"We Should Be the Government": An Interview with Gwen Patton

Gwen Patton is field director of the Southern Rainbow Education Project in Montgomery, Alabama and a member of the Working Group on Electoral Democracy. This fall, she plans to run as an Independent against U.S. Senator Richard Shelby. She talked with Bob Hall about who owns the government.

How did you get involved in the fight for voting rights?

I really didn’t have a choice; my community work is a continuation of what my grandparents and my father were about. As a child, I lived in Inkster, Michigan — a factory town about 20 miles from Detroit. My father was instrumental in getting the town incorporated and fighting to get our streets paved, proper sanitation and so forth. So I grew up seeing the importance of government and its role in community development.

I learned that people have a right to engage their government, to be a part of it, to have high expectations. I also learned that it was my responsibility to stand up for the race and advance the cause; that was expected of me.

My brother and I spent our summers with our grandparents in Montgomery, Alabama. My father’s father was a building contractor and a financial supporter of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Because of that support, he could not get a line of credit from the bank, he couldn’t buy tools. So at age 13 or 14, I recognized that there was an economic component to this struggle. We needed the economic base my grandfather and other local black businesses provided, but it was vulnerable to attack from white financial circles. So already I was seeing the power of money and economic reprisal.

When did you start helping people register to vote?

During those summers, I would go around the neighborhood with my mother’s mother—I called her Mommy. She was the block captain and she taught people about the literacy form that had to be filled out when you registered. I’d go with Mommy and help people practice reciting the preamble of the Constitution and learn how to recognize the test questions just by their lengths.

Her goal was to get as many people as possible to go down and try to register. It wasn’t about actually getting registered. That hardly ever happened. It was about dispelling the fear and asserting the fact that we had a right to vote. Even though you weren’t successful, people were very proud of you. Everybody in the neighborhood would say, “Sister So-and-So went down and faced that nasty registrar. Yeah, she went down anyway.”

When my grandmother finally got her little piece of paper saying she was a voter, there was a great community celebration, a tea party; it was very fancy and dignified. It brings tears to my eyes even now. That was 1952 or ’53.1 guess I was nine or ten years old.

So voter registration was part of a larger effort to build people’s capacity as their own advocates?

Oh yes, very much so. Even today, a voter registration drive shouldn’t just be a mechanical exercise, signing cards. It’s part of basic citizenship training about understanding government’s role and your ownership of that government. People gain a sense of their rights, but also of their responsibility as the ones who should be the government.

It also teaches them perseverance so they don’t easily become discouraged. We fought for 400 years to move from three-fifths human with surrogates casting our votes, to full human beings with our own say-so. People understand the vote is their voice, it’s their franchise to full citizenship. It’s theirs, it’s a responsibility. It’s to be used to better their own lives and the life of their community.

How have you seen the power of money undercut that sense of ownership?

Once we got the vote, we began using the same practices that the whites used in elections — media advertisements, brochures, palm cards, and so on. It was very expensive and soon money became the criteria for who could run for office. In the 1970s, I began to see that money was closing out those who had been the real backbone of the movement. Part of the black middle class who had not been that involved became the candidates who benefited from the new black voters. They also showed a real arrogance toward the community. They know it all and want to speak as our surrogates, not as leaders. This gets compounded when they go to the Ivy League white schools and are trained to look down at their “clients” — in this case the voters.

That’s a heavy problem within the black community.

So money works to widen the gulf between the politician and the community. How has money fueled voter cynicism and apathy?

After a while, if you are discounted so much, then you withdraw from the process. People feel the arrogance of those monied politicians. The message is: “You are stupid, I have the knowledge.” You either internalize that or you rebel against it. Either way, it leads people away from the voting process. It’s the exact same thing that’s happening with kids dropping out of school. If I keep calling you stupid, pretty soon you’ll stop coming to me.

There’s another level: By accepting money as the success standard and with the cost of elections mushrooming, where do you go to get the money? You go to the special interests and to the big-time business people, and they say, “I’ll give you the money, but you’ll have to be for these policies.” So now the candidate who started out arrogant has to grovel before someone else who holds the money. Now they are the ones who get humiliated.

So money has discounted our vote and corrupted public service. It’s made a mockery of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. We must fight that; I keep saying we can’t let private money trample on the graves of those who died to make the vote the great equalizer. Citizens have yet to own the government. Money has always been attached — even the word “franchise” is an economic term. People died in the Revolutionary War — black, white, poor, rich, women, men — yet at the end, it was primarily white men with property who got the franchise.

What reforms should people push for?

I want the community to understand that we have to totally change this system. We can demonstrate in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley against the poisons, but we cannot expect Senator Bennett Johnston to pass any kind of useful regulation because he’s paid by the chemical and oil companies. It’s ludicrous. I don’t want to stop people from marching, but I want them to know that to win on issues we must take the money out of politics.

There are two things the Working Group on Electoral Democracy is pushing for. First, the “100 percent solution” says all private money should come out of campaigns. There should be citizen-financed elections for all Congressional races and eventually down to the local level. I think the cost of federal elections should be a line item in the budget. The continuation of our government requires this kind of investment. The standard should be “one person, one vote,” not “you must pay to play.”

Second, there ought to be automatic voter registration for everybody when they reach age 18. We have technology for doing that. The vote ought to come as easily as drinking water — and be just as life threatening without it. That goes back to the need for education and gaining that sense of ownership — this is our community, our municipal government, this is how it should serve us and we it. If we could build that organic relationship between people and their government, then I think we could have structural change.

Is the campaign to get private money out of politics gaining momentum?

I can give you several examples from Alabama. We just had a candidate for governor drop out, saying the high cost of running was turning politics over to the “money changers.” Over in Greene County, in the Black Belt, people want a referendum on taking money out of politics, and it would win. Here in Montgomery, the newspaper is listing all political contributors giving $500 or more, something they’ve never done before.

The money is out of control now. There’s no self-restraint. It will go on and on and on until it explodes. As it becomes exposed, we need good grassroots organizing so people don’t feel debilitated and withdraw. We have to be ready to work with mainstream people who are ahead of us on this issue. We can’t act as surrogates who think we know it all. We need to listen more as we also offer leadership.