.”

In 1963, the minimum wage was $1.25 — the equivalent of $9.97 in today’s dollars. A $2 minimum wage in 1963 would be $15.95 an hour today.

In the 1960s, the sit-ins (a tactic adopted from workers’ sit-down strikes in the 1930s), Freedom Rides, mass marches, and voter registration drives eventually led Congress to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. King was proud of the civil rights movement’s success in winning the passage of those important laws. But he realized that neither law did much to provide better jobs or housing for the large numbers of low-income African Americans in the cities and rural areas. He recognized the limits of breaking down legal segregation.

“What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?” King asked.

King observed: “Negroes are not the only poor in the nation. There are nearly twice as many white poor as Negro, and therefore the struggle against poverty is not involved solely with color or racial discrimination but with elementary economic justice.” To achieve economic justice, King said, “there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.”

“There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American whether he [or she] is a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid, or day laborer,” said King.

In a speech to the Illinois AFL-CIO in 1965, King said:

“The two most dynamic movements that reshaped the nation during the past three decades are the labor and civil rights movements. Our combined strength is potentially enormous. We have not used a fraction of it for our own good or for the needs of society as a whole. If we make the war on poverty a total war; if we seek higher standards for all workers for an enriched life, we have the ability to accomplish it, and our nation has the ability to provide it. lf our two movements unite their social pioneering initiative, thirty years from now people will look back on this day and honor those who had the vision to see the full possibilities of modern society and the courage to fight for their realization. On that day, the brotherhood of man, undergirded by economic security, will be a thrilling and creative reality.”

King warned about the “gulf between the haves and the have-nots” and insisted that America needed a “better distribution of wealth.”

Thus, it was not surprising that Memphis’ civil rights and union leaders invited King to their city to help draw national attention to the garbage strike.

The strike began over the mistreatment of 22 sanitation workers who reported for work on January 31, 1968, and were sent home when it began raining. White employees were not sent home. When the rain stopped after an hour or so, they continued to work and were paid for the full day, while the black workers lost a day’s pay. The next day, two sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death by a malfunctioning city garbage truck.

These two incidents epitomized the workers’ long-standing grievances. Wages averaged about $1.70 per hour. Forty percent of the workers qualified for welfare to supplement their poverty-level salaries. They had almost no health care benefits, pensions, or vacations. They worked in filthy conditions, and lacked basic amenities like a place to eat and shower. They were required to haul leaky garbage tubs that spilled maggots and debris on them. White supervisors called them “boy” and arbitrarily sent them home without pay for minor infractions that they overlooked when white workers did the same thing. The workers asked Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb and the City Council to improve their working conditions, but they refused to do so.

On February 12, 1,300 black sanitation workers walked off their jobs, demanding that the city recognize their union (the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFSCME) and negotiate to resolve their grievances. They also demanded a pay increase to $2.35 an hour, overtime pay, and merit promotions without regard to race.

For the next several months, city officials refused to negotiate with the union. In private, Mayor Loeb reportedly told associates, “I’ll never be known as the mayor who signed a contract with a Negro union.”

The city used non-union workers and supervisors to pick up garbage downtown, from hospitals, and in residential areas. Even so, thousands of tons of garbage piled up. Community support for the strikers grew steadily. The NAACP endorsed the strike and sponsored all-night vigils and pickets at City Hall. On February 23, 1,500 people — strikers and their supporters — packed City Hall chambers, but the all-white City Council voted to back the mayor’s refusal to recognize the union.

Local ministers (led by Rev. James Lawson) formed a citywide group to support the strikers. They called on their congregants to participate in rallies and marches, donate to the strike fund, and boycott downtown stores in order to get business leaders to pressure city officials to negotiate with the union. On Sunday, March 3, an eight-hour gospel singing marathon at Mason Temple raised money for strikers. The next day, the beginning of the fourth week of the strike, 500 white labor unionists from Memphis and other Tennessee cities joined black ministers and sanitation workers in their daily downtown march.

On several occasions, the police attacked the strikers with clubs and mace. They harassed protestors and even arrested strike leaders for jaywalking. On March 5, 117 strikers and supporters were arrested for sitting in at city hall. Six days later, hundreds of students skipped high school to participate in a march led by black ministers. Two students were arrested.

At the rallies, ministers and union activists linked the workers’ grievances with the black community’s long-standing anger over police abuse, slum housing, segregated and inadequate schools, and the concentration of blacks in the lowest-paying, dirtiest jobs.

Despite the escalating protest, the city establishment dug in its heals, refusing to compromise and demanding that the strikers return to work or risk losing their jobs. The local daily newspaper, the Commercial Appeal, consistently opposed the strikers. “Memphis garbage strikers have turned an illegal walk out into anarchy,” it wrote in one editorial, “and Mayor Henry Loeb is exactly right when he says, ‘We can’t submit to this sort of thing!’”

Mayor Loeb and City Attorney Frank B. Gianotti persuaded a local judge to issue an injunction prohibiting the strike and picketing. The union and its allies refused to end their protests. Several union leaders — AFSCME’s international president Jerry Wurf, Local 1733 President T.O. Jones, and national staffers William Lucy and P. J. Ciampa — were cited for contempt, sentenced to 10 days in jail, fined $50, and freed pending appeal.

With tensions rising and no compromise in sight, local ministers and AFSCME invited King to Memphis to re-energize the local movement, lift the strikers’ flagging spirits, and encourage them to remain nonviolent. On Monday, March 18, King spoke at a rally attended by 17,000 people and called for a citywide march. He said:

“One day our society will come to respect the sanitation worker if it is to survive, for the person who picks up our garbage, in the final analysis, is as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant. All labor has dignity.”

His speech triggered national media attention, and catalyzed the rest of the labor movement to expand its support for the strikers.

King returned to Memphis on Thursday, March 28, to lead a march. The police moved into crowds with night sticks, mace, tear gas, and gunfire. The police arrested 280 people. 60 were injured. A 16-year-old boy, Larry Payne, was shot to death. The state legislature authorized a 7 p.m. curfew and 4,000 National Guardsmen moved in. The next day, 300 sanitation workers and supporters marched peacefully and silently to City Hall — escorted by five armored personnel carriers, five jeeps, three large military trucks, and dozens of Guardsmen with bayonets fixed. President Lyndon Johnson and AFL-CIO President George Meany offered their help in resolving the dispute, but Mayor Loeb turned them down.

