Heidi:  Hi, this is Heidi Burgess with Beyond Intractability. And I'm here with Harry Boyte, who has such a long and illustrious career that I want to let him introduce himself, rather than me doing it. It is January 8th, 2025. We're going to talk about nonviolence and citizen activism. So Harry, I want to start by noting that you got your start, as I understand it, way back when, in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and '70s. So I was hoping you could tell us about your work then and then move us forward to today.

Harry: Sure. Well, that was certainly my formation story. I was working in the movement for Martin Luther King and his organization called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The story behind that was that  I grew up in Atlanta, a southern boy, with a Scottish background, and a very deep sense of southern roots. My dad was a southerner from Charlotte, North Carolina. He'd been a newspaper reporter. He was in the Second World War in the Red Cross in Northern Africa, and that really did begin to change his racial views. He started out with pretty typical racially-prejudiced views of a Southern white working-class guy, but also he was really for the underdog. He was a reporter of the Gastonia strike in '34 and so forth. And then Mother worked on his racial views too. They had very different class and educational backgrounds. She was the daughter of a prominent Chicago architect and highly educated, with two masters degrees.

Dad became the director of the Atlanta Red Cross in 1945, or '46, just after I was born. We moved down to Atlanta. And I was a baby and a kid in Atlanta. Dad desegregated the Red Cross in the '50s, which was very controversial, actually, just to open up the water fountains and the bathrooms and the cafeteria.

But the moment I remember that really was life-changing for our whole family was in 1958 when Dad helped to create an organization called Help Our Public Education or HOPE. It didn't take a position on segregation or desegregation, but it had one plank, which was that there should be public schools in Georgia.  And as timid or innocuous as that sounds, it was very controversial because the political establishment was talking about closing the public schools, rather than desegregate. So in fact, when his name was in the paper in '58 and I was 12 years old, we had 150 phone calls threatening us in a week.

And I remember that did change the kind of mood of the neighborhood.  I stopped walking in front of the sheriff's house, because he was rumored to be in the Klan. I walked behind his house to get to school. But at any rate, that was the beginning of quite a tumultuous time. I was just at the threshold of being a teenager. Dad left the Red Cross and went to work, first for the Unitarians Service Committee, and then the American Friends Service Committee, doing work on school desegregation. We moved up to Charlotte, and then to Greensboro. He placed young people in northern schools because Prince Edward County, Virginia, had closed the schools. It was the only county that had actually closed the schools. This was in 1961 and '62. And it was not only blacks, there were a few poor whites he placed in schools in the north too, since there were no public schools in Prince Edward. As a result, he was brutalized by the American Nazi Party and almost killed. He had a nervous breakdown and was unemployed for awhile. That was all a formative experience. 

And then in 1963, I was traveling across the country, wondering what to do, whether to go to school, college, or go to be a seafaring poet on the merchant marine. But I called home from San Francisco and Dad said he had a job with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was an assistant to Martin Luther King, the first white person on the staff and the only white on the executive board. He said I should come back. They were going to have a march to get the attention of the nation for making progress on desegregation of public accommodations. That was the March on Washington.

So a guy I met out there, Peter Kovach, and I drove across the country and got to Washington on August 27th, 1963. Right before the march, I put my sleeping bag on dad's hotel floor and heard King practice his "I Have a Dream" speech in the room next door. 

That was a significant experience. The march was also very powerful for me, because I was an angry kid. I didn't know any other white kids that I could talk to about desegregation. And my teachers were afraid to talk about it. There was a climate of fear in the South in the '50s and '60s. But the calm and the demeanor and the dignity of the marchers was what really impressed me. I thought, "What did they learn to do that?" This was really the first expression of nonviolence on a large scale that I'd ever seen. And of course, it was also growing out of Montgomery, the bus boycott, and the sit-ins and the beginnings of the citizenship schools across the South, which taught nonviolence.

It had a big impact. I decided to go to college and stay in the country. I went to a Southern college because I wanted to be in the movement. So, for a couple of years, I went to Duke, because Duke was the only school that gave me a scholarship. And I had to have a scholarship, because dad had been unemployed. My first act, personally, about integration was withdrawing from the state track meet in the spring of '63 because it was segregated. And the principal just had a fit ,and contacted the schools where I was admitted. Duke was the one that kept my scholarship. 

So I went to Duke and organized a chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (C.O.R.E.), and that launched several very intense years of work in the movement. And also work with the maids and janitors at Duke, which was a formative experience. They were wise and they were quite disciplined and nonviolent. They wanted support for the organizing effort among the maids and janitors. The guy who was the leader of the effort was named Oliver Harvey. And he would tell me, "Would you stop the faculty from making all these demonstrations and protests? It's not helping the cause."

Heidi: So demonstrating on the side of the blacks or what? 

