In Black America; History Teaches Us To Resist, with Dr. Mary Frances Berry, Part II

From the University of Texas at Austin, KUT Radio, this is In Black America. Well the first thing is that there's so much evil in the world that there's so many things that you could. First of all, you figure out what you are best able to target on. And if there are people already trying to make change and there's something egregious, you can mobilize from the base that they're working on. Like in South Africa, there were already people in South Africa who had been protesting and dying and everything else had been happening to them. People in Europe had been having sanctions, the UN had sanctions. We as the biggest economy in the world and the most powerful nation in the world needed to come along in order to make that kind of change.

The main thing though is that if you're going to protest, you have to have and have a movement. You have to have a simple goal. Dr. Mary Francis Berry, the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought, Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, former chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the author of History teaches us to resist how progressive movements have succeeded in challenging times published by Beacon Press. Berry has spent over six decades as an activist in various movements, first protesting the Vietnam War, then advocating for a free South Africa and the civil rights movement. In her latest book, History teaches us to resist. Berry began as President Roosevelt refused to prevent discrimination in the defense industry during World War II. Berry advised historical examples that protesting essential element of politics and that progressive movements can and will flourish even in perilous times. I'm John L. Hanson Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America.

On this week's program, History teaches us to resist. With Dr. Mary Francis Berry, part two in Black America. The people in South Africa asked us to get sanctions passed by the American Congress and to stop trading and that that would help them to get their freedom. And so there was a great mobilization, not just us in Washington, and that doll of the Shell Oil Company, the coal, all these people, but on the college campuses everywhere. People were protesting about this and demanding that a law be passed by Congress so that there would be sanctions. Ronald Reagan, who was president, was absolutely opposed to the whole idea. He said that if you have, you know, they're better off the way they are now. You know, anyway, the people who want to get into part data communists. You know, people always say that everybody is a communist if they oppose what they're interested in or an outside agitator, one of the other, as he used to say in the South. Dr. Mary Francis Berry has been a trailblazer for most of her life.

There's a college year that fits and however universally. Berry has been one of the most visible activists in the cause for civil rights, gender equality, and social justice in this country. During her time studying to earn her PhD in law degree at the University of Michigan, she challenged American involvement in the Vietnam War. Berry served as chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. She also was chancellor, the first woman to head a major research university, serving at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In 1977, President Carter named her assistant secretary for education. Berry has long been a person of conviction and those convictions are evident in her service to the public and private sectors. In her latest book, History teaches us to resist. Berry truly believed that resistance is the cornerstone of democracy. On this week's program, we conclude our conversation with Dr. Mary Francis Berry. The sadness in his eyes and the thought that he just knew that his number was coming up

and he wasn't sure why. I found it interesting. You begin the book during the Roosevelt administration. There's racial discrimination in the armed forces and how that correlated to what was going on when the majority of the troops in Vietnam were African-American. Right. Large numbers of them were African-Americans, disproportionately African-Americans. There's this poem that was written by this great young black poet at the time, Ghani Norman Jordan, who died recently. Norman wrote this poem and says, Hey, Whitey, we're on to you killing red power, yellow power with black power. Two birds with one stone. And it was his lament about the war and about the sacrifice and what he saw as a disproportionate contribution of black soldiers. But lots of people were abused and died. And a lot of them, some people who I interviewed did die in that war.

And most of them had no real conception of why it wasn't like World War II. And we know somebody attacked Pearl Harbor or whatever. Conceptually, what was really going on? And what I just dragged on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. I remember also seeing up on the DMZ between North and South Vietnam, the last outposts where the Marines were. And I was up there with them at Kantien. And down below us, the engineers were digging and building a fence because McNamara wanted a fence built across between on the border and he thought that would stop the Viet Cong and in the war, which was ridiculous. But they were out there in the hot sun, digging and digging and getting shot at and snipe every time he looked up, somebody was getting hit and they were just digging and digging and putting up the fence and putting up the fence because that was what they had to do.

