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1869, Ep. 170 with Michael Ansara, author of The Hard Work of Hope: Otter Voice Meeting Notes

1869, Ep. 170 with Michael Ansara, author of The Hard Work of Hope

Cornell University Press38min

Jonathan Hall

00:09

Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. In this episode, we speak with Michael Ansara, author of the new book The Hard Work of Hope: A Memoir. Michael Ansara has been a dedicated activist and organizer since the 1960s starting with the civil rights, student, and antiwar movements. His poetry and essays have been featured in numerous journals. We spoke to Michael about the many flashpoint moments he experienced on the front lines fighting for civil rights and working to end the war in Vietnam, why he believes organizing is the key to success in helping to bring about change, and his time-tested practical advice for everyday Americans seeking to make a difference. Hello, Michael, welcome to the podcast.

Michael Ansara

00:59

Jonathan, it's great to be doing this with you.

Jonathan Hall

01:02

Great to have you on and I'm really interested to talk to you about your new book, a memoir, The Hard Work of Hope: A Memoir. Tell us the backstory to this book. It's it's about your life. So part of that is your, the backstory of your life. But tell us what inspired you to write this book.

Michael Ansara

01:21

So it started in a funny way. I've been a poet for the last 15 years, and a good friend of mine, Richard Hoffman, who's both a wonderful poet and memoirist, kept saying to me that some of my poems were the beginnings of memoirs. And I kept saying, no, no, no, no, no. And then finally, he convinced me to start writing, and I did. And for the first year, I just 2015 I just wrote and didn't think about purpose or structure or anything. And then 2016 we had an election, and Trump was elected, and I began to think whether or not I had something to contribute, particularly to the activists and organizers of this new period. And I thought that going back into my history of activism, first with civil rights, and then with the student movement of the 1960s and then 10 long years of struggling to end the war in Vietnam and finally ending up as a skilled community organizer that there were some lessons there that I wanted to share, And I hoped would be helpful to people navigating a very different and difficult situation.

Jonathan Hall

02:47

Very true, very true. Before we get to the lessons, let's tell us your history of activism. You state in your book that you have been an activist since the moment you stepped into a civil rights picket line at age 13 and went on from there. Tell us some of the highlights of your time on the front lines, fighting for civil rights, working to end the war in Vietnam and other issues.

Michael Ansara

03:11

So it was literally started when I was walking by a picket line outside of a Woolworths. The picket line was in support of the 1960 sit ins in a cafeteria in North Carolina. I walked by, I was 13, and I started talking with the people in the picket line, and what they said just resonated with me. I really believed in American history. I really believed in the promise of the Declaration of Independence. I really believed in American democracy, and it seemed to me completely wrong that segregation was the law of the land in the south. So I got involved in that, and it really transformed me and transformed my life, and I fell in with a wonderful group of African American organizers in Boston who were all in their 20s. I have no idea why they adopted this Pimply naive, you know, teenager, but they did, and they were very, very generous and included me. So fast forward to 1962 so 1962 in Boston, there was not a single bank that had a senior manager who was black. There was not a single law firm that had a senior partner who was black. There was no dean at any of the dozens of colleges who was black, black construction workers were shut out of the building trades, and segregation in our hiring was rampant, so we formed something called the Boston Action Group and did a survey of the black community going door to door. And figuring out what people bought, and we ended up focusing on Wonder Bread, that ubiquitous white bread, which pretty much every black family in the south end in Roxbury in Boston, bought, and it had a factory in the middle of Roxbury, and it refused to hire any black person other than menial janitorial positions. And it had good paying jobs in the manufacturing section and in the delivery and it refused to hire any blacks for those positions. So we went door to door, we built a network of block captains, and we launched a boycot of Wonder Bread, and we won. And we won seven or eight good paying jobs, but it was the first time I saw organizing in action and saw how it could work and how people could band together and make a difference, and it convinced me that that's what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be an organizer. And it also just raised such hope, and then it gave me an understanding of the hard work needed to translate that hope from aspirational to actuality, and so I set off on a career of trying to learn how to be an organizer. Two years later, I went to college. I went to Harvard, and I believed very strongly that we could build something new, a student movement and a new left that was very different from the old left that really believed in democracy and expanding democracy, and was rooted in American values and American language. And so I joined something called Students for a Democratic Society, and became one of two regional organizers in New England for SDS at the same time that I was at Harvard. And in the fall, winter of 64 we decided to oppose the war in Vietnam. At that point, nobody opposed the war. It was supported by every university president, every church leader, every business leader, every general and every politician. And we called for a march in Washington to protest the war in April of 65 what we didn't realize is that the March, which we thought was going to be tiny, was actually 20 or 25,000 people, and suddenly made SDS the spearhead of the opposition to the war in Vietnam, and that started a 10 year effort to Bring that tragic and unjust war to an end all along the way, there were many highlights, you know, many amazing stories that I recount. You know, from confronting Secretary of Defense, McNamara when he came to Harvard and ending up standing on a car with him and seeing him completely lose his cool, and jab his finger into my chest and yell, you know, I did this when I was a student, and I was, you know, tougher then, and I'm tougher now, which you just never think of, sort of the, you know, incredible head of the massive defense apparatus losing its cool. That was kind of stunning, and of course, countless marches and countless demonstrations. But one of the reasons I wrote the book is to explain that the way we built that anti war movement, what made possible the demonstrations was endless engagements, conversation, discussion with students, and we didn't lecture them about the war. We didn't simply stick to the war the only way you could have a discussion that would lead people to take that first anti war button, to be in the first march, or get on the bus to Washington or finally, sit in was through a discussion about our lives and who we wanted to be and what society was forcing us to be, and the war and by having Those discussions and engagements with people over time, the facts of the war and endless engagement allowed us to become a powerful force on the American campuses to oppose the war.

