Ken Grossinger: How are Artists and Organizers Creating a Better World Together?

CS/CW Episode 96: Ken Grossinger: How are Artists and Organizers Creating a Better World Together?

[: 00:00:00

[00:00:08] BC: A dozen or so years ago, Ken Grossinger was well known in labor circles as one of the movements most influential and effective strategists through his work with the Service Employees International Union, the AFL-CIO, and Democracy Partners. Today, while he continues his role as a movement leader, he has become a born again advocate for the essential role of the arts, and artists in the continuing struggle for worker rights, and social and economic justice. If you're a curious soul like me you may be asking yourself, "Gee, how'd that happen?”

In this episode we will hear why Ken not only believes that "organizers can't work effectively” without culture, but also that art is an essential to creating the narrative shifts that are the foundation to effective organizing and change work. He has written about why he thinks this is not only true but profoundly important for our times in his new book , ART WORKS: How Organizers and Artists are Creating a Better World Together. which we discuss in depth.

Act 1: “And Then I Married an Artist”

Ken, Grossinger, welcome to the show so let me begin by just asking, what is your life path, rather than the titles that you have held, but what's your work in the world?

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And then I married an artist, and I realized just how big a boat I missed. And I realized one other thing. Which was, it wasn't just organizers that didn't think strategically about art and culture in their work, but it was artists themselves who often didn't think strategically about their work in the service of social movements.

And so that's what I mean about being a late bloomer here, because I've only just come to this in the last, 10 to 15 years. And that's why I wanted to write the book because I thought if I was in this boat, many other people would have been as well.

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So, here's a question: People describe you as an effective strategist, right? So, the question is, what does that mean? What, what is an effective strategist, particularly in the work that we're referencing here, which is social change work, justice work.

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And I use that as the basis to think strategically about what to do. And that really separates, a lot of political and community and labor organizer strategists from other forms of strategists, which rely upon less, of power analysis. and more, a host of other things.

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[00:05:01] KG: So, I think it's about developing relationships where they don't exist, and building upon relationships where they do exist, to build up, a level of support, and a way to frame, moving the work forward. And it means reaching out to people who are on the fence, and are not yet committed one way or the other, entering into new relationships, or at least new relationships around a particular issue.

And then thinking about the extent to which it's possible to convert. or neutralize, your opposition. And so, that's all quite labor intensive, and it's why organizing campaigns, require a lot of depth and time to work, but it's all necessary.

Now the one exception, I would say, to this, are, social movements. I do think that power analysis has a role to play, a significant role to play in social movements. But I also think social movements arise from demographic shifts in the economy, shifts like the migration from blacks from the south to the north and so forth basically change the electoral map. And so, a fine distinction to be made about the organizing side versus the movement side. But both of them really do embrace some understanding of who's with you. And who's not?

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[00:06:36] KG: So, to the point of power analysis, I really learned that through a professor at Columbia University, who I studied with and who mentored me. A guy named Richard Cloward, Cloward was a scholar, activist, and sociologist originally and then went to get a master's degree in social work because he wanted to apply his theories. And he was a theorist behind the National Welfare Rights Organization, and he was a theorist behind a really important movement in the 1980s, which led to adoption of the National Voter Registration Act, in 1995 by Clinton.

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[00:07:42] President Bill Clinton: The victory we celebrate today is but the most recent chapter in the overlapping struggles of our nation's history. To enfranchise women and minorities, the disabled and the young, with the power to affect their own destiny and our common destiny by participating fully in our democracy.

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And so, he really taught me that in a very informal sense. It just became a natural part of what I did. And then when I started going to these community organizer and labor organizer trainings, I learned it had a name and the name was power analysis.

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[00:08:55] KG: We can't do..., organizers can't do the work that we do without art and culture. And I want to make two points about this. One is that art is not just a reflection of or a reaction to social conditions, but it's a contributor to social change. And two, narrative shift is central to organizing.

Now why is that? So we know that policy advocates, and organizer,s and lobbyists sometimes can win policy and legislative reform for the good. But what happens is when power changes hands, those concessions get rolled back. And I think they get rolled back in large part because we never deal with the narratives underlying the progress.

