genuinely getting emotional at work reading about the history of my hometown in the 60s and 70s
During the 1960s and 1970s many people, like Rand [the white organizer of an anti-integration group], threw over old beliefs and fears, pulled by the power of the civil rights movement. While Jomer [Rand], used religious language to explain his transformation, he was expressing what it meant to wake up to a movement whose aspirations deeply affected him. He acknowledged having been a racist through lack of knowledge and encounter with people whom h e had conventionally thought of as a “threat”. Real confrontation -- not those in his mind -- led him to [Chris] Sprowal [labor organizer, community activist, and one of the founders of the Black Coalition to support black student struggle in Freeport], to Malcolm X, and a reexamination of his attitudes. Rand’s conversion deeply affected his politics and he made a decision to fight for the “rights and desires of those who never had a voice.” In 1973, Rand became Chris’s campaign manager when Sprowal ran as the first black candidate for Village Trustee.
Sprowal, too, changed his attitude towards Rand and his organization. He saw that working-class white and black people had more in common with each other than with the middle class. As he stated publicly in the Long Island Kernel during his campaign, “I’m going to actively support the people who used to be referred to as ‘white racists.’ We find that they aren’t racists. They are people concerned about their jobs, about taxes, about quality education. So are we. Freeport blacks have a hell of a lot more in common with that blue collar worker in South Freeport than with the liberal in the Northwest with a $100,000 home.”
This new working-class alliance threatened the Republican Party, which had been actively courting Rand and grooming him for political office. Politicians such as Nassau County Executive Ralph Caso, Republican Party leader and State Assemblyman Joseph Margiotta, Nassau County Congressman Norman Lent, and Nassau County Supervisor Francis Purcell advised Rand in many meetings not to “get involved with the black community, don’t get involved with Chris, don’t get involved with the EOC [Equal Opportunity Commission].” Rand did not heed their advice and remained active in the EOC, welfare rights, and civil rights.
-- Picture Windows: How The Suburbs Happened by Elizabeth Ewen and Rosalyn Baxandall
What a stunning and extremely relevant reminder that that the antidote to racism (and capitalist power structures trying to take advantage of harmful racist popular movements born out of ignorance) is working class solidarity.
