The Long View of Elder Activists: Their Vision of a More Just Society Keeps Them Going
This article originally appeared in Southern Exposure Vol. 13 No. 2/3, "Older Wiser Stronger: Southern Elders." Find more from that issue here.
Modjeska Simkins, 85-year-old social justice activist, serves on the board of the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice (SOC) which I co-chair. She has arrived at some of our meetings after an all-night bus ride more alert than any of our other members, most of whom are in their thirties. She brings something very special. It's not so much stories of her activities that date back 65 years; she's so deeply involved in current activities in Columbia, South Carolina, that you don't hear those unless you press her during a break.
What she brings is a long view. I remember the mid-November 1984 SOC meeting when all of us, in deep dejection, were discussing Reagan's reelection. Modjeska looked at us and said, "Brothers and sisters, we're fighting the same rascals we've always fought. We just have to work harder. I can always look through muddy water and see dry ground ahead." Suddenly, the November 6 election did not seem like the end of the world.
I recently interviewed a number of elderly activists who have worked for social change all their lives. I wanted to know how the world, life, and social issues look from their vantage point. The common denominator characterizing them all is that long-view perspective typified by Simkins's remark. Something — perhaps their vision of a better and more just society — has kept them going, through discouraging times as well as good. They do not stop just because they pass some birthday milepost. As long as their health permits, they keep on keeping on.
In her bedroom, Modjeska Simkins still keeps an old mimeograph machine she bought in 1944. "Sometimes I get mad about something in the middle of the night, get up and do a stencil and have a letter or a leaflet ready the next morning," she says. Her days of activism began in 1917 when she joined South Carolina's first NAACP branch as a college student; and they continue today through her involvement with a variety of organizations. The Richland County Citizens Committee she heads deals with issues of justice for blacks, but she is also active in women's groups, peace organizations, the ACLU, and a coalition working against the death penalty. Twice since she turned 65 she has run for public office — "not to win," she says, "but just so those other cats couldn't avoid the issues." In 1966 she came within 10 votes of winning a seat on the city council.
When she was a child, someone told her never to close her eyes until she had learned "something new and special" during the day. "I never forgot that," she says. "No matter how tired I am, whether I'm coming in from a long trip or a meeting, I read something — not just the newspaper, but something that will be a special addition to my intelligence."
At an age when many start thinking of slowing down, Myles Horton rebuilt an institution. He was 56 when the state of Tennessee destroyed Highlander Folk School at Monteagle, Tennessee, to which he had devoted his life. It was the 1950s; hysterical anti-communism merged with fear of the civil rights movement, and Highlander was one of the victims (see Southern Exposure, Spring 1978). Horton simply began anew, started a new center in Knoxville, and 10 years later when he was 66 opened the Highlander Research and Education Center, which thrives today in New Market, Tennessee.
About that time, Horton retired as Highlander's director so younger staff could take over. "I tried to organize something we called the Mountain Elders," he recalls. "But it didn't work. I learned that when people get older they usually keep doing what they've done before. So the people who wanted to be active on social issues were too busy to be part of Mountain Elders. And the people who had not been active earlier in their lives weren't inclined to get active just because they were older."
Now approaching 80, Horton is busy extending his special approach to adult education into the international arena. He conducts tours of socialist countries — China, Cuba, the Soviet Union, now Nicaragua — and runs them like Highlander workshops, with everybody studying, learning, and returning home to share new insights in their own communities. He also spends time teaching and meeting with college students.
"I learned a long time ago," he says, "that anytime you work with only one segment of society, it's very limiting. You don't come in contact with the potential of other groups. So I always worked with everybody I could — all ages, races, sexes. I've decided this approach shouldn't change just because you are older."
