Harry Boyte Talks with Heidi Burgess about the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and the Lessons it Can Teach Us
Newsletter #313 - January 20, 2025
I talked with Harry Boyte on January 8, 2025. Harry is a co-founder of the Institute for Public Life and Work and Senior Scholar of Public Work Philosophy at the Institute and also at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, MN. He founded and for 20 years directed and co-directed the Center for Democracy and Citizenship (CDC) at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs (which moved to Augsburg in 2009). As a young man he worked in the citizenship schools sponsored by SCLC, Martin Luther King’s organization and did organizing work with King. Drawing on these experiences, he established the youth civic education initiative called Public Achievement. We talked about all of that and much more in this inspiring interview. We thought this was a wonderful interview to share on this Martin Luther King Day, as it shows how King's ideas are not only still relevant, but critically important, today.
At the start of our conversation, I asked Harry to tell me how he got started in this work back in the early days of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. He explained that he grew up in the American South, first in Atlanta, then Charlotte, then Greensboro, as his father's jobs changed. Both his mother and his father were active in the movement, which led to a number of incidents, such as his father being brutally attacked by the Ku Klux Klan (a far-right American white supremacist hate group) .Harry described that event as deeply "formative" for him. After graduating from high school, Harry wasn't sure what he wanted to do next.
And then in 1963, I was traveling across the country, wondering what to do, whether to go to college, or go to be a seafaring poet on the merchant marine. But I called home from San Francisco and Dad said he had a job with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was an assistant to Martin Luther King. He was the first white person on the staff and the only white on the executive board. He said I should come back. They were going to have a march to get the attention of the nation for making progress on desegregation of public accommodations. That was the March on Washington. So a guy I met out there, Peter Kovach, and I drove across the country and got to Washington on August 27th, 1963, right before the march. I put my sleeping bag on dad's hotel floor and heard King practice his "I Have a Dream" speech in the room next door.
That, Harry said, "was a significant experience."
The march was also very powerful for me, because I was an angry kid. I didn't know any other white kids that I could talk to about desegregation. And my teachers were afraid to talk about it. There was a climate of fear in the South in the '50s and '60s. But the calm and the demeanor and the dignity of the marchers was what really impressed me. I thought, "What did they learn to do that?" This was really the first expression of nonviolence on a large scale that I'd ever seen. And of course, it was also growing out of Montgomery, the bus boycott, and the sit-ins and the beginnings of the citizenship schools across the South, which taught nonviolence. It had a big impact.
After that, Harry went to Duke and was active in civil rights protests there. He also worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
I worked with the Office of Field Secretary for SCLC in the citizenship schools. And that really did affect me. It gave me a continuing understanding of the potential power of citizen identity. Citizen identity was about being an active co-creative citizen, who was responsible for communities, and who had a sense of ownership of communities. And this was really striking, because these were African-Americans, who were disenfranchised and often in very disadvantaged positions. But the strength and the courage and the nonviolence that I saw with them had a huge impact on me.
In 1966, King asked Harry if he could organize poor whites. So Harry went to Durham, North Carolina, where he did community organizing as part of the anti-poverty program there. He also started a newspaper for the working class community in which he started writing about citizen organization and citizen action.
The thing that I took from the civil rights movement, different than a lot of other community organizing, is attention to cultural dimensions of change. Community organizing is very nuts and bolts, bread and butter — local issues, like unpaved streets and lousy schools and problems with the sewer system. So we did all that, just kind of by trial and error.
But we knew that people needed a feeling that they could do something. They needed to feel they could have some power. And in fact, in the poor white community, one thing that struck me was how often they were quite jealous of the blacks for getting their stuff together. So that was actually pretty useful.
So, we also added a strong cultural dimension. We knew you couldn't make real larger change without thinking about both bread and butter issue organizing, but also a cultural dimension. And that came just straight out of the civil rights movement.
I asked Harry to explain what he meant by "cultural dimensions." He responded that
People needed to know the history of black and whites working together in the South. Southern populists. In the 1880s and '90s, there was an interracial movement of farmers and then the Southern tenant farmers union. And then again in the 1930s. So we did a lot of work on the history. We had people just study the history and find out and do interviews with people who were still around from the '30s, working in the textile and tobacco mills. In our newspaper, we had something called "corn corner," which was jokes. Working-class jokes. And we had sports coverage, which was all the track races, the dirt track races for cars. And we had potlucks and sociable things. So you needed to create a larger sense of community beyond simply doing the issue work. That's what I meant [by "cultural dimensions."]
He didn't start thinking about civic populist theory until the 1970s when he was writing about community and citizen groups. His first book, called The Backyard Revolution, told stories about communities which had revitalized themselves against tremendous odds. For instance, it told the story of a young woman, Bertha Gilkey, who revitalized Cochran Gardens—a public housing project in Saint Louis that was run by drug dealers and gangs.
