TRNN show host Marc Steiner’s Rise of the Right series has followed the ascendance of far-right political forces domestically and internationally. In a special episode of The Marc Steiner Show, TRNN Editor-in-Chief takes the mic to put Marc in the hot seat. From a childhood in Baltimore among family members who had survived the Holocaust, Marc’s activism in the 1960s and 70s took him from the ranks of SNCC to organizing alongside the Young Patriots of the Black Panther’s Rainbow Coalition. Marc looks back on his life as an organizer and journalist, and how it frames his understanding of our present moment.

Studio / Post-Production: David Hebden

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here in The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you with us. And you know we’ve done a lot of programs here on The Rise Of The Right, and we’ll continue to do that. But something happened on the way to the forum and the Editor-in-Chief here is a guy named Max Alvarez, you’ve heard his work as well as seated, doing some great work, and he’s turned the tables. So I think he’s actually come into the studio today to take over my show. I have no idea what the hell he’s going to do, but something’s happening here. Max.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, thank you, Marc. Yes, and apologies to all of Marc’s incredible listeners. I am Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the Editor-in-Chief here at The Real News, and I am at least just for a day, sort of like a pirate boarding the ship. I wanted to commandeered the Marc Steiner show for an afternoon because, Marc, it’s an incredible honor and joy to get to work with you. Working with you is one of the reasons that I left my old job to come work at The Real News. People like you, Eddie Conway-

Marc Steiner:

Eddie.

Maximillian Alvarez:

… Justin Knorr, Lisa McCray, all the amazing folks who were here, that’s why I left, in the middle of a pandemic, a good job at the Chronicle of Higher Education to be the Editor-in-Chief here at The Real News Network. And the work that you do, the work that you’ve done over the course of your career is just legendary. And I’ve learned so much from it. And I’ve been really excited to see the development of these two key ongoing series that you are producing here on the Marc Steiner show. Namely, the Not In Our Name series which looks at a plethora of voices across the political spectrum, primarily voices across the Jewish diaspora, Jews in Israel, Europe, beyond, all speaking out against the occupation. And that’s an incredible series in its own right.

And it’s not unconnected to the other series that you’ve been doing on The Rise Of The Right which you of course started as a limited intense collaboration with our comrade and now Real News board member Bill Fletcher Jr. And if folks listening to this haven’t already, you should definitely go back into the Steiner Show catalog or the Real News Network podcast feed and find those original episodes from the beginning of The Rise Of The Right series that was co-hosted by Marc and Bill, because I think it’s really well done, really brilliant number of episodes.

The conversations were great. And I think it really gives us an important base to start with if we’re going to start anywhere in learning about what we’re up against right now when it comes to the right, and especially the far right. Where it comes from, how it works, how it draws people in, what its ideology is, what its goals are, how it achieves those goals through violence and different forums, so on and so forth. And so obviously in the course of doing that series with Bill Fletcher, you realize that there’s a whole lot more to talk about here. And so that’s why I’ve been really excited to see us extend The Rise Of The Right series on the Marc Steiner show to keep these conversations going. And you just published a new installment of this series which was an extended interview with the author Jeff Charlotte about his new incredible book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War.

And as soon as I knew that that book was coming out, I had earmarked it, I was like, I want to get him on Marc’s show because I got to get these guys in conversation. And I wasn’t wrong. That conversation was incredible. Both of you just brought so much to the table and I learned so much from that conversation. But I wanted to sit down with you to record a spiritual sequel to that conversation because the questions you were asking Jeff Charlotte were intense, provocative, generative. And Jeff just had so many amazing and insightful things to say in response.

But I could tell there was just so much experience in your background and the questions were coming from a place of experience as a veteran organizer who cut his teeth decades and decades ago. And you have kept that struggle going throughout your life, but you cut your teeth really in the era of the Civil Rights Movement, the Radical ’60s, the 1970s, organizing in communities, organizing within the labor movement and trying to bring right and left together, black and white together, Jews and Gentiles together. I’ve heard you say number of times on your show how important and fundamental that has always been to your organizing.

And so I thought it would be good and important and necessary to follow up on your interview with Jeff Charlotte and all the great Rise Of The Right installments that you’ve done so far in this series. And turn the tables a bit and get listeners to hear a little more about that experience in your background and how it informs your thinking about politics today. The right that we are confronting in the 21st century, the state of the world, and how we organize our way towards a better future. So that’s really why I roped you into this conversation. I’m very grateful to you for being game for it. And so I guess let’s hop into it. Maybe this will be the first of many conversations that we can have because you have just so much experience in this area. So I don’t want us to feel like we have to cover it all in one conversation.

But if this is the beginning of a single conversation or multiple conversations, I thought it would be important to start with just asking you about your pathway into organizing and what drew you to becoming someone who saw organizing and mobilizing people as just a fundamental part of your existence. Because I think most of us we’re just like, “I’m just going to worry about myself. I’m going to do what I got to do at work to get my paycheck. I’m going to go home. If there’s a problem in my neighborhood, I don’t know, maybe I’ll talk to my neighbors.” But there’s a very different mindset that you have as an organizer, as someone who sees problems in the world as fixable and as problems that can be fixed if you bring people in communities together. That’s a different way of understanding your place in the world than I think a lot of us have. So I wanted to ask where that commitment to organizing came from for a young Marc Steiner?

