PART SEVEN

Between History
and Tomorrow
Into a New Century

I n 1979 the United States was a country plagued by uncertainty. The econ-
omy was into its sixth year of crisis, the army had recently been defeated
by Vietnamese communists, and citizens were divided over various social is-
sues. In the face of the widespread unease, a sizable segment of society called
for the restoration of order and traditional values.
Onto the national stage strode former movie actor Ronald Reagan, who was
elected president in 1980 on a promise to make the United States strong and
confident again. Reagan’s legacy, however, is uneven. He projected strength
but used the military most effectively against tiny nations like Grenada and
Nicaragua. He slashed school breakfast programs for children from poor fam-
ilies at the same time that most Americans found themselves working long
hours for less pay — conditions that underlay a strike by unionized air traffic
controllers early in Reagan’s first term. He promised fiscal conservatism but
ran up the biggest deficit in U.S. history and raised taxes several times to try
to pay for his increased spending.
Yet when Reagan declared in his campaign ads, “It’s morning in Amer-
ica,” he captured the soaring hopes of Americans for a better day. The presi-
dent bolstered spirits by providing amnesty for three million excluded and
undocumented immigrants with one stroke of his pen and by shoring up fi-
nancial markets. Reagan’s optimism was such that at the close of his second
term, his vice president, George H. W. Bush, was swept into office.
Domestically Bush struggled. He continued with Reagan’s often pain-
ful social and economic policies but had little of the folksy charm that had

303

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 303 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

304 Between History and Tomorrow

enabled “the Gipper” to manage the explosive contradictions of a nation in-

creasingly divided between haves and have-nots. Rates of homelessness and
poverty mounted. Racial tensions simmered and occasionally boiled over,
as in the case of rioting in April 1992 following the acquittal of four white
Los Angeles police officers who were videotaped viciously beating an Afri-
can American motorist named Rodney King. Bush, who stayed in the White
House during the rioting, was ultimately seen as weak and out of touch with
everyday Americans. A souring economy doomed his reelection bid in 1992.
He lost his job to Democrat Bill Clinton, governor of Arkansas and a man
who was far more comfortable with ordinary people, particularly African
Americans.
Clinton’s election ushered in a new era of relative social peace. Americans
still fought over social issues like abortion, religion in the schools, immigra-
tion, race, and the death penalty. Bias attacks like the one that killed gay col-
lege student Matthew Shepard also continued, but the widespread support
for Shepard’s family, as well as Clinton’s public appearance with Shepard’s
mother to announce new hate crimes laws, suggested a growing consensus
over tolerance, social liberalism, and civil rights. The economy boomed as
trillions of dollars flowed into the stock market from around the world. The
information superhighway created a “new economy,” producing overnight
“dot-com” millionaires, software billionaires, and millions of CEOs, MBAs, and
workplace “day traders.” This was also the period of “emerging markets,” as
globalization and free-trade policies ended protectionist tariffs and forced the
sale of state-owned industries across the planet. These liberalization policies,
which came to be known in the developing world as “the Washington con-
sensus,” drew new capital into aging industries, modernized inefficient pro-
duction facilities and forced the layoff of redundant workers, while opening
new opportunities for entrepreneurial individuals in countries around the
world.
Most of the world’s population missed the boom, however, experienc-
ing it instead as displacement, poverty, and blocked ambition. Many took
the traditional path out of misery, leaving home and family to migrate to a
wealthier region. Mexico lost millions of people as the 1994 devaluation of
the peso greatly increased the migration stream, bringing landless peasants,
laid-off workers, and suddenly impoverished professionals to the United
States.
As the excesses of the 1990s ended, ominous changes were set in mo-
tion. In 1999 antiglobalization protesters outside a World Trade Organiza-
tion meeting demanded the return to a time when the economy was more
local and when global warming did not threaten the planet. The new cen-
tury saw an economic bust, bringing down not just dot-com millionaires but
also countless ordinary people who had invested in tech stocks whose value
plummeted. Then, on September 11, 2001, coordinated suicide attacks by
nineteen fundamentalist Muslims in hijacked jetliners killed almost three
thousand people and destroyed one of the great symbols of America, the
twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City.