And so, we have a system in place where we've got organizers taking on institutions, and artists trying to shift the way we think. And artists really have a way of penetrating popular culture in a way that organizers never will. Because that's not how organizers think. And, in fact, artists don't think like organizers, which makes it such a wonderful collaboration.

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[00:10:53] KG: Well, I think you're exactly right. And if you look at some of the work of Bernice Johnson Reagan, she will tell you that those of us who are cultural workers thought of ourselves as organizers, and culture was just a part of what we did.

For your audience, Bernice was the, one of the founders of the Freedom Singers and went on to found, found Sweet Honey and the Rock. And think about another musician, Si Khan, who's been a civil rights organizer and has, I don't know, produced 20 CDs of music. And so, there are, in fact, any number of artists who are organizers and organizers who are artists.

And Harry Belafonte is probably the greatest example that I could think of. I mean, Harry, he had to balance his time between art and activism tipped toward the latter. I mean, Harry was at the strategy tables of the southern civil rights Movement, and he brought his artistic skills to that table. It wasn't that he was an artist that realized he had celebrity and could raise money for others to do the work.

So, I think you're exactly right, Bill. That's a really important caveat. I guess I don't think about that as much because I'm more concerned about the scale at which these collaborations happen and they're happening to be sure, but they're not happening on scale. So, I wanted to get at that.

[: 00:12:23

So, one of the impetuses for this conversation is an incredible book that you have written. And as I said before, it seems to me that it does a good job of collecting and sharing and animating your history and your experiences for others to learn from. Could you talk generally about the book and then we can get into some specifics.

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[00:13:44] BC: So, who are you speaking to in this book?

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[00:14:24] BC: So obviously one of the reasons for this podcast is Change the Story, Change the World, which is at the center of much of what you talk about in the book. Which is narrative change, and the power of that and the necessity for that, not just nice thing. As you said, change comes and goes very quickly and is very fragile unless it has a cultural narrative underpinning that anchors it in people's worldview and belief system above and beyond the codified and the policy world. So, I would ask, does a story come to mind that really personifies the cause effect that you have seen once you became a born again cultural organizer that really says, “Oh yeah, this is how this stuff really cooks.”

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And I could talk about both, but I want to talk about the community building component first. And this story takes place in Louisville, Kentucky. At a museum called the Speed Museum in the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, Brianna Taylor is killed. And, uh, Ta Nehisi Coates calls up Amy Sherald, who did the portrait of Michelle Obama, and asks Amy if she would do a portrait of Brianna for the cover of Vanity Fair Magazine.

And Amy said, yes, but I want it shown in Louisville. And so, Steven Riley, who is the director at the time of the Speed Museum, asked himself what it meant to be a museum director in a time of Black Lives Matter when the fight is right at your doorstep. And so, here's what Riley did.

He emptied several galleries within months. And as museum exhibitions... the runways are like three to five years. He emptied out several galleries within months. And then he put together two advisory boards. One was a national advisory board made up of artists who have had family members killed or maimed by the police. And the other was a local community advisory board made up of mental health workers, legal advocates, community economic development folk, and so forth.

And he charged these advisory boards with coming up with the content. For the show. And they didn't always agree with each other. So, the national advisory board said, well, we should have 30 pieces of work. And the local advisory board said, yeah, but they also, they all have to be a by black artists. And so, there were those kinds of issues, any number of them that came up and Riley would always defer to the local community advisory board when those conflicts emerged.

And it was only after they, along with Tamika Palmer and her family, Brianna Taylor’s mother. It was only until they came together on the content that they brought in a curator. Instead of the independent power of the curator to decide what will be in the community interest, that was created by the community. And Sadiqa Reynolds, the CEO at that time of the Louisville Urban League, said, “It was the first time I've ever People ever felt comfortable coming into that museum.”

And so it became a community building institution in such an important way. And it continues to play that role.

