Street SpiritJ U S T I C E N E W S & H O M E L E S S B L U E S I N T H E B A Y A R E A

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by Terry Messman

At the dawn of the decades-longconfrontation with the Tridentnuclear submarine, what Shelley

Douglass remembers most clearly is thephysical and emotional exhaustion thathad already overwhelmed the tiny groupof peace activists who would soon launcha campaign against the most lethalweapons system in history.

One day, out of the blue, Trident missiledesigner Robert Aldridge showed up at thedoorstep of Shelley and Jim Douglass bear-ing an unexpected — and unwelcome —call to renewed resistance to the arms race.It could not have come at a more difficulttime for the activists who formed thePacific Life Community and the GroundZero Center for Nonviolent Action.

They were still suffering burn-out andfatigue from years of stormy antiwarprotests, police repression, multiple arrests,trials that dragged on for years and long jailsentences. Relationships had broken apart,families had been separated by jail bars,and many were overloaded with anguishfrom a war that never seemed to end.

Now, they were once again being calledinto another colossal struggle against

impossible odds — a showdown with anuclear leviathan.

Those who had endured such heavycosts realized that if they were to confrontthe most destructive weapons system ofall time, they would have to take bettercare of one another and build more sup-portive communities.

WOMEN IN THE PEACE MOVEMENT

The many issues involving women’srights and the well-being of children andfamilies were also of vital importance inthe earliest days of the anti-nuclear move-ment in the Pacific Northwest.

From the very beginning, Pacific LifeCommunity and Ground Zero put forth aconsistent message about the importance offeminist principles to the larger peacemovement. The affinity group formed byShelley and Jim Douglass was named“Luna” — symbolically honoring the femi-nine spirit of peacemaking. The Douglassesconstantly said that the movement to abol-ish nuclear weapons had to be an anti-sexistand anti-racist movement.

At the end of the 1960s, a generationof women who had dedicated themselves

Feminist Legends andIcons of Resistance “We are reclaiming our history—remembering all thosefounding mothers, all those women who kept the movementgoing without credit for so long, all the contributions wewomen have made and undervalued.” — Shelley Douglass

by Carol Denney

The most compelling voices in thestudio of Youth Spirit Artworks(YSA) can communicate without

making a single sound. They roar out of thecanvases and the artwork on the studiowalls in powerful shapes and colors.They’ve transformed ordinary objects suchas wooden chairs and tote bags into vibrat-ing declarations of self-expression.

The “Visions of Equality” project’spainted wooden doors are powerfullyexpressive of the individuals behind thepaintbrushes, with bold colors and thecourage it takes to work large across aspace without the opportunity one has tohide in a journal or a sketchbook.

It’s all there, a spirit of self-determina-tion and purposeful exploration of color,shapes, patterns, and symbols both per-sonal and universal.

Artist Dre’an Cox’s painted door isplayful, reflecting a Pokémon theme fromvideo games. Gina Wardlaw’s door is aportrait of a strong, regal woman in brightcolors looking calmly at the viewer.

Other doors also take the widest viewof the theme, almost entirely lining thefences of the spacious, bright backyardarea of the YSA studio like bright boatsails in a harbor heading for new worlds.

Youth Spirit Artworks Art DirectorVictor Mavedzenge’s painted door standsamong them, testimony to his own deeptalent and his MFA Degree from TheSlade School of Fine Art in London.

YSA staff members Danielle Gibbins,the program director and youth advocate,and Lia Li, a student from China who isassisting with the entrepreneurship pro-ject, remind visitors that the studio’s

Mary Harris “Mother” Jones. “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”See Feminist Icons of Resistance page 6

Youth Spirit Artworks:More Than a PaintbrushIt’s hard to quantify the value of hope. How do you measurewhat happens to someone creating art for the first time?

See Youth Spirit Artworks page 16 Lia Li displays an “art cart” used by young artists working at Youth Spirit Artworks.

October 2015ST R E E T SP I R I T2

by John Lindsay-Poland

The use by police of military tacticsand equipment in the East Bay isno accident. Federal and local

funding and equipment flow to lawenforcement throughout the country, andthe Bay Area is no exception.

San Francisco applied to the Pentagonto get a wheeled tank, known as a Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicle.

Berkeley deployed a SWAT team infull military gear to a residential neighbor-hood in response to a robbery of $40 froma laundromat.

In the promotional video for the feder-ally funded Urban Shield exercises, simu-lations of violent confrontations withpolice commandos are accompanied bydramatic Hollywood music, as if this werea movie for our entertainment.

Urban Shield is a vendor expo for mili-tary equipment and a massive exercise forSWAT teams and other agencies, hostedeach fall by the Alameda County Sheriff’sDepartment. It’s the largest such “tacticalexercise” in the country.

Taking place this year on September11, it involved at least three dozen policeSWAT teams from the Bay Area, as wellas from other states and nations. The exer-cise is funded by grants from theDepartment of Homeland Security as partof the Urban Areas Security Initiative(UASI), a national program of more than$500 million a year.

This year, the large-scale scenariosincluded a terrorist attack on a bicycletunnel in Marin County, an explosion atLevi’s Stadium in Sunnyvale (where theSuper Bowl will be played next year), anda hostage situation at the Pebble Beachgolf tournament in Monterey County.SWAT teams also competed for 48 hoursstraight in dozens of other “tactical [i.e.militarized] scenarios.”

In addition, Urban Shield seeks to pre-pare police, fire and medical personnel fornon-criminal emergencies, such as thecollapse of buildings and rail and ferryboat accidents. But Urban Shield’s SWATteams and scenarios of militarized polic-ing are more numerous than all fire, med-ical and explosive disposal teams andexercises combined.

While most SWAT teams are from theBay Area, they have come from as far asIsrael, Bahrain, Qatar, Brazil, Guam,South Korea and Singapore.

The emphasis on SWAT teams as theresponse to emergencies — including nat-ural disasters — as well as the exclusivefocus on worst-case violent scenarios,obscures and diminishes resources forresponding to the ordinary emergenciescommunity members face every day:inaccessible housing and medical care,militarized and underfunded schools,racist violence and violence againstwomen, fossil-fuel dependent and expen-sive transportation, food insecurity, etc.

It also reinforces an attitude that policeare at war in their own communities, withpeople of color, homeless, poor and men-tally disabled persons bearing the brunt.

For most operations of SWAT teams arenot in response to emergencies. Accordingto a study by the American Civil LibertiesUnion, 79 percent of SWAT team deploy-ments in 2011-2012 were to serve searchwarrants, mostly for drugs. More than halfthe people impacted by SWAT raids —where the race of individuals was known —were African Americans.

At Urban Shield’s vendor expo, a hun-dred companies sell military gradeweapons and surveillance equipment to

local police departments. These includecompanies doing business in the occupiedterritories of Palestine, such as Motorola,3M, FLIR, iRobot, Exelis (formerly ITT),and Safariland.

The literature and T-shirts displayed atthe vendor event illustrate the thinkingoffered at Urban Shield. These includeAmerican Spartan Apparel, whose T-shirts say things like: “That Which DoesNot Kill Me... Should Run” and “KeepCalm and Return Fire” and “DestructionCometh: And They Shall Seek Peace, andThere Shall Be None” — many of themwith skulls and crossbones and guns.

How exactly do these sentiments help

prepare publicly funded agencies to savelives? As much as people want to sayUrban Shield is about saving lives, thefocus on guns and death is overwhelming.Moreover, the emergency scenarios in theSWAT exercises do not reward de-escala-tion of conflict.

Urban Shield is run by a tight networkof Sheriff’s Department veterans andcronies. The major contractor for the exer-cise, at least in other cities in past years,was Cytel Group, run by ex-AlamedaCounty Sheriff’s Department staff.

Several of the companies vending theirwares at the expo have been generouscampaign contributors to Sheriff Ahern’s

re-election bids. 511 Tactical, for exam-ple, gave $35,159 worth of contributionsto Ahern’s campaign in August 2011 andis a “Title-level Sponsor” of UrbanShield. Corizon Health, a “PlatinumSponsor,” also profits from health ser-vices in prisons, and contributed $55,000to Ahern’s Campaign Committee from2011 to 2013. That is more than his cam-paign spent in all of 2014.

Adamson Police Products, a “TripleDiamond Sponsor” of Urban Shield 2015,gave $17,300 to Ahern’s campaign com-mittee between 2009 and 2013.

While Urban Shield is funded by a fed-

Urban Shield and the Movement to Stopthe Militarization of Police in the Bay Area

Theater groups occupied street intersections in downtown Oakland in protest of Urban Shield exercises and police repression.

“Humanize Not Militarize: Responses and Resistance to Militarism.” The American Friends Service Committee’s poster art exhibitshows the effects of militarism in both foreign and domestic policy, from Urban Shield exercises to Ferguson, Missouri, to Gaza.

See Urban Shield page 15

October 2015 ST R E E T SP I R I T 3

by the National Law Center onHomelessness and Poverty

On September 18, the U.S.Department of Housing andUrban Development (HUD)added to the growing federal

pressure against criminalization of home-lessness by giving incentives for commu-nities to take steps to end criminalizationin its $1.9 billion grant program for feder-al homelessness funding.

HUD’s new requirement for federalhomelessness funding follows on the heelsof the Department of Justice’s announce-ment in August that criminalizing individu-als for being homeless is unconstitutional.

Every two years, HUD issues itsNotice of Funding Availability to local

Continuums of Care (local partnerships ofpublic and private agencies that addresshomelessness in a given geographic area).

In this year’s application for $1.9 billionin federal funds, for the first time HUD isasking Continuums to “describe how theyare reducing criminalization of homeless-ness.” In the extremely competitive fundingprocess, Continuums’ ability to fullyrespond to this question can determine up totwo points in the funding application, andin many cases could be the differencebetween receiving funding or not.

“We welcome the federal govern-ment’s direction of limited tax dollars tothe places that will most effectively usethat money to address homelessness,” saidMaria Foscarinis, executive director of theNational Law Center on Homelessness &Poverty.

“The federal government cannot sus-tainably meet its goals of ending veteran’shomelessness this year, chronic homeless-ness next year, and all homelessness by2020 if communities continue to wastescarce tax dollars on failed policies that

perpetuate homelessness.”The Law Center has published multiple

reports on the criminalization of home-lessness, including No Safe Place, whichshowcased the dramatic increase in crimi-nalization in the past few years, as well ascase studies of communities engaging inconstructive alternatives. The No SafePlace Advocacy Manual shows that whencriminalization ordinances are challengedin court, most often they are struck down.

The Law Center has also garnered con-demnation of criminalization as cruel,inhuman, and degrading treatment by theUnited Nations’ Human RightsCommittee, the UN Committee on theElimination of Racial Discrimination, andHuman Rights Council, which made spe-cific recommendations to the federal gov-ernment to adopt funding incentives toabolish the practice.

This question on the Continuum ofCare’s funding application is the first stepin implementing those recommendations.

“Criminalization of homelessness isalready more expensive than providing

housing, but those costs — from keepingpeople in jail to increased emergencyroom visits — are often hidden,” said EricTars, senior attorney at the Law Center.

“We hope HUD’s new question ontheir funding application brings at leastone cost — the cost of lost federal dollarscoming into the community — into fullview. When added to the potential costsof losing litigation, there’s really no rea-son for communities to ignore the over-whelming data that shows housing ismore effective than criminalization.”

“The Law Center is happy to providetechnical assistance to communities inreviewing their policies to conform withthe Department of Justice brief and HUDincentives,” said Tars. “We hope manycommunities will take advantage of thisopportunity to reverse and eliminate theseharmful, unconstitutional practices.”

The National Law Center on Homelessness& Poverty (www.nlchp.org) is dedicated tousing the power of the law to prevent and endhomelessness.

The Cost of Anti-Homeless Laws Just Went Up $1.9 BillionHUD just added a high costto the growing federal pres-sures against cities thatcriminalize homelessness.

A Column on Human Rights

by Carol Denney

The mayor of Los Angeles andthe mayor of Portland bothdeclared states of emergencythis September in response to

the housing crisis. It sounds good, exceptfor the reality that, as Megan Hustings ofthe National Law Center on Homelessnessand Poverty puts it, “homelessness hasbeen an emergency for 30 to 40 years.”

“If this is what it takes for cities to takeaction, it is definitely good,” Hustingssaid. “What we’re concerned about in LosAngeles is that the declaration of an emer-gency is being used to open more sheltersand put money into law enforcement —which is not the way to go.”

What does a declaration of emergencydo? It depends on the city in question, butgenerally speaking, it creates more flexi-bility. Zoning laws can be waived andfunding can be reorganized or acquiredfrom more sources.

In May of 2009, an emergency wasdeclared in Berkeley to close an elementaryschool for seven days over an outbreak ofthe flu. In November of 2009, in responseto an oil spill in the San Francisco Bay, thegovernor declared an emergency for allaffected communities. And every 14 daysin Berkeley, an emergency is declared bythe Berkeley City Council so the needleexchange can continue to save the lives ofinjection drug users.

In most such cases, a city council’sapproval is required, but most peoplewould not dispute that when thousands ofpeople are living on the street, whenthere’s no state in the union where work-ers making minimum wage can affordmarket-rate housing, and when hundredsof thousands of school children are living

in cars and trying to do homework in thedark, we have an emergency.

Still, the flexibility acquired in a tech-nical state of emergency runs the risk ofbeing misapplied by cities without prag-matic approaches to the housing crisis.Shuffling homeless people through shel-ters and ticketing people for sitting, sleep-ing, camping, etc. has yet to be officiallyrecognized as an inappropriate response tothe housing crisis by either Portland orLos Angeles, let alone many other citiesnationally — despite the Department ofJustice’s August 2015 official Statementof Interest regarding criminalization ofhomelessness being “cruel and unusualpunishment” and a constitutional violationof the Eighth Amendment.

“While there are not enough shelter bedsfor people who need them, they are not ananswer to homelessness,” stated Hustings.“They don’t address root causes.”

Those who watch in horror as citiesnationwide continue adding to an alreadytowering stack of anti-homeless lawswould be wise to keep an eye on citieswhich make grand pronouncements abouta state of emergency in housing availabili-ty when, in fact, this is old news.

There is nothing in the technical decla-ration of a state of emergency whichrequires a city to erase criminalizationlaws or create badly needed low-incomehousing. There is nothing in the declara-tion which obligates a city to recognizehow silly it is to fine people for sittingdown or sleeping, when they have nomoney in the first place.

Megan Hustings has a recommendationfor all cities with or without an emergencydeclaration regarding the housing crisis.She said, “A city needs to take a hard lookat the local resources that are going intoaddressing homelessness — look hard at

the resources and consider how toincrease funding for affordable housing.”

