Podcasts about jack o'dell

TRANSCRIPTSpeaker 1:You're listening to method to the madness on KALX Berkeley 90.7 FM. I'm your host, Stalin Huizar. And today we have with us Gus Newport, former mayor of Berkeley. Hey guys, how's it going? Fine, thank you. Good to be here. Uh, thanks for coming into the studio. Uh, and Gus is going to be with us today [00:00:30] talking about his illustrious career. He's had so many different amazing, um, experiences and achievements, a civil rights leader, uh, a beacon of the left. He's been involved in so many different things. So I wanna ask you about a few of the different experiences you've had, guests you can educate us. So first I want to start in Boston. Um, and with the Dudley Street project, it was already on the Speaker 2:way when I got there, I was a mirror of Berkeley for two terms, eight years and decided I didn't need any more. [00:01:00] I was invited to University of Massachusetts at Boston as the first senior fellow in the William in North Trotter Institute. I taught a class, um, alternative economics and public policy and people from the Dudley Street project started monitoring my class. Then I was asked to speak on several panels. It turned out, it started with a couple of guys, one in architect and one on news reporter who had discovered [00:01:30] that the poverty money that was being sent to Boston was being spent downtown to build up different areas around city hall and whatever else and wasn't getting to this part of Roxbury, whether it was real poverty, a lot of vacant lots and whatever else more is than the poverty money. What was that? It was CDB. Speaker 2:Junk is different kinds of money that came based on poverty, statistics in indexes and whatever else to upgrade, say the quality of houses, bring [00:02:00] jobs, uh, just beautified the place and whatever else that was, that was kind of money that was available to cities during that time. It had since the 60s going back to the Johnson era. So these guys put his initiative on the ballot, uh, for Roxbury to CC'd from the rest of Boston. And that blew the minds of the city. I first read about it in England, you know, through the Herald Tribune when I was over there visiting and they invited me to be on some of their early panels and things. So [00:02:30] because of what we'd done at w shoot and how East Palo Alto got formed when they're separated from Palo Alto down here. So it really was a shock to the city. And, um, they began working, engaging people, working with MIT, with department of Urban Studies and planning, gathering data and whatever else. Speaker 2:So it was a lot of vacant lots, a with a whole lot of debris on them because developers, what we [00:03:00] called the environmental racism in those days, we just dumped their debris because they didn't, didn't have to pay the tipping fees and all that, and there was no political might in these areas. So, uh, what kind of, uh, people lived in Roxbury at the time? Mainly black people from, uh, Cape Verde keep people from Haiti. Uh, some people from the Caribbean, et Cetera was like, as I recall, 30% black, [00:03:30] something like 27% Cape Verdean, another 15, 20% Latino and 10% white. And, uh, but, and this thing Hank thing happened after they started engaging and got organized, they decided they wanted to create an organization that would help turn around the city and they decided that the makeup of the boards, that community residents should control 50 plus percent of it and [00:04:00] they gave four seats to each ethnic group, didn't take it out of balance because of the numbers and the academics in Boston, which has more cows, colleges, university and place that blew their mind. Speaker 2:They said, my God, we didn't ever thought about that, but the people said we want to focus on the issues and not on each other. And so they came up with this study sheet organization that was an organization to create advocacy, planning and organizing. And because of the law in the state of Massachusetts, very sellable [00:04:30] Muse that a nonprofit can get eminent domain and 30 under certain circumstances, they said, we want to create our own master plan. And out of that master plan, they were given eminent domain authority to this day is the only nonprofit in the United States of America that was able to get that power. That's amazing. To guesthouse a little bit about, for people who don't know a lot about community development, what is a master plan or what is the purpose and function of a master plan? A master plan is to get all the data to look at the poverty index is to look at a [00:05:00] lack of jobs, crime, et Cetera, and things like that. Speaker 2:Look at the gaps, uh, take this data and create gis maps and whatever else so that you can educate everybody from people in the community to bankers to academics. We were very lucky because MIT assisted us, Tufts assisted us, Umass Boston, so we got a lot of help and they would send students to walk the streets with us to go door to door to get data so that we can create the agendas from that or whatever [00:05:30] else. But in communities like this, 70% has a household as single women and 70%. Right. And that that, that, that happens until this day. And they're shy about asking questions because they think they're not educated. They don't know. They come to find out that the questions they had were all similar. Everybody was concerned about the same thing. So this was an empowering sort of fact. We early on got a professional facilitation organization to come and teach facilitation skills to parents, [00:06:00] to young people, the small businesses, and to nonprofits so each could have a discussion and create an integrated sort of plan that became the