Nannie Washburn, who lives in Atlanta and is now 85, says a similar thing in a different way. The daughter of white sharecroppers in Georgia, Washburn began work in a textile mill at age nine, became a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s, marched for civil rights in the '60s, and joined youth 40 years her junior in the "new" communist movements of the '70s. "I don't think older people should be segregated off," she says. "We've got older people starving today, but younger people are hungry, too, because they don't have jobs. We need better health care for older people and for everyone. I've outlived two of my children because they died of cancer. If they'd leave all that war preparation alone and put money into research, maybe we could solve the cancer problem. I'd like to see thousands of people of all ages marching on Washington again."
Long-time activist and poet Don West also built a new institution in his elder years, the Appalachian South Folklife Center at Pipestem, West Virginia. Also the child of Georgia sharecroppers, West worked in the unemployed and union movements of the '30s and was fired from a teaching job in the '40s for his radical activities. When he and his wife finally found jobs in Maryland, they lived 10 years on one salary while saving money from the other for their long-held dream of an Appalachian center. Now 78, West gives poetry readings to raise funds for the center, and each year introduces hundreds of young people to the "progressive traditions" of the mountain South through the center's summer camps, work programs, and annual folk festival.
Recently, West read poetry to elderly citizens in Hinton, West Virginia, and they asked him if he belonged to a senior citizen organization. "I told them I guess I had never thought of myself as elderly," he says. "The most important thing is to work with young people. They face terrible problems; they need to know their history, know they can organize and change things."
Hosea Hudson, an early organizer of steelworkers, also concentrates his energies today on youth. He left Birmingham in the dark of night in 1951 when Police Commissioner Bull Connor ordered all "radicals" arrested, and for years he came back only under cover of darkness. That's all changed now. Hudson, still an active member of the Communist Party, often visits Birmingham these days, and in 1980 Mayor Richard Arrington gave him a key to the city and proclaimed February 26 "Hosea Hudson Day." In his years of exile from the South, Hudson lived in Brooklyn and later in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where his proudest achievement was helping black young people form a self-help organization. Hudson has now moved to Florida and hopes to continue his work with young people there.
"We are living in new times," says the 87-year-old Hudson. "The robots are doing the work, and there are no jobs for young people. If we are going to save humanity, we've got to save our young people — first and foremost black young people, get them off the streets and into organizations. That is what I think older people should be doing, going into neighborhoods, holding meetings, teaching history, helping young folks learn to struggle."
Another veteran of Birmingham's labor Movement, Charlie Wilson, is back in the Birmingham area trying to organize elderly groups. Blacks are joining, but not many whites. Now 76, Wilson is still convinced of the necessity of black-white unity, a lesson he learned long ago when he worked in a zinc mine in Tennessee where he grew up. "Things have improved since the late '40s," he says, "but there is still so much bias among the whites. They don't want to be in organizations with blacks. Some of them were in unions with blacks, but I guess they never really changed. Now that they're retired, they figure they don't have to do that anymore. But senior citizens won't get anywhere until we overcome that. We'd never have had a union if it had not been for the blacks. They were the ones who joined first and stuck with it when the going was toughest."
Robert Everett of Nashville is yet another union leader who now works full-time in community activity. “I’ve just retired from getting a paycheck,” he says. At 64, he leads youth activities in the church, and works with the local NAACP which he once served as president, as well as with the Tennessee Hunger Coalition and Tennesseans for Fair Taxation. He’s also a moving force in Nashville Communities Organized for Progress (see story on NCOP on page 88).
“We have all ages in NCOP and both races,” Everett says. “We all work together. That’s what makes us strong.”
Two long-time activists who died in recent years perhaps personify most clearly the life of social commitment that can be halted only by death. One was Claude Williams, a radical in the social gospel tradition whose political activity began in the 1930s (see Southern Exposure, Winter 1974 and Fall 1976). During the ’60s and ’70s, his home in Alabaster, Alabama, near Birmingham, became a center of activity on both local and national issues and a mecca for young Alabama activists. Williams kept working until the very day before he died in 1979 at age 84.
“His big thing was unity,” recalls Scott Douglas, a young community organizer in Birmingham. “He understood things the rest of us are only beginning to know now. He always tried to bring progressive forces together — this was back before the Coalition of Conscience, and most radicals were building their own turf.