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 304 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

 Between History and Tomorrow 305

Americans were forced into a world of difficult ethical, political, and

historical choices that divided people at home and made the nation un-
popular abroad. Newly elected president George W. Bush declared a “war on
terror” involving a significant abrogation of civil liberties, “extraordinary
renditions,” assassinations, and, most notoriously, the open-ended deten-
tion without trial of suspected enemies of America at the U.S. military base
in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
In 2007 the arrival of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depres-
sion of the 1930s, combined with increasing pessimism about the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan and scandals surrounding the behavior of the U.S. mil-
itary, made George W. Bush among the most unpopular presidents in more
than a century. In the 2008 presidential race, Democratic senator Barack
Obama of Illinois prevailed over Republican senator John McCain of Ari-
zona, becoming the first nonwhite president in American history. In his con-
cession speech from Phoenix, Senator McCain saluted the African American
struggle for equality and the “special pride that must be theirs tonight.” There
were tears of joy and dancing through the night as African Americans and
whites alike took to the streets to celebrate what McCain described as a na-
tion that “is a world away from the cruel and prideful bigotry” of its racially
divided past.
There were clearly changes in the American understanding of race and
ethnicity. A new cohort of respected nonwhite political leaders seemed to
be emerging on the national stage and the United States suddenly appeared
to be more ethnically democratic. However, there were many commenta-
tors who started to come around to Stanley Crouch’s concern that Obama
was the president of a new and more cosmopolitan nation, but not a more
racially democratic one. Many of the same old problems between blacks and
whites seemed to continue: the urban uprisings in undercapitalized cities
with large numbers of underemployed African Americans, mass incarcera-
tion of African Americans out of proportion to their numbers, and the often
rancorous national debate about racially biased urban policing that Ahmir
Questlove Thompson references in his discussion of growing up black in
Philadelphia.
Inner-city African Americans were not the only population facing frus-
trated socioeconomic and political aspirations, though. After nearly four
decades of rising inequality and declining intergenerational socioeconomic
mobility, middle-class rebellions were emerging on the left, like debt resist-
ers, and on the right among “tea party” activists. As new candidates were lin-
ing up for the 2016 presidential campaign, the nation wondered if Obama’s
promises of “change we can believe in” and a rejection of the unilateralism
of the Bush administration had had any substantive meaning.

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 305 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

 POINTS OF VIEW
A Public Debate between Somalis
in Lewiston, Maine, and Their Mayor
(October 1, 2002 – January 29, 2003)

55
MAYOR LAURIER T. RAYMOND ET AL.
The Letter That Sparked the Debate
and Supporters of It

America has always depended on immigrants to conquer new frontiers and revitalize
old ones. The “manifest destiny” to “overspread the continent allotted by providence”
and create a “boundless future . . . comprising hundreds of happy millions” that John
L. O’Sullivan talked about in the 1840s has always involved the arrival of people from
other places in search of a better life. The period since 1965 when post–World War I
immigration controls were loosened is not really so different. Though many Americans
think of immigrants working in low-wage jobs in big teeming cities like Los Angeles,
New York, and Miami, immigrants from Iraq work in meatpacking on the Great Plains,
Cambodians run grocery stores in Minnesota, Mexicans have revitalized post-industrial
cities and towns in upstate New York, and South Asians have renovated abandoned
1960s motels in small towns across the nation. According to researchers at the Uni-
versity of Michigan, America saw a rural renaissance in the 1990s, and it was partly
driven by immigrants.
In particular, the need of new arrivals for housing and space for small business
start-ups has increased real estate values in undercapitalized downtowns, forgotten
small towns, and dying neighborhoods across the country. Not only have these immi-
grants provided cheap labor for existing local businesses, especially farming and food
processing, but they also have contributed vast amounts of “sweat equity,” repopulating
fallow communities across the country, pulling boards off shuttered windows, patching
holes in leaking roofs, and filling the streets with new life and a new vitality. Even in
the U.S./Mexican border region, where neither legal nor illegal immigrants are likely to
stay for long, the impact of these “new immigrants” has been felt in the form of a huge
expansion of well-paid border patrol jobs that has led to the gentrification of old mining
towns and border stations like Bisbee and Douglas in Arizona.

Laurier T. Raymond, “A Letter to the Somali Community,” Portland Press Herald, October 1,
2002; Gary Savard, “Our Mayor,” Sunjournal.com, January 18, 2003.

306

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 306 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