King came back to Memphis on Wednesday, April 3 to address a rally to pressure city officials to negotiate a compromise solution to the strike. That night, at the Mason Temple — packed with over 10,000 black workers and residents, ministers, white union members, white liberals, and students — King delivered what would turn out to be his last speech. He emphasized the linked fate of the civil rights and labor movements:

“Memphis Negroes are almost entirely a working people. Our needs are identical with labor’s needs — decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor’s demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.”

The next day, James Earl Ray assassinated King as he stood on the balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Hotel.

As Time magazine noted at the time: “Ironically, it was the violence of Martin Luther King’s death rather than the nonviolence of his methods that ultimately broke the city’s resistance” and led to the strike settlement.

President Johnson ordered federal troops to Memphis and instructed Undersecretary of Labor James Reynolds to mediate the conflict and settle the strike. The following week, King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, and dozens of national figures led a peaceful memorial march through downtown Memphis in tribute to King and in support of the strike. Local business leaders, tired of the boycott and the downtown demonstrations, urged Loeb to come to terms with the strikers.

On April 16, union leaders and city officials reached an agreement. The City Council passed a resolution recognizing the union. The 14-month contract included union dues check-off, a grievance procedure, and wage increases of 10 cents per hour May 1 and another five cents in September. Members of AFSCME Local 1733 approved the agreement unanimously and ended their strike.

The settlement wasn’t only a victory for the sanitation workers. The strike had mobilized the African American community, which subsequently became increasingly involved in local politics and school and jobs issues, and which developed new allies in the white community.

Like the civil rights movement of the 1960s, there is a growing movement in the United States today protesting the nation’s widening economic inequality and persistent poverty.

One of the most vibrant crusades is the ongoing battle to raise the minimum wage. In the past 40 years, the federal minimum wage — stuck at $7.25 since 2009 because Republicans in Congress have refused to act — has lost 30% of its value.

As a result, low-wage workers for fast-food chains and big box retailers, janitors, security guards, day laborers, and others have forged a grassroots movement to pressure their employers (like Walmart and McDonalds) to raise starting salaries and benefits. These workers and their allies have engaged in civil disobedience and strikes to galvanize public opinion.

Coalitions of unions, community organizations, faith-based and immigrant rights groups have also successfully pushed cities and states to adopt minimum wage laws that will pay families enough to meet basic needs. A growing number of cities — including Seattle, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Pasadena, and many others — have passed minimum wage laws that will gradually reach between $13 and $15 an hour, typically with an annual cost-of-living increase. Los Angeles County — the nation’s largest county — adopted a law that will raise the minimum wage to $15 in unincorporated areas. Last year California and New York adopted state laws to bring the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Raise Up Massachusetts, a coalition of community groups, faith-based organizations, and unions, is sponsoring a ballot measure next year that would raise the state’s minimum wage from $11 to $15 an hour by 2022 with a $1 increase each year starting in 2019. Twenty-nine percent of the Massachusetts workforce would see increased wages under the initiative, affecting roughly 947,000 workers.

A Pew Research Center survey last year found that 52% of American voters favored raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. An even larger number of Americans embrace increasing it to $12 an hour. Backed by nearly half of the Senate’s Democrats, Senators Bernie Sanders and Patty Murray have introduced the Raise the Wage Act of 2017 which would gradually raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2024.

In recent years, New York, California, Massachusetts, and Hawaii have adopted different versions of the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights that provides new protections for nannies, babysitters, senior care aides, housekeepers and others — primarily women and many of them immigrants — who are excluded from federal labor protections.

Several states — including California, Rhode Island, Washington, New Jersey, New York, and the District of Columbia — have adopted paid family leave laws. A growing number of cities (including Philadelphia, Austin, Seattle, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Portland (Oregon), Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C), and counties (including Missoula County in Montana, Pima County in Arizona, and Kings County in Washington), have adopted laws providing government employees, and in some places all employees, with paid family leave.

These laws require employers to pay workers’ salaries if they take time off from work to care for a new child following birth, adoption, or foster placement, to recover from a pregnancy or childbirth-related disability, and/or to take care of sick family members. This is a right that workers in most other countries already take for granted. As the number of cities and states with such laws continues to grow, Congress will be under increasing pressure to adopt similar policies at the federal level.

Of course, President Trump and the Republican Congress are trying to roll back worker protections against wage theft, health and safety dangers at the workplace, and threats to retirement security. Trump has appointed anti-union members to the National Labor Relations Board who will seek to weaken rules protecting workers.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” King wrote in his Letter From Birmingham Jail. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Just as King helped build bridges between the labor and civil rights movements, today’s union activists are forging closer ties to the immigrant rights, women’s rights, and environmental justice movements, as well as to struggles to reform Wall Street and to challenge the proliferation of guns and the mass incarceration of people of color.

In his final speech at Memphis’ Mason Temple on April 3, 1968, King, only 39 at the time, told the crowd about a bomb threat on his plane from Atlanta that morning, saying he knew that his life was constantly in danger because of his political activism.

“I would like to live a long life,” he said. “Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.”

We haven’t gotten there yet. But King is still with us in spirit. The best way to honor his memory this Labor Day and every day is to continue the struggle for human dignity, workers’ rights, living wages, and social justice.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Peter Dreier is E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department, at Occidental College. His most recent book is The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (Nation Books, 2012). His other books include: Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century (University Press of Kansas, 3rd edition, 2014), and The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City(University of California Press, revised 2006). He writes regularly for the Los Angeles Times, Common Dreams, The Nation, and Huffington Post.

Fifty Years Ago, The Supreme Court Knocked Down Bans On Interracial Marriage—How Have Things Changed Since Then?

Fifty Years Ago, The Supreme Court Knocked Down Bans On Interracial Marriage—How Have Things Changed Since Then?

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Should we allow states to decide whether black Americans may marry white Americans? Today, such an idea seems absurd. Most Americans believe that states shouldn’t be permitted to trample on the basic right of interracial couples to marry. It would be unfair and a clear violation of civil rights. But until 50 years ago (June 12, 1967), when the Supreme Court knocked down state laws banning interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia, 16 states still had such laws on the books. At the time, 72% of Americans opposed marriage between blacks and whites.

Back then, the Supreme Court was far ahead of public opinion. In fact, it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that even half of Americans said they approved of such interracial marriages. In 2013, the most recent poll on the topic, 87% of Americans—including 84% of whites and 96% of blacks—supported interracial marriage. It may be shocking to some that 13% of Americans still disapprove of black-white marriages, but the shift in public opinion over five decades has been steady and irreversible. Equally important, 96% of Americans younger than 30, and 83% of those who live in the South, now support interracial marriage.

