My People

During the summer of 1964, I received an early introduction to the essential meaning of humanism at the Encampment for Citizenship in Berkeley, California. The Encampments were predicated on the belief that, “Young people can be a positive force in their communities if they develop critical thinking skills, youth activism, leadership qualities and the courage to work for social justice.” The Berkeley Encampment brought together fifteen-to-eighteen year olds from all over the country—from diverse racial, religious, economic, and cultural backgrounds. Days were filled with speakers, field trips, and discussions. We heard from a broad political spectrum of speakers with a strong tilt towards social justice activists. We attended the platform committee meetings of the Republican Party Convention that was convened in San Francisco. We picketed outside the convention with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). We visited the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and its hiring hall, and attended the civil rights trials then going on in San Francisco.

Perhaps the most memorable field trip was to the migrant labor camps in Stockton and meeting with organizers from a forerunner of the United Farm Workers union. We saw people—mostly Mexican migrant workers—living in the most deplorable conditions many of us had ever seen: in overcrowded bunk houses with no indoor plumbing, using open trench latrines, being fed meager rations of poor-quality food. They worked long days in the fields without shade and few breaks, breathing in and handling potent pesticides. We learned that they were excluded from the National Labor Relations Acts right to unionize, and from minimum wage laws, shunned by the established unions and that the few legal protections they had were seldom enforced.

One of us, David Saz, wrote that we saw “living conditions …almost completely alien to us…. [S]tatistics are not really important for they will not dominate the remembrance of the trip.  Desperate despaired faces, a hand full of change comprising the total savings, sub-human living conditions. Emotions and feelings will be remembered long after the figures are gone.” Indeed, one of us, Christy Newman, still remembers “the ‘Shape Up,’ where all these desperate men were trying to get hired for the day’s labor and the despair of those who were passed over.”

Returning to Berkeley, we met to discuss what we had seen. The discussion took place in the context of a summer that was a flash point in the Black freedom struggle. Hundreds of civil rights workers were participating in the Mississippi Freedom Summer voter registration drive, when three of them—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner—were secretly kidnapped and murdered by the KKK and law enforcement on June 21, 1964. National media attention was riveted on the disappeared young men until their hidden bodies were found seven weeks later on August 4. Those of us at the Encampment paid particularly close attention. One of us, Liza Cowan had two brothers in Mississippi as part of Freedom Summer and she was beyond concerned for their safety.

Several of us were African Americans who were themselves already very involved in the struggle. One was Tony Lee from Tuskegee Institute, Alabama. At the time of the Encampment, Tony had already integrated the Tuskegee public high schools. The following year he would go on to be the first Black undergraduate at Auburn University. These were acts of extreme courage and commitment for a young person. At Auburn, Tony was completely ostracized. He was placed in a dorm all by himself. Auburn did not want to subject white kids to living in the same building as a Black person and it hoped that being shunned would make Tony withdraw, as the first Black graduate student—who did not live on campus, had just done—but Tony persevered for four years and was the first African American to graduate from Auburn.

As we met to talk about our experience in Stockton, there was a uniform sense of how bad things were for the migrant workers and some thoughts about the prospects of the union organizing efforts. One of us, a young African American woman who had consistently spoken about the importance of the Black movement, said that although she agreed that the migrant’s conditions were awful, she had to focus all of her attention and energy on the struggle of “my people.”

That was when Tony Lee spoke up and said words I will never forget: “Those ARE my people.” His point, of course, was not to disparage the other Encamper’s exemplary commitment to the Black struggle, but rather to assert his own identification with and embrace of the struggles of other oppressed people—the humanist’s imperative of seeing ourselves in others and others in ourselves.

Looking back over the ensuing sixty years, the importance of Tony’s words and the world view they reflected, continues to resonate. As the second Trump regime prepares the mass deportation of the descendants of the migrants we met in Stockton, how we perceive our neighbors—as part of “the other” or part of ourselves—continues to be the defining issue of our epoch.

Having spent most of those past sixty years as a public defender in New York, I got to see close up how the choice of world views played out. I saw Black and Latino kids living in public housing stripped of any chance for a decent education or after school programs, with little to do but hang out on the street. I watched as those kids, just hanging out with friends in front of their buildings, were repeatedly rousted by the police and arrested for marijuana possession or for just talking back. Then, when the kids named themselves, such as “the 182^nd Street Crew,” they were labeled a gang. Some began participating in gang activities with neighboring kids—sometimes with fatal results. Some of them were recruited into other illegal activities by young men who had gone through the same process a decade earlier.

A lot of people—a lot of mostly white people—saw them as bad kids, other people’s kids, getting into trouble. Part of the “other.” But some of us saw them as “our kids” getting into trouble, and that difference determined what actions people wanted government to take. In 1989, when a group of Black and Latino children were falsely accused of the assault and rape of a female white jogger in Central Park, Trump took out full page ads in the papers calling for the death penalty—forever cementing which side of the world view divide he came down on. In 1996 Hillary Clinton labeled kids who were getting in trouble as “super predators,” joining Trump’s world view.

Now we continue to make that choice. Will we embrace our neighbors when ICE comes for them? Will we be able to say as thousands of American Jews did when Hamas slaughtered and took hostage Israelis on October 7, “Those are my people,” and also say of the thousands of Palestinian victims of Israel’s mass murder and ethnic cleansing, “Those, too, are my people”?