Intro: Clint Smith of Austin, Texas is trying to build a "Coalition of the Injured"
Section: Politics
Intro: Clint Smith of Austin, Texas is trying to build a "Coalition of the Injured"
Section: Politics
We have entered an age of profound human rights reverses, not only abroad but locally as well. Building community organization to protect the U.S. Bill of Rights and preserve an independent citizenry has never been more crucial. Effective organizing faces daunting challenges, however. Not only is it directly undermined and repressed by the incumbent Administration, but it must compete with well established systems of disinformation and subterfuge that predate these extremists.
To cope with these challenges requires grassroots leadership -- people of courage and resolve, usually unsung and often unknown to the larger community. One of these is Austin, Texas activist Clint Smith, who fully understands what it means to buck systems determined to protect the status-quo.
As Executive Vice Chairman of the Interagency Advisory Group and direct assistant to the Chairman of the Civil Service Commission, in addition to his role as Equal Employment Director of the Civil Service Commission during Richard Nixon's administration, Mr. Smith paid dearly for attempting to do his job. Nixon did not want agencies to hire on the basis of merit, nor did he want them to be colorblind. In direct contradiction of the laws he was obliged to enforce -- carefully maintaining them as façade, however -- Nixon converted the Civil Service Commission into his personal kingdom-builder. When Mr. Smith didn't go along he was forced out, but not without a fight that left him badly bruised. His last official act was to create a record that Nixon's successor could use to reverse this gutting of democratic process, only to watch in horror and disillusionment as Democratic president Jimmy Carter actually extended what Nixon had begun.
Mr. Smith's insight into the trends of power in the United States and the world have determined him to help build grassroots reaction to what he sees as disturbing fascist trends. Now in his sixties, he feels he can be most effective organizing at the community level. As co-convener of Austin Texas's Gray Panthers he focuses upon police operations in the city, gentrification, City budget allocations, and issues of age and sex and health.
In 2004, Clint Smith agreed to be interviewed as one of the subjects of University of Texas Anthropology professor Martha Norkunas Oral History Project in Interpreting the Texas Past. During March and April of 2004, Naoko Kato conducted four interview sessions producing 145 pages of transcript. Following is an abridged and slightly edited version of those sessions.
Part I: autobiography
1
The house I grew up in is located at 2932 East 12th Street. It was built in the late 1880s by the early German settlers to Texas. They faced the houses to the South, with high ceilings so they caught all the breeze that came through. They built houses to last, but also for comfort.
My dad worked on the railroad -- he traveled from Texas to California - before he married my mother and settled in Austin. He was a Pullman porter, a prestigious profession for a black man in those days. His dad was from Louisiana, from French and Native American as well as African-American stock.
My mother's family were some of the earliest settlers in South Austin. One of her ancestors, perhaps her great-grandfather, had come to Texas as a slave of one the generals under Sam Houston. They settled in the West Lake Hills area. They called it the "mountain." They would come down the Colorado River to the trading post, which is still there. There were Indians, Mexicans, and runaway and freed slaves living up there. This was before the emancipation proclamation. The freed men were afraid to come into the city because they might be recaptured, and sent back into slavery.
My mother's mother and grandmother were both midwives. They birthed many children of all races. There was a great deal of ethnic mixing. My mother's father was an Irishman. She was the youngest of a large family --five brothers and three sisters. Her family finally moved into South Austin, around Barton Springs.
In about 1940, when my father left the railroad and my parents bought the house on East 12 Street. It was far out on the outskirts of town. They bought it because they had to move out of a house he already owned when the city took it in order to build an incinerator. It was also in East Austin, near Boggy Creek. In 1928 the city council passed an ordinance requiring all minorities to live on the East side of town. My father complied with the law, but this didn't stop the city from taking his land anyway. My parents were early victims of a system of "people removal" that is still going on.
In any case, we settled there and I attended the "Old Anderson High School" on Pennsylvania Avenue, from 1949-53. Even though we were living in a segregated society, our values and expectations were high, and these were reflected in this high school -- in the band and the football team especially. Anderson was closed in the late 1970s under the guise of integrating the community. It just ripped the heart out of East Austin.
