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Delivered at Lehigh University
April 12, 2007
It is a great pleasure to be in Bethlehem in the spring, at a moment when so many fresh beginnings are underway. President Gast’s inauguration is, of course, the one that brings me here. I am honored to honor her on this historic occasion. A few months ago, when winter was at its worst in these parts, I headed south – to Louisiana and Texas.
Today I want to tell you some of the stories I heard there, stories of darkness and of hope, stories about mending the fire of democratic aspiration in dark times.
New Orleans is a place where the social stratification currently threatening
American democracy is impossible to ignore. When you tour its streets, divisions along lines of class and race are as blatant as they are anywhere I have visited in the United
States – as blatant as they are, for example, in the Rio Grande Valley, which I also visited on that trip, or in L.A. County, which I had visited last summer. The effects of Katrina only make the divisions more obvious. In New Orleans, the rain falls on the just and the unjust, but hurricanes mainly devastate the already destitute. The phrase “lower class” is not a metaphor. Poor people live on lower ground.
The homes of the wealthy that I saw in New Orleans are in relatively good shape, but remain largely unoccupied. Why return to a city still recovering from devastation if you have another home or two elsewhere?
Some middle class neighborhoods that were flooded in New Orleans are showing modest signs of a comeback. In them about four out of every ten homes I saw are in the process of being renovated. Their residents don’t own much besides the home they are trying to save, but because their neighborhood was in the middle of the spectrum of vulnerability – neither securely on high ground, like the upper class homes, nor completely unprotected, like the worst-off areas – a kind of salvage is possible. Some of these homes are now resting awkwardly on cinder-block stilts that are out of all proportion to their original design – little, one-story houses with daddy-long-legs, reminiscent of an Imperial Walker from Star Wars. It is an utterly surreal scene.
But cross into a neighborhood populated before the storm by poor blacks, and you will find no such sights, because there are no signs of human life at all. I spent a day riding around with Broderick, an organizer with the Jeremiah Group, a citizens’ organization in New Orleans that was founded in 1993. Brod, who is white and middle class and only a few years older than the Lehigh students in this room, grew up in the
Gentilly section of the city. As we crossed one of these dividing lines in his car, he said that if we kept going for twenty miles, we wouldn’t see a single home being reconstructed.

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Later that day, we finally reached the Lower 9, which is widely known to be where the least well-off residents of New Orleans lived before Katrina. Brod remarked that there is “no saving the structures.” I noted that “almost all the houses are just gone completely, and there are a few of them that are left standing and gutted, and a few others that are collapsed but in place.”
“That’s right,” he said. “So the devastation here is a different order of magnitude.
On my first trip back, I hadn’t been to this neighborhood. You couldn’t get to this neighborhood. But picture it as – I mean the East and Gentilly, and Lake View . . .
Broadmore, they all looked broadly the same, immense devastation, but structures still in place. And I pictured the Lower 9 as being an extension of that – maybe a little worse, because they were older houses. And then the first time you come out here, it was just breathtaking, because you [see] all of the houses in bad enough condition to where they were in the middle of the street, blocking the way. Right back here there was this gigantic barge a block into the neighborhood. It had come through.”
“A surge had pushed it through?” I asked. “That’s right,” Brod said. “Or the surge had broken the levee.”
One evening I met with leaders of the Jeremiah Group, ordinary people from the community who had organized themselves, mainly through their churches, to hold the political and economic elites of New Orleans accountable. The chief organizer, a black woman named Jackie, went over the agenda, and then asked an African-American minister named Rev. Pate to begin the meeting, as they always do, with a prayer. Jackie, a black woman named Angela, and a Latino named Jamie told stories about their pre-
Katrina fights for better schools, safe neighborhoods, drug de-tox centers, and the like, and then moved on to stories of Katrina’s aftermath, when New Orleans lost a million residents over night.
There have been many struggles since, beginning with the fight to get the dispersed citizens of New Orleans an opportunity to vote in the mayoral election. The need to fight on such an issue against powerful economic interests is as disturbing as the people’s will to fight was encouraging. To the elites, the evacuation of the city seemed like a chance to reconstitute the city’s population in their own image. The elite strategy, the Jeremiah leaders explained, was to make it difficult for the poor to return.