Since Loving v. Virginia, the number of interracial marriages has steadily increased, even in the South. In 1967, only 3% of newlyweds were intermarried. By 2015, that share had risen to 17%, according to the Pew Research Center.  Only 10% of recent white newlyweds are intermarried but the number is higher in different parts of the country, including some parts of the South, including 27% in the San Antonio area, 20% in the Orlando, Florida and Tucson, Arizona areas, 19% in the Fayetteville, N.C. area, 15% in the Dallas-Forth Worth area, and 14% in greater Oklahoma City.

In 1967, Southern racists used “states’ rights” as the justification to defend Jim Crow laws, including school segregation, racial discrimination in restaurants and on buses, severe limits on voting by African Americans, and bans on interracial marriage. More recently, opponents of marriage equality used the same rationale, claiming that marriage laws should be left to the states to decide. Indeed, the Loving ruling became a precedent in federal court decisions ruling that bans on same-sex marriage were unconstitutional, including in the landmark Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015.

Jeff Nichols’ 2016 film, “Loving,” focused on the brave couple who brought their interracial marriage suit to the Supreme Court, and the inexperienced but savvy attorneys who represented them. The film’s title is not a plea for compassion and understanding; it is the last name of the plaintiffs, a working-class couple who simply wanted to live as husband and wife and raise their children in Virginia, where they had been born and where they and their extended families lived.

In June 1958, Mildred Jeter, who was black, and Richard Loving, a white bricklayer, drove 90 miles from their home in Central Point in rural Virginia and got married in Washington, D.C., to circumvent Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which then made interracial marriage a crime. Six weeks later, the local police raided their home at 2am, hoping to find them having sex, which was also a crime for interracial couples in Virginia. The cops found the couple asleep in bed. Richard showed them the marriage certificate on the bedroom wall.

“That’s no good here,” the sheriff responded. In fact, the document was used as evidence that the Lovings had violated Virginia law. The Lovings were charged with “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth.”

In his ruling, Leon M. Bazile, the Virginia trial judge wrote:

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pled guilty, and Bazile sentenced them to one year in prison. The judge offered to suspend their sentence if they agreed to leave the state for 25 years. They agreed, and reluctantly moved to Washington, D.C. In defiance of the agreement, they secretly moved back to Virginia and soon found themselves in the middle of a controversial legal battle.

Like two previous movies about this case—“Mr. and Mrs. Loving” (a 1996 made-for-TV drama) and “The Loving Story” (a 2011 documentary) — “Loving” makes clear that neither Richard (played by Joel Edgerton) nor Mildred (Ruth Negga) were political activists. Poor, without much education, they had grown up in the small town of Central Point, where interracial mixing—if not marriage—had been the norm. They knew that their marriage was unusual, but initially they weren’t looking to change the law or embark on a crusade. The phrase “civil rights” pops up in the film only when one of Mildred’s relatives tells her, while watching Martin Luther King Jr. on television, “You need to get you some civil rights.”

Mildred got the idea to write to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy for help. Kennedy referred her to the American Civil Liberties Union, which agreed to take their case. The two ACLU lawyers, Bernard Cohen and Philip Hirschkop, were young and untested, but they were also persistent and clever. In November 1963, the two lawyers filed a motion in the state trial court to reverse the Lovings’ sentence on the grounds that it violated the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. It took four years to reach the U.S. Supreme Court. In the interim years, the civil-rights movement galvanized America and stirred its conscience about racial injustice. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Change was in the air. But interracial marriage was the last taboo. Given public opinion at the time, it was an issue Congress was unlikely to confront but that the Supreme Court might tackle.

In 1967, Chief Justice Earl Warren, the moderate Republican who had skillfully engineered a unanimous 9-0 vote in the Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation case in 1954, still led the court. As with the earlier case, Warren believed that the nation needed to see the Supreme Court united on the potentially explosive issue of interracial marriage.

It was certainly, in today’s parlance, no slam dunk. Five of Warren’s Supreme Court colleagues had been appointed by Democratic presidents—William O. Douglas and Hugo Black by Franklin Roosevelt, Tom Clark by Harry Truman, Byron White by John F. Kennedy, and Abe Fortas by Lyndon Johnson—but they espoused different views on a variety of legal and social issues.

As Southern Democrats, Black and Clark understood how explosive the Loving case would be. Black, who had represented Alabama in the U.S. Senate from 1927 to 1937, no doubt felt guilt over his racist past. In 1926, when running for the Senate, Black had joined the Ku Klux Klan, thinking he needed its members’ votes. He spoke at Klan meetings, espousing anti-black and anti-Catholic views.

Near the end of his life, Black would admit that joining the Klan was a mistake, but also said, “I would have joined any group if it helped get me votes.” In 1929, Black wrote to a constituent denouncing an interracial marriage in New York, observing that “New York State should have a law prohibiting this sort of thing,” according to a biography by Roger Newman. In the Senate, Black was an ardent New Dealer, but hardly a progressive on racial issues. He consistently opposed the passage of anti-lynching legislation, and even led a filibuster of an anti-lynching bill.

Clark, a Texan, was an assistant to U.S. Attorney General Biddle when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. Biddle named Clark to be Civilian Coordinator of the Alien Enemy Control Program that interned Japanese Americans and other supposed enemies of the United States. Like Warren, Clark later acknowledged that internment had been a mistake. Appointed attorney general by Truman in 1945, Clark helped formulate and carry out Truman’s aggressive Cold War anti-communist policies, including requiring federal employees to sign loyalty oaths and helping blacklist liberals and radicals. But Clark also played a key role in supporting Truman’s civil-rights efforts. He filed a brief in the landmark (and controversial) Shelley v. Kraemer case that in 1948, struck down racial covenants in housing contracts that had restricted real-estate sales to blacks. He also helped oversee Truman’s civil-rights committee that released an important report, To Secure These Rights, which had 35 recommendations that included ending segregation and poll taxes, laws to protect voting rights, and the creation of a civil-rights division in the Department of Justice.

That case once again demonstrated Warren’s skills at persuading his colleagues into a unanimous decision.

Three of Warren’s Supreme Court colleagues—John Harlan, William Brennan, and Potter Stewart—had, like Warren, been appointed by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. Harlan was a conservative who nevertheless often voted in favor of civil rights—in the same mold as his grandfather and namesake, the only dissenting justice in the landmark 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case that upheld the constitutionality of state segregation laws under the “separate but equal” doctrine.