 POINTS OF VIEW 55 • The Letter That Sparked the Debate 307

However, there are problems and challenges that such immigration poses both for
immigrants and for receiving communities. Among them is the provision of social ser-
vices, schooling, public infrastructure, and municipal administration for new arrivals,
who may not earn enough money or pay enough taxes at first to offset their use of public
resources; the changing ethnocultural or religious makeup of longstanding communi-
ties that are not accustomed to outsiders or newcomers; new political alliances in town
councils; fear of overpopulation and crime; and potential interracial dating and mar-
riage between the children of longtime community members and newcomers.
Many of these challenges and problems emerged in the conflict over the letter sent
by the mayor of Lewiston, Maine, Laurier T. Raymond, to the Portland Press Herald in
October 2002 asking the roughly 1,100 Somali refugees who had arrived in the previous
two years to discourage more of their countrymen from coming to the city of roughly
35,000. The letter immediately sparked a nationwide controversy. The press described
a “Somali invasion” and, in January 2003, white supremacists descended on the town
to organize a demonstration in defense of the mayor and against the Somalis. Few in
the community came out to support the white supremacists, who managed to bring
together roughly one hundred demonstrators. Many, including the mayor, avoided the
confrontation entirely. However, a large crowd of four thousand people, more than ten
percent of the entire population of Lewiston, came out in the middle of a Maine winter
to show that they welcomed the newcomers, displaying signs like the one carried by a
small white girl in Syrian immigrant filmmaker Ziad Hamzeh’s documentary The Let-
ter: An American Town and the “Somali Invasion”. The sign reads: “My best friend
is from another country.”
The documents in this section, including the original letter written by Mayor Ray-
mond, are a small representative sample of the many letters to the editor that appeared
in the local news media relating to Somali immigration to the Lewiston area.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
1. Should communities have the right to restrict how many immigrants
come?
2. What personal and political reasons do you think the mayor may
have had for sending this letter?
3. Do you think that the people who supported the mayor and his letter
are racist or anti-immigrant? Explain.

MAYOR LAURIER T. RAYMOND

A Letter to the Somali Community, October 1, 2002
For some number of months, I have observed the continued movement of a
substantial number of Somalis into the downtown area of our community. I
have applauded the efforts of our city staff in making available the existing
services and the local citizenry for accepting and dealing with the influx.
I assumed that it would become obvious to the new arrivals the effect
the large numbers of new residents has had upon the existing staff and city

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 307 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

308 Between History and Tomorrow POINTS OF VIEW

finances and that this would bring about a voluntary reduction of the num-
ber of new arrivals — it being evident that the burden has been, for the most
part, cheerfully accepted, and every effort has been made to accommodate it.
Our Department of Human Services has recently reported that the num-
ber of Somali families arriving into the city during the month of September
is below the approximate monthly average that we have seen over the last
year or so. It may be premature to assume that this may serve as a signal for
future relocation activity, but the decline is welcome relief given increasing
demands on city and school services.
I feel that recent relocation activity over the summer has necessitated
that I communicate directly with the Somali elders and leaders regarding
our newest residents. If recent declining arrival numbers are the result of
your outreach efforts to discourage relocation into the city, I applaud those
efforts. If they are the product of other unrelated random events, I would ask
that the Somali leadership make every effort to communicate my concerns
on city and school service impacts with other friends and extended family
who are considering a move to this community.
To date, we have found the funds to accommodate the situation. A con-
tinued increased demand will tax the city’s finances.
This large number of new arrivals cannot continue without negative re-
sults for all. The Somali community must exercise some discipline and re-
duce the stress on our limited finances and our generosity.
I am well aware of the legal right of a U.S. resident to move anywhere
he/she pleases, but it is time for the Somali community to exercise this disci-
pline in view of the effort that has been made on its behalf.
We will continue to accommodate the present residents as best as we
can, but we need self-discipline and cooperation from everyone.
Only with your help will we be successful in the future — please pass
the word: We have been overwhelmed and have responded valiantly. Now
we need breathing room. Our city is maxed-out financially, physically and
emotionally.
I look forward to your cooperation.
Laurier T. Raymond Jr.
Mayor, City of Lewiston

GARY SAVARD
Our Mayor, January 18, 2003
I am writing to express my support for the city’s mayor, Laurier T. Raymond Jr.
Mayor Raymond’s October letter to the Somali elders was not a request
that they leave Lewiston, but rather a request that they slow down the influx
to allow the city to assimilate their existing population and have some time
to assess its impact on schools, housing and services.
This has been blown completely out of proportion over the past few
months by a very vocal minority with a holier than thou attitude. Groups of

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 308 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

 POINTS OF VIEW 56 • The Letter That Sparked the Debate 309

people that seem to require a cause to champion in order to justify their own
self worth. Every cause, worthy or not, has such a group at its core.
Now it seems, in the natural progression of this cause, the inevitable
calls for Mayor Raymond’s resignation are being piped into the system.
Mayor Raymond chose not to attend the Many and One rally at Bates
College. I didn’t attend either, nor it seems, did about 36,000 other Lewiston
residents.
Does this mean we are racist or that we don’t care? I don’t think so.
I think that the majority of Lewiston’s residents are, like myself, very
willing to allow any minority population of this city every opportunity to
take root and succeed. In the same sense, I also think that, as citizens and
taxpayers, we are entitled to an honest accounting of the impact, financial
and otherwise, on our community that these ongoing changes have. Our city
officials should not keep us in the dark, elected or otherwise.
In closing, I will submit that any citizen of Lewiston has the right to ask
the mayor to step down. Conversely, we also have the right to ask him not to
bend to these pressures, but to continue on with his elected office.
I urge Lewiston residents to exercise that right. Non-residents need not
apply.
Gary Savard, Lewiston, ME