Marc Steiner:

It is my mother’s fault. It was in some ways. My mom was a Brit, drove an ambulance from World War II, pulling people out of the rubble and she crossed the color line early in segregated Baltimore and in segregated Britain in many ways. And so it really started when I was 13 and we were in Mondawmin Shopping Center, which is a shopping center on the west side of Baltimore that was a mostly Jewish shopping center.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It’s like two blocks from where I live now.

Marc Steiner:

And so we were there and looking over the railing and down below at the White Coffee Pot which was a chain of restaurants, there was a group of black students, turned out to be black students from Morgan State University, and a couple white people picketing the White Coffee Pot. So I asked my mother, “Can I join the picket line?” And she said, “All right, love. We’ll ask the picket captain. See what he says.” We went downstairs and introduced ourselves. My mother did. And he said, “Here.” Gave me a sign. I started picketing and from that day I was part of the Civic Interest Group which was like Baltimore’s arm of SNCC.

And they wouldn’t let me sit in until I was 16 because I was too young to get arrested, they thought, at 13, 14 years old. So they made me wait till I was 16 and I did get arrested a bunch of times. So that’s really where it began. And being at the foot of the brilliant Gloria Richardson who was the lead person organizing in Cambridge, Maryland. One of my greatest thrills is when I went to interview her years later, before she passed away, we have it on tape. And I went to and I told her I was in Cambridge, she said, “Oh, I remember you. You were that little white boy.”

So that’s where it started, was for me in the Civil Rights Movement, was there. But-

Maximillian Alvarez:

What as a little white boy made you want to join that picket line?

Marc Steiner:

A lot of things. One was Emmett Till and the pictures in Life and Look magazine, just his disfigurement. And knowing my parents, my mother especially, was very clear about there’s no difference between us. But we lived in a segregated world, that when I was 11 years old and that boy Scout troop… Well actually that’s where it really began, was because when I was 11, I became a boy scout. This might sound strange, but what happened was I was sitting at the… So like most white families, there’s a black woman who works in the home, domestic worker. Name was Mrs. Moselle Jackson. And she had a nephew whose name is Mr. Dennis Foster who would pick her up, take her home. And my mother and those two would’ve coffee and cake at the end of the day together all the time. And I ran downstairs to say, “Mom, I’m going to be 11 years old next week. I got to join the Boy Scouts.”

And so she said, “All right, love.” Went straight away. We’ll sign you up for Beth The Fellow which was the local synagogue troop. And I said, in my naivete, because I’ve been reading about Boy Scouts and brotherhood jamborees. And in my naivete I said, “I don’t want to be in a troop of Jewish kids. I want to be with lots of different people,” which didn’t exist. And so at the table, Mr. Foster said, “I’m a Scoutmaster, you can join my troop.” And my mother cocked her head and smiled and went, “Oh, that’s a lovely idea.” She knew exactly what that meant. So he picked me up that Monday and we drove from northwest Baltimore down to Warburg Junction through North Avenue, which is on the west side of town all the way to the east side of town on North Avenue to Ashland Avenue off of Broadway, which was a black working class neighborhood near Johns Hopkins Hospital.

And pulled up in front of the Faith Baptist Church, got out of the car and I [inaudible 00:12:11] has always been, I walked into the basement of the church and it was an integrated troop because I integrated the troop. So I became part of that world and several things began to happen, which led to the picket line. One was one day we were a bunch of guys in the car and he stopped to get donuts for everybody and all the boys pile out of the car. And I sat in the back and didn’t move. And I’ll never forget his words to me, he look back in the back of seat, said, “Marc, wherever we can go, you can go.” And I knew that wasn’t the case the other way around. Edwin Johnson, who became my best friend in the troop because we remained friends until he passed away, he had been a black panther.

He later became a city councilman. And we were really tight, he was an auto worker and we became best buddies. And I stayed at his house, he stayed at my house, we camped together and shared food together and several things happened. One was when I stayed at his house, in this row house, in a room with three or four brothers were sleeping together, heating grate, blaring the heat up to the house. I had never experienced something like that before. And when he came to my house, we slept in separate beds in my bedroom. And when I was at his house, the boys in the neighborhood accepted me. We were hung out and we played and did all kinds of stuff on the streets of East Baltimore, came to my place and the kids wouldn’t play with us. And we couldn’t go to the White Coffee Pot, we couldn’t go to the movie theater. We tried, they wouldn’t let us in. And so early on as a little boy, I began to realize this is pretty fucked up.

And I’d read about the Civil Rights Movement. And it was 1916, I read about all that stuff and the freedom writers and things. And so I saw that picket line and I said, “I want to be there.” And that started it. I gone through a lot of political changes over the years. Beliefs have changed. I joined the Young Socialist Alliance, which was a Trotsky group back when I was 15. And I joined [inaudible 00:14:24] Group, [inaudible 00:14:25] Party and I left them too. So I’ve had my Sojourns. Murray [inaudible 00:14:33] became a teacher of mine, who was a great anarchist thinker. I wandered my way through the left a lot, of different iterations. But that started me off. And as an organizer, it just came to me. I was in high school.

