I had tried my best to mediate the conflict, defending Marty against charges of racism, suggesting to him that he
cultivate more tact. Marty told me I was wasting my time. According to him, the only reason Angela and the other
leaders in the city were sore was because he’d refused to hire them to run the program. “That’s what ruins a lot of so-
called community organizations out here. They start taking government money. They hire big, do-nothing staffs. Pretty
soon, they’ve become big patronage operations, with clients to be serviced. Not leaders. Clients. To be serviced.” He
spit the words out, as if they were unclean. “Jesus, it makes you sick just thinking about it.”
And then, seeing the still-fretful look on my face, he added, “If you’re going to do this work, Barack, you’ve got to
stop worrying about whether people like you. They won’t.”
Patronage, politics, hurt feelings, racial grievances-they were all of a piece to Marty, distractions from his larger
purpose, corruptions of a noble cause. He was still trying to bring the union in then, convinced that they would
replenish our ranks, deliver our ship to shore. One day in late September, he had asked Angela and me to join him at a
meeting with union officials from LTV Steel, one of the few remaining steel operations in the city. It had taken Marty
over a month to set up the meeting, and he was brimming with energy that day, talking at a rapid clip about the
company, the union, and new phases in the organizing campaign.
Eventually the president of the local-a young, handsome Irishman who’d been recently elected on a promise of
reform-entered the hall, along with two husky black men, the union treasurer and vice-president. After the
introductions, we all sat down and Marty made his pitch. The corporation was preparing to get out of the steelmaking
business, he said, and wage concessions would only prolong the agony. If the union wanted to preserve jobs, it had to
take some new, bold steps. Sit down with the churches and develop a plan for a worker buyout. Negotiate with the city
for concessionary utility and tax rates during the transition. Pressure the banks to provide loans that could be used to
invest in the new technology needed to make the plant competitive again.
Throughout the monologue, the union officials shifted uneasily in their chairs. Finally the president stood up and told
Marty that his ideas merited further study but that right now the union had to focus on making an immediate decision
about management’s offer. In the parking lot afterward, Marty looked stunned.
“They’re not interested,” he told me, shaking his head. “Like a bunch of lemmings running towards a cliff.”
I had felt bad for Marty. I had felt worse for Angela. She hadn’t said a word throughout the entire meeting, but as I
pulled out of the union parking lot to drive her home, she had turned to me and said, “I didn’t understand a word Marty
was saying.”
And I suppose it was then that I understood the difficulty of what Marty had tried to pull off, and the depth of his
miscalculation. It wasn’t so much that Angela had missed some of the details of Marty’s presentation; as we continued
to talk, it had become apparent that she understood Marty’s proposal at least as well as I did. No, the real meaning of
her remark was this: She had come to doubt the relevance to her own situation of keeping the LTV plant open.
Organizing with the unions might help the few blacks who remained in the plants keep their jobs; it wouldn’t dent the
rolls of the chronically unemployed any time soon. A job bank might help workers who already had skills and
experience find something else; it wouldn’t teach the black teenage dropout how to read or compute.
In other words, it was different for black folks. It was different now, just as it had been different for Angela’s
grandparents, who’d been barred from the unions, then spat on as scabs; for her parents, who had been kept out of the
barré
(Barré)
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