Harry: Yeah, it was Duke University and we were working with the maids and janitors. We organized a group called Friends of Local '77, which was the name of the organizing campaign among the maids and janitors. It was all black folks.  We had about 30 or so students and about three or four faculty in the CORE chapter. Over the time I was at Duke,  there was a growing sympathy in support of the maids and janitors and their effort. The spring of '67, when I left Duke to go to the University of Chicago for a year, we had a vigil with 600 people. They next year, students had a sit-in on the president's lawn called the Duke Vigil. And that had a lot of notable people in it —for example, Judy Woodworth was there. It was a life-changing experience for a lot of people at Duke.

Also my experience in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, I worked with the Office of Field Secretary for SCLC in the citizenship schools. And that really did also affect me. And it gave me a continuing understanding of the potential power of the citizen identity.  Citizen identity was an active co-creative citizen, who was responsible for communities, and who had a sense of ownership of communities. And this was really striking, because these were African-Americans who were disenfranchised and often in very disadvantaged positions. But the strength and the courage and the nonviolence that I saw had a huge impact on me.

So, I did that for a couple of years. Then King asked if I would see if I could organize poor whites. And so I started in Durham working for the poverty program in '66. I took a year off when I went to Chicago, but we were having success organizing white male workers and making some connections with the black community. That was my first involvement in community organizing. I learned a lot about the ABCs of community organizing, although we didn't have anybody to get much experience from then, and I was mad about this.

Heidi: You had to invent it yourself?

Harry:  Ae had our fits and starts, but we had some successes.  And we ended up hiring neighborhood leaders, which is always a mistake. And then we hired some Duke students, which was an even bigger mistake, because  they couldn't get along with the neighborhood folks we were working with. But I had enough experience to know what could be done. So I created a newspaper, edited a newspaper, for the working-class community in Durham. And then I began writing about citizen organizing and citizen action and using the experiences I had had.

I would say the thing that I took from the civil rights movement, different than a lot of community organizing is attention to cultural dimensions of change. Community organizing is very nuts and bolts, bread and butter — local issues like unpaved streets and lousy schools and problems with the sewer system. So we did all that, just kind of by trial and error. But we knew that people needed a feeling that they could do something. They needed to feel they could have some power.  And in fact, in the poor white community, one thing that struck me was how often they were quite jealous of the blacks for getting their stuff together. So that was actually pretty useful.

So, we also added a strong cultural dimension, which I got from the movement. We knew you couldn't make real larger change without thinking about both bread and butter issue organizing, but also a cultural dimension. And that came just straight out of the movement.

Heidi: Explain a bit what you mean by "cultural dimensions."

Harry: Well, for example, people needed to know the history of black and whites working together in the South. Southern populists. In the 1880s and '90s, there was an interracial movement of farmers and then the Southern tenant farmers union. And then again in the 1930s. So we did a lot of work on the history. We had people just study the history and find out and do interviews with people who were still around from the '30s, working in the textile and tobacco mills. In our newspaper, we had something called "corn corner," which was jokes. Working-class jokes. And we had sports coverage, which was all the track races, the dirt track races for cars. And we had potlucks and sociable things. So you needed to create a larger sense of community beyond simply doing the issue work.  That's what I meant.

So I started writing about community and citizen action. First, in journalistic publications, although I was frustrated that the progressive press, for instance Nation and Progressive, which I wrote for all the time. They weren't too interested in blue-collar, white ethnics who were making alliances with the blacks. They had blind spots about that.

I did political work too and had a lot of part-time jobs. I wrote my first book which was called The Backyard Revolution.  It came out in 1980. And then the second one was called Communities Possible, which were in-depth stories of communities which had organized in very different settings— like disability communities.

My mother was also quite an activist. She led the desegregation of the League of Women Voters in Atlanta. And after Dad died, she was in a kind of an underground railroad site in Georgia where refugees from Latin America would come up and go up to Canada. So I included a story about that in the Community As Possible book.

And as I said, I continued to be active. I talked my way out of being in deep trouble in St. Augustine, Florida in '64, when I was caught by the Klan outside the old jail. But I got out of it. They said, "You're a Yankee Communist." I said, "No, I'm a Southern boy, and I'm a populist." Now, where I got the term "populist," I don't know.  It just floated into my consciousness. But that was why King thought if I could do that, maybe I could organize.

But I didn't really think about a civic populist theory until the 1970s. I was doing writing about community and citizen groups. My first book was an overview of the neighborhood movement that had come out of the '70s called The Backyard Revolution. I saw some wonderful stories of communities which had revitalized themselves against tremendous odds, like a public housing project in St. Louis called Cochran Gardens, where the young woman, Bertha Gilkey, was just convinced that the public housing project could come back to life. It was run by drug dealers and gangs.

It's quite a story.  She had worked for the breakfast program of the Black Panthers. That was one of the positive things that the Panthers did in St. Louis. And so she knew people could organize around projects. But anyway, she was an extraordinary organizer who could help people develop a sense that they could make a difference. Step by step, it's a slow process.  It's not in a situation like that where everybody's scared. It needs to be over time. So I did a story of Cochran Gardens and how it was revitalized. The city was going to blow it up because they thought it was just unremediatable.  I also did stories of really deep organizing in the communities, faith-based community organizations like the Communities Organized for Public Service, which was kind of a grandparent of modern, broad-based community organizing with very diverse groups.