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[00:18:40] BC: So, as you point out in the book, this is not business as usual in the museum world. The covenant that the director of The Speed broke by basically handing the curator “the mission statement” is extraordinary because curators are at the absolute center of everything that happens in museums. That's what they're basically a building built to house curators who make stories in the world with the material that they have at hand.

So that's extraordinary in itself. The other is, as you said, a museum that turns on a dime like that. Mm hmm.... to be responsive to something outside of its purview, that's not something that happens often. Museums define their success often in terms of how their peers in the larger museum world think of what they do, rather than what the community thinks of what it does.

So, that's an extraordinary story, it really is. And so, a question, after that, was there an element of that spontaneity and responsiveness that continued in the practice of the museum?

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You don't know if these things are going to hold or they're a flash in the pan. There's another museum story I share in the book. And this is a story from Montgomery, Alabama. Many people know Bryan Stevenson. He wrote the book, Just Mercy. There was a film made from the book.

Bryan founded an organization called the Equal Justice Initiative. And Brian understands in his bones that art and culture are central to organizing and dealing with racism.... what he did is he created two major art centers, for lack of a better term. One was a museum called the Legacy Museum, which tracked the Atlantic slave trade right up through mass incarceration and connected the dots.

And the other was he created a memorial called the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. And the National Memorial for Peace and Justice is eight corten steel beams hanging from the ceiling. And inside this rectangle, underneath the beams, is inscribed the names of some of the people who have been lynched. And it's the county and cities in which those lynching’s took place.

But Brian understood what Lonnie Bunch from the Smithsonian said, that museums need to be as much about today and tomorrow as they are about yesterday. And so, what Brian did was created life size replicas of these quartz and steel beams. So, that if you're from Richmond and happen to see one hanging from the memorial that spells out “Richmond,” you can bring that back to Richmond, Virginia. And you can demand a marker, some type of recognition of what happened. And you could use it to fuel racial justice fights, if you want. So, Brian integrated an action component into the work of the museums, which also is fairly rare and very important.

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[00:22:44] KG: Yes.

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[00:23:02] KG: And that's a great example of narrative shift work.

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And actually, this is my bias. You're a musician. I'm a musician. I've always felt, I've always known from my own experience in the world is that music is one of the most powerful forces for connecting the head and the heart. And in some cases, hacking the head and the heart. And could you just, okay. Talk about that. Why you think that is? Because I ask myself that all the time.

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[00:24:06] KG: I was looking for quotes from my book.

BC: I just want people to know that this book is not just a bunch of words. There's a discography There's music connected to it. So, it's a multi-sensory experience More than just a book.

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One cannot describe the vitality and emotion this one song evokes across the Southland. I have heard it sung in great mass meetings with a thousand voices singing as one. I have heard a half a dozen sing it softly behind the bars of the Hines County Prison in Mississippi. I've heard old women singing it on their way to work in Albany, Georgia. I've heard the students singing it as they were being dragged away to jail. It generates power.

[: 00:25:06

It’s important to tell people that, because most people think of songs as just really nice things to have around, and of course religion knows better. And certainly, the black church knows better. And just about any movement around the world at some point or another comes to grips with the fact that we need more than just a pep talk to hold the line, particularly when you're in a nonviolent movement. So, it's a long history.

[: 00:26:10

Generating it. There are a lot of celebrity artists that use music in a lot of important ways, but there are kind of another tier of artists that think about music as a form of organizing. And so, one of the examples the book talks about is Bristol Bay. There was a mine up in Alaska called the Pebble Mine, and it was going to be... it's been a 20-year battle. It was going to be the largest open pit mine in the world, or the second largest open pit mine.

And there are two major industries in Alaska. One are the extractive mining industries, and the other is the fishing industry --- people that fish commercially, people that fish for sustenance, and people that fish for sport. The fishermen had gotten together to oppose the mine. Now, the mine was being situated in a 60 percent indigenous community, and so if anything were to happen, there would be flows and flows of toxic material that went into the community. And not 150 miles from there was one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded in history, which created dozens of tsunamis, killed a lot of people.

And so, the thought, if you think about California and the San Andreas Fault, there are going to be more shakups, especially those of us who have lived through them. And in order to make this mine, they were going to need to build a 70 foot, seven stories earthen dam to contain the toxic waste that would basically decimate things.