2
I got my first job when I was in elementary school. We had a neighbor down the street named Mr. Synagog. In his backyard he kept fifty or seventy-five chickens, which had to be kept penned up. If they got out it was hard to get them back in. People built high fences, eight or ten feet tall, around their chicken pens and made sure to secure all the gates; but still sometimes a rooster would dig a hole underneath a fence and get out. Mr. Synagog (whose nickname was "Frenchy") paid me fifty cents a week to feed and water his chickens. It was a responsible position and I took it very seriously. There was a little store on the corner and with a nickel or a dime I could buy a candy bar, help buy food for my family, or save a little bit..
Unfortunately, like any kid, I would get distracted. One day I was shooting marbles and when I looked up all the chickens had gotten out. I'd fed them and left the gate open. I was running after the chickens, trying to get them back in the large pen which had only one gate. I'd manage to run one chicken through the gate and the rest would go the other direction. I was spent and frustrated when Mr. Synagog came home. I thought he was going to raise all sorts of hell but he just sat down and watched me for a while. Finally, to my concern, he said, "Boy, I've been watching you. I'm going to teach you a lesson that I never want you to forget."
But then he took a bag from the back porch, reached in and grabbed a handful of corn. The chickens started to watch him. He dropped a couple of kernels and they chickens started coming, some of them flying. He walked slowly down the yard and through the gate into the chicken pen dropping corn kernels as he went. The next thing I knew, all those chickens had followed him right through the gate and into the pen. He threw the rest of the corn among them, came out and closed the gate, and said, "Now I hope you learned something." What I learned I've never forgotten: if you have a strategy you can accomplish a lot more than if you don't.
3
Sp by the time I was eleven years old I had a job, and I always wanted to keep a job. Later, in my last year of high school I enrolled in a program called distributive education, which allowed me to work part-time for school credit and gave me a variety of work experiences. For awhile I was a deliveryman for a pharmacy, then I worked in a parking garage. Next I was an apprentice sales clerk in a department store.
I was also in the Anderson High School Band. We had to be up at seven o'clock every morning of the year, except during summer band practice. Our leader, B.L. Joyce was a real disciplinarian; he came out of the Souza band school. He set high standards for us, and we set high standards for ourselves. We challenged one another. I was in the band from 1949 until I graduated, in 1953. During that time we won three State prizes. Our uniforms were old, actually raggedy, but we thought they were beautiful. When we put on those uniforms, black and gold, we felt like a million dollars. When we marched down Congress Avenue with the University of Texas band, which was much larger, people said we sounded better. We went to Prairie View in March of 1949 and won the State championship.
I joined the Marine Corps during my last year of high school, through the Marine Reserve, and took basic training at Camp Pendleton in California during the summer of 1953. This was right after the Korean War and many of our instructors were World War Two veterans. They were brutal! When I finished basic training I went into the Reserve and applied to the National Negro College Fund for a scholarship. I got the scholarship and went to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and graduated cum laude in 1956,
That summer I was hired by the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health in Austin. They had a project involving the Carver library in East Austin. Because of budget cuts, the city council was considering closing Carver. This was before the U.T. Law School was integrated; just before the full integration of the University itself. Any number of people in Austin didn't feel that black folks needed to read, just as long as they could tell time and not be late for work. We did a survey for use by patrons of the library. The Hogg Foundation took over its funding and the library remained open.
4
I graduated cum laude from Lincoln University - I was second in my class, and class President -- and received a fellowship from a chemical firm in Philadelphia to attend the University of Pennsylvania. I'd majored in Political Science at Lincoln, and chose History and Political Science at Penn.
Lincoln was the first black higher education institution in the country, located about 40 miles outside of Philadelphia. It was established in 1854, mainly to train black freedmen as missionaries. By the time I enrolled it was an international school -- the alma mater of Thurgood Marshall, Parren Mitchell and his older brother Clarence, chief of the Washington bureau of the NAACP. We all attended the same church in Baltimore. (A mentor of us all was Howard University Dean of Law, Professor Houston, who put together the team of lawyers who later fought and won Brown vs. Board of Education.
