ABSTRACT
I know I was just born to do this kind of stuff. I can’t help it. But, the older I get, the more clues I think I have as to why I do it. I was born in 1953 in rural Kentucky...bathroom outside, all that stuff. I saw people who looked like me all the time...you know, were crazy about me, loved me to death. We moved when I was an infant to New Jersey to a blue-collar neighborhood where my parents were the most well-off. They both were college educated. The neighborhood we moved into at the time was pretty much mixed in being Black, Italian and Polish...And I was bused K through 12 to lily-white upper middleclass suburbs. That’s where I fi rst learned about classism...Because all of a sudden I realize them Poles that lived on that street where I did were not really white people, you know? Their white card wasn’t stamped. My neighbors were fi rst generation born in America and we were all being bused together. And I started seeing. Even though my father had a degree in biology, I learned later, due to racial discrimination, he managed a bar most of his life. And it was there that I learned things about how what your father did for a living made a big difference in your so-called status...(Regina, 51-year-old African American working-class female)
Once I learned my roots and I started realizing what oppression was and how our culture has been oppressed for so many years...And what racism was, and how internalized racism begins, that this [my organizing] began...I met some brothers and sisters from my country who explained to me what racism was. And I had a hard time understanding why if I had the same qualifi cations as this white woman, why was she getting the job and not me...I took all that anger, and all that energy, and I went into meetings...I remember how pretty they were going to do Park Street, and how they were planning on doing this, and how they were planning on doing that...I said “What’s happening to the people?” If they’re fi xing this up, I didn’t see no housing. There was no housing there. And that was the beginning...So I took all that negative energy and I started going to meetings, and I started to voice my opinion. And being heard! (Carmen, 42-year-old Latina working-class female)
I came out to my family, and throughout that year coming out was really a great weight off my shoulders. And because they were so positive, I felt, well, I’ve been blessed so I need to go out and advocate for those who it wasn’t so positive...I want to stick with queer youth work. I’d like to get more involved here at [the organization]...to come on [staff] full time or possibly working for the state, children and families, being active with them. (Nick, 23-year-old white working-class male)
High school was where I started [my activism]...graduated high school in ’69. I was working on a newspaper...I did a little underground newspaper when I was a junior. When I was a senior I became editor. We did stuff mostly around civil rights, Vietnam War, and especially student rights. That’s where I learned about power relationships: as a student, having grown-ups because at seventeen that’s the only power you know, being angry at you or calling you into the offi ce or undermining you or whatever...I went to UConn, the University of Connecticut...and I was becoming more and more active...full-time political work: a student strike in 1970; we did a moratorium in ’68, ’69; the strike in 1970. Politics was like full time! And May Day in New Haven in 1970 where Richard Nixon said that the revolution was going to happen that day. And we did too. There was just so much... The contradictions were just so great between what was supposed to be and what was actually going on all over the world and right here. (Steve, 52-yearold white middle-class male)
[My union] has an image that’s grounded in history. It’s based on two things: one is that you can fi ght and win, and that is through organizing and using your collective power through strikes. The other is...social unionism, it’s the idea that your union is also a force for social change. We were one of the fi rst but few organizations that came out against the Vietnam War, but before that, [the union] was striking in Harlem to get black pharmacists to be able to work in Harlem drug stores in 1936, so there’s this long civil rights history, long antiwar history and social justice history that we continue in our work in Connecticut. (Steve, 52-year-old white middle-class male)
It was through the women’s movement that I actually became a lesbian. It was very much tied to an analysis about sexism in our culture...So that was really the merging for me of taking and moving from reproductive rights and a strong relationship in the women’s movement through reproductive rights and abortion rights and then connecting that with the personal is political, and personal relationships. And so that’s when I hooked up with [my partner] because [she] was also a political activist-feminist activist at that point. So she and I have been together for 22 years. (Carolyn, 60-year-old white middle-class female)
As we have seen in the past two chapters, activists tell many different stories about their initiation into, continued participation in, and occasional weariness of progressive activism. I have shown how these stories are patterned using concepts from social movement scholarship. I have also shown how these concepts can be further clarifi ed by listening closely to the nuance and complexity in activists’ accounts. In the case of activists’ initiation into and continued participation in activism, the concepts of biography, social networks, and critical events are useful but only when used in an interactive and iterative way which better captures individuals’ creative capacities for innovation. Similarly, in discussing activists’ experiences with burnout and disengagement from activism, the concepts of abeyance and plausibility structures were also useful if only to point to their relative absence in progressive activism in Hartford. I have shown that, in the absence of these structures, individuals create their own strategies to maintain their commitments while also seeking balance across the many social roles they perform.