She added that around 500 citiesnationwide have inclusionary zoning lawswhere developers are obligated to reservea small proportion of units for affordablehousing, but the “inclusionary” units arenot affordable to low-income people. TheBay Area’s inclusionary housing, forinstance, creates “inclusionary” housingunits only affordable to people in the$80,000 to $100,000 income range —hardly helpful to a minimum-wage work-er, who would need to work three full-time jobs to meet such costs.

“We have systematically disinvested inaffordable housing over the last 30 to 40years,” said Hustings. “We need to invest.”

Many housing solutions are obvious:permanent housing instead of, or in addi-tion to shelters, legal outdoor spaces tocamp for those who prefer it or are travel-ing through, toilets for those who needthem, storage space for people who need

storage space, youth and family-specificprograms and assistance, etc. The ancil-lary needs are equally obvious: increasedfunding to under-funded medical and sup-portive services so people aren’t forced towait years for help.

When cities move toward practicalefforts to address the serious nature of thehousing crisis, they’ll stop wasting moneyon criminalizing the attributes of home-lessness.

Advocates with a watchful eye will seethem get serious about putting an end tothe endless and repetitive abuse of policeresources chasing poor and vulnerablepeople out of public spaces, hiring privatepatrols to harass people who fit a profile,and creating more ways to clog an alreadyoverwhelmed court system with cases inwhich a person’s only crime is to be poor.

We have an emergency, all right. Buthow we respond to that emergency is thereal issue.

When countless people are living on the street, when there’sno state in the union where workers making minimum wagecan afford market-rate housing, and when hundreds of thou-sands of school children are living in cars and trying to dohomework in the dark, we have an emergency.

Cities Declare HousingCrisis an Emergency

A homeless man on a bench at Oakland City Hall Plaza. Multiply thisman by a million to see the full dimensions of the housing emergency.

Photo credit:Tom Lowe

October 2015ST R E E T SP I R I T4

by Lydia Gans

The East Bay Gray Panthers held ameeting on September 23 at theNorth Berkeley Senior Center to

discuss housing issues in Berkeley. Themeeting was organized by EleanorWalden, co-chair of the Residents Councilof Redwood Gardens, a Housing andUrban Development (HUD) project inBerkeley for low-income seniors and peo-ple with disabilities.

Redwood Gardens was in the news thispast year when residents reported numerousproblems in dealing with their managementcompany. Tenants faced long delays in cor-recting hazardous conditions and violationsof the Americans with Disabilities Act, aswell as security threats and disregard for thehealth and welfare of those who are particu-larly fragile. Last year, when managementplanned major renovations, residentsobjected that they were given virtually noinput in the renovation process.

Redwood tenants began to organizeand, last spring, they joined the NationalAssociation of HUD Tenants (NAHT). InJune 2015, Walden and another tenant,Avram Gur Arye, attended the annualNAHT conference in Washington, D.C.What they learned at the conference andthe contacts they made motivated them toorganize tenants in other HUD projects inthe area to fight for proper treatment bythe owners of their residences.

NAHT is the national coalition of localtenant organizations of residents living inprivately owned or nonprofit housingcomplexes that receive project-based,Section 8 housing assistance from HUD.This is distinct from the public housingowned by local housing authorities.

Walden and Arye began the meetingby reporting on the NAHT conference.They found that their problems with man-agement are not unique and determined toconnect with other projects in the area.

“We learned that tenants have rights,”Walden declared.

After their report, Gary Hicks, co-chairof the Redwood Gardens ResidentsCouncil, took over running the meeting.

Berkeley City Councilmember Kriss

Worthington spoke of the increasing needfor really affordable housing and readfrom a flyer he had written with the mes-sage: “Berkeley needs truly AFFORD-ABLE affordable housing funding andpolicy reform.” It is a strong indictmentby Worthington directed at members ofthe Berkeley City Council who act in theinterests of developers and wealthy land-lords against the needs of people with lowor modest incomes. That does not apply toCouncilman Jesse Arreguin, he assuredthe audience.

On the flyer, Worthington lists “23possible reforms” that are reasonable andcould somewhat ameliorate the housingsituation. Several are or will be on theCity Council agenda. But he couldn’t helppointing out that so-called affordablehousing that is reserved for people with50 percent of the East Bay’s area medianincome (AMI) is hardly affordable —and it’s more than he earns!

Worthington also talked about theimportance of organizing, and of knowingyour rights and demanding to be heard.He recalled the message of the disabilitymovement of the 1970s:”NOTHINGABOUT US WITHOUT US!”

HUD representatives Bill Rogina andRobin Thompson were there to answerquestions and provide some backgroundon the functions of the agency. Roginahas worked on a national level for many

years to produce housing. Thompsonworks in the management of the housing.She currently manages 80 properties, aconsiderable workload.

She was asked about an issue that con-cerns the tenants, not only in RedwoodGardens, but in other projects as well —Walden had mentioned that it came upamong delegates at the NAHT conferencein D.C. Project owners are doing massiveremodeling in the buildings, including inindividual residential units, at great incon-venience and often without input from thetenants. This received some publicity inthe local press when it was happening inBerkeley last year.

What is worrisome to the tenants is notjust the process, but the motivation behindit. The suspicion is that the owners plan tosell the apartment buildings that tenantscall home. That is usually what happenswhen a property is put on the market.

Thompson was mildly reassuring. She

used the term “opt out.” “We are reallythe good guys,” she said. “It’s very rarefor an owner to want to opt out, nor areprojects owned by nonprofits interested inopting out.” But she didn’t deny that it hashappened.

“What if a tenant wanted or needed tomove?” someone asked. She explainedthat moving out would be a very foolishthing to do. Leaving the project meanslosing their access to affordable housing.They cannot take the Section 8 voucherwith them. Once they move out, thevoucher belongs to the unit. “Don’tmove,” she warned. “Don’t move!”

Several of the attendees spoke up aboutthe importance of connecting with tenantsin other Bay Area projects to share infor-mation and take effective action. Someonepointed out that if tenants don’t knowtheir rights — or give up insisting onthem — they can’t expect to solve theirproblems with the management.

Several people brought up issues intheir housing situation and looked forwardto meeting with tenants in other HUD pro-jects to compare experiences.

HUD representatives Thompson andRogina added that any issues addressed toHUD should also be sent to the individual’sCongressional representative. HUD isrequired to respond to Congress within fivedays. That was a very useful piece of infor-mation most people had not been aware of.

After the meeting, Walden expressedsatisfaction over the connection with theHUD representatives. “We certainly lookforward to working with them,” sheadded. She was pleased with the meeting,saying she saw it as “a foothold for goingon to arrange other meetings or forumswith HUD tenants in this area.”

Gray Panthers and Tenants Debate Housing Issues in Berkeley

Berkeley needs truly affordable housing, Kriss Worthingtonsaid. Yet members of the Berkeley City Council often act inthe interests of wealthy landlords and developers against theneeds of people with low or moderate incomes.

Saturday, October 10, 1:45 p.m.Rafael Film Center1118 Fourth Street, San Rafael, CA 94901

Thursday, October 15, 5:00 p.m.Lark Theater549 Magnolia Avenue, Larkspur, CA 94939

For more information or to buy tickets, visithttp://www.mvff.com/ or www.dogtownredemption.com

Street Spirit EditorialAdvisory Committee

Street Spirit is published by AmericanFriends Service Committee. It is guidedby an advisory committee of experiencedand dedicated advocates. AFSC express-es thanks to the members of the StreetSpirit advisory committee:

Janny Castillo, Ellen Danchik, DianaDavis, Carol Denney, Michael Diehl,Lydia Gans, David Hartsough, Sister EvaLumas, Daniel McMullan, The SuitcaseClinic, Pattie Wall, Susan Werner.

Street SpiritStreet Spirit is published by AmericanFriends Service Committee. The ven-dor program is run by J.C. Orton.

Editor, Layout: Terry MessmanWeb designer: Jesse ClarkeHuman Rights: Carol Denney

Contributors: Meriah Barajas, CarolDenney, Shelley Douglass, TomDouglass, Lydia Gans, Tom Lowe, JohnLindsay-Poland, National Law Centeron Homelessness and Poverty, TheSuitcase Clinic, George Wynn

All works copyrighted by the authors.The views expressed in Street Spirit arti-cles are those of the individual authors,not necessarily those of the AFSC.

Street Spirit welcomes submissions ofarticles, artwork, poems and photos. Contact: Terry MessmanStreet Spirit, 65 Ninth Street,San Francisco, CA 94103E-mail: spirit@afsc.orgWeb: http://www.thestreetspirit.org

“Dogtown Redemption” Film Premiere

A scene from the new film, “Dogtown Redemption,” a fascinating documentary about the lives of recyclers in the East Bay.

Dogtown Redemption Film Premiere

Mill Valley Film Festival

“Dogtown Redemption,” a new documentary film, arrives intheaters this October. The film is not only the intimate story ofrecyclers in West Oakland, but a journey through a landscape oflove and loss, devotion and addiction, prejudice and poverty.

The film follows the lives of three recyclers: Jason Witt, thetitan of recycling; Landon Goodwin, a former minister who strug-gles with his own fall from grace; and Miss Hayok Kay, the ulti-mate outsider, formerly a punk rocker from a prominent Koreanfamily, now at the mercy of the elements and predators.

“Dogtown Redemption” humanizes and celebrates thosewho live in this other America — the America that many of usdo not see. That a small recycling center has allowed so manyto survive on a daily basis is a minor miracle. A reminder thateven in trash there can be life, love and redemption.

A Landscape of Life, Love and Loss

October 2015 ST R E E T SP I R I T 5

by Meriah Barajas

Media has changed our world,to say the least. It haschanged the way we accessinformation, the way we

communicate, and has especially influ-enced the way we learn about the worldaround us. Media’s dominance hasbecome so pronounced that its effect onour perceptions has become commonplacein our everyday lives.

Media has definitely allowed us to dothings with greater ease. We can communi-cate with loved ones who previously wereseparated from us by the barrier of distance,but are now only a Skype call or Facebookmessage away. We can turn on the newsevery morning and see what is going on inour neighborhood or around the world.

However, by the same token, we haveblown media out of proportion and ourreliance on these platforms has led us to areality where our ideas are no longer ourown; they are mass-produced and fed tous. We not only let the media give usinformation; we now let it tell us how tothink about that information. We have letit tell us what to believe and how far tobelieve it.

We fall prey to the ways in whichnews outlets negatively frame the infor-mation they give, and the ways that socialmedia applications establish the norms ofhow their users interact with each other,on and off of the apps. We let these plat-forms distance us from many humanaspects of everyday life.

Instagram, Twitter and Facebook nowcommunicate for us. The real-life, organicconversations that used to produce therelationships of our past no longer existon the same wide scale.

In a generation where media is soprevalent, this tool with which we so easi-ly break down the barriers of distance andtime, can have the dangerous effect ofbuilding new and different kind of barri-ers — the kind that drive us farther apart.

The issue of homelessness is almostalways inaccurately depicted throughoutall media platforms. Stereotypes of home-lessness are perpetuated in the mediamore than anything. News outlets, forone, too often take the humanity out ofthe information they provide.

Many viewers of the morning newsdon’t think twice when they hear aboutthe thousands of individuals without

homes across the country because theseindividuals are no longer portrayed aspeople with feelings and ideas. Instead,they are numbers. We see statistics: peo-ple turned into numbers because they areeasier to compute that way.

Although these numbers might beinformative when describing the severityof homelessness, listeners and readersoften feel far removed from issues such asthe extent of homelessness, poverty andthe affordable housing shortage. Numbersare not as impactful because there is nohuman aspect tied to them to make themrelatable.

On all other occasions across newsmedia, we see either a success story of anindividual who rose out of homelessness,or a story of a homeless individual whowas caught in a situation involving drugsor illegal activity. Here is where thestereotypical perceptions begin. Althoughstereotypes are not inherently negative,they do become a danger when we beginto base our perceptions on them.

These two kinds of stories do not giveviewers or listeners an accurate depictionof what it means to be homeless and theseverity of the issue as a systemic prob-lem. We see either very good stories thatmake us hopeful for humanity, or verynegative depictions of people living onthe streets who are wrapped up in drugs,so we turn a blind eye when we interactwith such people that the news media“warns us” about.

Both of these stereotypical forms blindus to the reality of the issue, and onlywhen we separate ourselves from thisview can we begin to see the problem asone that is not an individual issue, but asocietal problem, one that needs our con-stant attention and effort.

Entertainment media has also given usunrealistic ideas of what to expect fromindividuals struggling with homelessness.If we don’t see a success story like WillSmith in the movie, “The Pursuit ofHappiness,” then often we see a personwho follows the stereotype: one who is

crazy, on drugs, has raggedy clothes. These depictions lead us into danger-

ous territory, and we begin to see home-lessness as existing in this neat, little boxwhere people who are dressed nicely andown cars, or pets, or go to college, cannotbe homeless. Both of these extremes arenot representative of the middle and morecommon area, the real population that isstruggling with homelessness.

Social media may do the most damageyet. Homelessness within social mediacan often be seen as comical, where “self-ies with homeless people” become trendson social media sites. Humans are treatedas backdrops instead of individuals withsocial and cultural capital, ideas andworth.

This is the extent of most peoples’interactions with individuals who arehomeless. When we have constant deroga-tory and dehumanizing portrayals in thiskind of mass media, then these ideasbecome the norm and influence the publicperception by perpetuating stereotypes ofhomelessness.

The mass media and social media arethe main sources from which we get ourinformation. This means we learn andabsorb a lot from it, whether we admitthat or not. Media has become especiallypervasive in our generation, and thisincrease in media consumption has cometo shape our social interactions, especiallyour interactions with homeless popula-tions in our cities.

Constantly being exposed to thesestereotypical portrayals of homelessnessin the media leads us to fall prey to adopt-ing these problematic perceptions of it,which distances us from the issues thatmost need our attention and empathy.

We constantly see portrayals of theway homelessness negatively affects oursociety, but rarely do we hear about howthis situation affects those individualswho are struggling with it. Rarely do wehear their voices and stories that make usfeel connected to their struggle.

When did we start being okay with theways the media have desensitized and dis-tanced us from the world around us? Weneed media platforms that reform the wayinformation is communicated and the wayhumanity is portrayed.

I am writing through a form of mediathat is enabling me to use my voice andconvey my ideas on the things that I findproblematic. This is what media shouldbe: a medium for us to convey the realityof situations that we have become all toocomplacent with.

So I leave my readers with a couplethings to think about. How can we dowhat is in our power to change publicopinion? How can we bring humanityback to a true understanding of an issue— and closer awareness of a people —when we have been so distanced bymedia stereotypes?