And the whole thing was so sad. I mean, there was a terrible sadness the entire time. Dr. Berry, you talk about the escalation of the war predicated on bad intel. And obviously, we're not learning anything from history. We got involved in the Iraqi war, bad intel. Yep. And it seems like everything goes full circle. Yes, we get bad intel. The American people are bereft of real knowledge about what was going on. For example, even when the anti-war movement and the military success of our troops who were dying and getting wounded and so on, maimed, brought the North Vietnamese willing to sit down at the peace table in 68. Not only did we succeed in getting Johnson not to run again, but they were willing to come to the peace conference and make peace. And Nixon then monkey wrenched the process had one of his guys go and deal with the Chinese, the people from Taiwan and Hong Kong who he knew and have them tell the North Vietnamese

if you just hold out until I get elected, I'll give you a better deal. And did that secretly in order to blow up the peace process because he said if you make peace, the Democrats are going to win the election. We don't want them, I don't want them to win. And so I'll give you a better deal, please. And so he then the war went on for two more years, three, longer than that. And more and more people died and more and more refugees and all the rest of it because he wanted to make sure he won the election. And the public didn't know anything about that until recently. And I didn't know, and many of us who were in the anti-war movement didn't know until recently, we thought we had somehow failed because the war kept going on. So the Iraq war, the protest against it, which I write in the book, started too late here. And they started late because we didn't have the information. And it wasn't until Colin Powell was at the UN and talked about the weapons of mass destruction and told those lies that they had him tell that the anti-war movement really got momentum.

By then it was too late. I mean, it had been going on, the war had been going on for too long. So lack of intelligence, which is true now, we still have. Think about Libya, for example. Kaddafi had already given up his nuclear weapons. He had paid off the debts. He had said, Uncle, he had cried Uncle more or less. So what do we do? We start a war there. We create all of this disorder and chaos. And we kill him. And then we have all these refugees coming across Libya going into the Mediterranean, into Greece and to Italy and up disrupting their democracy and their economy. And then we do the same thing in Syria. We say we're going into Syria. We don't really go in to win anything. We don't put enough investment there. We create more refugees. And then we have Malgo to Europe. And then Angela Merkel is hanging on by a string trying to keep power because she got all those refugees there, which was not a bad thing. It's just that we don't think

and the American people don't have the information in order to make decisions that might influence our leaders to perhaps go in a different direction. If you're just joining us, I'm Johnny O'Hanston, Jr. and you're listening to In Black America from KUT Radio. And we speak with Dr. Mary Francis Berry, the drill dean, our secret professor of American social thought and professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, former chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and author of a latest book, history teaches us to resist how progressive movements have succeeded in challenging time. Dr. Berry, at this point, obviously you thought it was important. But why is resistance essential to the American political process? Because protest is an essential ingredient of politics. I believe that. You hear politicians all the time and those who support them and all of us go out and tell people to vote. We're always talking about, make sure you vote. And people died so you could have the vote. Vote, vote, vote.

Vote like your life depended on it. Yes, people should vote. But if you vote and that's all you do, the politicians will be in office and they will not be held accountable. You have to not only vote, but you have to hold people accountable. Politicians love to have you go vote for them. That's what they want you to do. They want to get elected. They want to get reelected and so on. But the people who make the most more demands, you know, Frederick Douglass said that power conceives nothing without a demand and never has it, never will. OK, so if you don't have some form of protest and to make sure that your voice is heard and look to see what the leaders are doing and get as much information as you can and mobilize if you need to to change them, there won't be any change. When we changed American policy toward South Africa in the anti-partane movement in which a lot of people in some of them out there listening were involved with. The people in South Africa asked us to get sanctions passed by the American Congress and to stop trading and that that would help them to get their freedom.