Claude would ask people from various groups over to help him move a piece of furniture. The furniture could have been moved by one group or maybe it didn't even need moving. He was trying to get people together to talk."
And then there was Jim Dombrowski, who stood firm under 40 years of attack for his work against segregation. He retired at age 69 because of crippling arthritis, but proceeded to build a new career as an outstanding artist and never ceased his social activism (see Southern Exposure, July/August 1982). My favorite picture of him shows him on crutches marching in support of striking poultry workers in Laurel, Mississippi, in 1980. He was 83.
I went to New Orleans to visit Jim a few days before he died at age 86. It was April 1983, and many of us were working on the March on Washington for Jobs, Peace and Freedom scheduled for that August. That was all Jim wanted to talk about, and before I left, he was calling the hospital nurses into his room to tell them why they should join that march.
Once an organizer, always an organizer. Veteran social justice activists enter their older years with personal equipment not usually possessed by people who have not been in involved in this kind of work. They long ago committed themselves to a job that has no stopping point — the remaking of society — and therefore for them there can be no question of "what can I do when I retire." Their very view of the world includes a belief in the possibility of a society based on cooperation rather than cut-throat competition among various groups of people. Their philosophy, no matter what ideological label they put on it, is likely to tell them that there is no way the problems of one group can be solved in isolation from those of other groups. Thus they are not likely to view the issues lacing older people as separate from those confronting other victims of social injustice. And they've struggled long enough to know that one defeat does not end a war, that long and tedious work by a few always precedes the upsurge of a mass movement, and that victories making life better for great numbers of human beings can be won when people lay aside their differences to act in unison.
Whether they choose to put their energies into organizations concentrating on issues of the elderly or into multi-issue groups, these older activists are invaluable to current social justice movements. They've also lived long enough to learn that they don't know everything and to appreciate the special contribution that each succeeding generation of youth brings to the ongoing social struggle. Every elder activist I interviewed stressed a desire to work with young people.
All of this suggests that the most effective way to address the special problems of aging is to make issues primarily affecting elders an integral component of a multi-issue program that calls for new social and economic relationships which put the needs of people first. Young people need to understand that social policies that neglect the aging also threaten them, just as older activists understand that young people who can't find jobs are their problem.
At this moment in time, our society is so compartmentalized that special organizations focusing on the elderly are obviously essential; without them, the problems of aging people would be neglected. But those of us who understand how divisions weaken our collective power must take as our goal the development of intergenerational organizations and movements, where the old and the young can draw strength from each other. This is the way we can struggle effectively to change society. At the same time, we will be creating a place to live and work now that is a microcosm of the society we seek — a place where human differences are appreciated and where an injury to one is an injury to all.
Lucille Thornburgh
For 40 years, beginning in the 1930s, Lucille Thornburgh worked as a union organizer and labor journalist. When she reached senior-citizen age, she turned her energy and organizing skills to fighting the battles of the elderly. "When I was a working woman, I was active in the labor movement," she explains. "Now that I'm a senior citizen, I'm in the senior-citizen movement."
She organized the 350-member Knoxville chapter of the National Council of Senior Citizens (NCSC), now one of the most effective senior organizations in the South. She's also on the national NCSC board. A typical week may find her at a national senior convention one day and the next day handing out leaflets at a Knoxville shopping center urging support for tax reform in Tennessee.
In 1979, Thornburgh helped organize the Tennessee Valley Energy Coalition (TVEC), which fights for affordable utility rates and on other issues. And she and others in her NCSC chapter are active in SICK (Solutions to Issues of Concern to Knoxvillians) which is working to get Tennessee's sales tax on food removed. (See story on TVEC and SICK on page 40 and Southern Exposure, January/February 1983).
"We in NCSC bring a lot to a coalition," she says. "That's 350 more members they've got, and our people are active. But as much as they need us, we need them. NCSC tells us to join every coalition we can. We can't win justice for older people by ourselves."