Jonathan Hall

09:52

That's great. That's great. So you mentioned organizing, and in your book, you state that you might. Marched and March, but perhaps more importantly, fitfully immersed in baptisms of fire, I learned the craft, the art of organizing. So tell us the the importance of organizing, why you saw it was is like the key factor in the success of your efforts, and then the bigger picture, you know, connecting it to what's going on today, that one of the central questions is, how do you connect with people who disagree with you when you're organizing things?

Michael Ansara

10:28

Yeah, and so the first thing to understand is that there's a real difference between organizing and mobilizing. And so just as an example, once George Floyd was murdered. In the following 18 months, somewhere over 20 million Americans took place, took participated in a protest. Now it's an amazing number, amazing 20 million, but because there wasn't organizing going on. Building organizations that protest movement as massive as it was, became a moment, not a sustained movement. So organizing, it seems really simplistic, but organizers organize organizations, and organizations particularly small, the Democratic organizations build political power, and they build the skills of citizenship, and they build the ability to come out and protest over and over again, to organize people, to vote over and over again, to boycott over and over again. So what we're seeing today is an incredible mobilization. It's really been amazing and terrific. You know, we've seen huge demonstrations. The recent no kings demonstration had somewhere around five or 6 million people participating. The effort at Harvard to track protests that Eric Chenoweth has been heading says that there have been three times the number of protests since Trump was inaugurated earlier this year than in the comparable period of his first term, and many, many more protesters than in the comparable period of his first term. All of that is good, but if we are to save American democracy, we have to realize that we need to rebuild the fabric of that democracy. We need to build civic organizations, protest organizations, pro democracy, organizations that involve large and larger numbers of people, and we have to talk to the people who, right now, are either on the sidelines or even voted for Trump. And what I learned particularly organizing Massachusetts fair share, which was a neighborhood, community related based organization that we built in the 70s and early 80s in Massachusetts, enormously popular. We were talking to blue collar and low income folks who weren't natural protesters, many of them. In fact, we were we were talking to both black families and white families. Many of those white families had participated in the anti bussing movement just a year or two before. So we had to talk to them, and the critical thing is we couldn't preach to them. We couldn't attempt to shame them. We had to talk about their lives, and we had to listen to them, and we had to find the places where their lives were making them unhappy, nervous and angry, and point out that those problems weren't being caused by black families moving into the neighborhood. Those problems were being caused by larger economic forces and the increasing concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands, and then we had to have things for them to do that made sense. And you know, that's what organizing does. Organizing engages people. Talks to them in a way that connects with their lives. You listen to them, and then you begin to have issues that they care about, where you can offer a strategy for moving forward. I don't think that we're going to convince the 30% of Trump supporters that are dying. Hard supporters. I mean, 30% of the electorate that are Die Hard Trump supporters. I don't think we're going to change their minds, but there are millions and millions of people who either didn't vote. You know, there were 17 million people who cast a ballot for Joe Biden in 2020 who did not vote at all in 2024 and then there were millions of people who took a gamble on Donald Trump. I think they were incredibly short sighted, but they took a gamble, and they were upset about how much everything costs, and they were upset about how much they had been lectured to, and they were upset about a system that seemed rigged in the favor of elites and billionaires, because it is rigged in favor of elites and billionaires. And I think it is possible to reach some of those people. You know, one of the other things I would say that is very different from both the civil rights movement and the anti war movements, both those movements started as prophetic minorities. Today, a majority of the public is against what Trump is doing, and so we have the possibility of building a majoritarian movement if we have organizers, if there are organizers at those Medicaid facilities, if there are organizers at those veterans facilities, if there are organizers talking to scientists who are seeing the destruction of our scientific and research infrastructure, we can build a very broad, I think, effort. There are farmers that are upset, and, of course, the immigrant communities are being besieged and threatened. So the possibility for organizing exists. The challenge for us is we need another generation of young organizers. And if there was anything that I could possibly wish for, it would be that a new generation of young organizers determined to learn how to reach people who don't necessarily agree with them, how to bring out their peers, but how to go beyond their peers and transform America.