And so there was a great mobilization, not just us in Washington and all of the Shell oil company, the coal, all these people, but on the college campuses everywhere. People were protesting about this and demanding that a lobby pass back Congress so that there would be sanctions. Donald Reagan, who was president, was absolutely opposed to the whole idea. He said that if you have, you know, they're better off the way they are now. You know, anyway, the people who want to get into part data communists, you know, people always say that everybody is a communist if they oppose what they're interested in or an outside agitator, one of the other as he used to say in the South. But we were able to get sanctions passed and then when he vetoed them while we kept on protesting and got them passed over his veto. Even though today when people talk about Reagan, they talk about what a popular man he is, a popular president. Most of them don't know anything about it except there's an airport named after him in Washington and that every state in the union has some kind of monument to him.

They don't know anything about his anti part aid. They don't know anything about his not talking about the AIDS crisis until Rockets and Dad, he wouldn't even mention the word AIDS even though it was a crisis in this country. And there was medication that should have been made available more cheaply to people so that they wouldn't be dying all over the place. They don't know any of that about him, but if you don't protest, if you don't make your voice heard, if you don't mobilize and you don't organize and then you won't be able to hold politicians accountable, you can hold them accountable if you do. So your vote is very important, electoral politics, very important, running for office is very important, but that's not the end all and be all of the game. It's sort of like if you thought that if you tweeted something, you had done your job of protesting and now everything should be fine and you can go home and sit down and say, well I made a tweet, you know, I tweeted, hey, I put it up on Facebook, hey, now that ought to be enough. No, and you also have to show up, you got to show up and show out and that's what you have to do to make change.

Dr. Barry, through these different presidencies, how did one grassroots organizations decide what to resist against? Well, the first thing is that there's so much evil in the world that there's so many things that you could, first of all, you figure out what you are best able to target on. And if there are people already trying to make change and there's something egregious, you can mobilize from the base that they're working on. Like in South Africa, there were already people in South Africa who had been protesting and dying and everything else had been happening to them. People in Europe had been having sanctions, the UN had sanctions. We as the biggest economy in the world and the most powerful nation in the world needed to come along in order to make that kind of change. The main thing, though, is that if you're going to protest, you have to have and have a movement, you have to have a simple goal. If your goal is too complicated, then it won't work. That's been the whole history of movements. You've got to say, take the March on Washington movement with A. Philip Brandoff when Roosevelt was president.

He stories know a lot about that movement, but I use it as an example in the beginning so you can see that there were a long list of things that the March on Washington movement wanted, but what they did was focus on one thing, get jobs for blacks in the defense industry, which is where most of the jobs were because of the war. And left the others, one of them was desegregating the armed forces, which happened after that. But focus then on that one issue. You've got to have something that is simple enough and not so complex that you can't explain it to people all at once. And that if you're asking Congress to pass something or the president to do something or somebody to do something, just target that one thing and you can organize a movement around it. Take movements you learn from movements that fail to take a occupy Wall Street movement. The occupy Wall Street movements, its goals were to diffuse. It was a great movement because we learn a lot from it. We learn from movements that failed too. So we know what to do for the next movement.

You got to study movements that fail as well as those who that succeed. But they had, they were too diffuse. The other thing we learned from that is that their leadership, they thought it was great not to have anybody be the spokesperson or be the person the media could go to. That makes sense in that the media might try to, you know, that person might say something that undermines or you don't know or whatever. That's great. But in fact, the way the media operates, you got to have a spokesperson of some sort because they all want to go to somebody and have them as it's the way the media operates and the way it works. And it's got to have something to fill up the airspace to comment on what you're doing. So you learn that, the other thing you learn is, so you got to keep it simple, like we said, in anti-apartheid movement, in-apartheid now. Freedom now, okay? In-apartheid, in-apartheid. That's, you know, that's what we wanted. And first people didn't, some people didn't know what a part they was.

