DEMOCRACY: WHAT NEIGHBORS ARE FOR
Boyte, Harry C.
Democracy: What Neighbors Are For BY HARRY C. BOYTE Atruly pluralistic and humane society must be undergirded and overarched by a common vision of the public good," theologian and civil rights...
...Martin Luther King Jr...
...The past two decades have seen a groundswell of community organizations, citizen groups, consumer projects, and self-help campaigns...
...They started with "things we could change immediately," according to Gilkey...
...We said we needed to hire our own architect, so we could plan what we wanted...
...Even when an exceptional candidate articulates a far-sighted program, the ideas rarely foster empowerment...
...Cochran Gardens attracted a variety of government aid designed to "rescue" the poor...
...Such action represents the reappearance of a movement to tone up democracy in a society "whose spiritual muscles have atrophied through generations of disuse," as Indian educator Robert Powless described America...
...Nobody got vandalized...
...explained the concept in 1893: "What has made this land of ours a source of wealth is a social element, vast and precious," the authors wrote...
...it is a way to infuse meaning into today's lackluster politics...
...You'd ask, 'What are you doing?' They wouldn't say nothing...
...His next book, "Community Is Possible: Repairing America's Roots," will be published this fall by Harper and Row...
...Translating local ferment into a broad surge for change is no simple process...
...The area was "like heaven," says Gilkey, whose family was among the first black residents...
...For the residents of Cochran Gardens, the experience of empowerment began with renovating one building, which they renamed after King...
...Where it might take us, and whether it will prevail, are open questions...
...Drug dealers and theft rings occupied the top floors of the buildings...
...The few who believed that Cochran Gardens could change had a strategy...
...Before we can move from defensive reaction to constructive initiative, we must relearn how to talk in public forums...
...By the 1960s, Cochran Gardens had hit bottom...
...Office-seekers promise to do things for people, ignoring what people can do for themselves...
...They brought adult residents together with local school teachers and designed educational projects that portrayed public housing in a positive light...
...They'd just been shot," she says...
...They had few resources: "Nothing but dreams," Gilkey says...
...Still, the ideal of the commonwealth—a public life resting on community responsibility, mutual aid, and a sense of connectedness—has re-emerged in every great popular democratic movement...
...In recent years, however, that essential structure has been crumbling, and the common vision lies in fragments around us...
...It led to a feeling of attachment to other communities...
...We have a duty," King said, "to remove from political domination a small minority that cripples the economic and social institutions of our country and thereby degrades and impoverishes everyone...
...As more and more blacks entered the project, St...
...Bertha Gilkey today serves as a co-chair of the National Congress of Neighborhood Women, a network of ethnic and minority women in dozens of cities...
...Louis housing officials steadily withdrew services...
...For the poor and the powerless—and for progressives—revitalizing the notion of an American commonwealth could serve as a defense against the greed of Reagan-omics...
...They stopped upkeep on lawns and took away security forces...
...I gradually watched a beautiful community turn into a jungle...
...graffiti and broken windows recalled the spent rage of tenants who vacated the building...
...There were bicycles left outside...
...Such themes weave through many instances of community revitalization...
...The idea is public life sustained on the basis of shared values and purposes...
...In the process, the values of community life and the practice of self-governance deteriorate...
...Teen-agers who had vandalized buildings were put to work protecting old people from criminals...
...She and others from Cochran Gardens have helped organize tenants' groups elsewhere...
...One obvious ingredient in the success of Cochran Gardens was the integrity of leadership...
...But all is not bleak on the political landscape...
...Similarly, Thomas Jefferson found inspiration in the Iroquois' reliance on the moral force of opinion—rather than law—to control crime and other social maladies...
...They won several million dollars for the renovation of the projects by threatening to block a city grant application...
...We owe all that we value to the Community in whose life we live and move and have our being...
...The new spirit of populism charts a course away from politics as usual...
...If we can do it here, it can happen anywhere," she argues...
...Louis high-rise public-housing project...
...For the radical democrats of the American Revolution, self-government was possible only if communities constantly renewed the spirit of cooperation and commonwealth...
...Nobody told the kids that there might be nothing wrong about living in the projects," Gilkey says...
...And they feel like they're doing something worthwhile...
...Bell visited one old woman who had not been out of her apartment in months because she was afraid to leave...
...Cochran Gardens was built in the early 1950s near the center of the city's downtown shopping district...
...subject to the calls of that society...
...Generating a sense of one's own capacities and challenging the powers that be require a combination of circumstances: leaders with great skill, a pool of human resources, and commitment to communal values...
...The residents gradually gained power over the institutions and systems that had victimized them...
...All of the service programs aimed at the complex presumed that outside experts were the only people qualified to solve the problems...
...In addition to demanding community responsibility, Gilkey helped reknit torn communal relations...
...Tenants even had to bring their own chairs to meetings...
...She was raised there "before the changes...
...Today, Cochran Gardens is a beautiful, safe, and vibrant community...
...So tenants in her building raised money for a door and a lock...