So I decided I was a populist, a democratic populist, and I started writing more theoretical work on how populism was different than socialism or the left. And it was infused by a nonviolent sensibility too, with nonviolence being a different kind of power than dominating power.  So this is a long intro and I can come back to stuff that you're interested in.

But basically, the shortened version now is that I did a book with my former wife, Sarah Evans, on the concept of free spaces, which was a concept we had both developed out of the civil rights movement.  I had done work on textiles mills and wondered why working people didn't form unions and realized it was because the mill owners owned all of the spaces, the social spaces in the city. They were very conscious.  So that was the genesis of the idea of free spaces and also experiences in the movement, which were spaces of discussion and open debate and very different than the culture I had grown up with in the White South.

And then we looked at different broad, plural, democratic movements in American history, the Black Freedom Movement over time, and the women's movement from the 19th century, the Women's Christian Temperance Union and groups for more reform. And then especially community grounded workers' efforts like the Knights of Labor and then the Southern Populists. And we could see in all of those broad efforts, broad movements, that they were distinctive because they were democratic in spirit. They were generous. They were open. They weren't reactive. They weren't mainly defined by who they were against, although there were struggles. But they were defined by a vision of a deeper democracy and a more inclusive democracy. So we did a book called Free Spaces, which got a lot of attention and big article in the Times review. And then the University of Minnesota asked me if I'd come and start a democracy project there at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. The dean asked me to come. And that's what we've been doing ever since.  

We did have a diagnosis, that concept of free spaces, which were community sites where different diverse people could create a public and develop public skills and develop public confidence and develop a larger vision of who "the people" were and make change.  You could find those at the heart of every broad movement that we described as "democratic." In fact, it's what distinguished democratic movements from more reactive movements. Our starting diagnosis, when I went into the university, was that there was a contraction, a disappearance, of free spaces across the society.

Drugstores, which were once community gathering places, becoming CVSs. Even places like schools and churches were becoming more detached from the life of communities.

Heidi: It sounds like the institutional version of Bowling Alone.

Harry: Yeah, it was. I got to know Putnam as we were both working in similar terrain. But our analysis was that technology and television was a factor. The other factor in the erosion of civic life was the transformation of these institutions, which used to be civic centers and had become more service delivery operations.

Heidi: Interesting. So you mentioned two things that I want to follow up on. The first one is your image that was shaped, obviously, by this history and lots of other people, of what democracy is. One of the things that we've been noticing as we've been meeting various people who all agree that US democracy is challenged and they're working to fix it. But we haven't found any sort of consensus on what democracy is or should be. You've given hints, certainly, but I'd be interested in hearing you reflect on that a little bit more.

Harry: Yeah. Well,We took an older idea that I had seen in the movement in living practice. Nobody in the movement— all the older people who were my mentors — Septima Clark in the citizenship schools or Ella Baker or Bayard Rustin or King himself,—none of them thought democracy was mainly voting.  They all used some version of the old formulation that it was a way of life, which was pretty much the idea of Alexis de Tocqueville when he traveled across America in the 1830s and then wrote Democracy in America, which was the title of his famous book. He said democracy was about people doing things, self-organizing. So I always thought about democracy as much bigger than simply elections.

And the role of the citizen is much more serious and substantial than simply as a voter or someone who obeys the law, the constitutional version of "citizen." But that deepened over time and developed as we did things. I think you need public spaces or free spaces to keep it [citizenship] alive.

And then the work involved thinking about how a school, or a local business, or a cooperative extension office could become kind of thawed out. It could develop a revived civic spirit.  That led us to think about the work involved in sustaining and creating those institutions. So after some analysis, I created something called the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, which was kind of the seed bed for our developing theory of what we call "public work." "Public work" means a community working together on public problems. And that turns out to be the best way to lessen prejudice over time.

But "public work" also can be the people who do work with public spirit and public qualities. And professionals—we call those citizen professionals if they're in a professional role as a teacher or medical personnel or extension agent. They do "public work" too.

So we began to think about how does the culture of a local school, for example, become more outward looking— more public, and also how do librarians develop that mindset? Because you have to have workers who keep that dynamic alive, who develop a real passion around the civic role of their library or their school or their church or their congregation or their small business. So we've focused increasingly on democracy as not only a way of life, but how it's created through work.

Heidi: That is that it sounds wonderful. But people now, so many people, seem to have gotten so detached from their communities. The United States always has been known as a very individualistic society, but it seems like we're getting more so, and less interested in our neighbors and the well-being of our communities and more interested just in ourselves. And I'm wondering if you, A, agree with that statement, and B, if you do, what's to be done to revive this civic spirit?