How Homelessness Is Distorted in the MediaSTORIES FROM THE

SUITCASE CLINIC

Homeless people forced to live on the streets due to the nation’s housing crisis may find solace by sleeping under newspapers,but rarely will they find any help in the news reports inside. Corporate media outlets are filled with anti-homeless bias.

Many viewers of the morning news don’t think twicewhen they hear about the thousands without homesbecause these individuals are not portrayed as peoplewith feelings and ideas. They are numbers — statistics.

October 2015ST R E E T SP I R I T6

wholeheartedly to the antiwar movementwere increasingly aware of the destructivepersonal costs they had paid in thoseyears. Many felt exploited and oppressedby a patriarchal system that they confront-ed not only in the form of the Pentagon’swars and military hierarchy, but even inthe movement itself.

It was the discovery of an intimatebetrayal. How could the same movementthat worked for human liberation subjectso many women to dehumanizing treat-ment and refuse to honor them as equals?

Shelley Douglass reflected on women’srole in the peace movement in her articles,“Beyond Patriarchy,” in Fellowship maga-zine, and “Nonviolence and Feminism” inPeace Is the Way: Writings on Nonviolence(ed. Walter Wink, Orbis Books).

“Those times took a heavy toll,” shewrote in describing the unequal status andlack of respect that women faced in themovements for peace and civil rights.

It was a demoralizing and intolerablecontradiction. As Douglass wrote, “Thistragic waste of potential and unconsciousdehumanization took place in a movementthat only wanted the common good.”

“Women were expected to make coffeeand provide refreshments while menplanned strategy and did resistanceactions. Women kept the home-fires burn-ing while men organized, acted, and wentto jail. Women bore and raised childrenand created the homes to which the menreturned. Women did leaflets in the thou-sands, typed letters, licked stamps,marched in demonstrations.”

NO VOICE IN THE MOVEMENT

Although women did a great deal ofthe essential work in building social-change movements, they were rarely visi-ble or vocal leaders. That was not theirexpected role. According to Douglass,even in cities where “women have beenthe backbone of the peace movement foryears,” they were not taken seriously andwere locked in lower-echelon positions.

“We rarely spoke at demonstrations; ouractions did not make us celebrities like themen. When women went to jail, they lackedstrong community support. They had noknowledge, by and large, of their historicrole in the peace movement.”

That last point is especially troubling,given the groundbreaking and heroic rolesplayed by women in movements through-out our nation’s history.

Women who objected to this second-class treatment often met only scorn andincomprehension from the male leaders ofpeace and civil rights groups. But theywould not be silenced. Many began realiz-ing that they were not just facing personalproblems, but rather widespread inequitiescaused by gender inequality.

Douglass explained, “We realized thatour feelings were not just personal prob-lems; they were political, the results of asystem that exploited us all. We were notunique; this oppressive mentality pervad-ed even the movement itself.”

Many women ended up feeling “disil-lusionment with a movement that foughtfor other people’s freedom while standingupon our backs.”

In searching for ways to work for peacewhile standing up for their own rights anddignity as women, many began lookingback at the examples of strong women whohad gone before. They learned the stories oflegendary women who had overcome pow-erful systems of oppression to becomeheroes of the resistance.

Douglass explained how crucial it is toretrieve the history of women who wereicons of resistance and liberation. “We are

reclaiming our history — remembering allthose founding mothers, all those womenwho kept the movement going withoutcredit for so long, all the contributions wewomen have made and undervalued.”

REWEAVING THE WEB OF LIFE

A highly influential book that exploredthe interconnections of nonviolence,women’s rights and human liberation wasPam McAllister’s Reweaving the Web ofLife: Feminism and Nonviolence.

McAllister’s eye-opening anthologywas overflowing with first-hand accountsof feminism on the front lines of the peaceand freedom movements, profiles of his-toric figures who led the struggles forwomen’s rights, and utopian visions of thefuture of women’s quest for liberation.

Her book came out at a crucial historicmoment in 1982, just as anti-nuclear move-ments in the United States and Europewere engaging in massive nonviolent resis-tance that touched the lives of millions ofpeople. Reweaving the Web of Life helped

to put the oppression of women at the cen-ter of the social-change agenda, and sharedthe new methods that the women’s move-ment had invented and refined to buildstrategies for liberation.

McAllister’s book made it clear thatnonviolence was not only about war andnuclear weapons. It was also about rape andsexual harassment and domestic violenceand the economic injustices faced bywomen in the workplace. It was about thecenturies of discrimination women hadendured in every country in the world.

And, in a breathtaking leap, nonviolencewas also about compassion for all livingbeings — trans-species solidarity withwhales slaughtered by the whaling industry,birds decimated by pollution and irreplace-able animal species facing extinction.

McAllister’s own mentor was BarbaraDeming, a longtime activist in the peaceand women’s movements. Deming, aninsightful theorist of nonviolent socialchange, was the author of Prison Notes

and We Are All Part of One Another: ABarbara Deming Reader.

Deming demonstrated against Polarisnuclear submarines in the 1960s, and wasjailed for protesting atomic testing at theAtomic Energy Commission. She marchedin civil rights demonstrations in Alabamaand Georgia, and marched in the Nashvilleto Washington, D.C., Walk for Peace.

FAR-SIGHTED VIEW OF NONVIOLENCE

Deming helped McAllister understandthe “vital link between feminism and non-violence.” And Deming’s vision of nonvi-olence extended far beyond peaceactivism to include the entire ecologicalweb of connections that sustains all life.

This far-sighted vision of nonviolencereached up into the skies where high-flyingbombers target defenseless civilians, andextended down to the earth below wherethe web of life includes herons and cranesin coastal waterways and a next-door neigh-bor facing domestic violence.

In a beautiful passage, McAllisterdescribed visiting Deming at home andhearing the magnitude of her compassion.

“She embraces the whole spectrum oflife with unfragmented concern — fromlove for the Great White Heron who hauntsthe quiet canal in front of her house andconcern for the endangered snails in aFlorida stream, to concern about the globalimplications of the military maneuvers atKey West and the urgency of offering asy-lum to a battered neighbor.”

In “How Feminism Changed the PeaceMovement,” Caroline Wildflower, an anti-nuclear activist and Catholic Worker,described her painful experiences in well-known peace groups that dehumanizedwomen by relegating them to subservientroles and secretarial chores. Thingschanged for the better in the mid-1970s,when she got involved in the Pacific LifeCommunity and Ground Zero.

She found a new atmosphere wherewomen’s involvement was respected andencouraged. The Pacific Life Communityintentionally included feminist principles inits core values, rejected a hierarchical struc-ture and made all decisions by consensus.

“Each person’s ideas were consideredimportant — women’s and men’s,” wroteWildflower, and “feminism was talkedabout as an integral part of the strategy.”

Women became leading speakers andwriters in the Pacific Life Community.After she took the remarkable step of goingto jail for resisting nuclear weapons whileshe was pregnant, Wildflower herselfbecame a speaker and writer, writing abouther arrest for Fellowship magazine.

Ground Zero was “dedicated to femi-nism” and to a group process with collec-tive leadership, Wildflower wrote. “Ourfeminism permeates all aspects of life andmakes a difference for everyone.”

“Now that we have made these bigchanges, women are not constantly hurtand put down and devalued in the peacemovement. We have successfully createda situation where we live the revolutionnow, where women and men are respectedfor their talents and potential.”

Reweaving the Web of Life enshrinedthe courage and leadership of women whofought for human liberation. McAllister’sbook showed that women were an essen-tial part of virtually every social-changemovement in our nation’s history, fromthe Underground Railroad to labor unionorganizing, from the civil rights move-ment to antiwar resistance, and fromdefense of the environment to the strugglefor women’s rights and gay rights.

Today’s social-change movements canbe strengthened by learning from thesehistoric movements that overcame seem-ingly all-powerful systems of domination.The imaginations of today’s activists canbe electrified by the feminist icons andheroes of these resistance movements.

Feminist Iconsof Resistancefrom page 1

See Feminist Icons of Resistance page 7

Suffragist leader Alice Paul raises a glass to the voting rights amendment for women.

Ida Wells, a brave advocacy journalist, crusaded against lynching. Photo: Mary Garrity

October 2015 ST R E E T SP I R I T 7

HARRIET TUBMANRISKING HER LIFE FOR OTHERS

“Hundreds of miles we traveled onwardGathering slaves from town to townSeeking every lost and foundSetting those free that once were bound.”

— “Harriet Tubman,” composed by WalterRobinson, sung by Holly Near

Harriet Tubman was born into slavery.After she escaped, she risked her freedomagain and again, returning to the South toliberate many others still in slavery. Shebecame known as “Moses” for leading herpeople to freedom by using the secretivenetwork of escape routes and safe housesknown as the Underground Railroad.

Slaveowners posted bounties on herhead for helping fugitives escape the crueland brutal system of slavery.

Tubman was so committed to endingslavery that she helped John Brownrecruit people for his raid on Harper’sFerry. Brown, an uncompromising aboli-tionist who was captured in the raid andlater executed, called her “GeneralTubman” as a sign of profound respect.

Tubman then began working for theUnion Army, leading a band of scouts, andalso serving as a nurse for wounded sol-diers. Tubman led a Union raid on a groupof plantations along the Combahee River inSouth Carolina and liberated an estimated750 slaves from the plantations.

After the Civil War, Harriet Tubmantook part in the struggle to win votingrights for all women, becoming one of themost legendary symbols of freedom andcourage in U.S. history.

SOJOURNER TRUTH“AIN’T I A WOMAN?”

Sojourner Truth was a crusading aboli-tionist and women’s rights activist, and apowerfully persuasive speaker for humanrights. She delivered a legendary speechat the Ohio Women’s Rights Conventionin 1851 known as “Ain’t I A Woman?”

Truth was born into slavery butescaped to freedom with her baby daugh-ter. She dedicated her life to the abolition-ist movement, and advocated politicalequality for all women, black and white.

After the Civil War, she tried to end thesegregation of street cars in Washington,D.C., by riding in cars set aside for whitepeople — an act of civil disobedience 90years before Rosa Parks was arrested!

Truth also tried to secure land grantsfrom the U.S. government as reparationsfor former slaves, but Congress refused tohonor her basic demand for justice.

Through the causes she championedlater in life, Truth showed how all humanrights are connected. She spoke out forwomen’s rights, prison reform and votingrights for all. She spoke passionatelyagainst the death penalty. Just as she hadworked tirelessly to abolish slavery, shenow worked to abolish capital punishment.

In June 1881, Sojourner Truth spokeout against the death penalty by tellingMichigan’s state legislature that it was“murder in cold blood” to put a prisonerto death. She said, “I won’t sanction anylaw in my heart that upholds murder. I amagainst it! I am against it!”

LUCRETIA MOTTWOMEN’S RIGHTS AND ABOLITION

Many of the women now celebrated aslegendary figures of social justice weresimultaneously opposed to slavery and tothe subjugation of women. Lucretia Mottwas a Quaker minister who played lead-ing roles in the abolitionist movement and

in the women’s rights movement. Shealways linked women’s rights to nonvio-lence in her speeches and advocacy.

Mott fought ceaselessly for an end toslavery and racial discrimination, for therights of women and Native Americans,for the rights of workers, and for freedomof speech and religion.

Violent mobs attacked her homebecause of her abolitionist work, yet shebravely continued to fight slavery evenafter mobs destroyed the PennsylvaniaHall meeting place built by abolitionists.She worked her entire life for votingrights for women and Black people.

In 1833, Mott organized thePhiladelphia Female AntiSlavery Society.In her article, “Nonviolence and Women:The Pioneers,” Margaret Hope Baconcalled it “the first active political organi-zation of women, the launching pad forthe women’s rights movement, and themarriage of nonviolence and feminism.”

Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth CadyStanton were co-organizers of the SenecaFalls Convention in July of 1848, the firstpublic women’s rights meeting in the U.S.The women’s rights movement waslaunched with the Seneca Falls Declarationof the Rights of Women, which demandedvoting rights for women and declared thatmen and women are equal.

SUSAN B. ANTHONY AND

ELIZABETH CADY STANTONARRESTED FOR ILLEGAL VOTING

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth CadyStanton were lifelong friends and cowork-ers. They were indispensable leaders of thesuffragist movement, and worked togetherin a decades-long struggle for a federalamendment giving voting rights to women.

They were both abolitionists and workedfor equal rights for African Americans andwomen. Stanton also supported a broadspectrum of women’s rights, includingemployment rights, property rights, custodyrights and birth control.

Anthony was a leader in the AmericanAnti-Slavery Society and helped fugitiveson the Underground Railroad. She called

for unconditional emancipation and acomplete end to racial discrimination.

Susan B. Anthony was arrested for try-ing to vote in the presidential election of1872. After being tried and convicted forillegally voting, she refused to pay thefine saying, “I shall never pay a dollar ofyour unjust penalty.”

In 1878, Anthony and Stanton suc-ceeded in getting a bill giving women theright to vote introduced in Congress. Thebill, known as the Anthony Amendment,became the Nineteenth Amendment to theU.S. Constitution in 1920, 42 years afterthe two women introduced it.

IDA B. WELLSANTI- LYNCHING JOURNALIST

Ida B. Wells was one of the most fear-less advocacy journalists in the nation’shistory. As an investigative reporter andnewspaper editor, she documented thehorrific crime of lynching, and carried outa brave struggle against the widespreadtorture and murder of Black people.

Wells was a leader in the civil rightsmovement, as well as an activist forwomen’s rights and the women’s suffragemovement. Born in Mississippi in 1863,she later moved to Memphis, where shebecame a schoolteacher. In 1884, 71 yearsbefore Rosa Parks, Wells was dragged offa train when she refused to give up herseat in the first-class section. She success-fully sued the railroad and won her case.

Wells began reporting on racial injus-tice for Free Speech and Headlight, aMemphis newspaper; she eventuallybecame the paper’s editor and co-owner.

In 1889, three of her closest friendswere lynched by a white mob inMemphis, and Wells began doing inves-tigative reporting to expose widespreadlynchings in the South. She also beganspeaking out across the nation in a virtualone-woman anti-lynching campaign.

A mob destroyed the offices of hernewspaper in retaliation for her storiesabout lynching, but Wells would not endher crusade. She published SouthernHorrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, and

reported that blacks were often lynchedfor minor offenses as a form of intimida-tion, repression and social control.

ALICE PAULHUNGER STRIKES IN PRISON

Alice Paul was a Quaker who initiatedbold new strategies in the movement forwomen’s voting rights, including militantacts of civil disobedience, picketing theWhite House with a group of suffragistscalled “Silent Sentinels,” and carrying outhunger strikes in prison.

In the crucial decade from 1910 to1920, Alice Paul became the main strate-gist of the women’s suffrage movement,and the leader of the National Women’sParty. She was instrumental in the suc-cessful battle to pass the NineteenthAmendment to the Constitution in 1920,giving women the right to vote.