But Harlan was also the lone dissenter in the 1964 Reynolds v. Sims decision, which established the “one man, one vote” principle that ensured equal protection under the 14th Amendment. In 1956, Eisenhower appointed Brennan—a Republican-appointed federal judge in New Jersey—for purely political reasons. Brennan was a Democrat and a Catholic, and Eisenhower, who was running for re-election, wanted to appeal to both constituencies. Only one senator, Republican Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, voted against Brennan’s confirmation. Stewart was from a prominent conservative Ohio family, and a frequent Warren Court dissenter, but in the 1965 case Shuttlesworth v. City of Birmingham, he ruled with the majority to bar police from using an anti-loitering law to prevent civil-rights activists from standing or demonstrating sidewalks, a clear civil-rights victory. That case demonstrated once again Warren’s skills at persuading his colleagues into a unanimous decision. The justices deciding that case no doubt recognized that, despite the fact that many Americans still opposed interracial marriage, the tide of history was turning, and they wanted to be on the right side.

In their landmark ruling, Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court struck down all state anti-miscegenation laws and declared marriage to be an inherent right. Warren penned the opinion for the court, noting that the Virginia law endorsed the doctrine of white supremacy. He wrote:

“Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination.”

The Lovings don’t even bother to attend the court hearing. Richard Loving simply said to one of the attorneys, “Tell the judge I love my wife and it is just unfair that I can’t live with her in Virginia.”

At the time, most Americans did not accept that simple statement. Public opinion, particularly in the South, lagged behind the court’s ruling. In 1969, two years after the Loving ruling, members of Georgia’s state legislature and Board of Regents objected to hiring former Secretary of State Dean Rusk to a teaching job at the University of Georgia because he had participated in his daughter’s wedding to a black man. Although the Loving ruling had invalidated state laws banning interracial marriage, many Southern states were slow to erase their own laws. South Carolina didn’t repeal its law until 1998; Alabama didn’t do so until 2000.

If one rereads Warren’s words in Loving v. Virginia, and substitutes the term “same-sex marriage” for “interracial marriage,” the argument is no less compelling. Most Americans now agree that to deny gays and lesbians the right to marry is, as Warren wrote in Loving, “directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

The civil-rights movement laid the foundation for the gay-rights crusade, which adopted many of its strategies and tactics, including grassroots organizing, protest and civil disobedience, court challenges, lobbying, and campaigning to elect sympathetic candidates.

After the gay-rights movement burgeoned in the 1970s, more and more public figures — politicians, entertainers, teachers, judges, journalists, businesspersons, athletes, and clergy members — acknowledged their homosexuality. TV sitcoms began to feature openly gay characters. In 2002, the New York Times began publishing announcements of same-sex civil unions and weddings. Massachusetts Democrat Gerry Studds came out of the closet in 1983—the first member of Congress to do this. Now there are six openly gay and lesbian members in the House and one, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, in the U.S. Senate. All 50 states now have at least one openly gay elected official, according to the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund. In 2013, NBA player Jason Collins became the first pro athlete on a major American sports team to come out of the closet. The following year, Apple’s Tim Cook became the first openly gay CEO of a Fortune 500 corporation.

As gay activism accelerated, attitudes changed. Americans who believe that people “choose” to be gay fell from 40% in 1994 to 25% in 2014.

As advocates began to put specific issues on the agenda, public support increased for openly gay public school teachers, health benefits for gay partners, gay adoption, AIDS research funding, and for campaigns to end anti-sodomy laws, anti-LGBT workplace and housing discrimination, and hate crimes against gays. Support for gays serving openly in the military rose from 44% in 1993, to more than 75% in 2008. In 2010, President Obama signed legislation ending the government’s 17-year “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

As with interracial marriage, more and more people have confronted an issue that was once taboo. A growing number of Americans have realized that they know gay people. In 1992, only 52% of Americans said that they knew someone who was gay or lesbian. By 2010, that figure had increased to 76%. Not surprisingly, people who know someone who is gay or lesbian voice less disapproval, higher comfort levels, and greater support for same-sex marriage, polls have found.

In 1996, only 27% of Americans believed it should be legal for gay and lesbian couples to marry. By this year, that number had increased to 64%, a new high, according to the Gallup Poll.

Moreover, support for gay marriage is much higher among younger Americans. Among millennials (18-29 year olds), 83% endorse gay marriage. But support has also been increasing among older Americans. Among Americans over 65 (born before 1951), support for same-sex marriage has increased to 53%.

According to the latest poll, 74% of Democrats, 71% of independents, and 47% of Republicans favor same-sex marriage.

In June 2015, in its Obergefell v. Hodges decision, the Supreme Court overturned state laws prohibiting same-sex marriage, thus legalizing marriage equality throughout the country. In some ways, the ruling followed in the footsteps of Loving v. Virginia, but the two verdicts also differ substantially. The Loving decision was unanimous. The Obergefell ruling on same-sex marriage was decided narrowly by 5 to 4.

Four members of the nation’s highest court — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia (now deceased), and Clarence Thomas—opposed marriage equality. Each had his own public and private justifications, but history will record that all four of them supported states’ rights over equal rights, bigotry over tolerance. Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Anthony Kennedy (who cast the swing vote) will be remembered for embracing the notion that marriage is a matter of personal choice. Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, cited Loving v. Virginia several times, explaining that it had established an “abiding connection between marriage and liberty.”

During last year’s presidential campaign, Donald Trump flip-flopped on the subject of marriage equality numerous times. At one point he promised to appoint justices to erase the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell ruling. Later he said that his personal views on same-sex marriage are “irrelevant,” claiming that the case “was already settled.”  As president, he signed a “religious freedom” executive order in May that gives Attorney General Jeff Sessions authority to interpret existing federal laws and regulations in a way that could result in discrimination against LGBT people in health care, education, housing, and employment by allowing businesses to refuse services or jobs to gays and lesbians if doing so offends their religious beliefs.  The Trump administration has also revoked protections for transgender school students.  Trump refused to endorse this month’s Gay Pride celebrations, events previously marked by White House support.

Even if Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s one Supreme Court pick, opposes same-sex marriage, the current line-up of justices would not likely overturn Obergefell ruling, since five of them had already voted in support of same-sex marriage. But if Trump gets to select another justice, all bets are off.  And if Trump is forced to resign and Vice President Mike Pence becomes president, we’d have a much stronger opponent of marriage equality in the White House.  In 2015, as Indiana governor, Pence signed the country’s first state religious freedom bill – allowing individuals and businesses to deny services they feel are contrary to their religious beliefs.