Harry: Well, I think it's more complicated than a simple unidirectional arrow pointing down. My first book was on actually the birth of a new movement that I wrote about in this piece in Time magazine the other day, the neighborhood movement. The Christian Science Monitor called it the invisible story of the decade. And by 1980, something like 25% of Americans were involved in neighborhood activism.  Now that has diminished a little bit, although there seems to be signs of a neighborhood revival. Certainly in our neighborhood, people are doing all sorts of things.

We see a revival of anchoring civic institutions, for instance, we have a very active local library. And our church and several other churches are very active in the community. There's several restaurants which are community centers. And those are all kept alive by people who wouldn't call themselves "citizen professionals," but that's what we would call them. Well, probably our minister would call them that, actually. We've had a lot of conversations about this.

So I think the classic constellation of civic groups, service groups like Rotary and Kiwanis and so forth, have lost membership. The "bowling alone phenomenon" is a real thing. But I don't think it's the whole story. I think there are signs, actually, of revival of civic interest. Let me just give you two stories.

One is we could see that young people, who are generally seen as simply private, individualist, consumerist, were much more complicated than that. Because I had been in the civil rights movement and had seen the power and the importance of young people's action, courage, initiative. One of the very first things we did when I came to the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute was work with a group for a year and plan a youth initiative, a citizenship initiative, which we called Public Achievement. We talked a bit about that before.

And it's basically about how people come into public life. They don't come in too much because they're told that they should. They're often invited in and that makes a difference. But in the Public Achievement case, I was drawing on my own experiences in the civil rights movement and the citizenship schools, which were basically built around people's lives and identities. We started out by asking young people, "what were their interests? Were there problems they worried about? Were there things they were mad about, upset about?" in their local environment especially, although it could be bigger. And we talked to 21 groups, including over 300 young people. And every single group had a long list of things they were worried about. There was no group that said, "No, everything is fine or we don't care about it." So that kind of exploded the myth of apathy.

The issues they were concerned about varied, depending on the setting.  In an inner city school like Anderson in Minneapolis, there'd be drive-by shootings and drugs and a lot of crime and violence. In a suburb, it would be that they were overscheduled. "We never have time to even have meals together," they'd say. "We're a family. And we were supposed to be doing all these activities and we never really quite know why.  We're overscheduled".  And then there were pretty general cross-contextual issues like the school lunches are lousy. And there was bullying, and that was a big problem. This was in 1990. So we talked to 300 kids, all teenagers, all different backgrounds.

Then when we said, "Do you think you can do anything about that?" All the kids said, "No, we don't know how to do anything." We've never had a class on that. So the Public Achievement approach was built on young people learning to take action on issues they were concerned about.

And then one thing that happens, of course, is that sometimes there are really big issues like climate change. So then you have to say, well, break it down into something that's manageable and actionable over the course of a year, for example, if it's through a school.  And they've learned how to do it.

So there are core skills that we use and that have translated well across contexts —in other countries as well. My wife was a democracy director of democracy education for the largest democracy group in Africa for 20 years. And they found they could adapt it. They had to figure out what would be the parallel words in French or the local dialect.

All revolved around the concept of power. This was also a translation from non-violence. But power is relational and generative power is the capacity to act, rather than only power over. That turns out to be a simple but very, very important distinction. Because in practice, what it means is that if you have kids, say they're working on wanting to have a recycling center in their school. Or, we had kids who were upset about the bathrooms being amiss. So an issue like that, you can't just come and denounce the principal or hold a protest. I discovered that the first inclination that kids have is just to do a protest because that's what they learned and that they've seen. But that doesn't really get anything done, usually. Sometimes it gets them in trouble.

So we say you have to learn how to map the environment that you're in, the local political culture, the unwritten rules, as well as the written rules, of the school. And then you have to look at the map in power terms, in terms of generative power, which means building power.

So we use what's called a power map in which young people will take on an issue like bullying. What to do about bullying in their school? So they'll put bullying  in the middle of their map. And then they'll think about, "who has an interest in this issue?" And who's doing the bullying, or who supports or fosters the bullying? But then the organizing process is learning to talk to those people, do what we call one-on-ones, find out what their interests are, what they think about it, how they think about the issue. And so over time, you put together a much richer, more dynamic, more multi-dimensional understanding of power, and you learn how to act. You can build your own power that way.

And then it's also learning the culture. So in a school like Anderson, which was the lowest income school in Minneapolis, we had a group that wanted to work on the bathroom, the boy's bathroom. And they were kids who were angry at school. Several immigrants that couldn't speak English very well, their second language. So they had never even imagined talking to the principal. So we did a lot of role-playing. How can you talk to the principal? How can you be understood? How can you be respectful, and also make your case and find out, is there a way we could connect on this?

Now, one thing we find that's really quite powerful is that the experience of a third grader learning to do that, have a meeting with a principal that's a productive meeting can be a life-changing experience. They get recognition and respect and the world opens up. It's not simply a static, narrow, closed world. And we found that really could be powerful.

We have a video, a documentary that some students at Humphrey made about our work with special education at a school in which the kids are very eloquent about their own changes, their own self-transformation. They were level three EBD, which means they were locked away.  And they did this Public Achievement approach around several different issues, and they changed.