master plan. Speaker 2:We asked the people, because most of them, their lives aren't stable because rental housing, you know, kept moving and going up. Just like we got today, almost the median cost for housing in Boston back in the eighties and those days is between 500,000 and million dollars. [00:06:30] Home-Ownership rents kept going, sky high, et Cetera, whatever else. So when you asked finally people within the master plan, what kind of housing do you want? We want affordable home ownership, if that's possible, to stabilize their lives. We willing to keep moving from place to place. And that's how we looked at the land trust. We went to the land trust. The first community land trusts in the U s was founded in southwest Georgia called new communities. And they got the idea by a group of people, including Slater, king, Martin Luther King's uncle Andy Young, [00:07:00] a guy named Dan Gel, nick who was on the Berkeley City Council from New York, but Jewish lawyer and whatever else. Speaker 2:And they had a meeting and we said a group of people to Israel to look at a plan for community land trust to create affordable home ownership into perpetuity for people who were farmers and whatever. And that's where we got the original. I do that there, the idea of preceded Israel and India, Mahatma Gandhi creating this kind of playing for people who are victims of the caste system. So we then brought [00:07:30] that over and we were able to get the banks to go along with it because we had the data, whatever else. And the banks created a community development corporation for affordable housing and one for small business. And because we challenged them. So that's when the community reinvestment that came on board. They put 50% community people on the boards and every bank put up between 500,000 a million dollars into that pot. And that's how we're able to turn this whole place around. We started out taking those vacant garden, fifth 15 acres of [00:08:00] 30 were owned by the city. They taken through tax arrears. The plan was so good, they conveyed those acres to us and we got them to mitigate the taxes. Then we use that as collateral to get a $2 million program related investment from the Ford Foundation to purchase the other 15 and all of that became collateral with other kinds of subsidies and whatever. So this is housing built into perpetuity for people with limited incomes that Speaker 1:yeah, and it's, it's so uh, it's such an interesting story, especially in today's time or we're struggling [00:08:30] with the concepts of affordable housing and the, the mayor's race here in Berkeley is kind of centered on that topic, but all throughout the bay area, it's a big deal. And what I think is so fascinating about kind of the innovations in your career, Gus, is your ability to kind of help ground up movements like this. This is very much the story of Delancey street project seems to be this facilitation of a budge, a bunch of the local neighborhood people and being able to take of their own kind of a future through the acquisition [00:09:00] of real estate and the building of this thing. For people who don't know what a community land trust is, can you explain to us kind of what does that mean? Speaker 2:Just as a nonprofit organization, which has the board, the land is taken into perpetuity by a plan to build, could be affordable homeownership, could be some co-op, it could be farms, it could be a variety of things based on what people think they most need. But that land, like I said, it's kept in the perpetuity, [00:09:30] which is 99 years to be utilized for something like that. So then private for profit developers can come in and just take it, uh, push people out or whatever else. If somebody who owns a home in Atlanta trust gets on their feet and generates better income when they sell it, they can't take out any more than 25% profit based on improvements they made. And whatever else at the house itself. They, the houses. Yeah. Right. They land is owned by the nonprofit organization. Speaker 1:[00:10:00] So it's a, it's a way to kind of create some shared ownership over us. And this was a big, you said it's uh, how big was the geographic? Speaker 2:It was 30 acres in the beginning, but it was sort of in the same area, sort of a blanket approach. It grew because other people, including people who even owned their own homes and wanted to move into it and the city came in as Dudley street to do this and all the other neighborhoods, even in a city as great [00:10:30] and as well, highly educated as Boston. And of course, you know, the financial analysis and all that stuff was actually finalized in the Kubota system in Israel and whatever else. So we had the knowledge of how to do that. And then we also had an institute for community economics, which is a national community land trust organization, which created community development. The suits that made there were banking funds available at lower income. I ended up directing ice [00:11:00] instead for community economics use after I, I ran Dudley Street. Speaker 1:Right. So I'm now 30 years later. What's the, what's kind of the epilogue of dead tissue is such an amazing project and has created, um, a lot of interest in community land trust. But how is it, what's, what's happened? The federal government a few years ago here to know Speaker 2:a program called prime neighborhoods or something like that. Dudley Street scored number one in the country. And for [00:11:30] that they get like I think 5 million a year for five years. And they were able to create their own charter schools based on planning with the community for what they wanted to see in their schools. An example of how to upgrade this cause they were able to get the best