An interview conducted in 1991 and published in Detroit Lives, a collection of interviews compiled and edited by Robert H. Mast, Temple University Press, 1994 [at <http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1016_reg.html>]. Posted on this web page with permission from Robert H. Mast.
Marian Kramer is the president of the National Welfare Rights Union and co-president of the national Up and Out of Poverty Now! campaign. She's a Louisiana native with a long history of activism in the civil rights struggles in the South.
In the late '60s I worked for the West Central Organization [WCO] in Detroit. It was a community-based organization modeled after the Alinsky style of organizing. It was in the Wayne State University area, around Grand River and Trumbull, where urban renewal was happening. I was one of the people who was heavily involved in the fight to save that community, and make sure that the city, state, and federal governments respected the community's plans. It taught me how to be a community organizer.
Around 1967, folks like General Baker and Glanton Dowdell who worked at Dodge Main started coming around to WCO. Dowdell painted the Black Madonna, that beautiful picture that hangs in Reverend Cleage's Shrine of the Black Madonna on Linwood. They were putting out leaflets from DRUM [Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement].
We also had started to read The Inner City Voice [ICV]. I got recruited to help type up articles for the paper and started hanging out at the ICV office on Grand River across from the Trade Union Leadership Conference. The printers in the city refused to print the ICV. They'd get the "blue flu." So a decision was made to take over The South End, Wayne State's student newspaper, and continue to get the word out concerning the situation at the plants, the communities, and the students in the inner city of Detroit. Some of our people enrolled at school and became staff of the paper. People all around wanted to read the paper. Women like Cassandra Smith, Edna Watson, Dorothy Duberry, Diane Bernard, and Gracie Wooten played tremendous roles in the paper. We were forceful, but we were played down.
We were not the typical women in the NOW movement. A lot of us got pulled into the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and we were its backbone. But male supremacy was rampant and we never got proper credit. We were always in the streets, fighting urban renewal, organizing against slum landlords, forming tenants' unions, protecting people against police brutality, and so forth.
Alot of the men in DRUM were catching hell from their wives for participating in the struggles. The wives were concerned about their husbands being fired. General Baker and others formed a committee to politicize and get the wives involved in the fight. There were people like Arleen, Gracie, Cass Smith, myself, Edna Watson. We endured a lot of name calling and had to fight male supremacy. Some would call us the IWW: Ignorant Women of the World. I was thought of as one of the grouchiest women. In meetings we attended to form a Black liberation party, there was debate [as to] where the struggle had to be. One faction said that the focus should be in the plants, at the point of production. I said, "Yes, but all those men got to come back into the community; they live somewhere. We've got to be organizing in both places."
A lot of social struggles were right there in the community. Women had developed a lot of skills and were becoming central in the organizations. We asked, "Why is it that we always get the work and get shit upon in the process?" Also, a lot of Black women were getting into the plants and into the union. We thought that women should have been on the executive board of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.
The city of Detroit was increasing the rent of people in public housing. In 1969 some people in the Jeffries projects came to my house and asked me to help organize the tenants against rent increases. On a Sunday we had a big meeting and we decided to do a rent strike. We forged a unity between the seniors and youth. Ron Scott, who was in the Panthers, lived in the projects. We set up a picket line and used the young people from the Panthers and the League to help man it. We spread to Brewster. The city gave some concessions. It did not raise the rent and it formed tenants' councils in the projects. They still have those councils, but they've been co-opted. Some people who serve on the councils are nothing but lackeys for [Mayor] Coleman Young. Some people who were active in the housing struggles of that time now have been coopted into city government and are people we had to confront last year [1991] when we pitched Tent City. They get bribed.
I love my history in the sense that I had the opportunity to participate in the development of a Marxist-Leninist party in the '70s. It came off from lessons I learned from my involvement in the community, in welfare rights, and all that stuff. I treasure thal I was asked to sit on the preparatory committee to struggle out the party's line. I had never studied like that before in my life. I never learned to read real good in school. But I have learned to read real good in dealing with the "science" and dealing with my community involvement. In those preparatory groups you could see a lot of those people were all armchair revolutionaries, just studying the stuff so they could be popular at the time. But this was life and death for me. I wanted a future for the child I had birthed and for the many kids that we were taking care of at the time.
Then I got requested by Beulah Sanders, a former president of the National Welfare Rights Organization--I had met her in '65 at the Poor Peoples' Conference in Syracuse, New York--to help to reorganize the organization. She had seen one of our comrades at a meeting, and she liked the way the young man blew. She said, "We need folks like you to help us."
I was known then as being part of the Communist Labor Party. I was working constantly to organize welfare rights. Some of the old welfare rights women tried to do some red-baiting on me. Beulah said, "I wouldn't care what she is. If there's anybody that's helped build this organization historically and now, it's been Marian. If I hear that any more, and using that as an excuse to cover up the fact that you are not doing anything, then I'm gonna kick your ass."
I was on public assistance at the time. Working with women like Beulah and the others helped me deepen my development. These were the true fighters. These women stood in the forefront. They always were willing to give up more than what they had. They only had a welfare check. They always were willing to fight for decent child care as a support mechanism for people who are working. They fought for education. They nurtured a movement. I learned a lot. I was always in and out of the welfare offices. I went to New York for two and a half years and found myself being back in a network of welfare rights people.