Heidi: Is that documentary available online?

Harry: Yes. So if you do if you Google it, it's called "Public Achievement," which was the name of our youth initiative, "Public Achievement in Fridley." (Fridley is a little suburb of Minneapolis). And then the subtitle is "Transforming Special Education. " This has interviews with the kids, with the teachers, and how they changed, with community leaders, with the principal. (It is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaRimtavig8)

Those kids in the seventh grade EBD not only got out of their closed classroom, they became leaders across the town on bullying. So it's quite a moving.

Heidi: When was this?

Harry: This was back 10 years ago or so. But the school couldn't sustain it. There are always complications, because to do this well, you need a lot of infrastructure, and you need a lot of space for schools to be able to innovate. You basically have to carve out free spaces in a school. And especially after the national legislation, No Child Left Behind where everything became more oriented towards tests and teaching to the tests, it became much harder to sustain Public Achievement in public schools. There was more space in parochial schools. But then also, Public Achievement has spread to other countries too, so it depends on the context.

Our biggest partnership is with Japan because it's transferable. I mean, kids everywhere really want to have agency and be able to make a difference and feel proud of what they're doing and get recognized for making a difference. And we've had some really powerful stories. And if you teach that at a young age, it's likely to continue on into adulthood.

We haven't had resources to do systematic and qualitative research, which is what you need to do to really get deep. But we have had enough anecdotal research to know that it has life-changing effects on kids.

The very first positive experience I had with this was in 1992. I had a student, Melissa Bass, who was quite a liberal feminist, but she also wanted to see kids develop a sense of power.  And we were starting working with a pretty conservative Catholic grade school called St. Bernard's in St. Paul, in a working-class neighborhood. The principal, Dennis Donovan, was really was passionate about kids developing a sense of their power. He had been changed himself by being involved in a community organization and developing confidence in the sense he could do things in the world. We decided to start slowly. So there were three groups in the first year at St. Bernard's. And my student, Melissa, was in Public Achievement. She learned what happens when young people work as a team—not a big team, usually five to eight, something like that. If you just have a couple of kids, it's too small, but four or five is fine.

In this case, there was a group of seventh-grade girls at St. Bernard's who were really mad about sexual harassment. And they said that was the issue they wanted to work on. And a couple of teachers in this conservative school said, "No, that's not such a good issue for a Catholic school." But rather than simply be outraged, Melissa, went to work. She could have just said, "Well, it just shows how terrible the Catholic church is." or something like that, but she didn't. And Dennis was very good working with her. I worked with her too. She developed a way to teach the girls, seventh grade girls, how to do what do we call one-on-one. So they did a lot of discussions with other people, including other girls and boys, and teachers, and parents, and staff— the custodial staff is often really important to get a sense of a school.

They found out that if they reframed it from "sexual harassment" to question of "lack of respect", everybody would buy in. They could still do the same work. It just was the framing that was the key. That is actually a really important principle, as you would know from conflict resolution. So they framed it that way. They had a really remarkable success over the year in changing the culture of St. Bernard's. They did plays for younger kids, and they did a curriculum, and they did public speaking across the cities to Catholic schools. So that was all significant. Before that, I hadn't known that you could have the same kind of change in people that I had seen in the civil rights movement a lot, absent a big movement. But we did see real change.

And the girl who was f the leader of the group, was a very intelligent, attractive girl, but also she started the year just having a disastrous experience in school. Her mother had died of a drug overdose. She was living with her grandparents. She was failing everything. That experience of doing that project over that year transformed her life. And we're still in touch with her. She's doing well. She's a health professional.  She went to college. So what really struck me was that I could see the same change, the same results that came out of Montgomery with the bus boycott. Martin Luther King had a term for what came out of Montgomery— that the black community developed a new sense of "somebodiness."

That's the key theme in his book, Stride Toward Freedom about the Montgomery bus boycott. But you could see that through Public Achievement, if it was done well and the ground was right and the context was right. Young people could develop a new sense of somebodiness.

So that was one piece of evidence. It's actually not so much that people get interested. It's that they don't have opportunities to develop a sense of their own agency and confidence and the skills involved.

We've done our work in different settings, not only with young people, but around that principle. People need to learn how to do things as a learning process and educational process.

Heidi: Let me zoom forward for a minute.  I've heard from our mutual friend, David Eisner, that you're now trying to bring, I assume, the same sort of thing into Braver Angels.

Harry: Yes, we are. He's on our team.

Heidi: Oh, okay. So could you talk a little bit about that and maybe just start with one or two minutes of telling folks who are watching this who don't know what Braver Angels is and then how this is a new direction for them?

Harry: Yeah, good. It's great to have David involved because he's so experienced. He was the director of AmeriCorps for the Bush administration and then the National Constitution Center. He is really deeply knowledgeable about this kind of stuff. But Braver Angels was formed right after the election in 2016. David Blankenhorn, who had an Institute for American Values, kind of looking at conflicts and values in America, was worried about polarization and asked a staff person he had in Ohio, David Lapp, if he could get together equal number of Trump and Clinton voters after the election.