Jonathan Hall

17:16

That would be fantastic. That'd be fantastic. So with that in mind, what would you record you had mentioned giving people things to do, and again, not just focusing on left versus right, but trying to get as many people left and right as possible in the movement. What are some concrete steps you could tell ordinary people, young people, definitely, as well as old, that what are some concrete things that people can do to try to make things better for this country? So

Michael Ansara

17:48

I mean, first is the process of constant education and outreach. You know it for those people who are focused on the news every day, for those people who are really following it. They have a lot of information. But for your average american right now, they don't know what was in the bill that's about to be passed and how it's going to affect them. They have not followed what is happening to our scientific infrastructure. It's like, what? What does that got to do with me? Well, if you've ever had a vaccine, if you've ever, you know, been cured of a disease, it came from that infrastructure. So part of what we need to do is just constant education and storytelling and connecting it with the realities of people's lives. You know, we're about to see rural hospitals closing, so campaigns to keep those rural hospitals open to try and force whether it's taxation of the rich to bring in the money to a state or other forms to keep them open. Or, for example, the Justice Department has just canceled all of the consent agreements that it had with a number of major urban police forces said, Okay, we're done. There's no more oversight. There's no more reform that you need to do. Well, we could just say, Okay, that's it. They've canceled them and that's it. Or young people in urban areas could organize to force the creation of a new panel that is either part of the city or is a broad cross section of the city, and say, No, we want that consent agreement to be put in place, again, not with the Justice Department, but with a blue ribbon panel of civic leaders. And we want police reform to still continue. We want to understand how to make our neighborhoods safer and our families get more help. So those are the kinds of things, or I'll give you another example, the price of electricity is about to go way up. People haven't focused on this. Not only are we going to be. Hurting renewables and a path to dealing with climate change, but people are going to pay a lot more for electricity? Well, they campaign to say, No, we don't want to pay more for electricity. Most electric companies are regulated by departments of public utilities in the States. Go at them and say, Wait a minute. We've got to force a change in how electricity is produced. No do not approve the reopening of CO fired plants, which are going to be more expensive and often get subsidies. Let's go for the least expensive and most sustainable form of electricity that we can and that can be fought state by state, not just nationally. So there's a myriad of things to do, but overall, the thing that has to happen is we need to be talking to people who are not yet in the streets, and we need to be talking to them about their fears, their hopes, their lives, what really is going on with their families and with their lives, and from that, fashioning a new politics that is based on their needs, their hopes, their aspirations, and focuses on renewing democracy at Every level.

Jonathan Hall

21:18

So that sounds fantastic. That sounds great. How, how you know people are people that do follow news are, whether we like it or not, siloed into whatever news organization they're following, and it could also be they're following news on social media, that people are getting their news from various different sources. Um, you had mentioned bringing information and having conversations with people within the community. What's the best way to do that? Like, what can people do? People are getting information, and they're saying, This is what's going on. But obviously there's a larger truth that you want to convey to as many people as possible. What organization can people join that does that? Or what can people do? Concrete steps people can take to make that happen.