And so, among the fishermen, which is the point of the story, were artists, particularly musicians. And they realized that what they were missing was a campaign theme. They needed an anthem, campaign song. And so, they call up Si Khan in North Carolina, who I mentioned earlier, and asked him if he would come to Bristol Bay to learn about the fight.

And they did a lot of different things. So, they brought him to a third-grade class that was called Rebel to the Pebble. And Si said, in whatever way you say to third graders, “I'll be your musical messenger if you give me the message.” And he wrote this beautiful song called Abundance, which became the basis for an album which was used to raise a lot of money.

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No power known can ever force me

From this ancient place that gave me birth

From the richness of this river,

and the abundance of this earth.

We've been here ten thousand years,

along this river shore.

If there's any justice left,

we'll be here ten thousand more.

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You want me to throw out the song? Should I keep it the way it is? And through that process, created trust. And so now, musicians, and fishermen and others in the community were in a new kind of relationship. And eventually, they said to Si, “We've now got Alaska covered. We want you to go south into the lower 48 to raise money and carry our message throughout the nation.”

And so, Si created something called Musicians United at Bristol Bay, which did exactly that. And so, musicians have contact lists. They've got social media following. They've got organizing savvy. Many of them, contrary to popular opinion about how to get a message out there and engage people with it. And so, it's important. When we think about the power of music that we also think about the artists themselves that bring us that.

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BC: When our ancestors set around the ritual fire and prehistory, pretty much what kept them together was all the things you're talking about. Rhythm, music, images, the rituals, the. Pre-art, art. I think most people who are organic organizers know that you gotta move people above and beyond just the brain.

And one of the things that just rises up for me from that Bristol Bay story is the fact that intrinsic to the art making process is the embodied strategy you're talking about. Artists will tell you, “I know that didn't just come from me.”

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[00:32:02] BC: As a songwriter and storyteller, I'm tapping into a multi-millennial cycle of stories and ideas and feelings, and I'm just picking up on the stream.

And, So, when you're in a community, and you're doing that same thing that Si did, which is he's very intentionally saying, “Here's what washed up on the shore, let's see what sticks, and what doesn't. Here's our song.” And the thing about that kind of work is that the judgment world basically says, “Is it technically good? Is it technically bad?” But people's whose song rises up from their story, they don't have those questions. They’ve got, “I feel it here in my heart.” And that's age old. That's, that's very old school. That's not a new deal at all.

[: 00:32:53

And it's a exhibition, um, of 10 second generation Holocaust survivors. And so, at the opening panel, before the exhibit opened, each one of these artists talked about where their art came from and how being a second-generation Holocaust survivor impacted it. And there were all kinds of stories from, “I don't know where this came from,” to, “Well, my mother talked about it every da, to, “My mother would never talk about it, but I heard about it.” It's got, it's so rooted.

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[00:33:51] KG: Yeah.

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And I think giving people that agency back, getting their fingerprints back on their story is critical, right?

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[00:34:39] BC: Okay, good. Well, that's one of my soapboxes. So, this actually brings up a question. I guess you'd say my liturgy is this human creative practice, it's the most powerful aspect of what it is to be human, that we have in many ways squandered. And where people use it, it cooks. Yes. Okay, it really actually does make a difference.

But one of the things when I teach that I have to pound home is that many people assume that artists and art making are naturally aligned with this progressive tilt. When, in fact, historically, probably some of the most effective cultural organizing has happened from the other side of the coin. Which is people like Milosevic, and Hitler, and Pol Pot, and the Stasi all understood the power of culture. And on one hand stifled it, and on the other hand appropriated it in order to totally capture the story and, and produce tyranny.

And once you actually recognize that, you realize you're not dealing with a benign force. You're dealing with something that's extraordinarily powerful that could be used for good or for ill. Could you talk about that a bit in terms of your own experience?

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Birth of a Nation was a film that was made in 1915, and it gave rise to doubling the number of Ku Klux Klan chapters in America. It was shown in the White House, in part because it was the first feature length film that was ever made, and in part, I think, because of its content. And so, there is no question that the right has understood this.