David's who's very sociable. He's a wonderful guy, conservative himself, but really good at crossing differences. He said, "Well, I can get together a group in his little rural town, Lebanon. But I don't know what to do with them." So we got them together. And then they called in David and Bill Dougherty.

Now, Bill was somebody we had worked with for 20 years or more.  And Bill was a good example of what we call a citizen professional. In fact, he has a Citizen Professional Center at the University of Minnesota. He was also a leading figure in family therapy. And he kind of moved the field through different paradigm shifts from individuals and couples to family systems and then the community contexts.

He really liked our idea of how thinking about the public dimensions of work as a professional could change one's practice. So he had done that in a lot of different contexts, and it's still going on. He did a big project with police and black men in Minneapolis.

So in the simplest way, Bill learned to take his really well-honed skills as a family therapist and turn them into public skills.  So he applied the principles he knew as good family therapy to this public setting, in which, for example, the first principal is recognizing that as much as you think those people over there are the problem, you've got part of the problem yourself. You're involved. He designed a workshop for this group over the weekend, and they had started out thinking they hated each other and the other side was completely evil, and they came out thinking they were completely wrong. People on the other side were actually intelligent and well-meaning and good. And even then, although it was about depolarization of attitudes, Bill came back and he told me in detail what was happening, what happened there and he said, "what really is going on is that people are worried about the future of their community." So from the very beginning, that experience pointed to the idea that people need to not only just like each other more, but they need to learn how to work together on community problems. So that's always been an undercurrent in Braver Angels.

In the 2020 election, Bill pulled me into a group that was working on what could be done about the election conflict called "Hold America Together." And we had several hundred groups that were concerned—churches and Kiwanis Clubs and different colleges.  Then afterwards, we had a group that started thinking, "Well, how can we actually develop the capacities to take action, not only to have dialogue that's respectful and depolarizing?" And that's the group that David is part of. So Braver Angels is the largest group that has worked on depolarization with a lot of success. Most of the workshop design and the process design comes from Bill Doherty, he really knows how to do that well.  It began with red and blue workshop. And then it went on to how do you have family dinners that are not going to be explosive? How do you bridge the racial and rural/urban divides? They're basically one-on-one meetings and workshop models. How do you recognize your own prejudice as depolarizing within?

This newer effort that we've done over the last year is called the Civic Renewal Support Team, and it's working with some of the alliances and Braver Angels to take action on community issues. And we've seen some real successes about that. So it's basically adapting the same kinds of skills that we use in Public Achievement and that Marie, my wife used in Africa to great effect with villagers and people in townships and so forth. It involves learning how to think about power in a generative way. How do you build power? Power is not simply about control. It's how do you build it with others? And how do you have a meeting, which is a non-judgmental meeting, a meeting based on curiosity about finding out what a person's interests are. Where are they coming from? What do they care about? What's their passion? What's their story? There are several different variants, but it's really learning to listen deeply for  what young men call their "why" What is their "why?" And so we've been doing work around that.

In a leadership team, you need to learn to work together. You need to think strategically. You need to learn collective evaluation, what is working, what's not. All the kind of stuff we do in Public Achievement can be translated into adult settings. And one of my former students is working with a lot of the Braver Angels chapters or alliances on the East Coast in Connecticut, especially with these kind of skills.

Heidi: The thing that I find to be particularly exciting about this is that Braver Angels is huge. So it has the potential of really taking this to a very large scale.

Harry: Yeah. It means you've got to get beyond thinking that says "we know how workshops work. We're afraid to do anything else." How do you get beyond the individual depolarization to think collectively? And to think in community-wide terms? And work with people who are not in Braver Angels? And those are all kind of stretches. David Eisner is really good at this. So by saying that the evidence is overwhelming, that for people to overcome prejudices and kind of an us-them mentality, you can begin with discussion and dialogue, but you need to do work together.

So it's a good thing. It's not opposition to Braver Angels. It's just another stage of how you sustain and deepen and expand this work. I do think that I think it has a lot of potential.

Heidi: So let's come up to right now. I'm hearing a lot of people, and I'm sure you are too, who are completely despairing about the next four years and saying, "All is lost. All of this progress is going to come to a standstill." How do you think we can maintain momentum during the next four years? Is this movement challenged, or is it more likely to be stronger than it was before?

Harry: I think it's an opportunity.  I did a piece with a colleague for Time magazine the other day called "What Can We Learn?" Jimmy Carter [who died recently] has much to teach us about what we call "civic populism," which is not the angry us-versus-them populism. It's about building civic muscle and civic capacity.  Carter became president in the 1970s and in significant measure on the back of the neighborhood movement. A great leader, priest Geno Baronie, helped him create a campaign that had a lot of community language and neighborhood language and white ethnic appeal. And then he came into HUD, Housing and Urban Development, to design programs which would help communities do that.