Before I was expelled from high school, a bunch of black and white guys I was friends with because I was a fuck-up. And so I ended up in B21 in 10th grade which was the lowest class you could be in academically. And there was this quarter of young guys in that class who were all pretty bright, but we all ended up in B21 and I said, “Let’s start a frat, our own frat.” And we called ourselves Beta Omega Beta, B-O-B, Bigotry or Brotherhood. And so we began the first interracial frat in Baltimore among high school kids. So it was just organizing, it became part of my DNA, was a young boy. And that’s where it began and then kept on rolling.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, you’ve mentioned things to this effect. So this is probably a leading question, but also a genuine one because as a person of color, mixed race, first generation Mexican American, but my mom’s white passing, I found talking to a lot of other white folks. And of course the generational difference does mean that the circumstances are quite different. But I have found that white people, white friends, folks that I’ve organized with, folks that I would call comrades, I feel like the ones who got it when it came to understanding how race impacted the lives of non-white people were the white friends who had some other Marc against them. They were poor or working class or they were immigrants from Romania. I had a friend Stefan [foreign language 00:16:57], his parents basically fled [foreign language 00:17:00]. But they had a different sense of their whiteness in Orange County, California than my native born white friends. If that makes sense?

Marc Steiner:

Yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So I bring all this up to say… And it’s come up in a lot of other registers. I was just interviewing an incredible woman, she’s a labor union organizer in Slovenia. But she talked about how the fact that her mother was Croatian meant that they were sort of second class citizens growing up in the 90s. And so she identified more with the Mexican experiences. And she’s told me as such. She’s like, “I would compare my experience to the Mexican-American experience in the United States. And it made sense to me.” I feel like you’ve mentioned that, you had cousins who survived the Holocaust, who would sit in your living room. Did the Jewish side of you, did that history play a role in feeling more identified with other downtrodden populations or identifying less with the non-Jewish white America?

Marc Steiner:

That’s interesting. Because when I was growing up and when my father grew up, we were separate and we lived in a separate neighborhoods. There were two Christian homes on my block and they were both older people who lived there before the Jews moved in. And they were the only Christians, non-Jews in the neighborhood, were the Shiksa that the men married. Shiksa being a Yiddish term for non-Jewish woman.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I only know that because I watched Seinfeld growing up.

Marc Steiner:

And the male part, the counterpart of that is Shegetz. So there were some shegetz and some shiksas there, as we used to say. But yes, look, in our living room, as example, my cousin [foreign language 00:19:06] who had… I remember because he was like this short, thick guy. Like you, thick. He was strong looking physically and he had this number right there in his right arm. And my cousin [foreign language 00:19:27], who had come, went to Israel and snuck into Palestine. She had numbers in her arm and I knew what they meant because I saw the pictures, I remember the pictures of people in concentration camps. And so that had a profound effect on me. There’s a reason why the vast majority of white Caucasian, however you want to say it, freedom riders were Jews because we grew up, that generation, in the Holocaust experience with our families.

I think that was a huge piece of it. And then the struggle around Israel, back when we were kids, we identified that as a struggle of liberation. We weren’t aware of what it was doing to the Palestinians. We just were aware that it was our liberation struggle after people tried to wipe us out. And so all that drove a lot of white Jewish people to be part of the Civil Rights Movement. That’s why, [foreign language 00:20:34] were Jews. And so it had a profound effect on me and many other people in my broad generation, people born from 1940 to 1950 who were involved in stuff because of that. And I knew people didn’t like us because we were Jews. I also knew that I had cousins… Some cousins, I won’t mention their names now because I don’t want to hurt their children.

But I had cousins who would use the term [foreign language 00:21:05], the black disease, and they were the business owners. And I realized the black guys I hung on the corner with… That’s another long term we’ll have to get into, but I became a corner boy. I was the white boy on the corner dressed in a jitterbug. And I remember the anti-Semitism among a lot of the young black guys I ran with in the street who hated Jews because in part because Christians didn’t like Jews, but also in part because there were too many Jewish store owners and landlords who are pieces of shit and not all of them, but enough that people in backend identify them as the Jews that we hate. So that just fueled people’s antisemitism even more. And it really got to me, it really tore me up and I got into more than one fight around that, physical fight.

Usually I ignored it, but sometimes I couldn’t. But all that complexity, I think that’s what probably drove me to join the Young Socialist Alliance because they were communists and there were a lot of Jews in it. The man who started it in Baltimore, Bob Kaufman was a real noted figure in this town for years as a lone radical out there. And Trotsky was a Jew, so it was very complex. Jews were also at the founding end of the NAACP. All of that was in there in my head. That the concentration camp stuff. And so for me it was just a natural of, I was always an outsider. And so to be in the Civil Rights Movement pushed me even further outside of most of the white world. But it was where I needed to be. And I learned so much from the older heads in the group, black folks and Jews who were part of the Civil rights movement.

I just learned so much and it just became part of my life. I was Chairman of the National Conference of Christians and Jews Brotherhood Youth Group, Co-chairman with a black guy whose name was Albert Bishop. And we put together the summer camp and we had to assign cabins, and we had these jokes between us about, “I’ll trade you two Jews for three through three Asians,” and to make sure the caves were mixed. All of that, was part of my world. And from a little boy on, Lebanon on, my world was just so deeply racially mixed.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and it makes me think of something that our departed brother, a longtime friend and comrade of yours, Eddie Conway-

Marc Steiner:

Eddie.