And when I interviewed Norman Lear for the book, I asked him if he thought that political change required social change first, or did cultural change require political change? So, what was the driving force? And of course, he said, “Well, culture change has to happen before you can have political change. And he draws upon All in the Family, and he says racism and homophobia were never water cooler conversations until they entered the homes of people.

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Boy, the way Glenn Miller played

songs that made the hit parade

Guys like me we had it made

Those were the days

Didn't need no welfare state

ev'rybody pulled his weight

gee our old LaSalle ran great

Those were the days

And you knew who you were then

girls were girls and men were men

Mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again

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I think there are things that she says in there that are without question truthful. She basically says that the CIA invested in the Museum of Modern Art, which had, by the way, three CIA agents on their board at the time, in order to promote abstract expressionism. So, they wanted to send Jackson Pollock's work abroad to counter Soviet social realism.

So, the right, the left and our own government. is very complicit and very, as you say, intentional about using art to promote or restrain change of different kinds. And you could probably look in every art medium and find stories like that.

[: 00:38:40

BC: Coming back to this museum world, which is, to me, it's one of the most interesting sorts of case studies. If you look at it, they're incredibly conservative institutions by their history, and they have this immense footprint of power in communities, both symbolic and also just their horsepower, the big ones.

And the kind of challenge I think your book poses, which is asking the question... when I was at the Walker, one of the questions was, are we a cathedral or are we a piazza?

KG: What did that mean?

BC: The tradition of the, of the museum was it's a big, windowless building with tall white walls where people come to worship and learn from what we have and take in the story. “This is good. This is great.” The ancient cathedrals had their walls covered with the story.

But the Piazza, the center of the community is the place where everybody feels comfortable to come and have a conversation, bring their dog, have a stroll, uh, Bounce a ball against the wall, sing a song, have a demonstration. (It’s) the center of the community rather than the exclusive thing that often occurs in a museum.

And I will say from my experiences, that is really hard. It is really hard to change it.

I'll give you a small story here. We once had an opportunity to, to apply for a grant. It was back in the day when the word community and partnership was a part of almost every grant application. And the typical thing would be for a museum would be to round up a bunch of community partners, get them to sign on to the grant, and then integrate them into the projects and programs that had already been on the books rather than inventing something new.

And my proposal to my colleagues at the Walker was, “Let's create a community development bank inside the museum. Let's take the grant funding and, and turn it into shares and have five community based organizations and the five curators all have equal shares.” And the shares don't function as funds until community and museum shares are married together. And the marketplace would be, “What are you up to? What are you up to? What's interesting that you're doing that we might be interested in?”

So, the incentive was, Wow. Let's find all the different ways we could combine this resource. Right. And I wish I could tell you that everybody loved it, but the Walker bought in, but the funder felt they needed to know precisely what the projects were going to be up front.

[: 00:41:33

And maybe I should tell another story because it gets to this point at the American Museum of Natural History. David Koch was on their board for, I don't know, 15 to 20 years. David Koch is one of the biggest investors in fossil fuels, biggest investor in climate denialism. And imagine you're a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, which is an educational institution and wants to do a show about climate change.

Are you going to present that to the CEO? Who then has to grapple with whether or not they want to cross David Koch. Without ever opening his mouth, he immediately gives pause to the idea.

[: 00:42:46

In an open letter, a coalition of climate scientists, museum experts, and environmental groups say science and natural history museums should stop accepting money from fossil fuel corporations and individual donors like the Koch brothers. Koch Industries has extensive energy industry holdings and has funded climate denial.

David Koch is a board member of both the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

[: 00:43:22

[00:43:39] BC: Yeah, and getting back to your strategy, that's a power analysis that you just described. It's something that I call in my power analysis world as the chain of accountability. Most people in the middle of the chain, a lot of them, particularly people in philanthropy, are either oblivious or just barely understand the chain of accountability in the system in which they work.