Now in her seventies, Thornburgh grew up in Knoxville and got her first taste of unionism when she worked in a textile mill for six dollars a week. She joined the 1934 nationwide textile strike, lost her job, continued organizing as a volunteer, was elected vice-president of the Tennessee Federation of Labor in 1937, and later joined the AFL's Southern organizing staff. Until 1970 she was associate editor of a labor newspaper in Knoxville.
"The labor movement is a great training ground," she explains. "You learn that if you believe in something you have to stand up for it, whether it's on a picket line or writing letters."
She says many people who joined Knoxville NCSC, especially women who never worked outside their homes, lacked the skills for social action. "Many of them had never written a member of Congress, didn't know how to approach a legislative body, or speak on their feet," she says. "Now our members do all these things."
Thornburgh says she herself was a "timid shy girl" when she got involved in the labor movement 50 years ago. "But I learned to speak out and got more confidence in myself," she says. "I think the labor movement does that for people. Now I feel it's my job to put all I've learned to work to try to make life better for older people."
Aaron Henry
Aaron Henry, a long-time Mississippi activist, was 49 years old when he began working for the rights of older people. "I see this as another extension of my civil rights activity," he says today at age 63. "There are two groups of people we need to be especially concerned about — children and older people. I've fought for Headstart and other things for children, and I fight for a better life for older people."
Henry says he has found that the United States is not nearly as sensitive as many other nations in the world to the needs of the elderly. "Countries like Sweden and Norway, and like Red China, for example, care a lot more about older people," he points out. "And so do the American Indians. They respect their elderly people and are concerned for their needs."
Henry was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where he still lives. As a young World War II veteran, he joined the NAACP, became president of his local branch in 1953 and of the state conference in 1960, a position he still holds. He was involved in the civil rights battles of the 1960s and beyond, and since 1979 has been a member of the state legislature. "We've seen lots of changes, but we've got a long way to go," he notes.
Henry became actively involved in issues affecting older people when he was invited to the White House Conference on Aging in 1971. "A group of us were concerned because the needs of blacks weren't on the agenda," he recalls. "We formed a caucus and considered going across the street to Lafayette Park and holding a Black House Conference." But Arthur Flemming, former chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission who was presiding at the conference, persuaded the blacks to stay, made room for their concerns, and out of that came the National Caucus and Center for the Black Aged, which has grown to a membership of 60,000. Henry serves as chair of its board and as its representative on the Federal Council of the Aging.
"Our concern is that black elderly get what they are entitled to under the programs that do exist," Henry says. "More than 50 percent of black Americans over 65 live below the poverty level. The same discrimination that deprived them of good education and job opportunities all their lives hits them all over again."
This concern, Henry says, is not just for economic survival for the elderly. "Elderly people should have a voice in planning what is to be in their communities," he emphasizes. "We should not put older people in a rocking chair. It's a matter of human dignity. This is part of trying to make this a better society, a society that cares about its people. It should be the concern of all people — young, old, and in-between."
Johnnie Carr
Johnnie Carr celebrated her seventy-sixth birthday in January 1985. She says she is so busy with community work, and efforts to keep the clock from turning back on civil rights, that she never even thinks about advancing age. She's the president of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), which grew out of the Montgomery bus boycott in the 1950s and is still struggling for justice in that city.
"We're not in the news now as we once were," she says, "but we are working all the time. People come to us with their problems, and there are so many problems. Cases of police brutality, and the whole jobs question for young people."
Today, Carr is on the national board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and she recently worked on the march and rally commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery voting-rights march. About 10,000 people participated in some part of the 1985 march, which started in Selma and ended in Montgomery four days later. "We wanted to inspire young people to renew the battle, and I think we did," Carr says.
Carr, who worked as an insurance agent in her younger years, became active in community work and civil rights early through the local civic league, the PTA, and, in the late 1930s, the NAACP. For years before the Montgomery bus boycott, she and Rosa Parks alternated as secretary of the local NAACP branch and secretary of the youth council.