The city was going to blow it up because they thought it was just unremediatable. But she was convinced that it could be brought back to life. She had worked for the breakfast program of the Black Panthers. That was one of the positive things that the Panthers did in St. Louis. And so she knew people could organize around projects. And she was an extraordinary organizer herself, who could help people develop a sense that they could make a difference. It's was slow process, but step by step, they brought Cochran Gardens back to life.
In another book which Harry wrote with his former wife, Sarah Evans, he developed the concept of "free spaces," another idea that came out of the civil rights movement.
I had done work on textiles mills and wondered why working people didn't form unions. I realized it was because the mill owners owned all of the spaces, the social spaces in the city. ... So that was the genesis of the idea of "free spaces" ... which were spaces of discussion and open debate and very different than the culture I had grown up with in the White South.
Then we looked at different broad, plural, democratic movements in American history, the Black Freedom Movement over time, and the women's movement from the 19th century, the Women's Christian Temperance Union and groups for more reform. And then especially community grounded workers' efforts like the Knights of Labor and then the Southern Populists. And we could see in all of those broad efforts, broad movements, that they were distinctive because they were democratic in spirit. They were generous. They were open. They weren't reactive. They weren't mainly defined by who they were against, although there were struggles. But they were defined by a vision of a deeper democracy and a more inclusive democracy. ...
Free spaces were community sites where different diverse people could create a public and develop public skills and develop public confidence and develop a larger vision of who "the people" were and make change. You could find those at the heart of every broad movement that we described as "democratic." In fact, it's what distinguished democratic movements from more reactive movements. Our starting diagnosis, when I went into the university, was that there was a contraction, a disappearance, of free spaces across the society. Drugstores, which were once community gathering places, becoming CVSs. Even places like schools and churches were becoming more detached from the life of communities.
I asked Harry to talk more about how he defined "democracy." He explained that
Nobody in the movement— all the older people who were my mentors — Septima Clark in the citizenship schools or Ella Baker or Bayard Rustin or King himself,— none of them thought democracy was mainly voting. They all used some version of the old formulation that it was a "way of life," which was pretty much the idea of Alexis de Tocqueville when he traveled across America in the 1830s and then wrote Democracy in America, which was the title of his famous book. He said democracy was about people doing things, self-organizing. So I always thought about democracy as much bigger than simply elections.
And the role of the citizen is much more serious and substantial than simply as a voter or someone who obeys the law, the constitutional version of "citizen." But that deepened over time and developed as we did things. I think you need public spaces or free spaces to keep it [citizenship] alive.
Based on his writing and his work with community organizing and in the civil rights movement, the dean of the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota invited Harry to come and start a democracy program there. And that, he explained, is what he has been doing ever since. This is where he developed the notion of "public work," which he, explained, has two dimensions. First,
The work involved thinking about how a school, or a local business, or a cooperative extension office could become "thawed out"—how it could develop a revived civic spirit. That led us to think about the work involved in sustaining and creating those institutions. So after some analysis, I created something called the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, which was the seed bed for our developing theory of what we call "public work." "Public work" means a community working together on public problems. And that turns out to be the best way to lessen prejudice over time.
But "public work" also can be the people who do work with public spirit and public qualities. And professionals—we call those citizen professionals if they're in a professional role as a teacher or medical personnel or extension agent. They do "public work" too.
So we began to think about how does the culture of a local school, for example, become more outward looking— more public, and also how do librarians develop that mindset? Because you have to have workers who keep that dynamic alive, who develop a real passion around the civic role of their library or their school or their church or their congregation or their small business. So we've focused increasingly on democracy as not only a way of life, but how it's created through work.
I thought this sounded very inspiring, but also very challenging, since so many people are now pulling back from public life and collaborative work. As Robert Putnam said in his book of the same name, more and more people are "Bowling Alone." Harry agreed that is a challenge, but he has been devoting his life to working against that trend. He told a story about a youth citizenship initiative he developed early on during his tenure at the University of Minnesota which was called "Public Achievement."
It's basically about how people come into public life. They don't come in too much because they're told that they should. They're often invited in and that makes a difference. But in the Public Achievement case, I was drawing on my own experiences in the civil rights movement and the citizenship schools, which were basically built around people's lives and identities. So we started out by asking young people, "what were their interests? Were there problems they worried about? Were there things they were mad about, or upset about?" in their local environment especially, although it could be bigger. We talked to 21 groups, including over 300 young people. And every single group had a long list of things they were worried about. There was no group that said, "No, everything is fine or we don't care about it." So that kind of exploded the myth of apathy.
The issues they were concerned about varied, depending on the setting. In an inner city school like Anderson in Minneapolis, there'd be drive-by shootings and drugs and a lot of crime and violence. In a suburb, it would be that they were overscheduled. "We never have time to even have meals together," they'd say. "We're a family. And we were supposed to be doing all these activities and we never really quite know why. We're overscheduled." And then there were pretty general cross-contextual issues like the school lunches are lousy. And there was bullying, that was a big problem. This was in 1990. We talked to 300 kids, all teenagers, all different backgrounds.