Maximillian Alvarez:

… Said in an interview once, I think it was with Bob Shearer, when Bob was asking him the blunt question of how did you do it? How did you survive 44 years wrongfully imprisoned? Which is I think the question that all of us wanted to ask Eddie at one point or another. And Eddie said something about developing his consciousness and holding onto that and holding it sacred to constantly be learning and lifting that consciousness and bringing your ability to see the world for what it is. And he mentioned that because once you raise your consciousness, they can never take that away from you.

Marc Steiner:

That’s right.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And he said they can break your spirit, but they can never take away your consciousness of your circumstances. And I mentioned that because I feel like for what I’m hearing from you and connecting it to the conversations that you have on this show week in and week out, is that you’ve spent your entire life in radio as a Community Organizer, even a Labor Organizer, right? Tenant organizer, right? But I feel like what we’re describing here as a fundamental part of who you are is trying to bring that consciousness to other people because you have seen and experienced from a young age how much better things can be if we stop fighting with each other over our racial differences, our religious differences.

If we actually work together, we can get so much farther in making the world a better place, not to sound hacky and cliche, but it really is that. Because I feel like that is the through line through so much of the conversations that you have is that I’ve seen it. I, Marc Steiner, have seen and witnessed how much better things can be when white and black, even people in the Panthers and the clan come together and are fused together through struggle to recognize who our real common enemies are and how to defeat them and do so in a way that improves life for all of us.

I feel like that experience, what you’ve witnessed, that consciousness has never left you. And so it’s the standard that you apply to everything that you see of how do we bridge these divides, how do we confront this, as you always say, and how do we do our best to apply those lessons that you’ve learned through hard scrabble experience to the political struggles that we’re facing today. I guess, is that off base or does that sound?

Marc Steiner:

No, I think that race and racism are some of the deepest points in American society that we have to confront and address. It destroys class unity, it destroys lots of things, but most of all, it destroys people of color. And it’s a really tough one. It’s hard to get beyond on a lot of levels. There’s so much distrust. On one hand, there’s so much distrust in let’s say the black world towards the white world. It’s also an openness that people completely miss all the time. You can overcome racism through group therapy sessions and shit like that. And yes, it can work, but it’s not the same as watching it and become part of it, being overcome through common struggle, begins to change perceptions, light bulbs go off in people’s head. Before I came here today, I was talking to my buddy Hy Thurman. Hy Thurman’s, one of the younger guys in the Young Patriot movement in Chicago.

Young Patriots were white guys from Appalachia and in Alabama and Mississippi who moved to Chicago and they were a gang. And out of that gang like the Young Lords and the rest, they created a political organization, as did the Young Lords, as did a number of other groups in Chicago. And I was talking to Hy about that. And look some of the people who ran the Young Patriots, who I became really, really tight with in the late ’60s because I met them at an SDS meeting and we hit it off because of our street thing, because most white guys in SDS were upper middle class and came from a different… Well, I did too, but it came from a world that wasn’t there. And our street corner thing is what got us tight. And then I realized that some of the guys who began the young Patriots had been in the clan.

I’m not talking on the periphery, I’m talking, were in the clan, like Doug Youngblood, who was the leader of the young Patriots. Bad mother fucker that he was and who had done time in the joint for manslaughter. But he and I just connected and I went to Chicago to spend time with him. And you saw these former Klansmen in meetings with the Black Panthers. And I’ll never forget this meeting, which actually is in one of the documentaries, I forget which one. It’s still there. When the leaders of the Panthers were there with this group of white folks from uptown Chicago and the embraced that took place knowing that they had been in a clan. And that was then, this is now. It’s like when I was a civil rights worker in Cambridge, Maryland and Baltimore.

But we had gone down the Mississippi a bunch of times for different various reasons, not necessarily to demonstrate, but for meetings and whatever else. And it was the two times that I got to be in close proximity to Fannie Lou Hamer, she’s almost important Americans that ever lived in my book, who had been beaten and tortured by the police and never stopped. But I happened to be there one day where there was something, I even forget what the gathering was, what was happening. And these white people were came in.

Maximillian Alvarez:

When was this?

Marc Steiner:

This is around 1965, maybe, six. Somewhere around there. I don’t remember the exact year. I can go back and grab my notes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No, just to give people a sense of the timeline.

Marc Steiner:

[inaudible 00:30:28]. And we were there in a gathering and I heard some people said to Fannie Lou, “You can’t let those people in here because they’re in the Klan.” And the response was something like, “Baby, look, once you been with us for a while and not be in the clan much longer.” And those are the kind of things that you have to really understand and put your hands around, that building a cross racial coalition is the only way we’re going to win. The only way we’re going to change things. It’s not easy work, but it can be done. And people do come over. Doug Youngblood always talked about that, about if you’re southern and white and poor, your natural populous instincts draw you to the clan or other groups like that.

But when you overcome that and that spirit goes a different way, it builds a power that is almost unstoppable when it begins. I saw it happen numerous times. I wasn’t part of the woodworkers or public workers in Alabama, Mississippi, but I had witnessed it and I was there a few times and I got to know a bunch of folks really well. Man, when you asked me to do this, I started going back to my old stuff. All this stuff is coming back from that time and those folks, if you can imagine with the two instances, two thing I mean. A, on the Mississippi, Alabama border, black and white workers coming together, they did backbreaking work.

