Terrific guy, Jack. He’d be interested in meeting a young man like you. Of course I’m a registered Democrat, but we
have to learn to work with whoever’s in power....”
On the spot he offered me the job, which involved organizing conferences on drugs, unemployment, housing.
Facilitating dialogue, he called it. I declined his generous offer, deciding I needed a job closer to the streets. I spent
three months working for a Ralph Nader offshoot up in Harlem, trying to convince the minority students at City
College about the importance of recycling. Then a week passing out flyers for an assemblyman’s race in Brooklyn-the
candidate lost and I never did get paid.
In six months I was broke, unemployed, eating soup from a can. In search of some inspiration, I went to hear Kwame
Touré, formerly Stokely Carmichael of SNCC and Black Power fame, speak at Columbia. At the entrance to the
auditorium, two women, one black, one Asian, were selling Marxist literature and arguing with each other about
Trotsky’s place in history. Inside, Touré was proposing a program to establish economic ties between Africa and
Harlem that would circumvent white capitalist imperialism. At the end of his remarks, a thin young woman with
glasses asked if such a program was practical given the state of African economies and the immediate needs facing
black Americans. Touré cut her off in midsentence. “It’s only the brainwashing that you’ve received that makes
it impractical, sister,” he said. His eyes glowed inward as he spoke, the eyes of a madman or a saint. The woman
remained standing for several minutes while she was upbraided for her bourgeois attitudes. People began to file out.
Outside the auditorium, the two Marxists were now shouting at the top of their lungs.
“Stalinist pig!”
“Reformist bitch!”
It was like a bad dream. I wandered down Broadway, imagining myself standing at the edge of the Lincoln Memorial
and looking out over an empty pavilion, debris scattering in the wind. The movement had died years ago, shattered into
a thousand fragments. Every path to change was well trodden, every strategy exhausted. And with each defeat, even
those with the best of intentions could end up further and further removed from the struggles of those they purported to
serve.
Or just plain crazy. I suddenly realized that I was talking to myself in the middle of the street. People on their way
home from work were cutting a small arc around me, and I thought I recognized a couple of Columbia classmates in the
crowd, their suit jackets thrown over their shoulders, carefully avoiding my glance.
I had all but given up on organizing when I received a call from Marty Kaufman. He explained that he’d started an
organizing drive in Chicago and was looking to hire a trainee. He’d be in New York the following week and suggested
that we meet at a coffee shop on Lexington.
His appearance didn’t inspire much confidence. He was a white man of medium height wearing a rumpled suit over a
pudgy frame. His face was heavy with two-day-old whiskers; behind a pair of thick, wire-rimmed glasses, his eyes
seemed set in a perpetual squint. As he rose from the booth to shake my hand, he spilled some tea on his shirt.
“So,” Marty said, dabbing the stain with a paper napkin. “Why does somebody from Hawaii want to be an organizer?”
I sat down and told him a little bit about myself.
“Hmmph.” He nodded, taking notes on a dog-eared legal pad. “You must be angry about something.”