She once thought that by the 1980s things would have changed enough so that "we could sit down and catch our breath. It hasn't happened," she laments. "We've made some changes, yes, but there's so much yet to do. And now it seems we're being pushed back. Some whites we once considered moderate are now on the other side."
Carr is disturbed by the special problems facing older people; but she has not found organized senior-citizen groups in Montgomery an effective channel through which to work. "One problem," she explains, "is that many people in senior groups were never active on important issues before they retired, because they were afraid of losing their jobs. Some said they'd get active after they retired, but that rarely happens.
"I tell younger people, 'Don't wait until you are retired, get active now, and then it will just come naturally to keep on as you get older.' I'm going to keep working against injustice as long as I'm physically able. When I get to the point I can't work anymore, I want to feel I've done all I could possibly do."
Bea and George Wolfe
Ten years ago there were no social justice or peace movements in Sarasota, Florida, nor had a picket line ever been formed in the city. Today, public meetings against the arms race attract several hundred people, support flourishes for farmworkers organizing in Florida, picket lines appear in protest against the death penalty, and a chapter of the Gray Panthers makes itself very visible.
Who's responsible for the change? "It's a number of people like us," says George Wolfe, who moved here in 1975 with his wife Bee. "It's people who came here to spend their later years but could not 'retire' from issues that had concerned them most of their lives."
"Our activities for civil rights and peace were always the most important part of our lives," Bee explains. "We just transplanted that part of ourselves here and started out with new people."
Bee, now 71, was the rebellious daughter of a prominent Atlanta family, which threatened to disown her when she became a radical activist. As a young social worker just out of the University of Chicago, she visited Highlander Folk School and met Jim Dombrowski. "I found a beautiful new world of cooperation," she recalls.
George Wolfe, who is now 80, came from Lithuania, grew up in Massachusetts, and was also a social worker. They married in 1941 and moved to the Washington, DC, area where they took part in social justice movements for three decades.
In Washington, both were active in the Gray Panthers and in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which welcomes men. In Sarasota, they found a few other former WILPF members; together they created a branch. This group has now grown to about 100 members and has generated Sarasota movements against the death penalty, farmworker support, and a larger Coalition for Survival, which works against the arms race.
In the mid-'70s, the Wolfes also assembled about 30 people of all ages, invited national Gray Panther leader Maggie Kuhn to visit, and launched the Sarasota Gray Panther chapter. It now has about 135 members working on national issues and local problems such as inadequate health services and public transportation. The Wolfes chose the Gray Panthers to work with because they see this group as more oriented to grassroots local action than other elderly groups and because it seeks members of all ages.
Along with other retirees, the Wolfes have tried to bridge many divisions — between native residents and migrants, old and young, white and black. They visit college and high school groups (and find students delighted to meet active older people) and take up issues that affect the entire community. The Gray Panthers, for example, were the catalysts in developing a Coalition on Quality Education, which worked successfully to pass a school tax desperately sought by young parents.
Although they belong to organizations that are mostly white, both Bee and George have worked within viable coalitions with blacks (who comprise 8 percent of the city's population). For example, they fought the closing of a health clinic and the closing of a magnet school in the black community.
The Wolfes intensely dislike the term "senior citizen." "It sounds so stuffy and condescending," Bee says. "You don't have junior citizens," George comments. They prefer the term "elders" because it implies tradition and respect. For them, adding organizations of the elderly to their lifelong commitments is a logical extension. "With more people living longer, older people are a very important force in our society," George says.
"To me, it's a matter of empowerment," Bee says. "I watch the elderly people coming into our Panther meetings — alert, with their pencils ready to take notes, ready to act, knowing they can be effective. It's a beautiful thing to see."
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Anne Braden
Anne Braden is a long-time activist and frequent contributor to Southern Exposure in Louisville, Kentucky. She was active in the anti-Klan movement before and after Greensboro as a member of the Southern Organizing Committee. Her 1958 book, The Wall Between — the runner-up for the National Book Award — was re-issued by the University of Tennessee Press this fall. (1999)