A black man named Karl, who earns his living in public relations, gave a detailed power analysis of the situation on PowerPoint, culminating in a description of how much money moves through the state of Louisiana and the port of New Orleans without benefiting the lower and middle classes. Another black man named David, who was dressed in a sharp suit and wore shades well into the evening, described how he used jazz bands to get out the vote. Democracy in New Orleans can be summed up in the image of a jazz band, playing its way down the street, while the people who come out to hear the music are taken to the polls. Jackie asked David to end our meeting with a prayer. I later heard that David, like all the other members of his church, was converted while doing time in Angola Prison.

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At one point during my tour of the city, I asked Brod, “When will we know the fate of the new New Orleans?’ He said, “A year ago I would have said by now we’d start to have a sense, because a year ago I would have assumed surely the $8 billion would have been allocated a couple of months before that, [would] start to go into people’s pockets and knock around in the economy – and how much role that money would play .
. . something about a recovery would start to be clear. As it happens, none of that $8 billion is in people’s pockets.” The leaders of Jeremiah told me that only 258 people had thus far received some of the $8 billion that had been authorized by the federal government for the recovery effort.
Brod continued, “So if it continues to go at that level, then we’re in bad shape and the long-term recovery is going to be as bad as the immediate relief effort. I’d say in a couple of years – and depending on the political fights that happen between now and then, we’ll have some sense of whether . . . .” His voice trails off. And I say: “But if it comes that slowly, that already determines the fate, doesn’t it?” Brod says, “Yeah, that’s right. And that’s my point. If it continues to go that slowly, then the population will stay around what it is now [that is, 200,000]. If it starts to pick up and we’re able to push and to fast-track some of this stuff, I think it could have a huge impact.”
Brod came back to New Orleans to help Jackie with the organizing only recently.
Before that, he spent a few years organizing in Houston. That’s where he was when
Katrina struck. He and Renée, the senior organizer of MTO, Jeremiah’s analogue in
Houston, organized Katrina evacuees when they arrived in Houston immediately after the storm. Let me now read to you some what Renée told me about that organizing in the
Astrodome when I visited her and other organizers in Houston.
“I remember the first day we went in, I think it was the Saturday before Labor
Day. We go into the Astrodome, and Broderick and I, my colleague, were trying to figure things out. And T. D. Jakes [the leading African-American televangelist] and
Oprah Winfrey were on the microphone. They were very loudly, almost yelling, praying.
And saying ‘just trust in God, and everything is going to be fine. But we’re here to support you.’ And we see all this hoopla. Very patronizing. We had to wait. So we had to organize this first meeting, and Oprah’s got the mike and T.D. Jakes.
“And I said go get the mike,” Renée continued. “Go figure out how to get the mike. We had a group of pastors with us who had agreed to do this strategy. So Rev.
Hassell, a pastor of a C. and E. church, took the mike. He said, ‘I’m a believer, but I believe God expects us to do our part of the work too. So if you’ve been a leader in New
Orleans, and you were a leader in your church or your school or your neighborhood organization, whether you were a teacher or a deacon, we’re asking those of you who were leaders in New Orleans to come forward and have a conversation with the
Metropolitan Organization about what’s happening, and about doing something. Because
God alone is not going to provide.’

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“He made the announcement a few times,” Renée said. “And slowly – we didn’t have a room to meet in at this point – slowly we began to assemble this group on some bleachers. So we had the first meeting of about a hundred, out of about 15,000 that were there. The pastors prayed, and then we did house meetings.” House meetings are discussions among 8 to 12 people in which they share their stories and concerns. Renée continued: “We began to hear people’s stories of what they had gone through to get there.
And they were horrific. And once people began to be able to process that pain, we asked them what did they want to see different in the immediate scenario – what needed to happen.”
I wish I could read you everything Renée told me about what happened over the next days – about the fight to keep the evacuees’ cell phones on, or the fight to keep 800 of the of the evacuees from being shipped to Arkansas. But there isn’t time for that today. When I heard these stories, however, I couldn’t help reflecting on how fragile our political inheritance is, how vulnerable it is in an age when catastrophe strikes and corporate power looms large.