She was opposed to war and when theU.S. entered World War I, she organizedpickets at the White House, “protesting abattle for democracy abroad while therewas so little democracy at home.”

When Alice Paul and other suffragistswere arrested and jailed in the notoriouslybrutal and squalid Occoquan Workhousein Virginia, Paul demanded that thewomen be treated as political prisoners,and launched a prison hunger strike.

Jail authorities tried to break their spir-its with brutal force-feedings, beatings,and horrible jail conditions. The shockingmistreatment of the imprisoned suffragistsgenerated public outrage and media atten-tion and women flocked to Washington,D.C. Alice Paul’s acts of civil disobedi-ence were crucial in winning public sup-port for the Nineteenth Amendment.

After voting rights for women werewon, she began concentrating on passageof the Equal Rights Amendment. She wasable to get the Equal Rights Amendmentintroduced into Congress in 1923, a vision-ary bill that was far ahead of its time.

Alice Paul also played a major role inadding protection for the rights of womento the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Feminist Iconsof Resistancefrom page 6

See Feminist Icons of Resistance page 8

John Lewis and Diane Nash were leaders of the nonviolent sit-ins carried out by the NashvilleStudent Movement that succeeded in desegregating lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee.

Art by Nate Powell from March: BookOne by John Lewis & Andrew Aydin

When buses were burned and Freedom Riders were brutally attacked in Alabama, COREdecided to cancel the action due to violence. Diane Nash bravely stepped forward at a crucialturning point in history and refused to let the Freedom Rides die.

October 2015ST R E E T SP I R I T8

MOTHER JONES“THE MOST DANGEROUS WOMAN IN

AMERICA”

Mary Harris “Mother” Jones was afirebrand labor organizer who tirelesslyfought against unfair working conditionsand the inhumanity of childhood labor.She was a cofounder of the IndustrialWorkers of the World (IWW).

In 1903, Jones organized a Children’sCrusade on behalf of young textile workersexploited in mines and factories. She andthe children marched from Philadelphia allthe way to Oyster Bay, New York, to con-front President Teddy Roosevelt, demand-ing reforms in the child labor laws.

She worked with the United MineWorkers and became an effective championof justice and better pay for workers, andalso organized the wives and children ofstriking workers to protest on their behalf.

Mother Jones was so successful at orga-nizing strikes and picket lines that when theauthorities arrested her and put her on trialduring a coal strike in West Virginia in1902, the district attorney called her “themost dangerous woman in America.”

During a strike by the United MineWorkers in West Virginia in 1912, shewas arrested under martial law and triedbefore a military court. She was sentencedto 20 years in prison by the military courtbut was freed when Sen. John Kernlaunched a Senate investigation into con-ditions in the coal mines.

Her famous declaration was: “Pray forthe dead and fight like hell for the living.”

FANNIE LOU HAMERTHE VOICE OF A MOVEMENT

When Fannie Lou Hamer tried to regis-ter to vote at the Sunflower CountyCourthouse in Indianola, Mississippi, onAugust 31, 1962, she was immediatelyfired from the Mississippi plantationwhere she had worked for 18 years as atimekeeper and sharecropper.

When the plantation owner told her toeither withdraw from voter registration orface eviction, she refused to back downfrom her principles. She lost her job andher home simply for attempting to vote.

After trying to register, Hamer and herfamily were constantly stalked by menwith rifles who cursed at her and threat-ened to shoot her.

It only strengthened her convictions. Soon, Hamer became a field secretary

for the Student Nonviolent CoordinatingCommittee (SNCC), one of the most dan-gerous job descriptions in Mississippi.

She played a vital role in organizingthe Mississippi Freedom Summer whichbrought young black and white activists tothe state from all over the country to over-come the racist barriers to voting. Shealso sought food, clothing and support forneedy families at a time of great hungerand poverty in Mississippi.

In June of 1963, Hamer traveled withother activists to an educational workshopin South Carolina, but when the busreturned, Mississippi police arrested andjailed them, and they were severely beatenin their jail cells in Winona.

Fannie Lou Hamer was beaten almost todeath in her cell by two men with black-jacks. She suffered permanent kidney dam-age from the beating. Even though she suf-fered for the rest of her life from injuriescaused by the brutal beating, she would notstop fighting for justice.

One year later, in the summer of 1964,Hamer was elected Vice-Chair of theMississippi Freedom Democrats who had

organized to challenge the state’s segre-gated delegation to the DemocraticNational Convention.

President Lyndon Johnson and HubertHumphrey refused to support theMississippi Freedom Democrats in 1964,but Hamer’s eloquent challenge toJohnson and Humphrey showed that hervoice could shake up the White House.

The Mississippi Freedom Democratswere finally seated at the DemocraticNational Convention in 1968. That sameyear, Hamer worked in support of MartinLuther King’s Poor People’s Campaign.

Hamer was the courage and conscienceof the civil rights struggle, and she wasalso its voice. She lifted people’s spiritsby singing stirring renditions of “Go TellIt on the Mountain,” “Wade in theWater,” and “Walk with Me Lord.”

Due to her great dedication to theFreedom Movement, Hamer was threat-ened, arrested, beaten, and shot at.

She said, “Sometimes it seems like totell the truth today is to run the risk ofbeing killed. But if I fall, I’ll fall five feetfour inches forward in the fight for free-dom. I’m not backing off.”

DIANE NASHTHE COURAGE OF A FREEDOM RIDER

Diane Nash provided brave leadership inmany crucial moments of the FreedomMovement, including the Nashville studentsit-ins, the Freedom Rides and the SelmaVoting Rights Movement. Nash was a co-founder of the Student NonviolentCoordinating Committee.

When Nash was a 22-year-old studentat Fisk University, she became a leader inthe Nashville Student Movement’s ulti-mately successful campaign to desegre-gate the city’s lunch counters in 1960.

Nash and other students were trained inGandhian nonviolence by Rev. JamesLawson, and began a series of sit-ins atlunch counters. Nash advocated a “jail, nobail” policy by refusing to bail out of jailto maximize pressure on the city. After afew months of protests, all of Nashville’s

lunch counters were desegregated.During the sit-ins, Nash publicly asked

Nashville Mayor Ben West, "Do you feelit is wrong to discriminate against a per-son solely on the basis of their race orcolor?" Mayor West admitted he felt itwas wrong, and Nashville’s lunch coun-ters were desegregated soon afterwards.

In 1961, when buses were burned andFreedom Riders were brutally attacked inAnniston and Birmingham, Alabama,CORE decided to cancel the FreedomRides due to the violence. Diane Nashstepped forward at a turning point in historyand refused to let the Freedom Rides die.

Despite warnings that they could beattacked and killed, Freedom Riders board-ed the bus and traveled from Birminghamto Jackson, Mississippi. Before getting onthe bus, Nash signed her last will and testa-ment, showing the courage of her convic-tions in the face of death.

Diane Nash played a key role in callingfor a voting rights project in Alabama,which resulted in the Selma to Montgomerymarches and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.The Southern Christian LeadershipConference awarded its highest honor, theRosa Parks Award, to Diane Nash andJames Bevel for sparking the Selma VotingRights Movement.

DOROTHY DAYTHE WORKS OF MERCY

Countless people have been inspired todedicate their lives to peace and socialjustice by the example of Dorothy Day.Day co-founded the Catholic Workermovement with Peter Maurin and dedicat-ed her life to providing food and hospitali-ty to poor, hungry and homeless persons.

In Dorothy Day’s vision, the works ofmercy not only meant providing food andshelter to poor people in the inner city, butalso seeking economic justice for workers,protesting war and nuclear weapons, andresisting a capitalist system that exploitedand oppressed people.

Day was an advocacy journalist andeditor of the Catholic Worker newspaper,

reporting on labor strikes, supporting therights of workers, speaking against warand militarism, and giving a voice to thepoorest members of society.

Before converting to Catholicism, Dayhad worked for women’s suffrage,opposed warfare, written for socialistnewspapers, and supported the IWW, oneof the most radical labor unions.

Day deepened in her spiritual life, yetremained just as radically committed topeace and justice. She was jailed forrefusing to take part in civil defense drills,and arrested for supporting the farmwork-ers. Her faith led to lifelong acts of soli-darity with poor and homeless people.

Dorothy Day drew a contrast betweenthe works of mercy and the Vietnam War.“The works of mercy are the opposite of theworks of war — feeding the hungry, shel-tering the homeless, nursing the sick, visit-ing the prisoner. But we are destroyingcrops, setting fire to entire villages and tothe people in them. We are not performingthe works of mercy but the works of war.”

PLANTED BY THE WATER

In her recent article, “Finding Hope:Reweaving Then and Now” in On theIssues Magazine, Pam McAllister reflectson the many heroic women who are lead-ing social change movements today andreweaving the web of life. She writes thatgroups of women such as Code Pink andWomen In Black have “come together todo our work of reweaving.”

In a remarkable poetic metaphor,McAllister says that the names of thesewomen are “like prayer beads, markers ona long strand, each one a reminder thatwomen everywhere continue doing thework of reweaving the web of life.”

It is illuminating to learn of the womenthat McAllister now names as the “prayerbeads” who help protect life in the face ofa culture of death and injustice.

Some of her recent heroines are AsmaaMahfouz, a young Egyptian activist whohelped to spark a largely nonviolent massuprising when she used social media tochallenge Egyptian people to meet her inCairo’s Tahrir Square, and another youngwoman, Rachel Corrie, “who became amartyr in 2003 when she attempted to actas a human shield against the bulldozingof a Palestinian home.”

McAllister expresses great admirationfor Aung San Suu Kyi who was placedunder house arrest in Burma, but “hasnever wavered from advocating nonvio-lence as both a tactic and a way of life.”

She heralds the crucial work of womenpeacemakers in far-flung areas of theglobe, including Leymah Gbowee whoorganized thousands of Muslim andChristian women to conduct sit-ins thatwere instrumental in bringing an end to aviolent civil war in Liberia; and CindySheehan, who stirred a nation by chal-lenging President Bush’s war in Iraq afterlosing her son there.

Reminding us that our care must beextended to the natural world, McAllisterpraises Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan envi-ronmental activist who fought againstdeforestation in Kenya by founding theGreen Belt Movement “and organizingwomen to plant trees all over the nation.”

Her dedication to ecological preserva-tion is emblematic of the spirit of one ofthe most long-lived movement anthems:“Just like a tree that’s planted by thewater, we shall not be moved.”

Feminist Iconsof Resistancefrom page 7

Civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer organized the Mississippi Freedom Democrats.

Fannie Lou Hamer’s civil rights legacy is honored on the Mississippi Freedom Trail.

“Sometimes it seems like totell the truth today is to runthe risk of being killed. Butif I fall, I’ll fall five feet fourinches forward in the fightfor freedom. I’m not back-ing off.” — Fannie Lou Hamer

October 2015 ST R E E T SP I R I T 9

Interview by Terry Messman

Street Spirit: Concern for the rights ofwomen, both in society and in the peacemovement, was always a part of GroundZero’s message to the larger movement.Can you describe how feminism andwomen’s issues became interwoven withGround Zero’s peace work?

Shelley Douglass: Sure. Well, youhave to remember that Ground Zero andPacific Life Community, which precededit, were founded on the idea that nonvio-lence was a way of life. So it wasn’t just apolitical type of resistance campaignagainst Trident. It was an attempt, and isan attempt, to learn a new way of livingwhere things like Trident are not neces-sary anymore. In order to do that, youhave to have justice, because the point ofthe weaponry is to defend things that areunjust or structures that are unjust. Soequal rights for women was part of thebasis of what we were doing.

Spirit: You once wrote that GroundZero found that challenging militarismalso meant confronting the issues of sex-ism, racism and economic injustice.

Douglass: Exactly. It’s all part of onesystem that oppresses all kinds of people.And personally, speaking for those of uswho founded Pacific Life Community andthen Ground Zero, we were coming out ofa number of years of intense resistance tothe Vietnam War where basically every-thing else got shunted aside.

Spirit: What exactly was shuntedaside? All the personal issues that ledsome to say that the personal is political?

Douglass: Yeah, all the other issues.Yeah, it was (supposedly) selfish to thinkabout your own problems or your ownoppression when the Vietnam War wasgoing on and people were being napalmedall the time. It was that sort of intensity:“We have to stop the war and that’s themost important thing.”

The result of that, of course, was verydifficult for our friendships, our marriagesand our families. Marriages broke up andpeople went to jail for long terms thatthey weren’t able to cope with. Kids wereneglected, not across the board, and I’mnot saying we were all horrible people,but we did things in a way that didn’t giveany honor to the way we were living. Iguess you could say that, even as weresisted it, the war was kind of in our livesin the way that we treated each other.

Spirit: So people’s lives began fallingapart because the urgent demands of anti-war organizing took such a heavy toll?

Douglass: It did. Exactly. And whenwe began the Trident campaign, we werejust coming out of that kind of experienceand most of us had no desire at all to doany kind of resistance or political actionany more. That was it, you know. Wedidn’t want any more of that. [laughs]

Spirit: But then good old Bob Aldridgecomes along talking about the Trident.

Douglass: Good old Bob Aldridge,right. When he gave us that look and said,“Do you know where the Trident is sta-tioned?” We’re like, “Oh no!” [laughs]

But we couldn’t not respond. So whenwe had our initial retreat, the whole point

of that retreat was to figure out how wecould resist Trident, but do so in a waythat would allow us to remain human andto even grow and nurture each other.

That was where nonviolence came inas a way of life — and especially for thewomen. This was in the mid-’70s and wewomen were all very aware of the kind ofobvious sexism in the peace movement.You know, who did what chores and whogot quoted and who was a public speakerand who wasn’t — all of that stuff.

Spirit: Instead of leaving it in theabstract as “who did what,” could youdescribe what the actual practices were inthe movement at the time?

Douglass: Well, the men did most ofthe public speaking, and the men alsospoke most in the meetings. I can remem-ber a number of meetings where I wouldsay something and a few minutes latersome man would say “well, as Jim said”— and that gets kind of old. [laughs]

We did a lot of providing of refresh-ments, we women, and we made surecopies were prepared. All that kind ofstuff tended to fall to the women while themen were out doing the sort of public andmaybe dangerous kinds of things. And, ofcourse, we didn’t like that. So initially, onthe personal level again, we began to doexercises in our meetings that would sortof even the balance.

Spirit: What kinds of exercises? Douglass: Like when we had a Pacific

Life Community meeting, we would giveeverybody matchsticks at the beginning ofthe meeting. Each time you talked, yousurrendered a matchstick and, initially, themen after half an hour had no morematchsticks and so the women did all thetalking after that. [laughs]

That was very interesting because itshowed both that the men were dominat-ing, but it also meant that the women hadto take some responsibility for making

decisions. So we realized in a way it wasmore comfortable to sit back and let themdominate and then we could critique whatthey had done, because we weren’t theones making those choices.