teachers in the school. They noticed that the, uh, the, uh, one, the schools, the schools for, for, for young kids, these kids were always coming home with scratches on their legs and whatever else. But, but, [00:12:00] but, but the school yard was made a CMN community convinced them to dig, get up and put sand in there. And after a while they had no more scars. So it's just common sense thinking which government school this and everybody else often doesn't think of, you know, always trying to cut corners and think they have such brilliant thing, but they're not focused on people all. Speaker 2:We had a lot of young kids who were in our, our junior group gets scholarships to Dartmouth and places like that [00:12:30] and they came back and continued to work in the area and whatever else and people began talking about that. My God, how did you help them do that? We were able to get them scholarships. That was just when student loans were starting to come online. And you know, as you young students, no student loans, it's just, it's criminal. I mean when I taught a graduate course, they, my teeth, I couldn't believe some of these young people coming out of college with student loans of 200,300 $400,000. It was just [00:13:00] terrible. So from a movement standpoint, those are the kinds of things you've got to focus on. And we're talking to Gus Newport is former mayor of Berkeley and has done so many different things. It's hard to explain them all, but we're talking about one of his major accomplishments is facilitating the devotees street project in Boston and community land trust. Speaker 2:That is still going strong to this day. One of the questions I have for you guys, kind of closing up that chapter is the governance structure. You talked about, which is really innovative of having community members who are kind of at the controls of a nonprofit [00:13:30] that owns a bunch of land. How, how did you guys set up the, a sustainable structure to keep it that way? Well, like I said, 50 plus one 51% of the all had to be community residents, but also you also had board seats for small businesses, for representatives of churches, for some nonprofits and a couple of seats. Even for elected officials though, we never filled those. Uh, and so everybody felt that [00:14:00] they had a role and you could have OK. And also the land that was conveyed to us from the city. We have, we call it four by four committee for the board representative, the four representatives from the city. Speaker 2:So we make common decisions on how to disperse that land at what time, you know, and whatever else. So it was a learning situation for everybody. So it's the way that the actual nonprofit is structured is that that structure has kept that authenticity of yes representation all these years, 30 years later. And that was written as we [00:14:30] learn new things. We would have amended from time to time, things that were more creative and more beneficial. But that's it. It's a constant analysis and learning thing. And today, do you know like the community land trust model, which is so successful in this instance? Are there a lot of other ones in the country today? There's about 400. I just came back from a conference in Park City, Utah, um, a month or so ago and it was very, very, very pleasant. A lot of people participating in such a, [00:15:00] um, we had a little bit concerns because the name of the national organization now is grounded, used to be grounded community solutions. The name got changed, the grounded solutions. And that's because three of the sponsors is Fannie may know wells Fargo and Citibank. So I'm going to go in back and challenge that. And I think with the likes of Wells Fargo and them, they ought to be glad to get whatever they can to clean up Speaker 1:their own. Yeah, we were talking to Gus Newport, former mayor Berkeley's his method to the madness on [00:15:30] KLX Berkeley 90.7 FM and Gus, let's, let's rewind a little bit in terms of, uh, your timeline of your career and talk about the time when you were elected mayor originally at Berkeley and kind of how that story came about because that was another kind of innovative time and, and uh, political, uh, environment that I think, uh, is very interesting story to tell, especially with this political season we're in right now. Speaker 2:Well, I first came to Berkeley in 1968 I was working with an organization [00:16:00] called you guys as research and Development Corporation in New York that was working with the Department of Labor on the new jobs programs and whatever else. I was sent both to Puerto Rico to do some jobs development programs as well as out here to California. And then I worked in Puerto Rico from 1971 to 74, the Department of Labor. And um, a friend of mine was running [00:16:30] federally funded programs and things for the city of Berkeley and invited me out to help them with some assistant youth develop jobs and other kinds of things. And I did a wage compatibility survey for nonprofit organizations in both Berkeley and Oakland to look at the compatibility of wages they were receiving and whatever else. And then I was put on the Planning Commission, the Police Review Commission, [00:17:00] and I was then hired back to the city, including the, I forgot what it was, another department. But I had to engage the laws of the nonprofit and community organizations. I work with BCA to reorganize their whole status. And we wrote a manifesto saying what all services city government should provide, whatever. And [00:17:30] uh, Speaker 3:yeah, Speaker 2:Berkeley's first black mayor, Wharton wide. There was an office when I got here, Berkeley had determined that it was going to take over PG and e and who have a Master Police Review Commission and Warren, why'd you move the middle and didn't do these things? So that was the first black man, right? So Ron Dellums and John George and BCA and other people asked me would I consider running PCA [00:18:00] was Berkeley to discuss this action. I still had to compete against somebody that was already a BCA member on city council. John Denton, who was a white lawyer. And we went through several weeks. You had to get two thirds of the vote before you could be the candidate. Um, I was nominated and it was funny thing because you know, Berkeley probably gets more credit [00:18:30] for being progressive city than it is. I mean, Berkeley is a good community with a population. 