Perhaps you are thinking that New Orleans is too exceptional to be relevant to our worries over democracy elsewhere in America. But we had better face the facts. Before
Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast nine American cities were statistically worse off than
New Orleans. Yet many Americans had trouble imagining that thousands were too poor even to save their own lives by getting out of town. How exceptional, then, was pre-
Katrina New Orleans among the cities of America? And how exceptional is natural or man-made catastrophe likely to be in the years ahead?
The gap between rich and poor is widening, terrorists are multiplying, nuclear weapons are spreading, and the oceans are warming. There will be no shortage of catastrophes to deal with in years to come. Our time will be an age of calamities, and history will judge us by how we respond to them. American citizens will reveal, through their actions and their omissions, whether they insist that our political community survive as a democratic republic, or that it merely survive.
One organizer I met with in Texas was Sister Pearl, who told me about the grassroots work that, back in the late 1980s, transformed the colonias of the Rio Grande
Valley (the area just north of the US-Mexico border) from make-shift shanty-towns into neighborhoods with running water, sewerage, and paved streets. The people living in the fifteen hundred colonias between Brownsville and El Paso were among the least well-off people in the country. Two decades ago, when the rains would come, the children would have to walk to school through ankle-deep mud laced with fecal matter from their swamped outhouses.
When the citizens of the colonias amassed some political power, and achieved victories, the national media began to show an interest. “So anyway,” Sister Pearl said,
“there was a lot of press coming in. When the Today Show came, they wanted to film colonia residents. So we set up people for them to interview and to visit and to see. And so one woman came back and she said, ‘That’s not the kind of family I want to

5 interview.’ I said, ‘Why not?’ She said, ‘Well, they have hope.’ Could I make up this story? ‘They have hope. They have a strategy. They know how they want this to be done.’ I said, ‘Well, yeah, those are our organizational leaders.’ She said, ‘No, you don’t understand. I want dirt. I want to see them dirty.’ . . . .
Sister Pearl continued: “And I said, ‘If you want dirt, you go find somebody else to talk to. If you want strategy and power and people who have organized to do something about their situation, then we’re willing to talk to you. Because there are three stories here. One is: ain’t it awful. The other is: see them grovel . . . or: “See how dirty they are. And the third story is: see what people can do when they organize. Now that’s our story. If you want the other two, go to someone else.”
Sister Pearl added that the producer from the Today Show did go to someone else,
“to the county health department, who then took her to a house at 8 in the morning. . . .
[T]he picture she wanted to show was this woman, still in her housecoat, washing clothes out in the back yard.”
The stories I have been recounting this afternoon are not, then, about mere victims of catastrophe or injustice. They are about people who think of themselves as citizens with the power to hold political officials and corporate leaders accountable. These citizens are exercising responsibility, holding others responsible, and inviting others to hold them responsible. They have hope. And the hope they have is the fruit of the power that their own organizing has placed in their hands. They understand how tilted the political playing field is that they are standing on, but they also understand what it takes to win victories. They have won victories, and they intend to win more. It is their intention to reconstruct democracy from the ground up.
Things would be different if you and I and others like us behaved differently.
Our roles, relationships, institutions, laws, and policies are not so fixed that we could not change them if we decided to do so. It is mainly our slumber, sloth, and cowardice that hold them in place. Each person or faction might seem powerless to effect large-scale change when viewed separately, but such change has happened before, and when it has, the dependence of ruling elites on the deference of ordinary people has become evident.
By refusing to defer to unjust rulers or other human beings who claim a natural right to be our political superiors, it is in our power to deny them effective authority.
This means that the decision about who rules and what the basic roles and regulations are going to be in fact rests with us. The responsibility for our institutional arrangements belongs to us.
As long as human beings gather together to form societies, some people will have more power than others. Because even a slight advantage in power can be used to improve one’s position, the gap between the privileged and the rest tends to widen.
Because it takes power to constrain power, every attempt to eliminate the disparities altogether has reinstated them in a different form. Elites will always be with us.