It was time to come back to Detroit. General Baker and I got married. I started working directly with Westside Mothers, a welfare rights organization. We started grinding in and taking positions against workfare programs. We studied around that and looked at workfare as a program that was used in the economic ebb and flow. It was a slave program. We organized at least ten organizations throughout the county, helped throughout the state, and rekindled connections around the nation. In the mid-'80s we held a national conference in Chicago against workfare. The "advocates"--those who had been making money off the backs of people living in poverty--felt that they were better equipped intellectually to determine how the conference should be set up and what direction it should go in. We were sick and tired of them. They had taken the bribe of the '60s. Our thing was, that the victims of poverty should take over the boards and determine their destiny. A split took place.
Some women from Boston went back and started a campaign "Up to the Poverty Line." It started with six organizations and developed into ninety. But some said that our children are hungry now, we are homeless now, our kids need an education now, we need to be talking about up and out of poverty now, not tomorrow. There was a three-pronged approach: the streets, the courts, and the legislature. Some of us wrestled the question about who should lead the fight around hunger in this nation. We set up the foundation to reorganize the National Welfare Rights Organization. We held our first meeting at Georgetown University in 1987 and named our organization the National Welfare Rights Union. I was elected president. At the board meeting in Ohio in 1988 we decided that we were going to join a national Up and Out of Poverty campaign.
There was a joining together of activists in welfare, hunger, and homelessness. In July 1989 we had a summit in Philadelphia with over 500 people. Annie Smart said the theme had to be Up and Out of Poverty Now. We had representation from the Black Belt of the South through Albert Turner, Wendell Parrish, Jerome Scott, Annie Smart, Vernon Bellecourt, and many others. We put on a $90,000 conference with $11,500 seed money. Even with the heavy budget cuts here, Michigan came with a busload of people. Local groups played a hell of a role: Michigan Welfare Rights, the Homeless Union, Cass Church, Local 600 and General Baker, Flint United WRO [Welfare Rights Organization], groups in Lansing, Ann Arbor, and others.
We took this thing to the streets in Detroit. There was a media blackout, so in October last year we took over Channel Four and the Detroit News. Sixteen of us were arrested. We needed a coalition to maintain our campaign of Up and Out of Povertv.
The women I've had the good fortune to work with in the homeless movement, the welfare movement, the trade union movement, etc., have understood one thing: in order for our children to have a future we've got to eliminate poverty in this country. We've got to participate politically in this fight. We've got to run the victims themselves for public office.
The purpose of our survival summit is to debate how we can bring those various sections of the working class together around a common agenda: the question of survival, the question of coming up and out of poverty. Even though we understand our differences, the more and more we fight together to come up and out of poverty, the more and more we will become one. This working class has to cease fighting within itself and become a working class to fight for itself.
We've had several survival summits in the South. We've had a youth survival summit in Minneapolis. We've had many survival summits, and every one has been a jubilee. In May we had one of the most profound things that took place in this country: a poor women's survival convention. Over forty-seven cities alone in California were represented in Oakland. Two busloads came out of southcentral Los Angeles. The significance of this is that we had just gone through the L.A. rebellion. These women from southcentral LA had never participated outside their community. The Bloods and the Crips have been fighting each other for twenty-two years. The young women who came to the poor women's convention said, "Before we came here, we were gang-banging each other. Now we've learned we've been gang-banging the wrong people. We got to gang-bang this government from now on." They are determined to be a part of this fight. People are doing things all over this country. These young people represent our future.
We're understanding politically that this working class is in motion. Even the National Organization for Women reached their hand out to us and for the first time we participated in their march, at the front, and had a meeting with their national board.
Here in Michigan we've been through some struggles. We've fought the legislature, the executive, the judicial. They all turned against us. Both the Democrats and Republicans ripped 90,000 people off the welfare rolls. We put Tent City up. We exposed the city of Detroit for not fixing up public housing. The city spent over $2,000,000 in homeless shelters and warming centers last year rather than in public housing. Diane Bernard designed the program Operation Michigan Storm, coming off Desert Storm. We said there's a storm raising in this country and we were forced to be a part of this army because of our economic plight. We didn't declare this war, but damn it we're going to carry it to its fulfillment. So we fought Coleman Young and fought Lansing over Tent City and won a court case.
Back in June, I was a speaker at a meeting of the National Organization for Women. The question of a third party came out of their conference. They've been working on this Twenty-first Century thing. Even though we're gonna fall out with them sooner or later, they want a change in this country. They've done a tremendous thing this year in trying to get women elected. We've seen the need to elect the victims, and we're still doing that.
There's got to be a party that's going to spearhead the general strike. One part of it can be electoral, but it's gotta be the fighting in the streets. People are not talking about no Republican Party, or no Ron Dellums, or no Twenty-first Century Party. They want a party of a new type. We represent the revolutionary section. I did not come I to that conclusion by myself, because I don't claim to be nobody that's original. It's through collective analysis and theory.
<http://www.africa.utoledo.edu/poverty/marian.html> -- Yoshie
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