Rob Kall:
So, your book, Accompanying: Pathways to Social Change, is a very
detailed expression of a number of different scenarios where big change has
happened, and where you're giving examples of how they didn't happen with
organizing, they happened with accompanying.
Staughton Lynd:
Or, you could say some of them did happen with organizing, for example a
lot of trade union organizing (then and now); Saul Alinsky's style of community
organizing which very closely tracked the organizing of the CIO Packinghouse
workers on the Southwest side of Chicago; and then, to my lasting regret, too
much of the work of SDS and even SNCC, in the 1960s.
Rob Kall:
OK. So let's start. Let me take a couple quotes from the book
that I picked up, here. You say that "To
accompany someone is to go somewhere with him or her." You're quoting Dr. Farmer, /
Staughton Lynd:
Paul Farmer, yes. His work in
Haiti.
Rob Kall:
-Who had spoken a lot about accompanying. You quote him, saying "To accompany someone
is to go somewhere with him or her, to break bread together, to be present on a
journey with a beginning and an end."
And Farmer says that we're almost never sure about the end.
Staughton Lynd:
That's right. Whereas, for
example, my presence in Mississippi in the summer of 1964: It was certainly one of the mountaintop
experiences of my life; but I got there in June, and I left in August. That's not very much time to accomplish
something lasting.
Rob Kall:
But you did!
Staughton Lynd:
Well, I do think I did. There's a
wonderful book by a woman named Wesley Hogan: Many Minds, One Heart,
about the work of the Student non-Violent Coordinating Committee. She quotes a professor at Tougaloo College
(the Black College near Jackson Mississippi, and he said (she was present at a
conference where this professor spoke, Jack Bitner (sp?)) he could always tell
which of his students had been in the Freedom School. They were comfortable with Whites, they spoke
up to the professors, they asked questions, and that made me feel wonderful, as
you can imagine.
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