Spirit: So your matchstick experimentconfirmed your sense of male dominationin the peace groups.

Douglass: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, well Iwould not ever question that. There cer-tainly was. So we did things like that. Weused consensus decision-making, which is

very long and time-consuming, but it doeshonor everybody and that’s what wewanted to do.

Spirit: Did you find that the consensusprocess gave more people a voice andhonored their ideas?

Douglass: Yes, we chose it to honoreveryone’s input and perspective. Wewere very committed to that. We didn’tjust go into this sight unseen. We didtrainings in how to do consensus. We

Interweaving a Vision of Peace and Women’s RightsThe Street Spirit Interview with Shelley Douglass, Part 2

The feminism that I believein is a defense of all life. Notonly women, not only theearth, but all together. It’s alla web—reweaving the web.

Jim and Shelley Douglass demonstrate against the Iraq War at their weekly peace vigil in Birmingham, Alabama.

I’m a little dismayed at some of the popular feminism now: “Oh, we’re so thrilled that wehave a woman general or that women can be in combat.” That wasn’t our idea, at leastthe part of the feminist movement that I belong to. Our idea was not to get a piece of thepie and lord it over everybody else. It was to have a different pie altogether.

Jim and Shelley Douglass with Seattle Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen in the1980s when Hunthausen joined the protests against nuclear arms at the Trident base.

See Shelley Douglass Interview page 10

October 2015ST R E E T SP I R I T10

learned a lot from the Quakers, and fromthe Movement for a New Society, also.

So we were trying to experiment withways of honoring everybody’s voice,although not everybody got their way eachtime, of course. That was not possible. Butthe whole idea of the Trident campaign wasthat we’re all part of this system thatoppresses and we can all change. So wehave to learn to change just as much assomebody working on the Bangor base hasto learn to change. We were trying to inventways so that could happen.

Spirit: In anti-nuclear groups in theBay Area, consensus was very effective,even in really large meetings. We found itresulted in greater unity and better deci-sions, and it was way more democratic.Did you find that to be the case?

Douglass: We did find that to be thecase. It created greater unity becauseeverybody had been heard, and when wecame up with a decision, everybody couldlive with it. Not everybody thought it waswonderful, but there was nobody therewho absolutely could not deal with thatdecision. So together we could supportwhatever it was we had decided to do.

Spirit: Consensus often was taught toanti-nuclear groups by women from femi-nist organizations. What else did feministprinciples bring to Ground Zero’s work?

Douglass: As a part of that same disci-pline, we tried to work on our child-rear-ing practices. We were all fairly young atthat point in the ‘80s and we had lots oflittle kids around, ranging from almostnewborns up to early teens. So we tried togive them a sense of taking part. They hadtheir own meetings while we met and wetried to give them a sense that their voiceswere heard.

They did all kinds of things. They didfun things, and arts and crafts things, andthey also talked about the arms race andoppression. It would be interesting if youcould find one of those kids to see whatthey think now. [laughs] Ours were so little,I’m not sure they would remember much.

But we had one experience where wewere at a Fellowship of Reconciliationgathering, planning for a civil disobedienceaction. The kids had their own program andsent a delegation to the grownups sayingthat they didn’t think it was right that weshould always be the ones who got to getarrested, because we were always sayingthat we were doing it for them. So theywanted to get arrested too.

We took that very seriously and wearranged an action where the kids wouldgo with us to the action. I think theyoungest that went with us was our sonTom, who was probably about five, andthe oldest was an early teen. We had toldthe police we were coming and we madesure that there were people who had legaldocuments that would allow them to takethe kids out of custody after arrest. We alldid the action together and we were allarrested, and the kids were taken to thegate of the base and delivered into thehands of their responsible parties.

Spirit: What kind of action did theadults and children do together?

Douglass: Most of our actions at thatpoint were going over the fence and goinginto the Trident base. I think that one wasgoing in for an “Interdependence Day”picnic on July Fourth so it was a familykind of thing. You know, you go for a pic-nic as a family and —

Spirit: And then you get arrested as afamily. Were the kids arrested inside theTrident base?

Douglass: Yeah, yeah. They were alltrespass actions. I would guess there werearound a dozen kids and they were givento their responsible parties and then wewere taken off to jail. I think we spent anight or two in jail waiting for arraign-ment and then of course we went back fortrial. But they were very high on doing it.

Spirit: Once you accept that kids areactually human beings, I guess you’ve gotto accept them as part of the movement?

Douglass: [Laughs] Yeah right. They’rehuman beings too, so they’re part of it.

Spirit: We had the same thing in theLivermore Action Group. There was awhole children’s collective that plannedtheir own action. About 60 got arrestedand they were terrific and dedicated.

Douglass: That’s great. I didn’t knowabout that.

Spirit: Was it a positive experience forthe kids that participated?

Douglass: Yes, I think so. They didwhat they said they were going to do. Theyfelt very good about doing that and theykept being involved. As the kids grew up,some of them joined in other actions.

Spirit: In Birmingham, hundreds ofchildren and youth marched for freedomfrom the 16th Street Baptist Church.

Douglass: Sure, the kids saved thatone.

Spirit: They turned the nation around.Now, do you think the women’s movementbroadened our vision of nonviolence? Doyou think it connected the issues of war,sexism and environmental destruction?

Douglass: Yeah, I do. I think the femi-nism that I believe in, the feminism that Iknow, is a defense of all life. Not onlywomen, not only the earth, but all togeth-er. It’s all a web — reweaving the web.

And, you know, I’m a little dismayed atsome of what I guess you’d call the popularfeminism that you hear about now: “Oh,we’re so thrilled that we have a womangeneral or that women can be in combat.”Or, “Women have to break the glass ceilingand take over the corporations that areexploiting everyone.” [laughs]

I mean, that wasn’t our idea, at leastthe part of the feminist movement that Ibelong to. Our idea was not to get a pieceof the pie and lord it over everybody else.It was to have a different pie altogether.

Spirit: What do you mean by a differ-ent pie? A different model of the economy

and society?Douglass: Instead of a corporate, capi-

talist, militarist pie where your eye is onmaking a profit and dominating and con-trolling, we wanted a pie that was more cir-cular, with cooperation, with equal justicefor all, with an egalitarian kind of econom-ics, with some kind of economic parity, andwith nonviolence rather than violence.

What we were trying to do in the PacificLife Community was find a whole newway of life, where we wouldn’t depend ondominating people — any people.

Spirit: Do you think that’s a major partof the original vision that has been lost?

Douglass: Well, just like everythingelse, the women’s movement is multifac-eted and parts of it have been co-opted, Ithink. Parts of it maybe never agreed withwhat I wanted in the first place. [laughs]

Spirit: No, I think it did agree. I thinkthere was a widely shared vision acrossthe board, and that vision of equality andjustice has been co-opted. How do youthink it ended up being co-opted?

Douglass: It goes back again to thisidea that if you’re the woman, you can bethe token CEO of Exxon or somethingwhere you’re exploiting both the earthand other people, and you’re making a

whole bundle of money. So basically,what you’re doing is, you’re fitting theclassic male model and you have tobecome that kind of a person.

We used to talk about the so-calledfemale qualities and male qualities, andabout how women are supposed to be softand caring and sensitive, and men are dom-inating and aggressive and strong. And ifwe shared power, women would bring allthese good qualities to the mix. Our beliefwas always that we’re all supposed to beall of those things and it’s not divided sepa-rately between women and men.

But what seems to me to have hap-pened is that everybody has decided thatthe so-called masculine characteristics ofdominance and aggression are the onesthat we need to get ahead. So we join thesystem and I think women can becomethat kind of masculine just as well as any-body else. Look at Margaret Thatcher, orMadeleine Albright for that matter.

Spirit: So society has redefined its pic-ture of strong or liberated women in theimage of the patriarchy?

Douglass: Exactly. Exactly. The domi-nation system wins again.

Spirit: Also, when looking at women’s

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A Buddhist monk, Utsumi Shonin, prays for peace on the railroad tracks thattransport Trident nuclear missiles into the Bangor Naval Base.

The Japanese Buddhist monks of the Nipponzan Myohoji order have marched across the country seeking and praying for peace.

October 2015 ST R E E T SP I R I T 11

rights, the hardships faced by women inpoverty are almost never mentioned. Butthat has a lot to do with women’s rights.

Douglass: Well, at Mary’s House, peo-ple here don’t have very much money.They’re usually glad when they’re preg-nant, but they don’t always feel that theyhave the support they need to carry preg-nancy through. So the choice is not reallya choice, because there are all kinds offactors that control the choice they feelthey have to make.

Spirit: Factors like poverty and eco-nomic hardships?

Douglass: Oh yeah, economic injustice,racism, all of those things are involved init. And nonsupportive spouses, or nospouses. The men just disappear at thatpoint. I’m not going to say anybody iswrong for whatever they do. I don’t thinklegislation is a good solution to it, but Ithink we get so busy defending the right toabortion that we forget to ask the questionof whether it is the right thing to do for meor for any individual woman.

It’s just a question I have because obvi-ously there are some situations where it getsused in ways that I think kind of play intothe hands of the domination system. Whena woman turns up pregnant and the mansays, “here go take care of it,” and gives hersome money and that’s supposed to dealwith the problem. To me, that’s a verypatriarchal way of dealing with it.

FOR DELEGATION TO IRAQ

Spirit: You went on a Fellowship ofReconciliation delegation to Iraq that deliv-ered medicine to children in 1990 whenU.S. sanctions had caused deprivation. Whydid you decide to go to Iraq?

Douglass: It was before the U.S. hadactually attacked and Saddam Hussein’sgovernment was holding hostages to pro-tect itself against possible attack.

Spirit: American and other interna-tional hostages?

Douglass: Right, America being theringleader, of course. We had imposedsanctions on Iraq and Iraq produces oiland not much else, so they were basicallynot allowed to trade at all with the outsideworld. This meant that after a fairly shorttime, they ran out of medicine, they ranout of toilet paper, they ran out of any-thing they had to import.

They were suffering under the sanc-tions, and there was a citizen movementled partly by the FOR to go to Iraq andsee the situation and bring back a report toshare with people because the governmentwasn’t giving good information. I was theformer national chair of the FOR council,so I was asked to go and be one of the co-leaders on this visit.

There had been a previous trip that TomGumbleton, the bishop from Michigan, hadled and he had been able to bring back ahundred of the hostages. They had beenreleased to him and there were only aboutthat many hostages still remaining.

The hope was that we could at leastvisit them and make sure they were OKand perhaps even bring some more ofthem out. So we went. It was civil disobe-dience because we were taking baby for-mula and medicines into a country thatwas under sanctions. That broke the U.S.sanctions. It wasn’t a criminal offense, butit was a civil offense that the TreasuryDepartment could have charged us for.

Spirit: Were you ever charged? Anddid you have any problem getting themedicines on the plane?

Douglass: No. Other people later werecharged, but we were not charged. We

were flying from New York to Amman,Jordan. You couldn’t fly into Iraq becauseof the sanctions, but it’s legal to takewhatever you want to Amman. We couldget the medicines through because theirdestination was Amman. Then we tookanother flight from there to Baghdad.

Spirit: What was your delegation ableto accomplish?

Douglass: When we got to Iraq, ourpurposes were to try and meet with thehostages, to meet with Iraqi people, tomeet with any officials we could meetwith, and talk about the need for peace,and to bring back as much information aswe could. And we did all those things.

There were 13 of us on the delegation,and we had a minder who was a govern-ment person who was meant to keep us outof trouble. But luckily, since there were 13of us, he couldn’t keep track of us all.[laughs] We went to universities, we wentto farms, we went to women’s groups, allkinds of places. But the interesting thing atthat time — now this was before the firstbombing — is that Iraq was a socialistcountry and we saw very little, if any,Third World kind of poverty.

Spirit: Really? That contradicts thepicture of Iraq that most Americans had.

Douglass: Yeah. The Christians weresupportive of Saddam Hussein becauseHussein gave them the same breaks as theMuslims got in terms of taxes and legalprotections and stuff. The Christians werenot, at that point, being harassed in anyway. They had their churches.

And we visited the hostages. Many ofthem were holed up in the U.S. Embassyand we went with the idea that they werein dire straits, and I took communion allthe way from our Catholic Church inAlabama in a little container so that Icould give them communion.

We went in a cab to the U.S. Embassyone morning. We were coming to visitthese poor oppressed people and theywere hostages, so it was scary. But theyhad a Vietnamese Embassy staff that wasfeeding them and taking care of them.They had all kinds of electronic devices,like TVs, radios and all that kind of stuff,and they roamed fairly freely, as far as Icould tell, around Baghdad.

When I went to take communion to theCatholics, they said, “Well, why don’tyou meet us at Mass tomorrow?” [laughs]So we did. It was Advent and we went toMass at the little Catholic Church not toofar from the embassy with all the IraqiCatholics and with these guys from theembassy. A couple of them actually got intouch with us after they were released tosay that they were home safely. I thinkour visit did help get them released, butthey weren’t released to us, they werereleased to John Connally.

Spirit: So you were able to meet withIraqi government officials and ask them torelease the hostages?

Douglass: We did. We had a meetingwith the Speaker of the Parliament. Youknow, these are all very cut-and-dry kindof things. It’s not like we were having anyintense diplomatic talks. We were justthere to say this isn’t a good idea becauseit’s going to lead to an attack and it wouldbe a good idea to let them go. As it turnedout, unbeknownst to us, one of our dele-gates was an oil company employee andhe was kind of working behind the scenesand actually disappeared from our delega-tion toward the end and turned up againwith John Connally from Texas.

Spirit: You mean he turned up withJohn Connally in public or something?

Douglass: Right, with John Connally.

Spirit: Connally used to be the gover-nor of Texas and then Secretary of theTreasury. What was he at this time?

Douglass: I think he was just an oilcompany executive at the time. So it’s notas simple as it seems, and even in peacedelegations you find people who are actu-ally working for what I would considerthe other side.

Spirit: So this guy who was connectedto Connally somehow got on an FOR del-egation?

Douglass: He was on an FOR delega-tion, yeah. He was a corporate plant and hewas not on the trip roster because he joinedat the very last minute at the airport. It wasnot a good thing, that’s for sure.

Spirit: Was Connally in Iraq trying toexpedite the release of the hostages?

Douglass: Yes, he brought a plane, as Iremember, and put them all on the planeand took them home.

Spirit: Were the hostages released atabout the time you guys were returning?

Douglass: Yes, they were released andsome of them called us once they got backto the states to say thank you for comingand for caring and all that. That was verymoving. But in a way, that’s a sidelight tothe whole point of my two trips to Iraq.