Michael Ansara

22:07

So there are a number of organizations that people can join. There's indivisible. There's something called the third act, which Bill McKibben has started to encourage seniors, people my age, to not give up. But in fact, have a third act. There's a an organization that actually began of disgruntled Republicans called the union, which focuses on democracy. So anybody can join any of those, but also you can just start your own group. You don't need to be part of a national group. Just invite five friends, 10 friends, to get together to talk about how you feel, how you think about things, and then form a group that can do any one of a number of projects. So for example, if you're an alum of a university right now, it is critical that alumni organize and say to their universities, we're with you. If you stand up to trump the assault on public education at all levels is going to be devastating, and higher education is in a fight right now for academic freedom and free speech at every single college and university. And so one of the things that people can do is form Alumni Associations. I've been involved in a minor way in the formation of something called Crimson courage, which has been very active encouraging Harvard to stand up to Trump. We've been in the strange position for me of saying we support the administration, I had to go to the mirror and practice that a couple of times. We're here today to support the Harvard administration, but it's a critical fight, and so, you know, people who are alums can contact other alums and form those organizations and start expressing to their universities the absolute need to resist the attack on academic freedom and free speech. People who know scientists and researchers and labs, they're being devastated right now. Most people don't know about it. They don't know that story. Get them, at the very least, to hold public events and document what's happening and speak out. But again, in the ideal world, you'd have a new organization of alums in different universities. You'd have a new organization of scientists and researchers. You'd have a new organization if you're in a more rural area of farmers who are suddenly looking at tariffs and the probability that their workforce is going to go away. So in the ideal world, we would form organizations throughout American society that are devoted to democracy and in the. Ideal world, the major thing that those organizations would do is reach out to other Americans. There is simply no substitute to talking to the people that you know, that you live near, that you work with, that you're in school with. And yes, social media can play a role in that. I'm sure of that, but I still believe there's nothing that replaces face to face. So you can engage with the person, you can see what they're thinking, how they're feeling, and you can really have a conversation, because what we don't need is more preaching. You need conversations.

Jonathan Hall

25:39

That's great. That's great. These are great ideas. These are great ideas. So wrapping it up, the one final thing I wanted to ask is, you know, we're so honored to have you publishing this book with us, and you're an elder. You have wisdom to share, you know. And so you had mentioned that there were mistakes made in the 60s and that you wanted to rectify, or at least say, Don't do this. So if you could, this is a big question, but like, what would be one key thing that you think was a big mistake that was done in the 60s, and then what would be the counter to that that would be beneficial for right

Michael Ansara

26:17

now? So let me, let me actually give you a couple quickly. Some are just simple and obvious, which is the importance of symbols. In the anti Vietnam War, we were so alienated and so angry that we ended up marching under the flags of our enemies in Vietnam, the National Liberation Front of the Viet Cong we should always have been marching under American flags and only American flags. So that's that's kind of obvious, and I'm glad that today's activists, I think, understand that the larger question, though, is always about strategy. So I look back on the anti war movement, and I look back on myself, and we never really engaged the question of, how does the war end? We had demands, right, immediate withdrawal, blah, blah, blah, stop the bombing. But we didn't think, okay, strategically. And we had slogans like, bring the war home. Well, that's not a strategy. And I think at a certain point, particularly in the critical years 6869 we we failed to really develop a serious strategy. We thought somehow that ever increasing disruption in and of itself would end the war, and particularly in 68 which was a just an amazing year. It was a year of such hope and such tragedy, and, you know, amazing protests that rocked country after country after country, but also incredible repression. We made a critical mistake so Johnson won't run. Martin Luther King is killed. Bobby Kennedy is killed. We end up with an election between Nixon and Humphrey. Humphrey really won't break with the war, and he staggers out of the Democratic convention with those large and disruptive anti war demonstrations, a just a unhappy, miserable campaigner who couldn't offer a vision to the young that sound familiar at all, and and so we, we didn't support him at all, and his opposition was Richard Nixon, a insecure, bitter, aggrieved politician who had no respect for the Constitution of the United States. Now it turned into one of the very closest elections in our history. It was decided by fractions of a percentage point in various key states. We didn't participate. We said, vote with your feet. Vote in the street. Now the voting age was 21 in those days, so many people of our organizations wouldn't have been able to vote, but we had a lot of 21 year olds and 22 year olds, and we told them, Don't vote. Sit out this election. It's not that we were wrong about Humphrey. It's not that we were wrong about the state of American politics. It's that we had a profound failure of imagination of what it would mean to have Richard Nixon in the White House, and what it would mean for black and. Americans, what it would mean for the direction of our politics. It was Nixon who started the Republicans on the path to become the party of white creeence, to become the party, eventually, of Donald Trump. We could have beaten that, and I'm not saying we wouldn't have fought a lot with Humphrey. We would have fought with Humphrey if he was in the White House, but we probably would have won, whereas with Nixon, you know, we did have an impact. We stopped Nixon and Kissinger. They were seriously contemplating using nuclear weapons in Vietnam. It's now been documented from their papers, and they stopped because of the strength of the anti war movement, that's what held them back. So we did that, but we also they inflicted more years of death and horror in Southeast Asia that I think Humphrey wouldn't have I think we'd have stopped Humphrey, and we would have had peace significantly earlier. And part of it was we couldn't hold in our minds the need to protest and the needs to the need to win electorally, it seemed like they were in opposition. And I think younger activists today are better on that at least. I hope they are. Some were not, you know, I think, I think the Gaza folks were very much in our mindset. But so those are some of the mistakes that we made. I could go on and on. You know, we had to learn. We had a slogan that will sound very familiar to some people, there are no leaders here, which is hogwash. There are always leaders. And the question is, do you have good leadership? Do you have accountable leadership? Do you have Democratic leadership, or do you have bad leadership? And the notion there are no leaders here obscures those questions, and you never answer them. And so it's very hard to have really good leadership that empowers others, that teaches others and that builds collective responsibility and accountability. So there were, there were all of those. And part of it was we were just so young, and chronologically young, politically, and the pressure was so great. You know, it really was all on our shoulders to stop that horrible or Wow.