Who got cheated all the time by these people who owned the forest and owned the mills. They would pay them by the stack and they would cheat them by saying, “Oh, that stack’s not that big. It doesn’t fit in there. She’s only getting half the money.” And these workers came together and I started googling this stuff when I thought we were going to talk today trying to find, are these guys who’s still alive from then? I want to find them and see where they are now.

Maximillian Alvarez:

We got to do a follow-up and record with them. But this is why I wanted to do this because I know you’ve got so much of that historical knowledge and experience. And frankly, I regret not getting to have these kinds of conversations with Eddie.

Marc Steiner:

Oh man.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Before he got sick. Granted, it was my first year at the Real News. We were scrambling to stay afloat. It was still during Covid-

Marc Steiner:

And who knew that Brother Eddie was going to get sick?

Maximillian Alvarez:

And who knew? But I regret it still and I don’t want to make that mistake ever again. I want to keep learning as much as I can from folks who’ve been in the movement for a lot longer than I have. Like you, like Bill Fletcher, like so many of the folks that you guys talk to on this-

Marc Steiner:

I love Bill Fletcher.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Bill’s great. And even when you can have intense disagreements, Bill’s a guy you can disagree with and talk through and struggle over. And I think I would encourage my fellow young or young-ish, I’m not young anymore, I’m a millennial, but folks in my generation and Gen Z, we should really take advantage of these folks in the movement while we have the chance. We should learn as much as we can because there’s so much that you guys fought in the past that we can learn from and better know how to fight the folks that we’re fighting today, the forces that we’re fighting today. And again, that’s why I wanted to have this conversation because I know that in every conversation you have about what we are up against today and how we confront it, which are the questions that always come up.

For you, I can tell that so much of the answer has to come from what we’re already talking about here, from what you have seen and witnessed when you’re talking about that power of working people coming together through common struggle and building the solidarity out of that struggle. That that is a force powerful enough in your eyes to take on even the most vicious and virulent forces of the far right today. One can counteract the other and you’ve seen it. And so I want us to conclude with that question. But before we get there, I wanted to zero in on those two examples that you mentioned and get more of a sense of your involvement with them. Because I’ve joked around with you many times that to me you’re the Forest Gump of the left. But what I mean is the whole plot of that movie-

Marc Steiner:

I’m simple-minded. I understand.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No. But the whole plot of the movie is that he shows up in significant parts or sites of history. He’s in Vietnam, he’s at the Nixon White House, he meets JFK or he meets Lyndon Johnson at one point. So that’s the narrative Spielberg builds is that there’s just this guy who shows up in these significant parts of history, even if he’s not intensely involved in it. And so I make the joke about you being the Forrest Gump in the left, because I feel like every time I talk to you about labor struggles in the South, you’re like, “Oh yes, I used to organize with these guys,” or “I was organizing with the steel workers,” or “I was organizing with tenants in Baltimore,” or “I was in the abortion underground” and I was like, “Man, you’ve been fucking everywhere.”

Marc Steiner:

Part of it was also a necessity. I’m not diving the abortion underground now, but that was an necessity because my girlfriend got pregnant and she didn’t want a baby. That’s how we got in it and we stayed in it. But we have to do it again, it looks like. Now, we’re in Baltimore and one of the most significant coalitions that we helped create might in some weird way have had helped gentrification, though that wasn’t in our heads then, was in South Baltimore. And we started a collective, there was already people from University of Wisconsin came down and created these collectives in South Baltimore in the early ’70s. And we had a small collective. First we called ourselves the Red Karma Tribe. We just became the Warren Avenue collective. [inaudible 00:37:49] that it wasn’t a good organizing tool that we called the Red Car tribe. So we…

Maximillian Alvarez:

Probably wise.

Marc Steiner:

But we liked it. But anyway. In South Baltimore, the community newspaper was put out called the South Baltimore Voice, and we were part of that. And we began organizing with a group called The Tenants Union Group, TUG. And we organized across the divide on Charles Street. And the divide was that on our side of Charles Street was a working class white community, a mixture of dock workers and laborers. And this was working class white community. And on the other side of Charles Street was Sharp Lennon Hall which is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, free black communities in this country from the 19th century still there, was there. And it was a scene, when I was a kid, it’s where a riot broke out when they tried to integrate Southern High School in 1954, I believe. And the riots ensued not to not let black kids come in the school.

So there’s always these racial tensions in between both sides of Charles Street. But we organized both sides of Charles Street because it was the same slumlords on either side of Charles Street, exploiting the white workers, exploiting the black workers. So we built an interracial tenant union that was highly successful. We actually literally changed the housing laws in Baltimore. Because as a coalition, our rent strikes, we had organized rent strikes and it held onto the money picketed the landlord. And so if we lost, we want to be able to give the money out so that people wouldn’t lose our homes. We made a coalition with the Legal Aid, and we helped rewrite the laws and they fought our cases in tenants court. I became a, not a lawyer, but you didn’t have to be a lawyer to argue in tenants court.