50% of the people had undergraduate degrees and 25% graduate degrees. Speaker 2:And there were a lot of what I call single issue liberals. They pulled on me cause they wanted somebody that was going against Warren. Why? Then of course I was also known having been a close friend of Malcolm x cause [00:19:00] I was trailing knock four days before he was assassinated and when he moved from the nation of Islam to the organization and for American unity, I was one of the founding members. So I was fairly well known for some of those things. That's why we're doing this documentary now because the country does not yet know how Malcolm and Martin Luther King will come close together and Ma Malcolm had given up violence and was moving to the civil rights movement and he and Martin Luther King were about to go before [00:19:30] the United Nations to file a suit against American hegemony, imperialism and colonialism. And one of the things we're getting this documentary is we've got a tape overhearing Jagger, Hoover, FBI saying these are the two most dangerous men in the world. Speaker 2:35 days after he made that statement, Malcolm was dead. Of course Martin Luther King got killed actually a year after he gave the speech to break the silence, you know, against the Vietnam War. So all those things, civil rights [00:20:00] and whatever else. Also teach you how to engage community development. Because when I was with the civil rights movement, I wrote the first concentrated employment training grants with department labor for Rochester, New York, my hometown and I and a guy named Bob Turner, Phd from Kansas State and a road scholar went to several cities, including Philadelphia to the, the Jewish economic vocational training and other kinds of places to look in job development and all these kinds of things. [00:20:30] So you know, you're not even thinking what are you learning what you're taking in, you're just on the run. So then you show up in Berkeley with that and you have a chance to be here. I want to ask you about that perfectly citizen actions that manifest that which was very famous. And you talk about Berkeley and I maybe having a um, Speaker 1:reputation that maybe it proceeds itself in terms of, or being a little bit more progressive than it is. But that document was very left wing, Speaker 2:right? It was. It wasn't, of course, [00:21:00] I'm not suggested. Berkeley wasn't very progressive. I'm because of cause the free speech Boohoo was founded here. Sure. About the same time as the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement and the antiwar movement. Yeah. And of course, so there was, there was, there was a lot of transition but, Speaker 1:and you were becoming mayor after a lot of those things were kind of transitioning into the 80s and a different timeline. But can you speak to a couple of the maybe revolutionary planks in that manifesto that Berkeley citizens [00:21:30] action and you as a leader kind of came to power on? Speaker 2:Well, for instance, we were the first city to divest that was on the ballot when I ran divest from South Africa in Africa. We were the first city to past domestic benefits, benefits for gay couples and stuff. What year was that? That would have been 1981 1982 and that's because there was a day, there was [00:22:00] a gay faction within the Po politics of Berkeley. And I don't know if you know the name Holly near [inaudible] who was one of the new song singers who was very close to Jane Fonda. Jane Fonda mentored her. She was a play in New York called hair, I believe it was. And Holly had her own recording company. She was gay. I was the first man on the board. Uh, going back to Tom Hayden [00:22:30] just dying. And we also work with him. And Jane Fonda actually did a fundraiser for me when I ran for mayor the first time in the day that I reported to my office. Speaker 2:When I took office, I walk in, there's all these TV cameras, Jane Fonda sitting at my desk. So it was just all these kinds of things. And there was a lot of student involvement in DCA too. We put students in. My appointed to the planning commission was a woman named Theresa Cordova who was getting her phd [00:23:00] and planning and um, she was at the Institute for Study Social Change that which was run by Troy duster who probably graduated more black and Latino PhDs than anybody. And Troy duster happens to be the grandson of Ida B. Wells. So I mean Troy was like my mentor. So I was a fellow at the Institute for Studies Change Here in Berkeley too, and he ended up the sociology department and one time. So all these things are in the mix. Speaker 1:Yeah. Well and such a fascinating story [00:23:30] in terms of the timeline, the history of what was going on. Then you got to, I think you, you very much viewed your time as mayor, as a kind of the bully pulpit to go and talk about a lot of progressive issues, not just right. Speaker 2:Very much so. For instance, getting back to the university, Harry Edwards, who's quite a spoke for us first, and you know who organized