So we had to do things that made them recognize, you know, what that was. We wanted people to stop buying Krugerrands. Most people didn't know what Krugerrands were. So we had to go and take over a building at the money exchange where they sold Krugerrands and stand in the window and explain to people what Krugerrands were. So it's got to be simple. It's got to be persistent. You have to be persistent. But the main thing is when you pick your target, make sure that it's something that is not too complex. Also, they usually are organizations that are already working on whatever issue it is. They might not have been successful in making progress over time, but they're the ones that are going to be there after you finish with your movement. So you should work with them. Dr. Barry, I found it interesting in the beginning. You talked about A. Phil Randolph and Franklin Roosevelt, the Urban League. And I believe the NAACP was somewhat supportive of the initiative back then, but somewhat reluctant and modern times to participate in resistance. Well, the NAACP has gone through so many changes, and I'm a life member, so I can comment, I guess. So many changes in the last few years of leadership, different people being the CEO of the organization.

So that creates some disruption, but it has been more willing to engage in grassroots activism than it has been in some time in recent years. The Urban League is a different model. The Urban League, the whole purpose of it, and it's base and the way it is put together, it relies on corporate contributions and working with the business world and so on. It is, by definition, a more moderate organization. They have good ideas and the people who are there like Mark Moriel and so on are courageous, and they're all good people. And he is more courageous and more forthcoming than some of the leaders they've had in the past. I remember I wrote an article in a magazine called Emerge in the 1980s that in all the different meetings we had about opposing Reagan that the Urban League was missing in action. And that was because whoever was the leader then, and I haven't even forgotten who it was, didn't want to do anything that brought them out of the mold that business might find effective.

And they rely on getting money from business, not just for anybody to spend, but for jobs for people, and they have all kinds of programs that rely on these relationships and these interactions. But the NACP has grassroots. Some of the chapters are really very, very effective. Some of them are sort of dormant, but a lot of them can really raise people and do things. But then we have new organizations like Black Lives Matter and all the other, the youth organizations, million hoodies, and the rest of them that are involved and that are on the case nowadays. One of the things I'd say about organizations and resistance, I, the gun control, the students after Park Lane, there were these protests, and I was hoping that they would gain momentum. And I was hoping there wouldn't be any more shootings, but of course they have been some, but very sad.

But I was hoping they'll gain momentum, and I still hope that they'll gain momentum, and the fact that school is out, or it's getting out, because the summer students go away, and some people graduate and all that, what that has to do with it. But a movement has to be persistent, it has to change techniques, it has to try to keep the public's attention, because if the media doesn't cover you, then you might as well not have a meeting movement, because nobody will know you have it. So all of those things are important. It's things that it doesn't matter who's in the White House, but welfare reform and budget cuts always come up. Yes, and I remember that Bill Clinton was going to end welfare as we know it, and he did, in fact, join in the bipartisan way with the Republicans to reduce some of the supports that poor people who were dependent and their children had. And we have, of course, millions of children in this country who still, as Marin Wright Edelman can tell you, chapter and verse, living in poverty, so cause she's worked on ever since the Civil Rights movement, with some degrees of success, and sometimes not, depending on what's going on. Right now, they have a big debate going on about whether they're going to have a worker requirement for food stamps.

And a lot of people who are around now don't understand that the only reason why we have food stamps is because agriculture, big agriculture, wanted subsidies. Exactly. The states that have big agriculture from the government, and in order to get people in the urban communities, the representatives to vote for it, they came up with food stamps for poor people in urban areas who would use some of the surplus commodities at first from the agricultural product. But the two together, like you do with politicians, and like they do with compromise, in order to pass this bill. People who don't know that, I hear them saying, well, I don't understand why we have food stamps, and were they just trying to help poor people? No, they were trying to help agricultural interests who wanted to get rid of their surpluses at the time and have a market for the things that they were producing. Dr. Barry, as a former member and chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, what are these voter suppression laws doing to the democracy in your opinion? Well, I've got two opinions about those.