Republican efforts to weaken laws protecting LGBT persons from discrimination may play to their current base, but American attitudes have changed dramatically in the past few decades. Homophobia has not disappeared. A hard core of anti-gay Americans, including some politicians and clergy members, still generate headlines. But their followers are shrinking. The gay-rights movement has clearly won Americans’ hearts and minds. The days of gay-bashing as a political strategy are numbered.

Mildred and Richard Loving’s struggle foreshadowed the more recent battle over same-sex marriage. Perhaps not surprisingly, Mildred Loving embraced the idea of marriage equality for gays and lesbians before she died in 2008.  In June 2007, on the 40th anniversary of the case that bore her name, she issued the following statement:

“I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights. I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.”

Peter Dreier is professor of politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. His most recent book is The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (Nation Books).

This article was made possible by the readers and supporters of AlterNet.

I Don’t Care Who Killed JFK

I Don’t Care Who Killed JFK

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Next week, as Americans celebrate the 100th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s birth (May 29, 1917), much of the public conversation will be about his death. The controversy over who killed JFK in 1963 has now raged for over half a century. It is a diversion and a waste of time.

It is more important to learn from the successes and mistakes of Kennedy’s presidency, to reflect on the changes that have occurred since his death, and to restore the hope for a better society and a peaceful world that JFK—despite his many contradictions—inspired.

But the question of who killed Kennedy will never be resolved. Assassination buffs, for whom the JFK murder is a cult-like obsession, are locked into their views. Proponents of different theories argue and make claims, but they don’t really debate. They look at many of the same facts and come to very different conclusions.

Whether you believe the Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman acting on his own, or one of the many conspiracy theories that Oswald was part of a plot hatched by the CIA, the mafia or both, or some other speculation, the nation will never reach a consensus on the tragic killing of the young president.

But more importantly, it really doesn’t matter.

I refuse to waste my time wading into the muck of the JFK assassination controversies. It is not that I lack curiosity about American history. But nothing that I uncover would surprise me or alter my view of my country. I already know that the Central Intelligence Agency was involved in the overthrow of governments and the murder of political leaders in Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam and elsewhere. It is well established that the CIA bungled several efforts to kill and overthrow Cuba’s Fidel Castro. I don’t need more evidence to know that some politicians and government agencies collaborated with organized crime. We currently have a president who had close ties to the mob during his days as a New York real estate developer.

Nothing I could learn from the Warren Commission, Oliver Stone’s film “JFK,” or the hundreds of books about the assassination, would change how I think about the current problems facing the United States or what to do about them.

Kennedy was hated by the nation’s right-wingers, including the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society, some extremists within the military (such as General Edwin Walker) and anti-Catholics among Protestant fundamentalists.  Back then, the Republican Party still had a liberal wing — like Senators Jacob Javits (New York), Charles Percy (Illinois), George Aiken (Vermont), Margaret Chase Smith (Maine), Clifford Case (New Jersey), Mark Hatfield (Oregon), Lowell Weicker, and John Chafee (Rhode Island) – which made it possible for Democrats and Republicans to find common ground. The right-wing businessmen who later became the money behind Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964 were still just a faction within the GOP. Today, in contrast, the religious right, the National Rifle Association, and the Tea Party — fueled by funders like the Koch Brothers and Robert and Rebekah Mercer, political operatives like Jim DeMint, Grover Norquist, and Steve Bannon, and the right-wing echo chamber dominated by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh — has taken control of the Republican Party.

President Kennedy was torn between his Democratic Party’s segregationist wing and its liberal, pro-labor and civil rights wing. He was an ardent Cold Warrior, timid on civil rights and had few legislative triumphs as either a senator or as president. Because he was young, charismatic and murdered before he could even complete his first term in office, most Americans overestimate JFK’s achievements during his thousand days in the White House.  He is well-known for creating the Peace Corps and resisting his top military advisors who wanted to go to war with Russia over the Cuban missile crisis.  Even so, he rarely gets credit for some of his most important accomplishments, including creating a commission on women that helped jump-start the feminist movement and initiating an effort to limit the nuclear arms race. Three days before he was assassinated, he told aides that he wanted to do something about poverty. Lyndon Johnson took up JFK’s mantle and declared a national war on poverty.

Since Kennedy was assassinated, the nation’s economy has become increasingly dominated by a relatively small number of giant global corporations who have too much political influence. Some of the nation’s corporate leaders are Republicans and some are Democrats but (with a few exceptions) they share a common outlook about business and government. They want lower taxes, fewer regulations and weaker unions. They seek to maximize profits and control, but they are not a conspiracy. Since Kennedy’s time, the super-rich have expanded the tools they use to influence politics. In the past half century, the role of private wealth, corporate-backed think tanks and business-supported lobby groups in American politics has skyrocketed.

Regardless of who killed Kennedy, it won’t change my view that we need much tougher campaign finance reform to rid the country of its legal bribery system that gives corporate America too much power.

No matter who pulled the trigger in Dallas that November day in 1963, it won’t revise my thinking that we need tougher regulations on big business to protect consumers, the environment and workers from irresponsible business abuses, we need to tighten regulations on Wall Street so they can’t repeat the damage they caused with their risky, reckless and often illegal practices, and we need to battle the National Rifle Association and win stronger gun control laws.

We’ll never know whether JFK would have expanded or ended American involvement in Vietnam, but we do know that the president who replaces Donald Trump – either through his resignation, impeachment, or defeat in 2020 – must reduce our country’s military presence around the world, cut the defense budget and redirect tax dollars to strengthen our education system, our crumbling infrastructure and our shortage of affordable housing.

Whether Oswald acted on his own or was part of an organized plot, it won’t have any bearing on my view that the next president’s Supreme Court appointments should be individuals who will overturn Citizens United, reverse the current court’s pro-big business agenda, protect women’s right to reproductive health and abortion and restore the Voting Rights Act.

Whether or not JFK was a great president, he did inspire a generation with his call to use their talents to improve our society and our world. The idealism that he helped unleash resulted in a revolution in values and institutional change, including civil rights, the environment, women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights, consumer protections, workplace safety, and limits on American militarism. No matter who killed Kennedy, that is his most important legacy.

Peter Dreier is professor of politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. His most recent book is The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (Nation Books).

This article was made possible by the readers and supporters of AlterNet.

United: Perez And Ellison Move Democrats Toward A Progressive Future

United: Perez And Ellison Move Democrats Toward A Progressive Future

I was hoping that Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minnesota) would win the Democratic National Committee chairmanship because of his experience as an organizer, but former Labor Secretary Tom Perez — who won a narrow victory at the DNC’s Atlanta meeting today — is also a great choice. He’s progressive, pro-worker, an accomplished advocate for civil rights and social justice, and the first Latino in that job. He immediately asked Ellison to serve as deputy chair — a smart move to bring the party together.