Then when we said, "Do you think you can do anything about that?" All the kids said, "No, we don't know how to do anything about that." We've never had a class on that. So the Public Achievement approach was built on young people learning to take action on issues they were concerned about.
The core skills they taught, Harry explained, revolved around power. But not "power-over," rather, what he called "relational power" (some people call this "power with") and "generative power"—(which some call "power-to").
You can't just come and denounce the principal or hold a protest. I discovered that the first inclination that kids have is just to do a protest, because that's what they learned and that they've seen. But that doesn't really get anything done, usually. Sometimes it gets them in trouble.
Instead he helped them build "power maps" that showed who had power in the setting they were concerned about, and who they had to influence to bring about change. He used the example of bullying at school.
So they'll put bullying in the middle of their map. And then they'll think about, "who has an interest in this issue?" And who's doing the bullying, or who supports or fosters the bullying? Then the organizing process is learning to talk to those people, do what we call "one-on-ones." Find out what their interests are, what they think about bullying, how they think about the issue. Over time, you put together a much richer, more dynamic, more multi-dimensional understanding of power, and you learn how to act. You can build your own power by making a power map.
Learning how to do this, he explained with further examples, can be a "life-changing experience. They get recognition and respect and the world opens up. It's not simply a static, narrow, closed world. And we found that really could be powerful."
As our conversation progressed, we moved forward in time. We talked about how these ideas have been and are again being used by Braver Angels, a large national network of people who seek to bring Americans together across the partisan divide. Braver Angels, was formed, Harry explained, right after the 2016 election by David Blankenhorn and Bill Doherty. David ran the Institute for American Values, looking at conflicts and values in America, and he was worried about polarization. So he wanted to get together groups of Republicans and Democrats and help them, somehow, work through their differences. But he didn't know how to do that. Bill was a family therapist, and he took those skills and applied them in the public sphere. For instance, in family therapy, Harry explained, one of the first steps is to recognize that both sides have a role in creating "the problem." Bill worked to create this realization in the political groups too.
He designed a workshop for this group over the weekend, and they had started out thinking they hated each other and the other side was completely evil, and they came out thinking they were completely wrong. People on the other side were actually intelligent and well-meaning and good. And even then, although it was about depolarization of attitudes, Bill came back and he told me in detail what was happening, what happened there and he said, "what really is going on is that people are worried about the future of their community." So from the very beginning, that experience pointed to the idea that people need to, not only just like each other more, but they need to learn how to work together on community problems. So that's always been an undercurrent in Braver Angels.
Now Braver Angels is the largest group that has worked on depolarization with a lot of success.
It began with red and blue workshops. And then it went on to how do you have family dinners that are not going to be explosive? How do you bridge the racial and rural/urban divides? They're basically one-on-one meetings and workshop models. How do you recognize your own prejudice as depolarizing within?
This newer effort that we've done over the last year is called the Civic Renewal Support Team, and it's working with some of the alliances and Braver Angels to take action on community issues. And we've seen some real successes about that. So it's basically adapting the same kinds of skills that we use in Public Achievement and that Marie, my wife used in Africa to great effect with villagers and people in townships .It involves learning how to think about power in a generative way. How do you build power? Power is not simply about control. It's how do you build it with others? And how do you have a meeting, which is a non-judgmental meeting, a meeting based on curiosity about finding out what a person's interests are. Where are they coming from? What do they care about? What's their passion? What's their story? There are several different variants, but it's really learning to listen deeply for what young men call their "why" What is their "why?" And so we've been doing work around that.
We ended our conversation by talking about hope. I observed that a lot of people on the left have lost hope after the election, believing that democracy in the United States is doomed. Harry observed that he thinks our current time actually presents an opportunity.
People are very discouraged. They're sick of politicians bickering, and they're also sick of the bickering in their own communities and families. The challenge is not that people are apathetic. I think the challenge is people are hopeless. They feel that they don't know what to do. That's basically the problem. And so just even introductory experiences through which you can learn things. You can learn to take action. That there ere are ways to do it. There are a lot of tools and resources and skills and knowledge that can really bring about some change.
So people need to learn that action is possible, he said, just the way the Blacks did in their citizenship schools, and teens did in his Public Achievement programs. A lot of this, he pointed out, is already going on. But it is invisible. We agreed that a key goal going forward needs to be not only doing more such work, but also to making all the work that is happening much more visible—to give people hope, and ideas of ways they can personally get involved.
As always, this summary had to leave a lot out. Harry is a great storyteller, so there are lots more details in the full interview, as well as more on why Harry has hope for the future, and plans on how we can all work together to make a better future come true. Check it out!
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