So I did a lot of arguing in tenants court with the tenants and we had gorilla actions like when they evicted somebody, we would pick up their shit and we’d put them back in the house and change the locks. Every time they threw them out, we’d go back in the house and change the locks. Then we would take the rats and roaches that we found in people’s homes and we put them in cages and we left them on the doorstep of the landlord’s homes, things like that. We had those actions as well. But the significant part was that this was the first time, I think, that these workers came together, other than if they were working on the docks or other places, came together there to fight together across racial lines. And it was different than the unions only in that it became social that people had dinners in each other’s homes and meetings in each other’s homes.

There wasn’t like there were only blocks apart, but they were miles apart in terms of communication. And so people began to change because they were struggling with black workers and black workers with white workers in a way that they’d never done before. And it made people start thinking about their own racism. We didn’t have sessions talking about now you have to deal with your racism and let’s talk about why you hate black people, all that kind of crap. No, because that’s an intellectual exercise. This was a worker’s coalition where people actually began to change because they saw the humanity in the other people and began working together.

And I remember the tensions when there were a couple of interracial relationships that began, and that was pretense for a while. I’m talking about romantic relationships, but it changed the laws. It built a coalition where people remained friends forever. And then what happened was that that’s when the gentrifiers started moving in because the landlord started saying, okay, we’re going to get out of this. We’re going to sell these homes for lots of money to these people. And it began to change the entire nature of the neighborhood. But those experiences and what I experienced in Mississippi and Alabama just viscerally watching what was going on in the organizing taking place, the stuff in Chicago and the Rainbow Coalition, the Poor Peoples Campaign with King in ’68 that I was part of, that I worked with the Young Patriots in Chicago to organize poor whites in the South and across the country to be part of the poor peoples campaign. It can be done. And unless we do that, we are never going to win.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, let me ask you, following up on that, because as I was saying before, it’s like I can hear when you’re doing your interviews that you go back to those examples. You go back to that time, you go back to those common struggles and the bonds that were forged among people through that common struggle. And you point to that as this is the force that can counteract the right today. That can counteract not just that, but also it can build a sense of solidarity and community that is necessary for poor and working people to win gains, to improve their workplaces, get better wages, get more say over their working conditions, push back against predatory landlords, even defending themselves and their neighbors against police violence. There’s a real, I think, elemental sense of the way forward is through collective people power and this is how you build it.

I wanted to ask though what that looked like at the time as an antidote to right wing politics of the age. So again, I guess, to connect the dots, what I’m saying is that we’re talking about this organizing from the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s as an example of the antidote to the reactionary right wing, the increasingly fascistic right-wing politics that we’re seeing today. So my question is, what was right-wing politics at the time? How did that factor into the organizing that you were doing and how did that organizing counteract those forces from the right?

Another way of phrasing that is how is the right then different from the right we’re talking about today?

Marc Steiner:

Well, one of the ways, the big difference is we’re talking about a little while later, some other point, which is the right is much more organized in many ways than they were then. They’re really organized. They’ve been organizing for the last 50 years to get to the place where they are now. You got to remember, this was also a time in the ’70s with the Boston integration of schools and how that built this right wing racist movement to stop black people from being bused or white kids from being bused and it’s really difficult. Look, it’s hard to overcome. There’s going to be a body of right wing people in this country that are just not going to change for lots of reasons. They’re going to be isolated. You can’t get to them. You’re not going to be organized with people of color for the most part except from trappings to make themselves feel better.

It’s going to be very difficult. However, what I see and still see is that we can make a dent. We can build a huge cross-racial movement in this country. It takes organizing. Look, I was thinking about this before we came in here and this might be a little digress, but you can stop me. But we were talking before we came in the conference room, just about the workers that you’re interviewing across the country and doing some really incredible work, bringing the voices of working class people, nobody else is really doing across. And the piece we did here, Real News for the people in East Palestine facing the toxic madness that they’re facing in their community. And one of the things that brings people together in this century and organizations like this can play a role in, is bringing the voices from across America together to talk, whether they’re an East Palestine, right?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Palestine.

Marc Steiner:

East Palestine. We call it Palestine. East Palestine, different place.

Jackson, Mississippi, before, and which is a majority black city fighting for its rights against these fascists in Mississippi. But having them touch each other and hear each other and they begin to make alliances. You don’t have to make the alliance, the alliances will be made when people get connected, they’ll make the alliance. Before I came in, I was researching because I had forgotten about them. And I remembered them as the Cowboy Indian alliances that have been informed out west. Now these Cowboys, they’re some right wing motherfuckers, man. They just are. But I also like a lot of them that I knew from my time on the resume in Wyoming. But that’s how things changed.

Because a lot of people’s right wing sentiments, yes, they’re bathed deep in racism. And I do believe that you can overcome and change that. And they’re also bathed in the populist sentiments that are at the root of revolt in America. And there’s left wing populism and there’s right wing populism, but tapping into that populism is what pulls people in. And so I really do believe that we can do that. And the more I watch the stuff you do and other people are doing here at Real News, the more I see that this is part of the kernel of making that happen.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think so. I think I have to think so, right? Because that’s what binds all of us here. You, me, Steven Janice, Taya Graham, Manson Moosa, Chris Hedges, all of our incredible coworkers on the editorial side, the studio side, the fundraising side. All of us are committed to that in one way or another. And that’s what gets me out of bed in the morning, man is seeing that in our different areas of work. Because take Steven and Taya, they’re focusing on the abuses of an unchecked, cancerous, constantly growing police industrial complex. And for most of my life, the goodness of the police was unchangeable. I remember being on a jury where the accused was a cop. And during the voir dire process, the lawyer kept asking her the same question, which was, “Would you be unable to be an impartial juror if the accused was a police officer?”