Importantly, the delegates at the Atlanta meeting also elected union organizer and immigrant rights activist Maria Elena Durazo — who supported Ellison for the top post — as DNC vice chair. The daughter of migrant farm workers, as head of UNITE HERE’s LA local and then leader of the 800,000-member LA County Federation of Labor, Durazo helped elect progressives throughout the state and helped transform the California Democratic Party into a voice for the disenfranchised, including immigrants.

We now have a Latino and an African American at the top of the DNC, a moderate Democratic minority leader in the Senate (Chuck Schumer) being pushed to the left by the grassroots resistance movement, a democratic socialist (Bernie Sanders) with a large and energized base within the party, and a charismatic and principled progressive woman (Elizabeth Warren) as the strongest voice within the party and the most likely candidate for president in 2020. These are all positive signs.

The battle between Ellison and Perez was often portrayed as a struggle between the party’s “progressive” and the “establishment” wings. That’s a mischaracterization. Both Ellison and Perez are long-time progressives. Perez is hardly a corporate Democrat or a tool of the party’s Wall Street wing. His entire career has been devoted to fighting for civil rights, workers’ rights, and social justice.

Perez is certainly the most progressive DNC chair since Oklahoma Senator Fred Harris occupied that post in 1970. Since then, the position has been held primarily by corporate fundraisers and moderate-to-liberal politicians, including Larry O’Brien, Jean Westwood, Robert S. Strauss, Ken Curtis, John C. White, Charles Manatt, Paul Kirk, Ron Brown, David Wilhelm, Chris Dodd, Donald Fowler, Roy Romer, Steven Grossman, Ed Rendell, Joe Andrew, Terry McAuliffe, Howard Dean, Tim Kaine, and the recently deposed Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

It would be a huge mistake for my fellow Ellison supporters to diss Perez and threaten to leave the Democratic Party. No doubt a handful of Ellison supporters will feel the need to go on the warpath. I hope the media don’t manufacture a phony party crisis by giving a megaphone to the small number of Ellison supporters who think that Perez’s victory is a defeat for progressives. It isn’t.

After he lost the primary fight, Bernie endorsed Hillary. Some of Bernie’s followers attacked him for doing so as a sell-out. A few drifted over to embrace Green Party candidate Jill Stein. But the media exaggerated the extent of the desertion. In fact, about 95% of Bernie supporters voted for Hillary. We need that kind of unity now.

As my friend Gerry McDonough, a long-time progressive activist in Massachusetts, observed: “We’re in a war against fascists. There’s no time for infighting.”

Ellison echoed those sentiments. “If you came here supporting me, wearing a Keith t-shirt, or any t-shirt, I’m asking you to give everything you’ve got to support Chairman Perez,” he said after the vote. “You love this country, you love all the people in it, you care about each and every one of them, urban, rural, suburban, all cultures, all faiths, everybody, and they are in need of your help. And if we waste even a moment going at it over who supported who, we are not going to be standing up for those people. We don’t have the luxury, folks, to walk out of this room divided.”

The task ahead — which Perez supports — is to rebuild the Democratic Party as an organizing party that can take advantage of the growing grassroots resistance movement that has emerged since Trump’s inauguration. That means raising money to hire organizers and put them in states and Congressional districts where liberal and progressive Democrats can win governors’ seats, state legislative races, and the House and Senate races. It means working in collaboration with unions, community organizing groups, environmental and LGBT groups, the Dreamers and other immigrant rights activists, Black Lives Matters, Planned Parenthood, Indivisible and other groups that are already mobilizing on the ground.

The anti-Trump resistance movement is way ahead of the party. The five million strong Women’s March, the battles at airports against Trump’s travel ban, the recent wave of town hall meetings all over the country where angry voters (many of them politically involved for the first time) confronted Republican members of Congress, and the 7,000 local groups galvanized by the Indivisible website all happened without Democratic Party involvement. But we need the party to help expand the protest movement and channel that energy into an electoral movement to put progressive and liberal Democrats in office.

Let’s get behind the Perez/Ellison team, strengthen the progressive movement, and defeat the pro-Trump Republicans in 2018 and 2020.

Peter Dreier is professor of politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. His most recent book is The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (Nation Books). This essay is reprinted from the Huffington Post.

Steve Mnuchin: Evictor, Forecloser, And Our New Treasury Secretary

Steve Mnuchin: Evictor, Forecloser, And Our New Treasury Secretary

Reprinted with permission from The American Prospect.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Donald Trump criticized Wall Street bankers for their excessive political influence and attacked hedge-fund managers for getting away with “murder” under the current tax code. “The hedge-fund guys didn’t build this country,” Trump said on Face the Nation. “These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky.”

Now, however, Trump has tapped Steve Mnuchin, a 53-year-old Wall Street hedge-fund and banking mogul—and, since May, his campaign-finance chair—to be the nation’s secretary of the Treasury.

Trump’s earlier rhetoric aside, it’s actually a good match. Both Trump and Mnuchin earned their first fortunes the old fashion way: They inherited them. Trump took over his father Fred’s real-estate empire and expanded it through questionable business practices. Mnuchin, also the scion of a wealthy and well-connected family, graduated from Yale in 1985, started his career as a trainee at Salomon Brothers and soon wound up working at Goldman Sachs, where his father Robert had been a general partner.

Both Trump and Mnuchin have run businesses accused of widespread racial discrimination and other predatory practices. They both represent the excessive wealth and greed of the billionaire developer and banker class. And both men have hedged their political bets, donating big bucks to Democrats as well as Republicans.

While Mnuchin ran OneWest Bank, based in Pasadena, California, the lender engaged in a variety of predatory practices that government bank regulators scrutinized and trial judges condemned. As Treasury secretary, Mnuchin would no doubt be one of the Trump administration’s key advisors in trying to dismantle the 2010 Dodd-Frank law strengthening regulations on the financial industry, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which in its short life has already protected hundreds of thousands of consumers from bank abuse.

Mnuchin jumped on the Trump train when many Wall Street executives were wary of the New York developer, not only because of his faux anti-Wall Street rhetoric but also because of his cavalier comments about renegotiating the America’s debt with other nations, which revealed Trump’s erratic understanding of global trade and diplomacy.

When he began his campaign, Trump pledged to self-fund his presidential bid. After the Republican primaries, Trump backed off that promise. Instead, he tapped Mnuchin as his finance chair to draw on his Wall Street contacts to raise money from fellow financiers. At the time, Mnuchin pledged to raise $1 billion for Republicans and the Trump campaign, but he never came close to raising that amount.