And the picture I draw often is, when the cocktail party is happening, When the people at the top of the chain are, are there in the room, what goes, what doesn't go? What's the worldview that is represented in that? And so much of what you're just describing, which is what's happening in journalism, what's happening in a lot of places, which is the silent tyranny that is this shadow that is cast where people who are aware of the chain accountability and are also thinking about their self interest in their careers and even their institutional survival are basically doing the editing ahead of time and it's, it's really scary.

I'm thinking also about this whole cancel world. And, uh, one of the stories is about Pins and Needles about a piece of art that is telling an important story. I'm going to let you tell the story. Why don't you just tell it? And also, it's the evolution of the work and how it had to confront what to say and what not to say.

[: 00:45:13

What made it special was, it was an attempt by the ILGWU, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, to shape public perception about garment workers. And what distinguished it was it wasn't professional actors, but it was the workers themselves that played the role. The workers themselves had the longest Broadway run in the history of America, not professional actors

[: 00:46:12

Sing me a song with social significance

There's nothing else that will do

It must be tense with common sense

Or I won't love you

[: 00:46:34

And from that group, we got the cast of Pins and Needles, uh, to rehearse. They came three days a week. After work from seven to ten.

[: 00:47:24

So, are you familiar with the play Lady Beth by Susie Tanner? I'm not. Do you know that that was a play and actually there's one of our episodes Susie tells it and it was the closing of the Bethlehem steel plant in Los Angeles and She did the same thing. She brought the steel workers in They told their story and then they appeared on stage.

They took it on the road and the sponsor was Bruce Springsteen

[: 00:48:08

[00:48:09] BC: Yeah. So, there are so many stories that are connected to the stories you tell in this book. And I just want to, I want to compliment you on the weaving of in the trenches, organizing strategic policy strategy, along with really surprising, wonderfully entertaining, beautifully written stories about people that everybody knows to people that nobody knows. And having them all in the same container is so important,

[: 00:48:42

[00:48:47] BC: So, here's a hard question. So, we live in a world that is increasingly a hyper temporary, and by that, I mean where the most profound issues and events and lessons and learning are regularly turned into digestible gummies on screen, on media, et cetera, et cetera.

How do you succeed in creating the message and not have it turned into just another day's minor headline and then here today, gone tomorrow?

[: 00:49:24

[00:49:33] BC: Yeah.

[: 00:49:33

It's about the power of film and political mobilization. And it describes the evolution of nine to five. Because 9 to 5 was not just the movie with Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda. It was also an organization. Before there was a movie called 9 to 5, it was 9 to 5 the organization by two women, Karen Nussbaum, and Ellen Cassidy.

And when Jane's antiwar activities wound down because the war ended, she decided to dedicate her time to fighting for women's equity. And she calls up Karen and she says, Karen, I want to learn about your organization and what it's doing. So, Karen, of course, meets with Jane and schedules several meetings for Jane with other activists and organizers that she's associated with.

And then she has this big convening in Ohio, which is where Karen was based at the time, of 300 women. At the end of the night, Jane had this throwaway line, which was something like, “Do any of you have any revenge fantasies about your boss?” And one woman stands up and says, “I want to grind his bones into coffee beans and feed them to the other bosses in the town.”

And at that time, Jane understood that 9 to 5 need not be a drama that could be labeled a feminist film, but a comedy. And so, I tell this story because of what happened after the film came out, which is they decided to do a 20 city tour of the film. And they wound up doubling the number of affiliates that they have through the film, through the, their collaboration.

[: 00:51:25

[00:51:41] KG: Right, and that's one way to do it, to integrate the art with the organization or the organization with the art.

[: 00:51:47

[00:52:12] KG: So, this was a story rooted in a collaboration between a housing organizer a woman named Carol Ott and an artist named Justin Nethercutt --- his Street name was Nether. And what they want to do was to draw attention to the housing crisis in Baltimore. Those people who know Baltimore know it's one of the last of the East coast cities that has blocks and blocks of dilapidated and blighted housing.

And Justin and Carol approached Micheline and I, and he told me what he wanted to do, which was to draw attention to the housing crisis and to hold the city to account. And I'm not very much of a diplomat, but I said in my most diplomatic tone, “That's a great idea, but it's not really going to change anything.”