Spirit: What did you experience in vis-iting the hospital and seeing at first handsome of the effects of U.S. sanctions?

Douglass: At that time, before any ofthe wars, Iraq was basically a developedcountry. They had very good medical careand it was socialized medicine so every-body got it. They had free college, so ifyou kept your grades up, you could go allthe way through a B.A. degree and notpay anything — women too. It was a sec-ular Muslim country, so women didn’thave to wear the burqa; they wore what-ever they wanted.

We met with all kinds of people whowere just saying they don’t like Saddam,but what the United States is doing is justmaking us support him all the more becausehe may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard —that kind of thing. Of course, they werevery careful about talking about him.

At that point, the hospitals were amongthe most heavily affected by the sanctionsbecause they had to import everything fromlight bulbs for the incubators to tubing toaspirin. It all had to come from outside thecountry. Their supplies had run out.

So we would go to the hospitals andthe doctors would give us the tour. And itwas so sad, especially in the children’shospitals because they had children therewho were sick and who could have beencured if they just had the right medicine,but who were dying. They couldn’t givethem fluids, they didn’t have IVs, theydidn’t have saline, they didn’t haveaspirin. They didn’t have anything.

We met with parents in the hospitalwhose kids would have survived had theybeen able to get decent medical care, butwhose kids were dying. And we had littlepeace doves and things, toys to give themand balloons and bubbles to blow, but themedicine we brought was a drop in thebucket compared to the need, because it’sa country with a lot of people and theyneeded medical supplies.

Spirit: What did the parents of childrenwho were sick or dying for lack of medicalcare say to you?

Douglass: People in Iraq would say tous a lot, “What does Bush have againstus? Why is America doing this to us?”They made a distinction between us andthe American government. They wereasking us, “Why are they doing this?”

Spirit: Because the sanctions didn’tjust affect the Iraqi government, but pri-marily hurt the Iraqi people.

Douglass: Right, right. It probablydidn’t affect Saddam very much at all, butit certainly affected all kinds of people. Sowe were kind of speechless with the par-ents in the hospitals because most of uswere parents and we could imagine whatit felt like to be there kind of helplesslywith your child. That was very intense.

Spirit: Several years later, you went toIraq again. What was the purpose of thissecond delegation?

Douglass: We were going mainly as acitizen peace venture trying to, again,understand the situation of the people inIraq and see if there was anything wecould do as citizens to lessen the hostilityin this country. We were going there to tryand come back and share with people herewhat was actually happening in Iraq.

Spirit: How had things changed in the

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Shelley Douglass protests the sanctions against Iraq that harm civilians and children.

October 2015ST R E E T SP I R I T12

years since your first trip?Douglass: Well, I made the trip in

March 2000, 10 years later, and as I wassaying, on our first trip, Baghdad was amajor developed city. There were low-income places, but there weren’t anyThird World levels of poverty that wesaw. There was free education, religionwas protected, all that kind of stuff. Goodwater, good sewage, power, electricalpower all the time — just the things youwould expect in a big city.

Ten years later, after the bombings, Iwent back on another delegation withVoices for Creative Nonviolence and nowit was a Third World country — and thatwas done consciously by our governmentas a policy. That was the lesson.

They had bombed all the power plants.They bombed the water-purification cen-ters. They bombed the communication cen-ters. They bombed all of the infrastructure,and they kept the sanctions on so that noth-ing could be repaired. So everything was intotal shambles at that point.

We went to the Amiriyah shelter,which was an underground shelter inBaghdad where women and kids andelderly people had taken shelter duringthe bombing. A smart bomb had gone intoone of the air ducts and people were liter-ally baked inside when this bomb wentoff. This happened because the U.S. mili-tary thought that this was a command sitefor their military — you know, it was a“smart bomb.” So it’s like going toHiroshima. Inside the Amiriyah shelter,there are shadows baked on the wall ofpeople who were incinerated in the shelterwhen the bomb hit.

Spirit: That’s horrible. So you wit-nessed this slaughter of civilians in U.S.bombing raids, and you saw how 10 yearsof sanctions had caused great damage.

Douglass: Right, and there was no rea-son for it. Saddam Hussein was a tyrant andhe did horrible things and it was all politi-cally oriented so you didn’t open yourmouth; but you could live safely, you couldworship, you could go to university. Oncethe U.S. bombed during those two wars,nothing was secure anymore in Iraq.

You know, people were scramblingjust to eat. It was incredible and, ofcourse, we kept the sanctions on thewhole time and we kept changing the rea-son for why we had sanctions.

Spirit: So you saw at first hand thatthings had dramatically worsened for Iraqicivilians because of the war and sanctions?

Douglass: Yes, because of the war andthe sanctions. Yeah, it went from being arepressive, but otherwise good life, tobeing almost impossible. And, it’s gottenworse since then, which is the key to whythere’s so much hostility to the U.S.

Spirit: So the U.S. government madethe people of Iraq hate and fear us andcalled that “mission accomplished.”

Douglass: Right, exactly. And that’san obvious example that is just very stark,but we do that all the time in the world.

Spirit: What was the reaction of otherson your delegation, especially those whohadn’t been there before? How did theyreact to seeing these conditions?

Douglass: We were all horrified. Well,Kathy Kelley, of course, had been theremany times, but I don’t think anybodyelse had been there before. But you didn’thave to have seen it before to be horrifiedat what was going on then.

We saw the conditions, and the waypeople were having to live. We alreadyknew about U.S. policy, U.S. bombing

runs. We knew what had been done, butnow we were walking around in sewage inthe middle of the streets because the sewershad been bombed. The city only had elec-tricity for two hours a day because thepower plants had been bombed. And thesanctions were still going on.

PERSECUTION OF AN ARCHBISHOP

Spirit: I just read the new biographyof Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, AStill and Quiet Conscience. He is such anadmirable man, but it was shocking tolearn more about the horrible indignitieshe suffered for speaking out for peace.

Could you describe your impressionsof the archbishop when he came to peacedemonstrations at Ground Zero?

Douglass: Sure. He’s the kind of per-son you would never think was an arch-bishop, you know? You would neverthink of him as an archbishop or anybodywith any power. I mean he’s just this guy,not particularly well dressed. When weknew him, he just seemed like this oldguy and he was bald and had kind of akindly persona. He listened a lot, anddidn’t do a lot of talking.

I think that the first time I met him, Iwas in jail. We had gotten arrested (forcommitting civil disobedience) and Jimand one other person in our group wereboth doing a fast. I don’t remember whythe archbishop came to visit us in jail, butpeople were concerned about Jim’s safety,basically. I don’t know who got him tocome, but he came, and even though hedidn’t look or act like an archbishop,because he was the archbishop, the jailgave him a special visit. And they put Jimin a wheelchair and wheeled him down,and there was the archbishop!

Spirit: Why was Jim Douglass in awheelchair when he was in jail?

Douglass: Jim was fasting and nonco-operating with the jail, and so he wouldn’twalk. Eventually he was taken to the hos-

pital, and through his fast, we were able toget better food for everyone in the KingCounty Jail.

So Jim was doing this fast and theywheeled him in, and there was the arch-bishop who wanted to know if he was allright. Then, the archbishop did not haveto do this, but he came to the women’s jailto tell us that Jim and John were OK.

It was a very pastoral kind of thing to doand he did wield his power because, youknow, just Joe Blow wasn’t going to beable to come in and see us outside of visit-ing hours. But he was very low key aboutdoing it, and it wasn’t like any big deal. Hewas just telling us what we needed toknow.

He was always like that. He’s verythoughtful, very caring. And I don’t thinkI ever heard him say a word against anyof the people who were against him.

When he came out with these kinds ofcontroversial statements about not payinghis taxes in resistance to nuclear weaponsand “Trident is the Auschwitz of PugetSound,” and when he came to our demon-strations, he always made a point of goingboth before and afterward to the parisheswhere people were most opposed to what-ever it was he had done. And he wouldjust let them talk to him and he would talkto them and listen. The people didn’tchange their minds and refuse to pay wartaxes, but most of them wound up with avery soft spot for the archbishop, eventhough they didn’t agree with him.

Spirit: Why would those who dis-agreed with him have a soft spot for him?

Douglass: Well, they felt respected andthey had affection for him even thoughthey thought he was kind of crazy.

Spirit: You’re describing the personthat I met when he came to speak onnuclear weapons in Berkeley at PacificSchool of Religion in 1982. I thought hewas so modest and unassuming, but this

kindly person somehow had this propheticfire in him. Did it surprise you that thissoft-spoken man who didn’t seem to wantto offend anyone, would speak out sopowerfully about nuclear weapons?

Douglass: Well, yes and no. He wassomeone who followed the gospel. Imean, that was basically why he visited usat Ground Zero, because he was the pastorand that was one of the things he was sup-posed to do. So it didn’t surprise me whenhe started speaking out against war andfor peace. He knew exactly what hethought he should do and he wasn’t goingto do any more to fulfill anybody’s expec-tations or make a big public thing, but hewasn’t going to do any less either. Andthat’s what got him in trouble, because theVatican wanted him to do much less andhe wasn’t willing to step back.

Spirit: The new biography gave mesuch a different picture. This low-key,modest man was actually one of the bestathletes in football, basketball and track.He rose to positions of leadership every-where he worked, quickly becoming presi-dent of Carroll College, and was appoint-ed bishop at a very young age. A talentedwhirlwind of a man was concealed underhis kindly, soft-spoken exterior.

Douglass: He is pretty amazing, but Ithink that’s how he got there. He got putin those positions because he was a pastorand he cared about people.

Spirit: He protested nuclear weapons,and also spoke out for the rights ofwomen in the church, the rights of gaypeople, and for economic justice. JimDouglass told me that you can just look atthe Beatitudes and that’s RaymondHunthausen all the way down the line.

Douglass: Yeah, that’s true. Anotherthing that strikes me is that he’s so lowkey he doesn’t like to be called archbish-op. He always wanted us to call him“Dutch” (his nickname). And we’re notbig on clerical privilege, so if somebodycalls me by my first name, I call them bytheir first name. But I could not bringmyself to call him Dutch because he wasthe archbishop. So we compromised bycalling him The Arch. [laughs]

But there was just a sense that he was aholy person, and is a holy person. And itwasn’t somehow fitting to start pallingaround and calling him by his first name,even though we had a good friendship andhe came and had meals with us, and all thatkind of stuff. So it wasn’t like we werekowtowing, but there is just a certain sensethat this is a really special kind of person.

Spirit: Why did you feel he was spe-cial, other than being the archbishop ofthe Seattle diocese?

Douglass: Well, not because he was anarchbishop, but because he was holy. Hereally stood for what he believed and hetook a lot of flak for it. I didn’t know until Iread the book how much flak he took. Hewas a person who had read the gospel andhe tried to live it out, and succeeded. Andhe was in a position in the church wherethat meant a lot to a lot of people.

He stood for people who were disen-franchised, and he stood for people whowere poor. He stood for an end to thearms race. He reached out to people. Youknow, he’s right in tune with PopeFrancis, and it’s just sad that he’s not thebishop now.

But the thing that surfaced in the wholeVatican mess in Seattle, the thing thatmade it public, was over gay rights. Therewas an ordinance, an anti-discriminationordinance, that was being proposed inSeattle, and at a staff meeting one day thearchbishop said, “We’re going to supportthis ordinance for gay rights.”

And the then-auxiliary bishop, DonaldWuerl, said, “No we’re not.”

Archbishop Hunthausen said, “Well,

Interview withShelley Douglass from page 11

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This stupa was built at Ground Zero after permission was denied tobuild the Peace Pagoda. The stupa is still there to this day!

Photo by TomDouglass

October 2015 ST R E E T SP I R I T 13

I’m the archbishop and this is my deci-sion.” And Wuerl said, “No, that’s notright.” And they actually took the disputeto the Vatican and that’s where it becamepublic, even to the archbishop, that therewere certain places where he no longerhad his authority.

And the thing that I respected him forabout that was he didn’t allow it to be sweptunder the rug. He’s a very loyal person tothe church and the Vatican, but he wasn’tgoing to let this just happen, so he did makea lot of it public. But not nearly as much ofthe very personal, painful stuff that weknow now from the book.

Spirit: It is so sad to read how theVatican mistreated him for speaking hisconscience about nuclear weapons and gayrights. It was terribly cruel to him and hehad to live with that for the rest of his life.

Douglass: I thought it was horrible.It’s definitely one of the absolute lowpoints in the history of the church in theNorthwest. And it’s an illustration of theway the Vatican had been handling itspower by just crushing people, which iswhat they tried to do to him.

Spirit: Yes, they deliberately tried tocrush his spirit and silence him.

Douglass: Yeah. I don’t think he evertotally recovered from that, no matter howmuch people loved him. It was just — itstill is very painful.

Spirit: I don’t think it’s possible to fullyrecover from such a prolonged attack.

Douglass: But he was fully supportedby the people and the priests. He getsstanding ovations. As soon as his name issaid, everybody’s on their feet, you know,because he was such a beloved figure.

Spirit: It was such a gift to the churchthat they had this incredible propheticleader who was loved by his people. Butlook how the Vatican treated that gift.

Douglass: Yeah, look how they treatedhim. But what is really interesting to me isthat (Donald) Wuerl was the guy initiallysent to share power with ArchbishopHunthausen, and is the guy who we allcouldn’t stand. I’ve always been preju-diced against him since then and probablywould still not agree with him. But he isnow the archbishop of Washington, D.C.,and just after this new encyclical cameout, he was on the news defending thisnew encyclical that talks about social jus-tice and how it comes from decades ofCatholic teaching. [laughs]

Spirit: He talks out of both sides of hismouth, and he’s just a yes man to whoeverthe pope is. It was devastating for me toread in the book how much Hunthausensuffered because of the Vatican repres-sion, and from people like Wuerl.

Douglass: The church was very tensein those days in Seattle. It was a verytense kind of situation. We were not heav-ily involved in all that because we wereout doing Trident stuff, but people knewthat Archbishop Hunthausen supported us,so if we went somewhere to give a talk ina parish or a Catholic school, peoplewould show up with tape recorders andrecord every word we said and basicallyuse it to get him.

Spirit: It’s very sad that this man whowas so compassionate and so dedicated topeace would have to suffer all that.

ARSON AT THE PEACE PAGODA

Spirit: It was also sad when Buddhistreligious leaders were attacked when theyworked for compassion and nonviolenceat Ground Zero. Why did such a violentcontroversy erupt when they wanted to set

up a peace pagoda at Ground Zero? Douglass: When Jim and I first moved

down to Ground Zero, we had a visit froma Japanese guy who was dressed in orangerobes and had a drum that he beat all thetime. He said his name was Suzuki and hewas a monk in a Japanese Buddhist ordercalled Nipponzan Myohoji.