Mnuchin will be the third former Goldman Sachs executive to serve as Treasury secretary in recent years, following Robert Rubin the Clinton administration and Henry Paulson in the Bush administration. Mnuchin will be joined in Trump’s inner circle by another Goldman Sachs alum, Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart News chief and Trump campaign chair whom Trump named as his chief strategist and senior counselor.

Mnuchin worked for 17 years at Goldman Sachs, where he eventually became an executive vice president. At Goldman, Mnuchin saw how the bank could profit from the 1980s savings-and-loan crisis by buying up cheap assets, repackaging them, and selling them off. According to The Wall Street Journal, he left in 2002 at the age of 39 “with a reported $46 million stake in the bank.” He was recruited by his Yale roommate, Eddie Lampert, to join ESL, a hedge fund, as vice chairman.

A few months later, he jumped to SFM Capital Management as its CEO. Within a few months he changed jobs again, leaving SFM to co-found Dune Capital with his former Goldman colleagues Daniel Neidich and Chip Seelig. Mnuchin is now CEO of Dune Capital Management, a hedge fund has had business dealings with Trump. Dune Capital was part of a group of lenders for the construction of the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago. In 2008, Trump filed suit against Dune and the other lenders on his then unfinished Chicago skyscraper, “plunging the project into legal turmoil,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

The 2008 financial crisis inspired Mnuchin to return to banking. According to Bloomberg News, Mnuchin was watching TV in his New York office when he saw a story of customers lined up outside a branch of California’ s IndyMac bank, trying to pull their money out. “This bank is going to end up failing, and we need to figure out how to buy it,” Mnuchin told a colleague. “I’ve seen this game before,” he said, recalling how bankers had enriched themselves after the S&L crisis.

In 2009, after the bank collapsed, Mnuchin assembled a group of investors (including computer capitalist Michael Dell, financier George Soros, private equity investor Christopher Flowers, and hedge-fund titan John Paulson) to buy IndyMac Bank from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) as part of a sweetheart deal. They renamed it OneWest Bank and kept its headquarters in Pasadena.

The FDIC had taken over IndyMac—one of the largest banks to collapse during the Wall Street-induced mortgage meltdown—in July 2008. It had specialized in high-risk variable-rate mortgages and loans that didn’t require much documentation, including the income and credit history of borrowers.

The Mnuchin group paid FDIC $1.6 billion for the bank, far less than the value of IndyMac’s assets. The FDIC was so desperate to unload IndyMac that Mnuchin and his colleagues were able to obtain, as part of the purchase deal, a so-called “shared loss” agreement from the FDIC, which reimbursed these billionaires for much of their costs for foreclosing on people unlucky enough to have mortgages from IndyMac.

Within a year, the group that The Los Angeles Times called a “billionaires’ club of private financiers” had paid themselves dividends of $1.57 billion. In other words, the FDIC took much of the risk by subsidizing the bank’s troubled assets, while Mnuchin and his colleagues pocketed the profits.

Under Mnuchin’s leadership, OneWest engaged in a laundry list of predatory practices, including robo-signing and peddling reverse mortgages to senior citizens. In a July 2009 deposition, a OneWest vice president admitted that bank employees robo-signed 6,000 foreclosure-related documents per week. She admitted to not reading the documents before signing them, not knowing how the records were generated, and not signing in the presence of a notary. OneWest also engaged in “dual tracking,” the process in which a mortgage lender processes a homeowner’s request for a home loan modification while simultaneously putting the homeowner through the foreclosure process. In September 2013, a San Luis Obispo County couple won a seven-figure settlement and title to their two houses from OneWest when a judge determined the bank had engaged in dual tracking.

As part of its arrangement with the FDIC, Mnuchin’s group agreed to participate in a mortgage-modification program to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. Instead, OneWest engaged in aggressive foreclosure practices. According to a survey of homeowner counselors conducted by the California Reinvestment Coalition (CRC), a watchdog group, OneWest was one of the worst offenders in terms of failing to offer loan modifications to consumers facing foreclosure. By 2011, the Office of Thrift Supervision, a federal bank regulator, had accused OneWest of engaging in “unsafe or unsound practices” in its handling of foreclosures and its serving of residential mortgages on behalf of other lenders.

The CRC—a nonprofit organization that pushes banks to reinvest in low income communities and communities of color—determined from Freedom of Information Act requests that the FDIC had already paid out over $1 billion to reimburse OneWest for the cost of over 35,000 foreclosures in California and an unknown number in other states. CRC also estimated that the FDIC will eventually pay out another $1.4 billion for the costs associated with even more foreclosures in the future.

OneWest opened its doors with 33 branches and roughly $16 billion in assets. Mnuchin engineered its growth by purchasing two other failed institutions—First Federal Bank of California and La Jolla Bank—getting the FDIC to agree again to additional “loss share” arrangements so that the owners had little to lose. After these purchases, OneWest had 73 retail branches and $26 billion in assets. It also serviced billions of dollars of mortgage loans on the behalf of third parties, such as Fannie Mae. In multiple surveys of California housing counselors, OneWest was ranked among the worst mortgage servicers in the state.

Mnuchin and his OneWest colleagues were happy to enrich themselves at the government’s expense, but when it came to their customers, they displayed little mercy or compassion. In 2009, according to The New York Post, a judge called OneWest’s behavior “harsh, repugnant, shocking and repulsive” when it tried to foreclose on a New York family. The judge branded the bank’s conduct as “inequitable, unconscionable, vexatious, and opprobrious.”

Also in 2009, OneWest had the locks changed on the home of a Minneapolis woman in the middle of a blizzard, even after the company sent her a letter stating, “You expressed concern that at the end of the redemption period … you and your mother will be evicted from the property. … Rest assured, that will not take place due to the rescission of the foreclosure sale.”

The bank made a tidy profit on each foreclosure. “On bad loans, OneWest, which bought many of the loans at 70 percent of par value, gets the cash from a foreclosure,” according to The Los Angeles Business Journal, “and is also reimbursed [by the FDIC] up to 95 percent of the difference between the original loan value and the foreclosure sale amount.”

OneWest’s foreclosures were located disproportionately in communities of color. A CRC and Urban Strategies Council analysis of One West’s 35,877 foreclosures in California, from April 2009 to April 2015, found that 68 percent occurred in ZIP codes where the non-white population was 50 percent or greater.