A men's school still at that time, in the late `50s, Lincoln was known as the black Harvard. There was an emphasis on toughening people up, almost like basic training in the military. We knew that we were going out into a segregated world. There was so much competition that if you weren't strong, you probably wouldn't last very long. Lincoln had a reputation for producing the majority of the black doctors and lawyers in this country at that time. Most of the professors were white, but the president, Horace Mann Bond, the father of Julian Bond, was black (I recall Julian well, he was a kid at that time).
I graduated from Lincoln in June, 1956 and enrolled in the American Civilization program at the University of Pennsylvania the next Fall. My intention was to go to law school. I was the only black student in a class of about twenty, and I had a distinct feeling of not being welcome. In addition, there were problems at home -- my family needed income. I was in the Marine Reserves at the time, and in 1957 applied for active duty, and was assigned as a Military Police officer to duty in Europe.
5
My first posting was in a town called Nancy, in Eastern France. It was located in the triangle formed by Metz, Tulle, and Rodin. The Germans came through there during both World Wars. In Nancy the fighting was mostly in the bars between GIs, especially Marines and Airborne. So MPs were in a war within a war. Besides policing the bars, I did a good deal of traveling between France and Germany. I felt like a human being -- everything was open. I didn't encounter the kind of segregation in Europe that existed here. It was like a different world. I was stationed in Europe for three years.
Shortly after I returned to Philadelphia, I met my wife. She was from Princeton, New Jersey. I figured I'd better start making a living. We moved to San Antonio in the summer of 1961, where I took a job with the San Antonio Housing Authority. The executive director, Marie McGuire, a really fine person, later became the head of the Public Housing Authority in Washington under John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson. The building at 400 Labor Street was the first building in this country designed for the handicapped and elderly. It had ramps at the doors, and in the bathrooms, lowered sinks and basins, counters in the kitchen. I worked for Marie for a year and a half - until the federal goovernment recruited me to work for the U.S. Civil Service Commission.
When I began working for Marie, the Kennedy administration was just beginning their big push in civil rights. This was the time of the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. In Birmingham, Alabama demonstrations led to violence. The attorney general, Robert Kennedy went down to deal with the situation. One of the results was the creation of an organization called the President's Council on Equal Employment Opportunity. Like many black people I was encouraged by these developments. I took and passed the federal service entrance examination. After being on the register for about nine months I was contacted by the Dallas office of the Civil Service Commission, and immediately hired for the position of investigator. This involved conducting the same kinds of security and suitability investigations that the FBI had conducted in earlier years . Certain federal employees had jobs that were subject to such investigations when they were employed and then periodically after they were on the job. By 1962 the Civil Service Commission had taken over that program.
I worked in the Dallas region for about a year. Just before Kennedy's assassination I moved into the Washington headquarters, the central office, of the Civil Service Commission, to a job involving personnel management. In 1965 I was selected to serve as an assistant to the chairman for the Civil Service Commission and from there was promoted to a supervisory position in what was called the Inspections Division. This involved reviewing and evaluating management programs, including budgetary and personnel management practices, of other agencies, at a much higher level than I had worked at before
6
My new job involved not only oversight and enforcement of the Merit system, but also enforcing laws requiring equal opportunity and fair treatment, generally, for government workers. In 1971 I was appointed Executive Vice Chairman of the Interagency Advisory Group of Agency Personnel Directors supervised by the CSC, and Director of Civil Rights within the Civil Service Commission itself. If a federal employee was discriminated against -- a postal worker, for example -- they couldn't go to court. The highest level of appeal was to my agency. During the mid 1970s, Watergate hit and I began to experience backlash when I made decisions in favor of people who had complaints within the Civil Service Commission.