I think there's lessons over periods of time.  Elections make a difference because they tell, not simply the policies, but the narrative they're telling about America. People pay attention to that. I learned that in the Civil Rights Movement. I was complaining, long ago, about there was no difference between Goldwater and Johnson, and I couldn't even vote. But a janitor at Duke said, "Well, that's not the right way to think about elections. It's who created the ground in which we all, as citizens, can do the work we need to do." So it's a challenge. I don't think Trump is too attuned to the role of the citizen.

Jimmy Carter was, on the other hand. When left office, he said, "I'm taking up the most important office," which is the Office of Citizen, and he did it. So we need those stories.

On a more significant level, it brings me back to the civil rights movement.  In the 1950s, a woman named Ella Baker, who was a very important person in the movement was the first director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King's Organization, which Bayard Rustin had gotten King to do. Bayard Rustin was King's political mentor in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. He'd been sent by the labor leader, A. Philip Randolph, the grand old man of the civil rights movement. He and Ella Baker were great friends and they talked (they were both in New York).  Ella Baker was the Chapter Secretary for the NAACP, especially in the South, which meant she traveled all over the South all the time. And she reported back that there's this ferment, this sense of eagerness to make change, activism in the South.

All over, she said, communities were doing things. They were beginning things, asking questions, taking bold steps. But she said, "Nobody in the next town knows anything about what's happening in that town." So they realized that to move beyond the local ferment to a larger citizen movement, and they used the term "citizen movement."

First-class citizenship was the heart of the Black sensibility. And this didn't simply mean voting. It meant dignity and recognition and respect. The movement would need to somehow make visible the fact that there was stuff happening all across the South. So the Southern Christmas Leadership Conference's first campaign was called a Crusade for Citizenship in 20 cities. And that meant to give people a sense of hope that things could be done, that change was possible. And then that led to the sit-ins and then the citizenship schools, which was a big movement across the South. It provided local leadership training that the Public Achievement is, in some ways, modeled on — the citizenship schools where people would learn to take action on community problems.  That's what I worked for as a kid.

So I think the challenge is partly how do we make visible the ferment that's invisible? It's below the radar screen. I was talking to a woman who is a community college teacher in northern Michigan who was saying," I got the feeling that there's stuff going on, But nobody knows about it. It's all invisible" —she's really passionate about reviving civic life.   So how do we make it visible?"  So how do we make it visible?" So that's one question.

I think there's also a policy piece. I was just having a conversation with Jim Scheibel, who is a fellow I've known since 1976. He was the director of Vista for Jimmy Carter. He was also the president of the AARP in Minnesota for some time. And he had been a community organizer. He was saying, look, "there are a couple of other things to think about, too, regarding visibility. One is a policy agenda. At the state level, there's going to be a lot more space for state-level policies around service." We would say "public service," especially service with a kind of public work flavor, that's not charity, but working with people.

And then I think finding champions who are visible, well-known, prominent champions who can say that there is a story brewing in America is important. Thinking about experiences Marie had of doing that in Africa around xenophobic violence, for example, in South Africa. They did a very successful program. In this case, her organization was contracted by Freedom House, which is an international group around democracy. They contracted with Marie to do what are called "study circles" around the question of "how do you build healthy communities and deal violence?" It was very successful.

In the Carter and civic populism piece, we cite, as the evidence that civil action is possible, the findings of Will Friedman, who was head of public agenda, and is now a democracy researcher. He's been doing focus groups with people about what they think about things. And as you said, people are often quite discouraged and worried about the direction of the country. But the more they hear about stories of citizens doing things and having success or making change, the more hopeful and energized they are. So I think we need mechanisms to accomplish that — making this work visible, the yearnings and the ferment and the stories that are kind of bubbling around across America.

Heidi: Great. I'm wondering, you said a few minutes ago that elections tell you something about the mindset of the country. What do you think this election tells us?

Harry: Well, I think several things. People are very discouraged.  They're  sick of politicians bickering, but they're also sick of the bickering in their own communities and families. The challenge is not that people are apathetic. I think the challenge is people are hopeless. They feel that they don't know what to do. That's basically the problem. And so just even introductory experiences through which you can learn things. You can learn to take action. That there ere are ways to do it. There are a lot of tools and resources and skills and knowledge. That can really bring about some change. I think that is the strength of the Braver Angels civic renewal work. And I think there are other ways, other partners.

For example, I was talking with Jim Scheibel about this. We both liked Jimmy Carter in '76, and he worked for Carter. We both knew he was an organizer. And we both knew the neighborhood world and the community organizing world. Jim was saying there are organizations we could also work with like AARP. They have a lot of internal stories [about effective civic organizing and civic action], but they're not stories that are very public. It's an enormous organization. Just having them develop a storytelling process could be effective.

I don't think people are going to put their hopes on Washington politicians to fix our country's challenges.

Heidi: That's good because they won't. 