And I watched person after person say, “I can’t do it. To me, cops are always right. To me, cops are always telling the truth.” But I was like, “Yes, I got no problem with that.” So they let me on the jury. But I say all that to say that even just in the matter of from then to now, seeing the change in so many people, even right wing people, people in rural areas, because we see it happen on our channel when Steven and Taya are reporting on police violence in Baltimore against black poor people and police violence against white homeowners in rural America. They’re all getting treated like shit. And what I’m seeing happening on their channel in the live chats and the comments is people doing what you’re saying is they’re through that common enemy, through that common struggle to fight this thing. Interesting alliances are forming.

I see it on the labor side. People will sometimes send me emails or DMs saying like, “Oh, you should interview more right-wing workers.” And I was like, “I interview right-wing workers all the time. The fact that you can’t tell should tell you something about how we don’t just fit into these neat boxes of conservative, liberal, republican, democrat.” If you talk about where we come from, how we came to be the people we are, what matters to us, what we fight for, what we live for, the times that our bosses give us shit, feeling that powerlessness on the job or with when you struggle to pay rent or all these sorts of areas for building those alliances, like you said, for finding that common ground and feeling that human solidarity. I see it happen on your show when we’re talking about how to address the historical political humanitarian monstrosity of Israeli apartheid.

We see what it’s doing to our fellow human beings, our Palestinian brothers, sisters, and siblings. And more and more people are saying, “This is not right.” And you’ve even brought Zionist on your show to say, “This is not right.” You’re doing that work as well. Manson Moosa and Eddie before him are showing and revealing the awfulness, the moral monstrosity of the prison industrial complex and how it damages not just the human beings who are swallowed into it, but their families, their communities that they’re released back into. And so I think that that’s, like you said, the best that we can do here on the media side is to try to put more of these disparate pockets of people, put more of the downtrodden in direct conversation with each other, more people struggling for better workplaces, better communities, better worlds, put them in touch with each other so that they can learn, they can show solidarity. They can then do that work of building the alliances that need to be built.

Marc Steiner:

Yes. No, and as you were speaking, I was thinking about how before I came in, again, I told you I was talked to Hy Thurman who’s now organizing in northern Alabama building cross racial coalitions in northern Alabama. Hy is an amazing guy. He wrote the book Revolutionary Hillbilly, which is…

Maximillian Alvarez:

It’s a great book. You interviewed him about it a year ago-

Marc Steiner:

Yes, I did.

Maximillian Alvarez:

… On the show. So if folks want to listen to that, you can go in the catalog and find Marc’s conversation with Hy Thurman there.

Marc Steiner:

He’s a special guy. So maybe this is not for this tape, we’ll see. But they’re having a conference in September of the New Rainbow Coalition on a res in Wisconsin, Indian Reservation, Wisconsin, and probably well known La Dukes. That’s where she lives. I wouldn’t be surprised, anyhow, I digress. But it would be interesting to have a conversation with them and connecting all the various people that are interviewed here at Real News and the people you’re interviewing with Real News. And because it fits to have them be part of that conversation, crossing these regional geographic and racial boundaries to come together to say, “We can do something different.” And some of those guys from the Old Rainbow Coalition in Chicago have never stopped believing that’s the way we have to go. There’s a reason why the police broke all that up.

You can’t have the Brown Berets, the Young Lords, the Red Guard, the Young Patriots, the Black Panthers coming together in that kind of coalition. That was scary stuff for them. They had to kill that stuff. But that energy is still there. And there’s younger people getting into it, across the country. In white rural neighborhoods, in white neighborhoods, the other John Brown gun clubs have begun to take on. It’s happening in so many different ways. Because you can lose hope.

I went through a period where I just threw up my hands going, “We can’t beat this. We can’t stop them.” But then that’s ridiculous because that’s what we always did. When you talk looking people back in my generation to talk about what went on the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, we did the same thing talking to people from the 1930s and the workday we’re doing organizing. And as I said, Hy Thurman said, “No, we’re not recreating. It’s a continuity. And we have to build that continuity and strengthen it and deepen it because it’s there.”

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and like you said, at the end of the day, we have no choice but to fight. And this I think has also been the common theme throughout your show and throughout this Rise Of The Right series. And yes, just a parenthesis there, we should definitely keep these conversations going because we got to wrap this one up, but there’s so much more I want to ask you about. And so I hope that folks listening to this have enjoyed it. As Marc always says, please reach out to him, reach out to us, let us know what you think and what sorts of questions you’d like us to ask the great Marc Steiner, and hopefully we can keep these conversations going. But I guess just a closing thought on the need to fight because what’s the alternative? Fighting does not mean that we’re going to win, but not fighting definitely means we’re going to lose.

Marc Steiner:

Absolutely. Yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And that’s where we are. It’s like the future is never written in stone. The moral arc of the universe bends towards whatever the pressure of the day bends it towards. And so as long as that possibility exists, we have no choice but to fight. And I think what I’ve gathered from this conversation especially is that we have a lot of templates. We have a lot of examples from the past, your past, our history. We can look to our history of struggle and see examples of how to get ourselves out of this. And I was really glad to hear you say what you did just now, which is something that Jeff Charlotte also said in that great interview that you guys did, which is that we are not naive here. We’re not going to reach everybody. So I want to make that point mainly for my fellow millennial leftists and Gen Z leftists this.