I wrote a book called, $5 in a pork chop sandwich, a vote bag in the corruption of democracy, which was based on research in places all of the country, where money was used to take people to the polls, to give people a little money after they voted, and all the rest of it, which happens in communities all around the country. In big cities, places, they call it street money, but they call it walking around money, that the campaigns have, and that the preset captains who want to deliver so many votes have. In rural areas, they do things like in Louisiana, they give you, after you haul to the polls, and you vote your numbers, and the clerk reports that you have to the hauler, they take you to the Dachshop, and buy you a cold drink, and get you a pork chop sandwich, and give you a $5 bill. That's quite common in some parts of the state. In Kentucky, you can get your, in West Virginia, you can get your driveway, gravel dumped on your driveway, if you need some gravel, if your name is on the list of people who voted a certain way. So these things, in nursing homes, in Chicago, what the preset captains do is, where they don't let people drink, they take this little miniature bottles of liquor, and they give the old people, as they get the avnsab ballad, you can get a bottle of booze.

There are all kinds of ways to do it. It's not, it's, it's, it's to increase turnout. The main problem with voting is turnout. Turn out is low in elections in this country. Presidential elections have the highest, but the rest of them do not. And so politicians, they're not trying to do anything illegal. They're just trying to get people to come out and vote, the ones that are going to vote for them. What voter suppression is about is trying to keep the people who you know are not going to vote for you from voting. That's what that is. On the one hand, you want your voters to vote, but you don't want the other voters to vote. And so what do you do is you use voter ID laws, you use things like changing polling places from one place to the other so people can't keep track of where it is, and all kinds of things to keep people voting. My view on ID laws, those discriminatory things, we have litigation, and we have some court cases that have struck them down. I think that while we're doing that, what we should do is find a way to help people to get ID and help people to vote in the meantime, because we don't want them to have to wait until the courts, you know, it takes a long time to get cases to court, to get the courts to say that these people are abusing you.

If people in a community where they say they can't get to the place where you get the ID, why can't churches, sororities, fraternities, get some vans and take them, you know, fool the people who think you're not going to be able to turn at your vote. Take them, having used get their IDs, having get whatever it is they need to get, make that something that you can have a protest around that while you're litigating. Someone told me that if I say that it undermines litigation because litigation assumes that there's no other way for them to do it. That's not true. It's unequal to put an unequal burden on people, but at the same time you don't have to let the people who are suppressing you succeed in keeping you from some election. Did you get my drift? I got your drift. A couple more questions Dr. Barry, of all your activities, what do you think has been the most significant?

Wow, what kind of a question is that? I have no idea. I like to research and write because I am a scholar and I am a historian and that's what I do. I like to analyze things and talk about them and I like to teach because I like to teach the people. I like to teach my students and I like to teach the people about the issues and hope that the activism somehow results in positive change. I mean some positive change, but we need a lot more of that. So I think that in equal measure I guess I do all of those things and keep on being the main thing is to keep on being hopeful. What do you want readers to come away with? What I want readers to come away with is that they should study movements that have existed in the past whether they succeeded or failed and see how they did it. And the book is written and accessible to anybody. It's not a book that you've got to be. It's not waiting and you don't have to be a scholar or anybody to read it. It's common sense.

And see what people should be doing, how you do it, if you want to do it, if you're involved with some people and you're in a movement and something isn't quite working out, check it out. And so I want them to come away with the concept that in the history of this country and of the world, if you resist, you can win. Dr. Mary Francis Berry, the Geraldine R. C. Goh, Professor of American Thought, Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, and author all history teaches us to resist, how progressive movements have succeeded in challenging times. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions, ask your future in Black America programs. Email us in in Black America at kut.org. Also, let us know what radio station you heard us over. Remember to like us on Facebook and to follow us on Twitter. The views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or of the University of Texas at Austin. You can get a previous program is online at kut.org. Until we have the opportunity again for technical producer David Alvarez.

I'm John L. Hanson, Jr. Thank you for joining us today. Please join us again next week. CD copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing in Black America CDs. KUT radio, 300 West Dean Keaton Boulevard, Austin, Texas, 78712. That's in Black America CDs, KUT radio, 300 West Dean Keaton Boulevard, Austin, Texas, 78712. This has been a production of KUT radio.