...Benjamin Franklin, for example, borrowed from the Iroquois when he characterized property as "the creature of society...
...Gilkey believes that the principles which proved so powerful in Cochran Gardens—self-help, dignity, empowerment, community responsibility—can be transferred to any community...
...Bertha Gilkey grew up in Cochran Gardens, a St...
...You'd be going on the elevator and see someone lying down...
...We said, 'What are things we can do that give some hope?'" Everyone wanted an automatic laundry, for instance...
...The community did not die as Pruitt Igoe had...
...discover shared values among different heritages and traditions, and rebuild the capacity to solve problems ourselves...
...But it is no easy task to effect the kind of transformation that occurred in Cochran Gardens...
...When I toured the area and saw the building where Gilkey lived as a child, it stood in stark contrast to the other structures in Cochran Gardens: Large piles of rubbish surrounded the doors...
...This perspective drew upon Indian ideas of decentralized power and shared wealth...
...The populist magazine Commonwealth Harry C. Boyte is the author of "The Backyard Revolution: Understanding the New Citizen Movement...
...A well-meaning but paternalistic church delivered the same message, using a model of a suburban house and two-car garage to show children what they should aspire to...
...The poverty and crime accompanied a sense of powerlessness that was reinforced by traditional welfare programs...
...Community power is the first building block in a democratic movement still in its infancy...
...Sometimes the story is dramatic...
...An idea and an ideal have been lost, battered by corruption, cynicism, adulation of private riches, unbridled individual ambition, and a preoccupation with winning at any cost...
...They thought if you didn't have a degree, you couldn't do nothing," says Gilkey...
...Commonwealth is more than a dusty populist term...
...We moved from a cold-water flat...
...If you didn't paint, it didn't happen," she recalls...
...The ideal is the commonwealth, a concept of politics that reflects and reinforces the virtues of citizens in communities—as distinguished from the politics of interest groups and issue constituencies...
...Older adolescents got jobs repairing apartments they had once used for drug dealing...
...In 1969, residents elected Gilkey—then a young woman of twenty— to head their tenants' association...
...In the 1960s and early 1970s, Bell worked in Cochran Gardens amid the palpable fear and numbed apathy...
...Democracy: What Neighbors Are For BY HARRY C. BOYTE Atruly pluralistic and humane society must be undergirded and overarched by a common vision of the public good," theologian and civil rights activist Vincent Harding has observed...
...articulated this sensibility when he described the civil rights movement as a "crusade for citizenship" that taught a "new sense of some-bodyness" and displayed the "single garment of destiny" which binds all communities together...
...Laundromats...
...Tenants from Cochran Gardens helped register thousands of voters in other public-housing projects...
...And we wanted a community center, rooms, first-floor apartments, wrought-iron fences, doors, walkups for the large families, courtyards, all of it...
...They initiated social service programs run by the tenants' council...
...Schools counseled students that they might be able to escape if they studied hard...
...They fought the city housing authority on issue after issue, eventually winning formal tenant management rights...
...We wanted people to face each other over the courtyards so there would be more of a community feeling," Gilkey says...
...Conceived as a model project, it initially provided white working-class and lower middle-class families with inexpensive, attractive housing...
...But it was people with degrees that got us in the mess in the first place...
...But the Laundromat was torn up, kicked in, and vandalized...
...They come in, listen to the young mothers' problems, rock the baby," says Gilkey...
...Driven by determination and rage "at seeing good housing go bad," she and several others began trying to turn the place around...
...The elderly who couldn't paint prepared lunch, so they could feel like they were part of it too," says Gilkey...
...Such efforts did not go unnoticed, and the activists began to exercise political clout in the community at large...
...Shoot-outs between police and criminals were common—in broad daylight...
...Gilkey supported herself for ten years as a day-care worker, and she never received funds allocated for community purposes...
...Tenants sponsored a program to pair unwed mothers—desperate for free time to attend school or do other activities—with elderly women who had time on their hands...
...We're saving that one to fix up for last," Gilkey explained...
...Local organizations provide the framework for a continuing discussion of populism and democracy—how ordinary people can exercise control over the bureaucracies and corporate powers of the technological age...
...The electoral process turns aspirants into commodities, voters into consumers...
...recover memories in this most forgetful of countries...
...Everybody who lived on a floor was responsible for painting that floor...
...Though such sentiments were influential, they did not hold sway...
...The key at each point was rebuilding a sense of responsibility to the community...
...Just to be a reminder...
...But we can all become involved in the answer...
...Louis public-housing complex, which was blown up by the city after it had become, in the official parlance, "far gone...
...But more important, it could strengthen communal life, the set of daily experiences through which people learn to trust their neighbors, help one another, and believe in their own capacity to solve problems...
...Then they raised money to paint the halls...
...It was like Pruitt Igoe," remembers Norma Bell, a social worker raised in that infamous St...
...In conventional politics, the candidate is the focal point of attention...
...What was wrong was the poverty and the crime and the drugs...
Vol. 48 • June 1984 • No. 6