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Must they, however, be permitted to dominate us? That, it seems to me, is the central political question of our time. The hope implicit in a modern democratic republic is that even the most powerful people in the world – the richest of the rich, the officers of the largest corporations, the people who control the media, the commanders of urban police forces and national armies, the administrators of governmental, educational, medical, penal, and ecclesial bureaucracies – can be constrained to use their power within limits that every adult member of the population has a role in setting and a right to contest. The objective is not the naïve and dangerously self-deceptive one of a society without elites, but rather the more modest and realistic one of a society governed by laws chosen in the right way.
The relatively disadvantaged outnumber the privileged few. If ordinary people do not find strength in numbers, elites will be able to do as they please. By distributing the powers of citizenship widely, a democratic republic enables the less well-off to fight domination nonviolently. To the extent that the fight is successful, liberty, domination’s opposite, takes root, and the likelihood increases that the republic will treat its own citizens, its resident aliens, and the people of other nations justly. Yet the fight is not always successful. Indeed, it is not always fought.
The point of recognizing rights of democratic participation is to allow ordinary citizens to gather their strength and exercise it nonviolently against any form of domination that might arise. Freedom of assembly is the right of citizens to gather their strength by meeting with one another. Freedom of speech entitles citizens to express their concerns in public, to inform one another of whatever appears to endanger justice and liberty, to propose and oppose policies, to offer reasons to others, and to demand reasons from them.
Having the right under law to hold elites accountable achieves nothing if the right is not exercised. A society living under a democratic constitution without practicing the art of holding its rulers responsible for their policies and actions is no democracy. A society in which the political system has been rigged to disallow effective nonviolent contestation of groups that wish to dominate is no democracy.
In the last several decades most Americans have implicitly ceded control of their country’s central institutions to the ruling elites. While the elites go on fighting among themselves for the upper hand, the consequences are now clear: a massive windfall for the wealthiest one percent of the population, a declining share of prosperity for the middle class, an increase in the percentage of the population falling below the poverty line, a foolish war undertaken on false pretenses, thousands of military and civilian casualties, the use of arbitrary detention and torture, an erosion of civil liberty, a failure to confront the perils of global warming, and widespread international suspicion of
American commitment to its democratic ideals. Responsibility for this outcome must be borne by the ordinary people who have acquiesced in it as well as by the elites who have authored, defended, and executed the policies at issue.

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One thing that elites need, if they wish to dominate, is the deference of ordinary people. Accordingly, organized resistance is the most powerful weapon that the masses have. It is not easy, however, for citizens who care about liberty and justice to organize effective local campaigns on behalf of these ideals, let alone to organize a successful democratic movement on a nation-wide scale.
In an economy based on the market system, corporate bosses always already have the advantages of organizational power at their disposal. By using the inducements of wages, salaries, and other benefits to secure the cooperation of others, they are able to achieve objectives that would be impossible to achieve without the collaboration of many people. The bosses of large corporations, in particular, tend as a group to have enormous power in their hands – a good deal more than the clergy and the professors.
Bosses also share an interest in using whatever organizationally aggregated power they have to acquire other advantages for themselves, including the knowledge that is required to establish and maintain political dominance over other groups. The top bosses know a lot about how to build organizations and amass power. They know this because they study such matters in school and get a lot of practice while on the job. Bosses specialize in organization building. That is what they do for a living. The top bosses are very good at what they do. That is how they got to the top.
So long as ordinary people remain unorganized, they will lack the power to prevent bosses from achieving economic dominance and translating it into political dominance. The relatively disadvantaged, insofar as they are politically isolated from one another, tend to be ignorant of the benefits that organized political power could bring to them. Detailed knowledge of those benefits – and of how elites turn modern economic and political systems to their own ends – can be hard to come by. It belongs mainly to the members and clients of organized communities that are dedicated to acquiring and disseminating it. Such knowledge, in other words, is itself one of the benefits that organizations of certain kinds confer on those participating in them.
Because isolated citizens tend not to know what they are missing by virtue of being isolated, they often lack the motivation to overcome their isolated condition.
Building citizens’ organizations takes a lot of time and energy – time and energy one will be disinclined to spend unless one has a clear view of the potential advantages of aggregated strength. Even when those advantages become clear, however, they do not necessarily provide the sort of stable and strong incentive to cooperative activity that bosses provide to their managers and workers by paying them. For this reason, citizens’ organizations consisting mainly of volunteers and operating without large infusions of capital from the wealthy are at an organizational disadvantage relative to corporations.