Jonathan Hall

32:19

And with those lessons learned, is the central one of the central lessons you want to convey now is one organizing, but is there, is there any other kind of broad, overreaching lesson that you'd like to impart to the to any activist that wants to get started?

Michael Ansara

32:35

I mean, I would say organizing is the most important, but also focusing on strategy, both smaller strategy of okay, how do I win a campaign? How do I build an organization? How do I expand the organization, but the larger strategy. So I believe that we are in the most severe crisis of our Constitution, that of the democracy since the Civil War, we we have no idea how this will unfold. We just don't and so we can't do a strategy in the sense of saying, Okay, we know how it's going to unfold. So we know what we have to do, but what we have to do is think through all right, where can we make big gains, and what do we do if those are blocked? So I think there's a very good chance that in 18 months, we can defeat Maga Republicans in the House and send a message of rejection of the current policies. I think there's an outside chance that if there was a big enough wave, we could actually take the Senate narrowly. I think it's a very long shot. So I would say to organizers, we've got to prepare to do those things, but we also have to be thinking we don't know what's going to happen. Is it at all possible that people who are elected would not be seated in the Congress? Is it at all possible that National Guard and Marines would be sent into big cities to somehow depress the vote? I have no idea. So as you do your strategy, you have to think about all those things. And again, what we need is an organized movement that can respond to whatever comes down the road. And that has to be a massive movement. It has to be in the 20 and 30 million Americans who are in groups, in teams, so they can sustain their activity, so they can educate each other, and so that they can educate those who aren't yet aware to ask. And you know, honestly, I have no idea if we are up for it, but there's no way to find out, except to try it and. And again, to do everything we can to create a new generation of organizers who are smart, audacious and really steeped in a democratic ethos that is, I think, the future for us, if we have that new generation of organizers, they will fight for their future, and their future will be a fight for the country's future. And I think, I think it's going to happen. I think young people are not they're not going to follow old people, and they shouldn't, not even going to listen to me, I don't think, but maybe they'll read my book. Maybe they'll read it, but I think there'll be a new generation of leaders. I think we just saw it, by the way, in the New York mayoralty primary, there were over 50,000 volunteers in mamdanis campaign, and they changed the electorate. They had for the first time, more people under the age of 45 voting in that election than over the age of 45 turn New York politics totally on its head. And it was a great candidate. It was a great message cost of living, talking to people about what they care about. But it was also 50,000 volunteers talking to each other, talking to their friends, talking knocking doors. They knocked over a million doors. That's what we need. Wow. So we have a case study here. Yes, we do, and it worked, and it worked. And they use social media, and they use door knocking, you know, and they use talking to the people that you know.

Jonathan Hall

36:44

Wow, wow. Well, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to come onto the podcast, but also taking the time to write down your words of wisdom. They literally are in your new book, The Hard Work of Hope: A Memoir.. I strongly encourage anyone listening to this to get Michael's new book, because we just scratched the surface. As far as the the amount of helpful information, lessons that were learned and practical advice for activists of today, strongly encourage you to take a look at Michael's new book. So thanks so much Michael for coming on the podcast,

Michael Ansara

37:17

Madison. Thank you. It was wonderful being able to talk with you. Our pleasure. Take care.

Michael Ansara

37:22

That was Michael Ansara, author of the new bookThe Hard Work of Hope: A Memoir. Use the promo code 09POD to save 30% off his new book at our website, cornellpress.cornell.edu, if you live in the UK, use the 30% discount code CS, announce and visit the website combinedacademic.co.uk Thank you For listening to 1869 the Cornell University Press podcast. You

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