Harry: No, they won't. It's kind of like  Waiting for Godot. It's not going to happen. So I think there is a sense that we have to be the ones we've been waiting for. That was a song of the Citizenship Schools of the Civil Rights Movement. "We are the ones we've been waiting for." Nobody else is going to rescue us. We are the ones.

Heidi: Well, I think that's a great way to end, but I always ask people I'm talking with if there's something that you were hoping I would have asked that I didn't, some story that you really want to share that you haven't.

Harry: Well, I think maybe just the question what gives me hope.

Heidi: That's a good one.

Harry: And there I would say there are two things. I'm a person of faith. So when I think "God, I can't do this," I think, "let go." Like Alcoholics Anonymous, "Let go and let God." No, you can't do it by yourself. You have to look to other people and you have to look for the spirit. My mother was a Quaker for 60 years. And so she always talks about the light within.  We've also worked with the Episcopal Church. We took the Braver Angels approach to our Episcopal Church in this neighborhood. And people have really developed quite a vibrant culture of talking about differences, telling stories. We think that the discussion of different points of view is deeply enriched if you have stories that go along with them. Also last year, we've been working with a group of conservative congregations out in Western Minnesota. We've developed a good relationship. So faith is one thing that gives me hope.

And then I also get hope from seeing the remarkable, sometimes amazing capacity of people to overcome enormous challenges. This is one of the  things I've been doing research on.  I'm working with a group of Black colleges in Texas around making the stories visible during the period of segregation. Black communities built 5,300 schools and thousands of libraries. There were centers of community life and leadership development and all had a very strong focus on citizenship. And there was a group of Black teachers who had been educated at historically Black colleges called the Jeans Teachers Network. And they were tremendous organizers who often activated the communities to build these schools. They got funding from a fund at Tuskegee called the Rosenwald Fund. That's why they were called Rosenwald Schools. They were so skillful in negotiating the racial turmoil and prejudices and brutality, often, of Jim Crow. And they built 5,300 schools. And most of the civil rights leadership— this is an unknown story—but they all came through Rosenwald: John Lewis, Medar Evars, and Coretta Scott King and on and on and on. They came through the Rosenwald schools — Maya Angelou. That kind of story is so hope generating! Because if people can do that in such brutal circumstances, then we can too. In the world I grew up in, the white teachers in my schools were afraid to even raise the topic. We have challenges today, but they're not overwhelming.

Heidi: Well, very good.

Harry: Now, I have some questions to ask you. Just in this last topic, after seeing your work, your intractability work has given you a kind of window into a lot of things happening and experiences and insights. If you think of the problem as this storytelling or making visible problem, what are your thoughts on that?

Heidi: Well, I totally agree. And that's what we've been trying to do in our small way with Beyond Intractability. And we're revising the site now to try to do it in a bigger way. But what I've seen, as I talk to people around here, is everybody is very depressed. They think all is lost. Democracy is doomed.

And yet, over the last couple of years, we got introduced to the Inter-Movement Impact Project, which is where I met you and David and a whole bunch of other people. And we've been floored with the amount of activity there is going on of people who are trying in lots of different ways to strengthen democracy. And it's still largely under the radar. None of my academic friends know about it, because it's not getting published about in academic journals, and that's all they read. And it's not getting written about in the New York Times, which is where all my progressive friends get all their information. So they have no clue that this stuff is going on, which perpetuates this sense of hopelessness and the notion that there's no way that we can do anything to affect what's happening in this country, and it's all going down the tubes. So I think that getting people to understand what's going on is absolutely essential.

I really was excited when I learned about Citizen Connect because it seemed like an answer and I was very disappointed to find out that they have significant funding issues. And hopefully, it will survive, but it's changing form, I guess. But getting people to know about what's happening, getting people to see what's possible, I think, is absolutely key.

Guy used to be a graduate student working with a fellow named Kenneth Boulding.  He made up "Boulding's first law." Bolding's first law was, "if it exists, it must be possible.", He was an economist, and this was back at the time when economists that you couldn't have inflation and recession at the same time, but we did have inflation and recession at the same time. So there came Boulding's first law.

But it applies here, and we use this a lot. Because Braver Angels exists. And all the other Bridge Alliance members exist. And yours and David's organizations and Common Ground USA. All these things exist. They're all doing good things. And therefore, they prove that bringing America together is possible.  They prove that breaking down hyperpolarization is possible. And once people know that it's possible, then they're more likely to decide that they want to get involved.

Harry: Absolutely.

Heidi: Because I totally agree with you that everybody's demoralized. Nobody likes the way the direction of America's going or their families are going or anything in between. Because we're tired of all this divisiveness.  We're tired of having to walk on eggshells all the time. And if we could see there actually is a way out, I think there'd be a groundswell of action to move in that direction. 

Harry: I agree with you. I think there's a kind of ferment and also hunger.  It's kind of like the early but the pre-civil rights movement days.  A lot of ferment.

Heidi: Well, I want to thank you tremendously for doing this.

Harry: My pleasure. I appreciate your work very much, Heidi.