Suddenly, as a result of the Watergate revelations were developing, many of us who had been involved in Civil Rights enforcement found ourselves confronting serious abuses of the legal hiring system. The forces in the White House under Nixon wanted to fill the major agencies with only their people, their agents: Housing and Urban Development, Health Education and Welfare, and the rest. They wanted, in other words, to politicize the entire Federal system, which was by law supposed to be a non-partisan system. People were supposed to be hired based on merit, not on grounds of political loyalty. My job was to enforce merit hiring. I did it diligently - and became quite unpopular. By the time Reagan came into office, the legal process was so weakened that he was able to unceremoniously place political appointees in every job. He appointed Clarence Thomas to the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, and Thomas never saw a Civil Rights policy he liked. He was a Black man, but he was first and foremost a Reagan man. He didn't enforce the Civil Rights Act, he helped to close it down. He couldn't actually kill it, so he subverted it by refusing to enforce it.
When the Nixon administration became exposed for Watergate, a number of us in the Federal Government who were also involved in the Civil Rights movement felt that with Carter's election we would once again be in a strong position to help "secure these rights" for all Americans. We had the documentation to reveal that it was not only discrimination that people were suffering, but abuse of the Civil Service Act. What Carter did, however, rather than repairing Nixon's damage to the system, was just some reorganization. People changed jobs, but nothing was really done to insure that how people got jobs was according to the Civil Service Act. In fact, many of the people Nixon hired who were instrumental in subverting the Act were kept on, and some of them actually helped write the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. This new act legalized many of the abuses that had occurred during the Nixon administration.
Carter's next step was to abolish the old Civil Service Commission and create a new office of Personnel Management, which was much easier for the President to manipulate. Previously, the three heads of the old Civil Service Commission, two from the party in power, one from the party out of power, mainly reported to the Congress -- to the people. Under Carter they reported to the White House. I had worked for the chairman of the Civil Service Commission in an executive capacity for ten years and protested as vigorously as I could, to no effect. By the Fall of 1982 I felt I could no longer be effective, so I left government service.
The dirty secret that people don't talk about, especially Democrats, is that the Democratic Party under Jimmy Carter played a major role in destroying one of the most important protectors of democratic process: the Civil Service Act; and initiated a rollback of worker rights, merit employment and equal opportunity that continues to this day.
7
During the latter period I worked for the Civil Service Commission, I was also assigned by the Carter administration to be Federal Consultant on the staff of Howard University. A group of about a dozen of us was sent to Lebanon in 1980. Our task was to observe relations between Israelis and Arabs. The Lebanese Teachers' Union sponsored the trip. They wanted American citizens to know how American money was used to repress Palestinians and other Arabs. In 1982 Israel's Defense Minister, Ariel Sharon, allegedly orchestrated the massacres at Sabra and Shatilla. But about a year earlier, a delegation of children had come to Washington to plead for American acknowledgement of the Palestinians' situation. I met some of these children in the camps in 1980 when I was in Lebanon. Some of those I knew personally were massacred.
When I retired from the Civil Service Commission in 1979 I remained on duty at Howard University as a federal consultant in the Institute for Urban Affairs and Research. The group I was with received a hundred thousand dollar grant from the U.S. Office of Education. Our project was to examine the linkage (or lack of it) between education and industry, and especially to investigate why minority youth in particular were unemployed. We found that most youth lacked adequate training and needed better information on where jobs were located.
In 1999 I returned to Austin to live. One evening I went to a meeting of the Gray Pathers, at St. Edwards University. Gray Panthers was founded in the early 1970s in Philadelphia by Maggie Kuhn, to challenge unfairness in the system -- like the Black Panthers did -- in a peaceful manner. The organization was fairly strong in Austin, based on a membership mostly of women concerned about civil rights. At the St. Ed's meeting they were talking about the need for universal healthcare in this country. I joined, and now am one of the co-conveners the local Austin chapter.
Part II: ideas and observations
In the eyes of corporations - who get the significant tax breaks, who insist on cutting back services and benefits to real people -- we are all now in the position of the "negroes" of forty years ago. We all find ourselves being dispossessed and denied rights. Someone said a long time ago, we will either hang together as American citizens or we will be hanged separately by these world-wide, global corporate interests.