But foreclosures are where OneWest’s interest in those neighborhoods appears to end. Only two of OneWest’s 73 branches are located in low-income areas. It makes few small business loans to businesses with annual revenues under $1 million—the kind of operations common in low-income and minority areas.

CRC executive director Paulina Gonzalez called OneWest Bank “a leader in foreclosing on seniors,” many of whom have reverse mortgages—loans that provide cash payments to help homeowners realize value from the equity in their homes, and become payable when the borrower dies or moves—insured by the Federal Housing Administration. Using another Freedom of Information Act request, CRC determined that OneWest’s reverse mortgage servicing subsidiary, Financial Freedom, was responsible for 39 percent of the foreclosures on FHA-insured reverse mortgages since April 2009.

CRC estimates that Financial Freedom only services 17 percent of the reverse mortgage market. In other words, Financial Freedom is foreclosing on reverse mortgages at about twice the rate that one would expect, given their share of the market.

Inevitably, these rapacious practices became the target of protest and public opposition.

In 2011, OneWest tried to evict Rose Gudiel, a 35-year-old government employee, from her one-story house in La Puente, a working-class suburb of Los Angeles. Guidel, her father (a warehouse worker) and her brother cared for her disabled mother in the small house they purchased in 2005.

They made steady mortgage payments until 2009, when one of her brothers died unexpectedly and the family lost his income. The family was two weeks late on the next mortgage payment. The Gudiels then spent over a year attempting unsuccessfully to get the bank to modify the loan—even though their income had long since recovered after another brother moved in with them. Then the bank started foreclosure proceedings.

“I was the first person in my family to graduate from college, and I worked hard so that I can own a home,” said Gudiel at the time. “And now Steve Mnuchin and OneWest are taking my dream away.”

But Gudiel said she would refuse to leave if the Los Angeles County Sheriff tried to evict them. She was joined by her neighbors, friends, and supporters from the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (a community organizing group) and the Service Employees International Union.

“[The bank] kept saying we can’t do anything. Your case is closed,” said Gudiel. “Our stand was, ‘No, we’re not leaving. This is our home. We worked hard for it and we’re just not going to leave.’”

In August 2011, Gudiel and her allies organized a sit-in at OneWest’s Pasadena headquarters. In October, in the midst of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Gudiel and over 200 supporters marched up the winding, hilly roads of Bel Air to the front gate of Mnuchin’s $27 million mansion, where they carried signs, blew whistles, and chanted in English and Spanish, demanding that Mnuchin and OneWest end the eviction proceedings and let Gudiel and family buy back their home. The protests garnered widespread media attention and forced OneWest to relent. OneWest and Fannie Mae authorized a loan modification that allowed the family to stay in their home.

In July 2014, Mnuchin arranged to sell OneWest to the CIT Group for $3.4-billion—more than double what he and his fellow investors paid for the bank five years earlier. CIT Group, a holding company that owned a Salt Lake City-based online bank, wanted to buy OneWest for its low-cost deposits and its network of Southern California retail branches. The consolidated bank now has assets of about $60 billion, ranking it among the nation’s 40 largest banks.

The CRC led an unsuccessful campaign to thwart the merger unless the combined bank pledged to expand its investments in low-income and minority neighborhoods. Over 21,000 people signed petitions against the merger, and over 100 organizations joined the effort to stop it. This groundswell of opposition forced the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to hold a rare public hearing in February 2015.

At the hearing, the CRC pointed out that, like OneWest, CIT Group is no stranger to corporate welfare. It pocketed $2.3 billion from U.S. taxpayers through a Troubled Assets Relief Program bailout that the bank never paid back because it went bankrupt in 2009. Amazingly, CIT Group told its shareholders that it intends to use the bankruptcy to reduce its federal tax bill, thus cheating the taxpayers twice.

Despite OneWest’s and CIT Group’s troubling track records, the Federal Reserve approved the merger, while the OCC granted a “conditional approval,” and required that the merged bank improve its draft plan to invest in underserved neighborhoods, as required by the federal Community Reinvestment Act. Nearly two years after the merger was first announced, however, “California communities are still waiting to hear about CIT Group’s reinvestment plan,” said CRC executive director Paulina Gonzalez.

“There’s nearly $5 billion in corporate welfare between these two huge banks,” Gonzalez said. “This merger is the poster child for enriching the 1 percent on the backs of the rest of us.”

Under the terms of the acquisition, CIT agreed to pay Mnuchin $4.5 million a year for three years as the merged bank’s vice-chairman. Because he relinquished that post in March 31 of this year, Mnuchin was given a $10.9 million severance package, according to The Wall Street Journal.

In CIT Group’s most recent annual report, the bank disclosed that it had received multiple subpoenas in 2015 from the Office of Inspector General at the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) related to the servicing of reverse mortgages by Financial Freedom.

After Trump appointed Mnuchin as his campaign-finance chair, CRC’s Gonzalez said that “HUD should release more information about its investigation of OneWest’s subsidiary.”

Mnuchin has dabbled in Hollywood, producing American Sniper, Mad Max: Fury Road, and Suicide Squad, but his sojourn into the entertainment world was also marked by controversy. Last year, Mnuchin resigned as co-chair of Relativity Media shortly before the Hollywood studio filed for bankruptcy. In a story in Variety, some creditors accused Mnuchin of having a conflict of interest because Relativity Media—which had received financing from OneWest Bank while he served as the bank’s chairman—repaid $50 million of those loans right before it went bankrupt.

Like Trump, Mnuchin has showered politicians in both parties with donations, though in recent cycles most of his money went to Republicans. Mnuchin has also spread some of the wealth he earned from his government-subsidized banking fortune to a wide variety of charities. Before their 2014 divorce, Mnuchin and his wife Heather were stalwarts in the high-society world of philanthropy in both New York and Los Angeles, attending and hosting star-studded balls and parties to support their favorite causes.

CRC’s Gonzalez noted the contradictions in Mnuchin’s two roles as philanthropist and as bank executive: “There is a sad irony in the image of Steve Mnuchin as a philanthropist, compared to the reality of Mnuchin as the leader of a bank responsible for foreclosing on tens of thousands of American families and senior citizens,” she said. “Steve Mnuchin was greatly enriched by OneWest Bank and now CIT Group, but those banks did little to serve the needs of ordinary families and working-class communities.”

IMAGE: Steven Mnuchin, Treasury secretary-designate, arrives at Trump Tower in New York, November 29, 2016.   REUTERS/Mike Segar

Peter Dreier teaches politics and chairs the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. His latest book isThe 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame(Nation Books, 2012).