And Justin says, “Yeah, but.” And the but was that he was going to put up a QR code next to each mural. And when you scan the QR code, it brought you to a website. that then revealed the name of the slumlord who owned the building and the, uh, politicians that represented that district. And so, a couple of things happen.

So, the very first mural goes up. And, um, I was just thinking that I wish we had the visuals for people to see it. But we don't. So, the very first mural goes up. And two days later, the mural is left intact, but the QR code, not surprisingly, gets ripped down. And so, Justin being Justin, he went back and put up the QR code again.

And I don't know how long it takes to get a demolition and renovation license in Baltimore, but that building came down in three weeks. And so, it drew a bunch of press attention, channel two or Channel seven, I forget which one said “It was art aimed to shame.” And so now you've got a little press attention focused on one mural and one building, and Justin was doing 15 of these.

And so, without having to take you through all 15, I wanna jump to number five. Number five was a picture of, uh, Pharaoh in a golden headdress. But instead of looking out over Egypt, he's looking out over a cotton plantation. And the words exile is written in Hebrew and English. And the slumlord happened to be Jewish.

And goes ballistic and calls up the Baltimore sun. And says, “This is the idea of Jews keeping down blacks in the ghetto. So, this is hate speech, number one. And number two, I don't own this building.” Whoa. And the Baltimore Sun, which is the daily newspaper in Baltimore, does a one and a half page hatchet job on Justin and Carol's entire project.

And so now, all the press is paying attention. And so, the Baltimore Weekly, which is the progressive alternative that comes out only once a week. called up Justin for comment and then asked Justin if it was okay with him if they called the Baltimore Sun to ask Several questions one of which you might guess is did you just report this story or did you research it?

And so sure enough the Baltimore Weekly invested their own fund in doing independent research and found not only that this landlord had been cited 500 times for lead paint, but in fact had controlling authority of this building. And so now Bill, what you've got is a volley between the Baltimore Weekly and the Baltimore Sun.

And every time a new mural goes up, the press is right there paying attention to see what's going to happen. So, at the end of the summer, the Baltimore mayor throws up her hand and said, I'm going to put 22 more million dollars into demolition and renovation in the city of Baltimore. And so, it was the notion that art was not just a reflection of our reaction to social conditions.

But it was a contributor to social change, and it made that contribution through the collaboration of an organizer.

[: 00:56:16

[00:56:47] KG: I guess two things in particular. One... are the organizing victories that we've had. Amazon, a rise in the minimum wages in California, 20 an hour for low wage service sector workers.

[: 00:57:00

[00:57:03] KG: Yes. I mean, labor's obituary has been written more than once in our history. And labor has always rebounded. And whether this is a rebound or a blip is unclear, but it's inspiring me.

And the other thing that's among a million things that inspire me, that really inspires me is Joni Mitchell. Joni Mitchell has come back, come back from serious illness and medical problems, which she had to relearn how to talk. Let alone sing. And that woman is on stage again, performing and embracing community. And Jesus, I feel like anyone that follows her and follows that story. It's one of those stories that if she can do it, well, certainly I can get there part of the way.

Yeah,

[: 00:57:50

[00:58:00] KG: And she's lifting up a lot of young artists in the process quite intentionally.

[: 00:58:04

Thanks, Ken, for your stories and your continued good work. To our listeners, thank you for the time that you've spent with us here. And I know. If you're like me, there are times when you're listening to a podcast and you want to jump in and say, amen, or are you out of your mind? So if that hankering for dialogue lingers beyond this moment, please indulge it by dropping us a line at CSAC@artandcommunity.com, art and community is all one word and all spelled out. Change the story. Change the world is a production of the for the study of art and community are. Theme and soundscape spring forth from the head, heart, and hands of the maestro, Judy Munsen. Our text editing is by Andre Nebbe. Our effects come from freesound.org, and our inspiration comes from the ever present spirit of UKE 235. So, until next time, stay well, do good and spread the good word. And once again, please know that this episode has been 100 percent human.