Suzuki-shonin told us about his orderwhich was founded by a monk namedNichidatsu Fujii who had actually livedwith Gandhi and had made a vow duringWorld War II that he would not fight andhe would work for peace out of hisBuddhist teaching.

They’re kind of Buddhist Franciscansin the sense that they own nothing andthey walk all around the world, chantingthis peace chant that’s supposed to be thesound that would be made if the worldwere in perfect harmony. When theycome to a site of intense violence, theystay and pray and eventually they buildpeace pagodas there, which are sites forprayer and for intensifying the power ofpeace and nonviolence.

So Suzuki came to see us and he wasvery taken with our idea of a nonviolentcenter by the Trident base. He would comeand chant, and then, in 1980, he called us afew days before the election of RonaldReagan happened and said, “Fujii Guruji isin New York and I want to bring him toGround Zero and he has 30 monks andnuns. Please be ready.” [laughs] [Editor:Nichidatsu Fujii, the founder of thisBuddhist order, is also known as Guruji.]

So, you know, here’s Jim and me andat that point there weren’t a whole lot ofpeople around, so we called a meeting andit just happened to be held on ElectionDay — that was a coincidence.

Spirit: A meeting about peace andnuclear disarmament on the day Reaganwas elected as president.

Douglass: So Nichidatsu Fujii, who issort of a Saint Francis, a modern saint,and these monks and nuns came toGround Zero and there was a gathering ofall kinds of people — Amish, Quaker,Catholic — just whoever we could pulltogether. We had a prayer meeting forpeace and we told Guruji about GroundZero and the struggles and the jail sen-tences people had been serving.

We showed him the land, and hisresponse was that this should be the placewhere the first Peace Pagoda would bebuilt in the United States because it wasnext to incomparable violence that hadn’tyet been done and it was the place ofresistance and suffering. We were a littlebit taken aback, you know, because whenthese guys get going, they’re kind of likea steamroller. They’re very focused andvery intense in their energy.

But we decided that this was a goodthing. We have a long, continuing rela-tionship with the monks that began backwhen first Suzuki and then Guruji came toGround Zero. So some supporters of themonks drew up plans for a pagoda thatmight be at Ground Zero. Then the monkscame to start work and somebody donatedto us the geodesic dome that we put up.

Spirit: How did the people who livednearby respond to these plans?

Douglass: The neighborhood was verysuspicious of this. First of all, a lot of thepeople in the neighborhood at that time inthe 1980s were people who had served inthe Second World War or had livingmemories of relatives and parents whohad served, and these were Japanesemonks coming. So that was a huge obsta-cle. And people didn’t really understandwhat the pagoda was. They formed anintense opposition against it.

One of their posters had school busesstacked up to the height they thought thepagoda would be, (and claimed) that wecould spy into the base. That was the idea,that we could see over the trees from the

top of the pagoda and watch what the basewas doing. It was not very thoughtful, butvery intense opposition.

We wound up having to apply for con-struction permits and had almost complet-ed the process when it became a publicissue. Then, after all the intense opposi-tion, the county commissioners justdenied the permits to build.

This was all happening at the sametime as the first Trident was coming in,and I can’t remember what year that was.

Spirit: The USS Ohio came to theBangor naval base in August 1982.

Douglass: OK, well it was all happen-ing in that same sort of time frame. A lotof this happened within that year of 1982.And the most intense thing was that whenwe were getting ready to blockade theTrident submarine, there was huge hostili-ty, and people were very suspicious andthe Navy spread misinformation aboutwhat we were planning to do, whichdidn’t help. So people thought we werecoming with weapons and that we weretrying to blow it up and we were going todo all these very violent, scary things andthe pagoda was seen as part of that.

Spirit: They actually thought violent,scary things would happen when a nonvi-olent group was protesting the Tridentand a peace pagoda was being planned bypeaceful monks similar to St. Francis?

Douglass: Yeah, we had some publicmeetings and we were accused of every-thing from getting ready to blow up theTrident to urinating on peoples’ lawns.[laughs] You know, it’s just like throweverything — throw the kitchen sink. Butthe hostility was so huge that you couldalmost feel it in the air.

It was a very, very hostile situation. Itwas kind of like the Civil RightsMovement in the South. You knew thatpeople were really hostile, and during thistime the monks and the Ground Zero peo-ple were using the geodesic dome forworship. We had a beautiful goldenBuddha that had been shipped from Indiato go on the pagoda when it was complet-ed, and that was in our dome. And thenwe had a kind of modernistic metal cruci-fix that somebody had made and given tous and so that was in the dome.

We used the dome for prayer and med-itation and the monks often slept therewhen the weather was bad. So in the mid-dle of the night in May of 1982, some-body went into the dome with an ax andsmashed up the Buddha and smashed upthe crucifix and then poured gasoline andlit the thing on fire.

Spirit: Oh my God. They were basical-ly burning down a church.

Douglass: Yeah, and of course it was atotal loss. The only thing left was thecharred floor of the dome and some melt-ed hunks of metal that were no longer rec-ognizable, really. Luckily, nobody wassleeping in there so nobody was hurt, butof course the fire department came andthe fire was put out.

We put out a statement “to those whoburned our dome,” which talked about non-violence and forgiveness, and said that wehoped we could come together and makepeace. We leafleted that statement on thebase and gave it to the papers. Theirresponse was that we probably set the domeon fire ourselves to get publicity.

Long after this all happened, we foundout through the Freedom of InformationAct that it was two brothers who wereMarines on the base, twin brothers, whohad snuck into the Ground Zero dome andtrashed it and burned it. And the baseknew that. All the time they were sayingwe probably did it ourselves, they knew it!They shipped the guys back out toCalifornia two days later.

Spirit: Those two Marines were nevereven prosecuted for arson?

Douglass: Oh no, and never evenadmitted they did it until we got theFreedom of Information Act. I mean, thebase obviously knew because they had itin these papers, but nobody else knew.

Spirit: That’s just incredible. We sup-posedly have freedom of speech and reli-gion, but the Navy covered up for thearsonists who burned down the dome.

Douglass: Yeah, yeah. What hap-pened, though, was I think that the actionof theirs was kind of like lancing the boil.I think people began to realize what wasthe logical outcome of the way they weretalking and acting, so it did kind of lessenthe amount of violent rhetoric and hatredthat was going around. And it may actual-ly have been a help in the sense that theviolence was kind of vented before theactual Trident demonstration happened.

Spirit: So what did the NipponzanMyohoji monks do at that point? Did theystay involved in the Trident campaign orgive up on the Peace Pagoda?

Douglass: There was a big group ofthem there because they were doing con-struction. The rebar for the pagoda was allin place and they were actually ready topour the concrete, if I’m rememberingcorrectly. So once the permits weredenied, all that had to stop and we decidedthat there wasn’t really any appeal at thatpoint. We decided we would lay it to restfor the time being and just leave thingswhere they were.

So we cleared off all the constructionstuff, other than the form itself, and wetook the remains of the Buddha and thecrucifix and they were put into a rock basewhich is about 10 feet high, and on top ofit, there is a stele (an upright slab used asa memorial) that has the words, “Na MuMyo Ho Ren Ge Kyo,” put on it. It’s asite of prayer the way a pagoda would be,but it’s much smaller and didn’t need anyconstruction permits.

So that was put up very soon, and it’sstill there. It’s still a site of prayer for peo-ple at Ground Zero and it’s always main-tained by the Buddhists who still have apresence in the area. They have a templeon Bainbridge and a lot of people havecome to pray and they do peace walksevery August.

Spirit: What are the peace walks?Douglass: They start out at various

places, such as Austin and Hanford, andthey walk across the state of Washingtonon foot, the whole way chanting forpeace. And they stop and talk about thenuclear arms race and people will listen.So it’s a way of raising consciousness anda way of praying at the same time. Theyarrive at the base on whatever day hasbeen picked, usually around Hiroshimaand Nagasaki day as the action day. Sothat goes on every year.

[Editor: The 2015 Interfaith Peace Walkbegan on July 26, 2015, in Salem, Oregon,and finished several hundred miles later atGround Zero on August 10..]

Spirit: Jim told me that the PeacePagoda has been given the green light?

Douglass: We don’t know yet for sureand we have varying perspectives on howlikely this is. Various people think differ-ently about how likely this is to happen.

Spirit: What do we know for sure?Douglass: Well, what has happened

for sure is that there is a renewed proposalto try and build the Peace Pagoda atGround Zero again, a much smaller onethan the original proposal. And theGround Zero community met and formeda committee and studied the issue andtalked it through and decided that they didwant to go through with building a pagodaat Ground Zero. But as far as I know, noone has yet applied for any kind of permit,which is, of course, where we ran into theproblem before.

Interview withShelley Douglass from page 12

October 2015ST R E E T SP I R I T14

by Carol Denney

To start with, the consultants arepretty funny. I opted not to sign inand put on a nametag at the

“Community Visioning Workshop” inBerkeley on August 29, and it drove themmad. They kept surrounding me like abunch of bees encouraging me to wear aname tag and sign in, and I kept decliningpolitely, knowing that anything I filled outwould be ultimately used in metricsagainst a neighborhood I loved.

They would boast about the turnouteven if half the room was consultants,volunteers, and kids from local organiza-tions getting credit for being there.

And after only being allowed to saypositive things about the Adeline Corridorin guided workshop after guided surveyafter guided visioning committee, a reportwill be produced that says, “98 percent ofthe response was positive.”

One of them finally filled out a nametag for me and walked purposefullytoward me across the room offering to putit on me. I declined that, too, and not evenbecause it was somebody else’s name.

But the funniest person there by farwas new interim Berkeley City Manager,Dee Williams-Ridley, who wanted peopleto shout good morning like a bunch ofkindergartners until she was satisfied withthe volume. They were all pretty goodsports about it. But she wouldn’t quit.

She had a whole speech planned abouthow “you can’t play a symphony alone,”asking what kind of music we liked —jazz? rap? blues? It’s an old trick: no mat-ter how annoyed an audience is with thiskind of thing, if you can trick them intomaking a sound, or raising a hand, orclapping along, they end up rememberingit later as positive.

They might think they played a role indeveloping the plan, and if later, afteractually filling out surveys and writingessays and mapping things with crayons,they point out that the plan doesn’t at allresemble what they wanted, the develop-ers get to point out that at least theyplayed a role.

Williams-Ridley said, “you’re writingyour own song” and “you are gettingready to write your own song” so manytimes, I started to write a song about it.She kept trying to drive up the energywith cheap tricks, such as: “Why do youlove Berkeley?” “What’s stopping you?”“Repeat after me; I will not stop until mysong is written!” in a room that was readyto burst into song, alright, just not thesong she wanted.

She finally acknowledged that peoplehad a lot of distrust. She was told directlythat people wouldn’t trust her, and sheasked repeatedly for people to go easy onher, to give her a chance, which was sopathetic we were ready to hold hands andfolkdance if she would just shut up. Andthen she said, “Will you give our city staffa chance?” — and the room went dead.

This is Berkeley, after all, not a bunchof kindergartners. Even Berkeley kinder-gartners are ahead of this game. The truthis that nobody should trust the city staff orDee Williams-Ridley, either, as MayorTom Bates’ representative.

She stated that “the basis of trust isauthenticity,” which I found puzzling. Thebasis of trust has nothing to do withauthenticity, whatever that is, and when itcomes to the city of Berkeley, trust hasmuch more to do with transparency, sadlyin short supply these days, and the patternof previous behavior which, in the case ofthe Adeline Corridor, is the usual rawskidmark of greed.

City officials galvanized extraordinari-ly united opposition by blithely planningto build and displace the beloved AshbyFlea Market, and more recently altered thedistrict’s land use controls to favor tax-base-enhancing automobile sales uses, theobvious enemy of small, pedestrian-serv-ing businesses that make the AdelineCorridor such a shopable, walkable neigh-borhood.

The City of Berkeley has blown offdecades of opportunities to listen to its cit-izens and has opted for big developer, cor-porate, and university perspectives everytime. While protesters in San Francisco’sMission District have stopped at least twoout-of-scale luxury housing develop-ments, Berkeley’s best-educated and best-organized have yet to stop or even scaleback the pet project of a former planningdirector which distorts a landmark build-ing in an historic setting, mars an iconicview from the Campanile, exacerbates thehousing crisis with 18 stories of luxuryhousing, kills off the current building’stheaters (with a lot of cat-and-mousegames regarding their replacement), dis-places valued businesses and will requireyears, perhaps a decade, of disruptive con-struction.

Berkeley citizens have no track recordon which to base any trust in a processdedicated to using their own dutiful par-ticipation in surveys designed to greasethe path for their own exploitation —“98% found the process positive!” and“98% enjoyed the cookies!” — since afterthey slog through the monotonous “onlypositive remarks” free association exercis-es, the only options offered for sugges-tions have to be for immediate physicalimprovements to actual spaces on maps.

Once a few play areas and bike pathsare thrown into the mix, whoever is leftwill probably sign off on more developer“flexibility” just to get the hell out ofthere. One person shouted “This is corpo-rate BS!” at some point, but the event wasextremely civil, considering what’s atstake.

Attendee Rinna Flohr, owner ofExpressions Gallery on Ashby inBerkeley, was hazy about the benefits ofan Arts District, but looked forward toany specific recognition which mightimprove awareness about arts in the areathrough signage or advertising. Local resi-

dent Lois Fischer characterized many ofthe residents she knew in the room as“concerned” about the planning process,many of them longtime residents.

There was nothing about rent controlor vacancy decontrol. Nothing aboutlocally owned businesses or businessopportunities and absolutely nothingabout the racism hovering over both thehistory of the area and a room filled withprimarily white planners and city staff andprimarily black residents in a rapidlywhitening, gentrifying area.

There was a brief admission regardingthe extreme decrease in the black popula-tion, but nothing about Black LivesMatter. Nothing about police who thinkcamouflage outfits help them blend inwith picket fences.

“The basis of trust is authenticity —and I am authentic!” If Interim CityManager Dee Williams-Ridley is authen-tic, whatever that is, what a lovely thingthat must be for her and for anybody whohad concerns about her provenance. Butit’s not about her.

The Lorin District survived being ini-tially excluded from Berkeley’s bound-aries in 1878, the severe disruption ofBART construction in 1970s, and hasmore economic resilience, communityconnection, and many other measurableattributes which the City of Berkeleycould learn from if the City were interest-ed.

Here’s the good news: Great transit! The Adeline Corridor is

served by bus, by BART, and a short dis-tance from both I-80 and the Bay Bridge.People in the hills may have the swankyviews, but they have to battle it out onabsurdly constricted roads through a seaof Mercedes to commute or get someeggs. And the views from West and SouthBerkeley are still pretty impressive.