those three blacks that if raise their fists at 90 68 Olympics was on faculty and had more students attending his class. He taught [00:24:00] sports psychology and sociology, I think, and was quite ill. He had the most heavily attended Subaru who came time for him to get tenure. It was going to be a difficult thing, but, but Haman, Mike came in was the chancellor at that time and Haman said, we're going for it, but Gus, you're going to have to help us and other stuff. We did some national calling in Haman when he became chancellor, had been chair [00:24:30] of the planning school and both the law school he came to some of us with, some of the professors were progressive and said, Gus, I'm going after chancellor. He said, it's going to be difficult. They've never had a juice chancellor before. We pulled together everything we could, including national friends to assist and whatever else he became the chancellor. Speaker 1:Nice. Well it's so much, I mean, you've broken down so many barriers in your career and I, I, to [00:25:00] not end this interview without asking you about kind of where we sit today. It's 2016 and so many of the issues that you fought for in your civil rights career are still persistent today. Even though we have, we've had a black president, so we've made progress. And so I want to ask you from your seat of the wisdom and knowledge that you have, can you give us some of your, um, kind of positive thoughts about where we can take, um, our progressive society going forward [00:25:30] and kind of use a lot of the stuff that you've accomplished and consolidate those gains and go forward? Cause there's so much negativity around right now. I want to provide some positivity to people. You made a difficult, we'll use a buzz of thoughts. Um, okay. Well anyway, Speaker 2:no, I worked with Bernie Sanders and you know, the millennials were just great. I mean, uh, I was never so proud as the role [inaudible] played in movement. And a lot of them told us that after Bernie [00:26:00] didn't make it through the primary. And of course we know that there were problems in the primaries. I mean, Bernie didn't get 3 million votes that should've been to him in California, New York and other places in the Sierra delegates are a problem. Right? And, and a lot of the millennials told us they were not going to vote for Hillary because we have problems with Hillary. And with bill going back to welfare reform and NAFTA and Gatt and some things like that. And, but the old friend of mine, Jack O'Dell, who just turned [00:26:30] 93 last month was Martin Luther King's right hand man. And he wrote, um, I forget the NAACP had a, a regular paper that was created by WB Dubois freedom ways. Speaker 2:He was a co-editor. He called me from, he lives up in Vancouver, British Columbia now. And he said, brother Gus, he said, you know, I've always liked you because, [00:27:00] uh, even though you were greatly left as I was at the end, you use common sense. So I said, all right, bud, Jack, what are you getting at? He said, well, I was proud that you and Danny Glover worked for Bernie Sanders. But now the next step is the election itself. He said, remember you and I used to talk about when you got drafted in the military, when you reported to Louisiana, [00:27:30] um, Kentucky, that you weren't allowed to go and eat in certain restaurants as a black person says, yeah, remember we talked about there were places during the Jim Crow era, very close. We were people, black people were getting hung. I said, yeah, he said, we've moved past that, but if Donald Trump gets elected, we're going to go back to that. Speaker 2:He said, we may not totally agree with like Hillary, but we do at least know that she [00:28:00] won't carry us back to that and we can put our foot on her button and keep on pushing. You know, the next one we've got to go. So I said you right. So we started talking to millennials. I think looking at the polls and whatever now it looks like she's going to make it. I was sorta set back last week being in Tennessee and hearing some of these white, uh, organized people in the political move and talking about they thing's going to be violence in some of their neighborhoods or whatever else. And [00:28:30] so you have to have an analysis like Martin Luther King I always talked to about the beloved community. The beloved community basically was centered in the church. We had ministers that used to play a role out today. Speaker 2:Church doesn't play a great role in the inner city, but people shared everything. And because of segregation, blue collar, white collar, no collar, everybody lives side by side. But we're there to help one another. But I had to explain to people last week [00:29:00] that the beloved community was not an integrated community. It was a segregated community. Many of you were in the civil rights people, but you did not live in the beloved community. You lived in Peyton Dale or whatever they used to call that. Whether it was a whole lot of things going on. And that's what we got to get back to because when Mahatma Gandhi and other people were talking about nonviolence, this, that if you're going to turn around and society has to be a vision of love, Cetera, and whatever else, it's such an inspiration [00:29:30] and chair, um, at that, you know, pardon me for saying hell, can't wear it on. I buy the age, year out. We are still going so strong and a inspiration Speaker 1:to all of us. And thanks so much for coming in today guys. We'll be speaking to guests, Newport, former mayor of Berkeley. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Chris Gondek interviews Nikhil Pal Singh, the editor of Climbin' Jacob's Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O'Dell.