Boston, MA, March 2007. Photo ©2007 Pat Rabby.

I was first introduced to peace and social justice organizing in 1966 when someone from the American Friends Service Committee gave a presentation to my Schenectady, NY high school social studies class. That led to my attending a 1968 session at the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence run by Joan Baez and Ira Sandperl in Carmel Valley, CA. While there I heard about and then participated in an anti-Vietnam War nonviolence civil disobedience action at the Oakland Induction Center in Oakland, CA. Organized by the pacifist-based War Resis-ters League/West office in San Francisco, several hundred of us sat in, got arrested and spent 10 days in jail. While in jail I got to know more about the War Resisters League (WRL) which led to my joining the staff. It has now been 41 years since 1966 and I'm still doing multi-issue, multi-racial activist organizing. I attribute that to the pacifist philosophical underpinning of equality and justice for all.

Nonviolent Resistance or Electoral Organizing?

I remember a person I was organizing with in WRL said to me, "Social change is about changing hearts and minds. Who can we really trust in electoral politics?" Many of us at that time believed that the only way to change things was through grassroots organizing and nonviolent direct action.

I'm still just as committed to nonviolent resistance. But, starting in the mid-1970s, I began to believe that electoral organizing can be a valuable complement to other methods, especially when we approach elections as opportunities to build bridges, organize coalitions, and involve people who might never have spoken out before. Elections can galvanize communities and catalyze larger social changes.

A great example of this was when in the 1970s I was living in San Francisco as an out black lesbian peace activist. I be-gan to hear about Harvey Milk, a gay photo store owner working in the predominantly gay Castro Street area. I remember Roy Kepler of War Resisters League/West used to say, "Never underestimate the power of a single act of nonviolent action." Harvey Milk echoed those sentiments, but with a twist. Harvey used to say that until we as gays and lesbians were represented at City Hall, then politically, we as a community had no weight. But together, we could mobilize. Together, we could build coalitions. Together, we could make our votes count. His election campaigns mobilized San Francisco's gay and lesbian community.

Harvey won a historic election to the Board of Supervisors in 1977. As the first out gay politician elected in California (and only the third in the country at that time), Harvey helped change the gay and lesbian community from one in which we sat in bars and said, "I'm out and I'm proud," to one where we proclaimed in public, "I'm out. I'm proud. I vote. I count." As a peace activist and as a lesbian activist, it showed me not only that individuals can make a huge difference; it showed that electoral politics can make a difference for those who get involved in campaigning for others. For San Francisco's lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community, the Milk campaigns built a base of community power and voting power that henceforth could not be ignored.

Jesse Helms - Progressive Coalition Builder?

In 1982, I moved from San Francisco to Durham, North Carolina to join the staff of the War Resisters League/Southeast. In Durham it was evident that there was a prominent black community, and a prominent white progressive community. But the two communities were not getting together, so in general each had little political power. The Mayor and Durham City Council were still conservative. The prominent Black group, the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People, had already been organizing for 50 years. The white progressive group was called the Durham People's Alliance. Perceptive, far-thinking activists in both groups realized "We can't do this independently, but together, we can change our communities." Joint meetings were held at the Chicken Hut restaurant in the black section of town. That led to a joint voting coalition that elected more black and white progressive candidates. And because of the strong LGBT community of Durham, we too were included in this coalition. The three overlapping communities created an agenda for change. We ran Durham City and County candidates who won, and realized "Hey, this works!"

When I moved to North Carolina, I knew that I was moving to a state whose Senator, Jesse Helms, was nationally notorious for his segregationist, racist, sexist, homophobic, and militarist policies. In fact, Helms voted so consistently against so many issues that, in the opposition he generated, he was inadvertently a one-man progressive coalition builder.

I remember that in 1989 Sue Hyde, from the staff of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, traveled to Durham to testify at a city council meeting. At an informal lunch with her in Chapel Hill, she asked us, "So, what y'all going to do about Jesse Helms? You know that he is up for re-election in 1990?" We decided, "Damn it, she's right. He's attacking our communities. All of our communities. We've got to do something." So, we formed North Carolina Senate Vote '90, our first-ever state-wide LGBT-and-allies political action committee.

We knew that even if we got every gay and lesbian in the state to vote against him, it wouldn't be enough. We needed to work from a broader framework of equality and justice for all. Asking the rhetorical question, "Are we about justice, or just us?" we figured out who our coalition partners would be by looking up Helms' voting record. Helms voted against the arts, against the environment, against education spend-ing, against a woman's right to choose, against HIV funding, against gays, against people of color, against peace, and the list went on and on.

So, through North Carolina Senate Vote '90 and in then in 1996, through North Carolina Mobilization '96, we launched campaigns to unseat him. Helms was narrowly reelected both times against Black Democratic challenger Harvey Gantt. So, in the short term, we "lost." But the statewide grassroots organizing that was done in those campaigns is still evident to this day. We built the infrastructure needed to organize in all 100 counties in the state and helped build progressive multi-issue and multi-racial coalitions. Now I tell people, "Jesse Helms has come and gone. But as a community and a movement, we're still here. We've outlasted Jesse Helms."

Lessons Learned

In my own electoral organizing, I am connected with the Democratic Party. I have been a member of the Democratic National Committee's Black Caucus and its Gay and Lesbian Caucus. But I most certainly respect those who are in other political parties. I am very interested in challenging the existing two-party system in the United States, especially through proportional representation and instant-run-off voting systems which make it possible to vote for alternative candidates without assisting the worst candidate in the race.

The one word that has had the most impact on me as an organizer over these past 39 years is the word "and." I'm African-American, and I'm a woman, and I'm a lesbian, and I'm a peace activist, and, and, and. US society wants to force us to choose between false binaries. We favor either nonviolent direct action or electoral strategies. Either we work for fundamental social change or we do electoral work. I think that we need to be firmly rooted in the grassroots and firmly grounded in electoral organizing. We need nonviolent resistance to injustices and we need to galvanize people to vote. We need both.

After all these years of organizing and studying and honoring those who have come before me, I've come to the conclusion that social justice organizing is about changing hearts and minds, and about changing public policy. We need both to institutionalize social change.

Lively Coalitions

Here are three initiatives that exemplify the work I'm excited about today.

Southerners On New Ground, found-ed in 1993, works to build a progressive movement across the South with transformative organizing that connects race, class, culture, gender, and sexual identity. Specifically, SONG integrates work against homophobia into freedom struggles in the South (www.southnewground.org [5]).

The National Black Justice Coalition, founded in 2003, is a civil rights organization dedicated to empowering Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people. NBJC works with our communities and our allies for social justice, equality, and an end to racism and homophobia (www.nbjc.org [6]).

The North Carolina Justice Center's Network of Immigrant Advocates program helps immigrant advocates around North Carolina to share information, build relationships, and work for social change through collective action (www.ncjustice.org [7]).