We’re not saying that the people out there saying that they need to and want to exterminate every trans person, that we’re going to go up to them and pat them on the back. We have to draw fucking lines in the sand somewhere. But what I’m also saying, and what I think you’re saying too, is it’s a big fucking country. There are a lot of people in it, and not everyone is that far gone. There are people who are maybe susceptible to that poisonous way of thinking who can be brought back from the break. The same way that people who were enticed to give in to the seductive allure of white supremacy or the seductive allure of seeing their male supremacy over women, American citizen supremacy over immigrants. All these different ways that we’re taught to feel better than our neighbors, than our coworkers because it provides some sort of existential salve when we’re still all getting screwed by the same people at the top.

I think the more that we can work to get people to reject that divide and conquer mentality and come together as a working class, as the great unwashed masses as the many because we have that strength in numbers, the more that we can build that kind of coalition and do so in a way that is lasting, that has real organizational power and longevity and infrastructure, and that is forged together with bonds of real care and commitment, a lifetime commitment. That way lies the path to our salvation.

Always understanding that there are not just ruling class elements that we are fighting against, whether that be Jeff Bezos and Amazon or the bought off political lackeys who are doing Amazon’s bidding. They’re all connected in this matrix of corruption and class exploitation and they’re killing the planet, yada, yada, yada. But we also have to be aware of where are the other enemies or agents of our enemies are in operation, whether those be the cops that are beating us and driving scabs through our picket lines, or whether those be the… They could still be working class, they could still be poor.

That doesn’t mean that they’re always good people. They may actually be just dyed in the wool reactionaries who are convinced that the Civil War is coming like Jeff was describing. Some of those people that Jeff talked to in his book are fucking scared and there’s no way we’re going to reach them. This is the last thing I’ll say then I’ll toss to you to close us out. I think back to something that a great worker and organizer in New York told me when I went up there to do a live show of my podcast, Working People, in New York at the People’s Forum, I got a bunch of these younger organizers together, incredible folks. Chris Smalls did the opening, we had folks from Trader Joe’s, Home Depot, Starbucks, and Labor’s Local ’79, the Construction Workers Union in New York City.

Their union headquarters is right across from Madison Square Garden. And Taf Sav, a full-time organizer with laborers, Local ’79, had a really great way of putting this. And I think the way that he’s talking about it when you’re organizing workers applies very much to what you’re talking about, organizing communities, apartment buildings, so on and so forth. So Taf said, I’m not quoting him verbatim, but he said something to the effect of when you’re trying to unionize or when you’re trying to mobilize people in your shop, there’s top layer of people who are really into it.

That’s your organizing committee. Those are the people you come back to every single day. You’re strategizing about the next steps. Then there’s like this bottom layer of, frankly, reactionaries, the rats, the ones who will snitch on you to the boss, the ones who will try to actively undercut the unionizing effort. And then there’s this massive amount of people in the middle who can be swung either way. And he said, as organizers, your job is to collectivize with the people at the top to organize the people in the middle and isolate those people at the bottom.

Marc Steiner:

Absolutely.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So that’s ultimately what we’ve got to do.

Marc Steiner:

I agree.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So those are my final thoughts. And again, I really hope that we can keep doing these, but I guess I wanted to ask if you had any final thoughts on our first experimental-

Marc Steiner:

I’ll make it quick.

Maximillian Alvarez:

… All Steiner version of The Rise Of The Right.

Marc Steiner:

I’ll make it quick. I think that there’s a kernel here of the work being done by a number of people at Real News that could coalesce around this idea of bringing disparate voices together to help build something new and get people connected. And that’s the power right there, is in the connectivity and the continuation of the struggle and bringing people together that would not ordinarily come together. And I’ve seen it happen before this kind of media existed, and I know now that this kind of media can really play a role in developing that. I keep thinking the back of my head, I said all those people, you talking about interviewing people we’ve interviewed, we should get them all to come to this conference in September about building this new cross-racial coalition in America and how that gets done.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yes, baby.

Marc Steiner:

That’s the inspiration I’m walking away with today and looking forward to more conversations just about how that happens and bringing people in to talk about that, who we’ve interviewed together. And I think that’s really important, whether it’s the stuff you’re doing, The Rise Of The Right, even Not In Our Name, bringing those voices together to say there’s a different way. And that’s what has to happen because we’re facing real danger and we have to stop it for our kids, for my grandkids, my great grandkids. Yes, I got those two.

Maximillian Alvarez:

As I always say-

Marc Steiner:

I have to come back from the grave to haunt these motherfuckers.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, as I always say, it’s an honor to be in the struggle with you.

Marc Steiner:

I feel the same way. I’m glad our paths crossed and put us together here.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Me too.

Marc Steiner:

Max Alvarez and Marc Steiner.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yes, brother.

Marc Steiner:

And so write to us. Write to me at mss@therealnews.com and write to Max at… ?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Max@therealnews.com.

Marc Steiner:

And we got much more coming. SO stay with us. And thank you David Hebden for making us sound good.