Diversity! This isn’t the fake diversityso popular among groups that sigh withrelief when one black person sits in thecorner of their meeting. This is the realthing, the area where African Americansexcluded by racial covenants and race-based redlining east of what was onceGrove Street (now Rev. Martin LutherKing, Jr. Way) could buy property, startbusinesses, have families, and build theconnections and resources that keep a realneighborhood humming and help to side-

step homelessness. Around 25 percent ofthe population in the Adeline Corridor isAfrican American, as opposed to only 10percent across the rest of the city.

Walkability! What the planning consul-tants call “the walk score” is 89 in theAdeline Corridor, as opposed to only 79for Berkeley as a whole. This meansmany errands can be accomplished onfoot, unlike the whoops-out-of-butteremergencies for people with gold-platedviews.

Stable vacancy and occupancy rates!Vacancies along the Adeline Corridor arelower than both Downtown Berkeley(11.2 percent) and the Telegraph Avenuearea (12.7 percent) since the vacancies(7.2 percent) are “absorbed at roughly thesame rate” as businesses leave, makingfor a stable, neighborhood-serving busi-ness community.

This is noteworthy since BART con-struction disrupted the area for years, bur-dening local businesses. But let’s not bestupid. If the property owners onTelegraph and in the downtown loweredtheir rents, they could lower the vacanciesin a New York minute. They would justhave to give up on their dreams of gettingNew York rents.

Got density? The population density(25 people per acre) is two and a halftimes greater than that of Berkeley overall(10 people per acre). This is a crucialpoint, because “enhancing density” isused as the excuse for imposing tall, uglyblocks of chicken-coop housing alongtransit corridors, an excuse which resi-dents can point out is not called for in thisarea.

Planners, developers, and consultantshave no excuse for imposing out-of-scalemonster buildings here. They should beon their knees examining how over theyears this area, naturally and organically,achieved such a radical degree of densitywithout sacrificing its skyline, withoutabandoning its culture, without losing itsidentity, and without selling out to plan-ners, developers, and consultants.

Got kids? Got work? This, the historicLorin District, has a higher percentage ofchildren compared with the rest of thecity. 70 percent of the Lorin District is inthe workforce, although the medianincome is lower than for most of the City

Berkeley Officials Act as Cheerleaders for theDevelopers in Adeline Corridor Planning Process

The Community Visioning Workshop held by Berkeley officials in planning for the Adeline Corridor. Carol Denney photo

See Adeline Corridor Planning page 15

October 2015 ST R E E T SP I R I T 15

eral grant to the Alameda County Sheriff’sDepartment, it does not fund the pay,including overtime, of city and countyagencies participating in these exercises,which commit substantial amounts in over-time pay not covered by UASI grants.

Sheriff’s Department sergeants anddeputies cost about $81-$97 per hour forovertime. For 48-hour continuous exercis-es on the weekend by teams of eight andmore staff, this cost alone is significant: atleast $34,000.

In 2012, activists in Oakland beganorganizing to push back against UrbanShield, which had been headquartered atthe city-run Marriott Hotel in downtownOakland. They formed a coalition of orga-nizations, including American FriendsService Committee, Critical Resistance,War Resisters League, Arab ResourceOrganizing Center, Oscar GrantCommittee, CodePink, Oakland PrivacyWorking Group, and others, as well asfamilies of people killed by police.

The coalition organized street protestsat the Marriott, joined by a feeder marchby families of police murder victims.

Last year, protests were energized by theresponse in Ferguson, Missouri, to thekilling of Michael Brown. Buddhists sat inengaged meditation in front of the MarriottHotel’s doors. Congresswoman BarbaraLee reportedly urged then-Mayor JeanQuan to cancel the contract to host theevent in Oakland. After all, Oakland has apolicy against gun-selling in its jurisdiction.Why should it then sponsor an event forvendors to sell military gadgetry?

Mother Jones magazine published anextensive report on Urban Shield, after itsreporter was thrown out by UrbanShield’s media flacks.

Ultimately, Oakland did kick outUrban Shield. In response, the Sheriff’sDepartment moved the event this year tothe county fairgrounds in suburbanPleasanton. A Pleasanton police officeronly recently killed John Deming, Jr., anunarmed young man in July.

Joined by more groups this year, includ-ing Black Alliance for Just Immigration andthe Mount Diablo Justice and Peace Center,the coalition in a short period organizedteach-ins in Walnut Creek and Oakland, aswell as a surprise drop of a banner overInterstate 680 in Pleasanton, that read “WarGames in Pleasanton?”

The centerpiece event was a protest onthe first day of Urban Shield, on

September 11, part of a contest over themeaning of terror, who is impacted, andhow to respond. Marching through down-town Oakland to the Alameda Sheriff’soffice, theater groups occupied streetintersections and enacted repression bypolice of Black, Filipino, Mexican andArab communities and their responses.Oakland police stayed away.

In powerful testimony in the shadow ofthe Sheriff’s office on Lakeside Drive, alocal 13-year-old girl described a SWATraid on her home. “As soon as I hit thedoor, I opened it, and they started scream-ing at me, telling me to put my hands up.Pointing rifles at me. And I look around,and it seemed like a movie. I couldn’tbelieve it.” She was brave beyond words

to describe her experience in public.Alameda County should not be hosting

this large event, which involves not onlynine Bay Area counties, but teams frombeyond the Bay Area and the UnitedStates. But neither should individual cityagencies participate in an exercise thatmilitarizes emergency responses and ordi-nary policing. Our communities badlyneed other kinds of security, instead offortifying the state’s violent responses toprotest and crisis.

On September 29, activists spokeagainst Urban Shield at a meeting of theAlameda County Board of Supervisors,while also opposing the Sheriff’s proposeduse of federal UASI funds to acquire newphone surveillance equipment. The contract

with Harris Corporation would prohibit thecounty from disclosing even what theequipment is — a non-disclosure agreementimposed in other cities for use of the“Stingray.”

Stingray technology mimics the signalfrom a cell phone tower to capture datafrom all cell phones within a wide area. Ina small victory for activists, the Board ofSupervisors postponed their decision onthe Harris contract to allow more time forpublic input.

John Lindsay-Poland is the Wage PeaceCoordinator for American Friends ServiceCommittee in San Francisco. He can bereached at jlindsay-poland@afsc.org. Thanksto researchers who contributed to this article,including Dalit Baum and Mike Katz-Lacabe.

Urban ShieldProtesters ConfrontPolice Militarization from page 2

“Humanize Not Militarize,” a new poster exhibit by the AFSC, shows the effects of military violence in foreign and domestic settings.

of Berkeley, where only 60 percent are inthe workforce.

Car free rate!32 percent of people inthe Adeline Corridor area are car-free,unlike 25 percent of Berkeley citywide,which is mighty green. So why is the citymessing with the Adeline Corridor?

They’re not coy about it. Planners,developers and the consultants they lunchwith want to build what they build every-where else: out-of-scale, fake-affordable,UC-dorms-whoops-we-meant-housing-units that make developers sing arias andneighborhoods wince.

The planners and politicians want todeliver the goods to their best donors, andthe donor-developers want “vacant parcelsand surface parking lots” they’ve prettymuch run out of or cost more in otherparts of town.

Consultant Mukul Malhotra of MIG’splanning and consulting staff, referred to“enhancing” the zoning restrictions, andany public discussion of that will comelong after the bike paths and play areashave loosened up whoever is left — if dis-cussion comes at all.

They are hoping what all planners anddevelopers hope: that if they scatter somepark-lets, bike lanes and play structuresaround, they can keep people in the areasinging hallelujah long enough to loosenthe zoning restrictions, limber up theheight restrictions and land use controls,and “create opportunities” for themselveswhich apparently don’t exist right now oraren’t quite as lucrative as some tweaks ina planning process will make them downthe road.

Right now is already here. MaxAnderson, who represents the district onthe City Council and is one of the

founders of Friends of the AdelineCorridor, commented at a recent commu-nity meeting that the planning departmentis “forging ahead with development pro-jects without consulting the community”and suggested a “moratorium on develop-ment” until a plan is ready.

Suffice it to say that a “moratorium ondevelopment” will not be on any check-box at the next “Community VisioningWorkshop.”

Berkeley officials could have had a dif-ferent speech instead of the “you can’tplay a symphony alone” speech, whichwas pretty flat by symphonic standards.They could have said, hey, we want tostop the gentrification of this historicallyblack area, put the brakes on homeless-ness, and get some common sense intowhat has up to now been a planningprocess which only benefits the wealthy.What are your ideas?

It’s a question they can still ask.

Adeline Corridor Planning Processfrom page 14

Modern Timesby George Wynn

I know it's futile to dowhat I do: daydreamingtraveling back in timein my imaginationa coin collectorholding on tohis precious coins

What I can't get overis the modern skyscraperworld and technologyis not for meHow can I practicemindfulnesswhen people bumpinto me so absorbedin their smart phones as if they will neverlook up again

It's either drones or smart phonesgood news is so hard to find

October 2015ST R E E T SP I R I T16

work, with its inviting array of cleanpaintbrushes and working tables, is guid-ed by the youth themselves.

“We want to reverse the top-downmodel,” says Gibbins. “If they want to domore products, more T-shirts, it comesout of their discussions every Friday.”

The young participants, who rangefrom 16 to 25 years of age, check intogether every week to make decisionsabout their projects, ranging from finearts, spoken word, and writing projectssuch as the “Beyond This Prison” letter-writing project which began as correspon-dence between Louisiana inmate GlenRobinson and Berkeley resident J. R.Furst. The young artists also pursue theopportunities and challenges of largercommunity art projects, entrepreneurshipopportunities, and product sales.

The youth can earn money directlythrough their sales of artistic products, aswell as by applying for progressivelyfocused work opportunities using a varietyof skills, such as keeping track of sales data,assisting with communication and media,and project management, earning more asthey shoulder more responsibility.

The money they earn is theirs. They’veseen what can happen with a particularlypopular T-shirt: people walk in off thestreet requesting it, it flies off the shelves,and YSA can run out of stock entirely.

“It helps them become more indepen-dent and learn to budget,” explainsGibbins. “They have the freedom to dowhat they want.”

YSA’s mission is to use art jobs andjobs training to transform the lives of low-income and homeless youth to ensure thatthey meet their full potential, which oftenhas more to do with self-confidence andemotional clarity than the art itself.

Many of the participants don’t come intothe program thinking of themselves asartists at all. When they leave the program,they often have a very different view ofthemselves and their talents, whether theysee themselves as artists or not.

“They discover that with hard workthey can do anything,” states Gibbins sim-ply, as Li nods in agreement. “They learnto ask for help. Art is just a mediumthrough which they learn.”

The community organizations workingin partnership with Youth Spirit Artworkscomprise a long list. Participants learnabout the program largely through wordof mouth in the community.

YSA murals and mosaics spring to lifethroughout the town of Berkeley andyoung people either see it for themselvesor hear about it from friends and teachersat local schools, or groups like YEAH(Youth Engagement, Advocacy andHousing) and BOSS (BuildingOpportunities for Self Sufficiency).

YSA has a partnership with UrbanAdamah, a community garden on SanPablo Avenue where youth can harvesteggs, learn about plants and farming, andsee the skills required to organize withothers — literally from the ground up.

Respected local artists and poets con-duct workshops with the participants, andthe youth take field trips that engenderdiscussions they may never have hadbefore about college requirements, jobskills, and possibilities for a future somehave never had the encouragement toenvision for themselves.

There is no template for an originalmodel. In the eight years of YSA’s exis-tence, the best practices of youth empow-erment organizations with similar goalshave informed the program, but YSA isoriginal as an organization. It partnerswith local artists and has a dedicated anddeeply educated staff, but it is designed

by the youth themselves, who move seam-lessly through the studio in ways that con-vey connection and respect.

“They love to sing,” says Gibbins.“There’s a lot of community organizing,”she adds, and mentions contributions fromthe Juice Bar Collective that quicklybecame favorites, even to some of theyouth who were initially more used tojunk food.

“It’s hard to quantify the value of hope— and resilience,” Gibbins says. Theneed to measure the youths’ progress hasinspired efforts to try some testing, but thepoint is well taken.

How do you measure what happens tosomeone who walks through a museum,or who is suddenly given not just theopportunity to paint a chair, but to usetheir own judgment about the design andthe colors? What happens to a youngmind when their personal vision orexpression, played across a T-shirt, catch-es peoples’ fancy and sells like crazy?

Art, poetry, and music have always beenthe first programs cut in most school bud-gets, so many young people have no ideawhat transformative power the arts canhave unless they have personal family orfriends who can make the introduction.

But YSA’s comprehensive approach topersonal transformation is wider than anypaintbrush, and more lasting than anysong, especially coupled with the seriousrequirements of budgeting for communityprojects and creating media for communi-ty events.

Its greatest source of support is stillpersonal donations, a supportive board,and community connections through itswork, which seems perfectly situated in aSouth Berkeley neighborhood with animpressive balance of retail stores, artsgroups, and cooperatives.

“Art is a piece of it,” says Gibbins,“but there’s so much critical thinking andcreativity.”

The grounded nature of YSA’s effortshows in its young participants, such asJason, who has been involved for threeyears. He shows his work if requestedwith quiet confidence and pride, and ifcomplimented on his considerable skill asa draftsman, he simply smiles and saysyes, as though there is clarity in his ownmind that should he elect to work in thearts arena, he has the required skills.

On a recent Friday afternoon, the cor-ner of Ellis and Alcatraz Avenue inBerkeley came alive with Youth Spirit

Artwork leaders, GHA Design representa-tives, Ecology Center organizers, UCBerkeley College of EnvironmentalDesign students, Climate Action Coalitionpartners and other local groups who col-lected input from the community aboutbuilding a “parklet” or “artlot.”

There were drinks and snacks, and largeinformational signs about the project, andeverywhere you looked, there were lots ofcreative, structural models of different sizesand shapes clustered around the curbs tohelp get people thinking about possibilities.Small groups chatted, strolled, and brain-stormed together in the sun.

Youth Spirit Artworks worked with144 young people last year alone, animpressive, unmistakable metric whichprospective donors can contemplate alongwith the distinctive visual projects.

These are 144 young people whopotentially have a better sense of whothey are, a better sense of their worth inthe world, improved skills for job inter-views, and even a resume.

It might not be the easiest thing tomeasure. It’s a lot like the rush of possi-bilities people sense once they’re exiting agreat exhibit at a museum or art exhibi-tion. It’s much more than a paintbrush.

Youth Spirit Artworks: More Than a Paintbrushfrom page 1

YSA staff Lia Li and Danielle Gibbins in front of the Malcolm X Elementary School mural in Berkeley. Carol Denney photo

The “Beyond This Prison” letters writing project wall at YSA. Carol Denney photo

A painted chair in the front window of Youth Spirit Artworks. Carol Denney photo