I feel we've come to a period now where many groups and people feel the same kind of pressures Blacks felt in the 1960s; the same pressures that motivated the movement for civil rights. Back then we were trying to get better laws passed. Now, we need to focus on making sure we can retain the protections we gained then - for all citizens.
The Texas redistricting effort was designed to do the opposite of opening the system. Its moving us backwards, toward re-segregation and exclusion; which also, in my perception, extends down to the neighborhood level under "Smart Growth" dis-locations.
The Federal government is supposed to be open. That's what Civil Rights was about. When we were fighting our goal was to open the government, open the system. Under Nixon, things started moving back the other way. It wasn't so much about color as about political affiliation. Since Nixon, the backwards trend continued under both Democrats and Republicans. The Reagan revolution as it was called, did really re-open another system, however: the spoils system; which has become a defining factor locally.
I'm for affirmative action in terms of opening the system, getting information to people about available jobs available, and the training needed for them; and then making sure they have fair opportunities. You cannot guarantee the results. All you can do is try to make it possible for people to succeed. The other thing you can do is help individuals identify their abilities and talents; and then help frame how they develop their talents so that they help themselves and other people. That's affirmative action as far as I'm concerned.
In the city of Austin recently we fought in the big battle over the new police contract which dramatically increases the authority and power of police and takes money away from human services while protecting the growing profits of business. Fifty percent of the money in the city's budget for the next five years has been allocated to so-called public safety. This means that hospitals, clinics, food banks, and everybody else will have to fight over the crumbs. It also means that law enforcement will have to oppose and oppress the interests of the people in East Austin who are affected by these changes. One definition of fascism is when the power of the State is married to the needs of business, during a period of extreme nationalism. I think this is what we're seeing. The strengthening of police is being done under the guise of public safety and homeland security. In States like Mississippi and Texas before the Civil Rights Act was passed, White Citizens' Councils, and the KKK were hooked up with the police. Now is it's not just minorities who are at risk, its all American citizens.
What's happening in East Austin and much of the rest of Austin, is not Urban Renewal -- but People Removal. Recently, a local Sociologist reported to the city council about how he had trained a lot of policemen. Many see their job as being to protect the middle and upper class public from minorities. As long as they do their job, they will be rewarded. Police aren't supposed to care about what people do to each other in East Austin as long as they stay in East Austin. An Hispanic community leader who worked on the planning commission was very blunt about how things work. She found out that city planning is a kind of pacification process. The city wants the community to be involved in neighborhood planning; so they bring people in, occupy them, take up their time for a couple of years, and this keeps them quiet until the city is ready to do what they'd been planning to do anyway. Before residents know it they've been rezoned out, or priced out or taxed out of their neighborhoods.
A lot of folks are finding themselves in jeopardy: workers laid off of jobs they've held for a long time, young people who can't get jobs, university graduates taking jobs in very different fields than they prepared for, families losing their homes. I believe people are starting to come together. Organizations like the Gray Panthers are trying to facilitate this connecting process.
What we need is a "Coalition of these Injured." Black folks are less injured than they were, but white people and Hispanics are becoming more injured. The President's Faith Based coalition is designed to drive a wedge between people, its real goal is the oppression of the human spirit. Some of us are trying to revitalize, and strengthen and free the human spirit. To me, this is what America is supposed to be about. But we had better realize that we've been sold a bill of goods. A lot of people still blindly hope that the economy will magically improve. I talked to a guy not long ago who said he thought everything was working just fine. I reminded him about Enron and told him that some people have to begin to realize that the rules of the game have changed. I told him, "you're one of the eighty percent that's deprived, you're not one of the twenty percent that has the power. And that twenty percent is shrinking all the time." The rules have changed, but I think there are opportunities. This is supposed to be a government of, by, and for the people. But we have to make it that way.