The systemic imbalances between business enterprises and voluntary political organizations – with respect to both the acquisition of knowledge and the provision of incentives for cooperative activity – help explain why the need for major democratic reform is great in our time but also why the odds are stacked against it. The people who run business enterprises and profit most heavily from them are constantly in the process

8 of accumulating economic power and using it to acquire political power and influence.
When one business enterprise fails, others immediately arise to take their place. New business elites are always in the process of emerging, fueled by the knowledge and incentives generated by the market system, and they are well positioned to affect political decisions at the local, county, state, national, and international levels. By contrast, citizens’ organizations have much more trouble achieving even the levels of solidarity and knowledge required to have an impact on a local scale. When a citizens’ organization collapses, the process of replacing it is long and arduous.
Surveying the contemporary scene, some intellectuals have declared authentic democracy a thing of the past. In doing so, they ratify the despair of the numerous citizens who no longer see any point in participating in political life. I prefer the outlook of people like Jackie, Broderick, Dave with the shades, Karl with the PowerPoint, Renée in the Astrodome, and Sisters Pearl and Christine in the Rio Grande Valley. They all act as if democracy is fragile and endangered, but not dead. The example they set shows us what it looks like.
The evidence for democracy’s vitality can be found mainly at the grass-roots level, where decent citizens like these are still organizing themselves and winning occasional victories against the odds. These people are below the radar screen, because the media would rather show us the woman in her housecoat, scrubbing her family’s clothing in a muddy backyard. It remains to be seen how far such organizations as
Jeremiah and Houston MTO can be made to reach and how profound their effects might be. If we knew that citizens’ organizations cannot be made to reach very far and that they will never be able to address the basic issues of plutocracy and militarism, then I would be inclined to add my signature to the obituaries now being written for democracy. But we do not know this.
What we know about the successes that citizens have achieved through democratic organizing provides soil in which democratic hope can take root. What we do not know about the future limits of such organizing provides room in which that hope can come to flower. It is in the interest of ruling elites for the rest of us to assume that democratic organizing is a hopeless endeavor. It is in the interest of the people as a whole to believe that there is hope in becoming organized. Democratic politics is one of the areas of human life in which wagering that something is possible can be an essential step toward achieving it.
The danger that plutocracy poses to democracy in our time is increasingly apparent to everyone who is paying attention. This much is clear, however: if democracy does survive, it will be because numerous citizens cooperate in a selfconscious attempt to save it. To achieve the requisite cooperation with one another, citizens will have to assume that saving democracy by democratic means is at least possible.
Why should we think that the same citizens whose gullibility, docility, discord, and fear permitted the current political crisis to develop are capable of joining forces in

9 sufficient numbers to keep corporate, governmental, and cultural elites from exercising power arbitrarily? One reason is that citizens with similar flaws are getting their acts together in New Orleans, Houston, and the Rio Grande Valley. Another reason is that citizens with similar flaws achieved great reforms in the past. Among those reforms are the abolition of slavery and the defeat of legalized racial segregation. Among the citizens who made these reforms possible were inspirational (but flawed) leaders like Abraham
Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.
A lot of people are sitting on their hands, waiting for the next Lincoln or King to come along and inspire them. But politics that comes from the hero down is more likely to result in either fascism or inert concern than in democracy. We forget that before King emerged as a public figure, Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of a bus; and before she did that , she attended a citizenship school run by Septima Clark and Myles Horton. It took a lot of face-to-face organizing to build the political infrastructure of the civil rights movement, and it took no less to do the same for the abolition of slavery.
We denizens of the universities pay lip service to democracy. But are we doing any better than the Today Show? Have we taught the history of democratic reform in a way that might inspire our students to act? Do we behave as if that legacy were alive? In our politics, we put the cart before the horse, and then neglect to feed the horse. Where are our citizenship schools? When was the last time we went out into the communities we live in to ask the sorts of questions that Renée and Broderick asked in the Astrodome?
We want democratic results to appear miraculously, like fast food, without our participation and effort. We are like farmers who curse the dirt and pray for rain, but neither plow their fields, nor spread seed upon the earth.