This is a consuming society. We sit and watch TV and our biggest concern is "I've got a car but I want another car." Our wants increase and become "needs". When you look at the level of personal debt, especially credit card debt, it's scary; or how the price of gasoline changes from morning `till afternoon. Anybody can see there's no way we can continue like this.. So maybe we can raise awareness in people. One of our big problems is that we are society that is overweight - when half the world is starving. Can you imagine such a thing
I think it was the poet, William Browning who said, "come grow old along with me, for the best is yet to be, the last for which the first was made." There's real hope there you know. No matter what bad experiences I/we might have had in the past, there's still the future. Maybe the past is like a soldier preparing for combat by going through basic training. I/we have to go through some tough experiences to get ready for what I/we really have to face. It's like anything else. It might have been bad, but learning something from it was important. So from now on I can make life better for myself and other people too. I don't think we have much choice, anyway.
It seems a shame that the great World War Two generation went and fought Hitler overseas, just in order to come back and live in a Fascist regime. Fascism is a very simple system. Business and the State work together, denying real power to anyone else, and denying even the illusion of power during periods of heightened nationalist concern. Like now. Its about fear. Roosevelt said there's nothing to fear but fear itself. But there's a difference in leadership now.
There's a higher law than the nation's laws. Preemption is where you decide to strike another nation because you think they're going to strike you. . At Nuremberg the idea of preemption was condemned. Yet, this is what this country is engaged in now as a policy of this administration. It's been announced: we'll attack anybody in the world, do anything, go anywhere to preemptively protect our interests. Being patriotic to me does not mean being patriotic to a person or an Administration. Patriotism is about our society, and the constitution. Its about human rights, human liberties, and a system that ensures these things.
Patriotism isn't about nationalism. Nationalism can very quickly take the form of fascism. It was President Eisenhower, a conservative and a military man who warned us about this. He said that every bomb that's made, every tank that is manufactured means taking away food or clothing or housing from someone. Munitions, and investments in munitions, operate only to the detriment to the people.
North Carolina has a reputation for having one of the better run State governments. My wife's mother was ill for about eleven years. She had Alzheimer's disease and Duke University was the only place that had much in the way of research into Alzheimer's. I learned the meaning of the term "the caretaker's disease" as applied to Alzheimer's, because it almost killed Colleen, my wife. In every other advanced country in the world there is some form of universal healthcare. It's considered a basic right, except here in the United States. My mother-in-law owned a home in Princeton, New Jersey where they were from. We had to sell it. Next, we had to sell our house in Columbia, Maryland. Finally we had to sell the one we were buying in North Carolina. It just was so expensive to care for her until we finally were able to get her into a nursing home. This is the tragic legacy of the 1960s, of the Civil rights movement and the Civil Rights Act. They were designed out of concern for people, for the greater society. Now we're at the other end of the spectrum. Its all about budget cuts. Tax cuts go to the greedy, to the corporations and the wealthy. Ordinary citizens who need help get service and benefit cuts.
The City or State or National budget is where priorities are set. Whoever is able to prevail in defining these priorities will be able to assume leadership in other areas of getting human needs met. I think some of us missed a beat back there in the 1960s trying so hard to get the Civil Rights Act enforced. When Nixon was deciding on how to budget under the Office of Management and Budget and how the budget would be allocated, and how to feed a few and starve many - that was where the power was. Now we can learn from our mistakes. We must build a "coalition of the injured," meaning injured by being left out of the budget. This coalition cuts across race, ethnicity and gender. Its goal is to provide Home-Front security.
The other day a street person came toward me so I reached in my pocket and gave him a dollar. I knew he needed it and I didn't want him to have to ask. I told him I wanted to ask him something. We were waiting for the lights to cross the street. I asked him what he thought about the situation, about the so-called terrorism? I told him I'd heard it said that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. He answered, "Yeah I've heard that. I'll tell you something else. I appreciate your helping me out. I think if people in power just stopped messing with other people they wouldn't have so much to be scared of. As a matter of fact, now that I think about it, if someone helped me or my family to get a job, I'd protect them, so you won't have to worry about me doing stuff to them, I'd protect them." Moral of the story: as/when we help others, we help ourselves!