56
ELDERS OF THE SOMALI COMMUNITY ET AL.
Letter in Support of the Somali Community

War may tear regions and countries apart and destroy countless lives, but it also brings
people together. Since America ended its flirtation with isolationism in the 1930s by
entering World War II, the nation has intervened in numerous domestic disputes and
regional conflicts. Each intervention brings new social and political connections, some
as intimate as mixed marriages and babies and others as abstractly instrumental and
professional as recruiting native academics to teach foreign languages and area studies
in American universities or bringing locals to American corporate headquarters to help
identify and take advantage of business opportunities in the region.
In the seven decades since the end of World War II, the United States has become
a giant force in world politics, often absorbing political refugees and dissidents from
around the globe when U.S. actions have helped shape the outcome of political conflicts

Elders of the Somali Community, “Somalis in Lewiston,” Portland Press Herald, October 8,
2002.

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 309 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

310 Between History and Tomorrow POINTS OF VIEW

in the refugees’ home countries. From the millions of people from dozens of communist
countries who were given political asylum during America’s cold war conflict with the
U.S.S.R. to the many allies granted visas during the numerous Middle Eastern crises over
the past sixty years, one commitment the government has made is to provide a haven
for those who have lost their homes in conflicts involving the United States. Though
the policy is not always successful, the question of what happens to displaced allies is
always on the agenda. Somalia was no exception.
In 1991, after many decades as a cold war flash point on the strategically impor-
tant Horn of Africa, Somalia pitched into civil war. In 1993, the U.S. Army led a United
Nations force into Somalia with a stated purpose of ending a famine and wresting the
country from the war lords who were said to be making life unbearable. Though the
U.S. Army lost only nineteen soldiers — a relatively small toll compared to the hundreds
lost in Lebanon in the 1980s and the two thousand plus killed in the recent conflict in
Iraq — the conflict spun out of control for President Bill Clinton, who woke up one morn-
ing to the front cover of American newspapers displaying photos of a dead American
soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. These dramatic images shocked
the nation and, in combination with a lack of strategic goals and bad coordination
with other U.N. partners, each of whom had its own allies on the ground, made the
intervention in Somalia one that most Americans would prefer to forget. Such were the
difficult conditions under which Somali Muslims made their way to the United States.
People displaced by war and politics, like the Somalis, are a tiny percentage of the
total immigration flow to the United States. However, despite their presence being con-
nected to highly charged foreign policy debates, many of the challenges that they faced
were similar to those of the more common migration stream: people in search of eco-
nomic opportunity. Like most immigrant groups in the American past, upon arriving the
Somali generally sought homes in places where there was available employment and ties
to friends, immediate family, clans, villages, and political or professional affiliations.
This brought the majority of them, estimated at 50,000, to the Minneapolis/St. Paul
twin city area and eventually to the small towns and cities of neighboring Wisconsin,
where many have found work in meatpacking plants. They also took up residence in
cities and towns from Texas to Maine. The terror attacks of September 11, 2001, came
as a terrible blow to their adjustment to their new homes. None of the terrorists had
been Somali, but to foreigners and Muslims, the country suddenly seemed less friendly
and homelike.
The next year was a disaster for Somali immigrants. British filmmaker Ridley Scott
released Black Hawk Down (2001), which graphically, represents the downing of a
U.S. Army helicopter in Somalia and the fighting between American soldiers and name-
less, somewhat faceless Somalis who were loyal to various war lords. The movie focuses
on the struggle of the Americans to make their way out of the confusing and terrifying
battles of urban Mogadishu. Critics have disparaged the movie for many things, includ-
ing rushing release to take advantage of post–9/11 jingoism, ignoring the far greater loss
of Somali life and the courage of poorly armed Somalis fighting an invading modern
army, and not hiring any of the Somali immigrants as actors. In light of the movie’s
success, Somali immigrants came to be seen by some as movie villains who popped out
from behind buildings with automatic weapons, like targets in a shooting gallery.
In late 2002, the Midwestern Somali community found itself the victim of a series
of violent race bias incidents, and distrust grew between Somalis and their neighbors

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 310 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

 POINTS OF VIEW 56 • Letter in Support of the Somali Community 311

as Somalis felt increasingly unwanted in their new home. Lewiston, Maine, is one of
the many places across the United States that became home to Somali refugees. One of
the “whitest” cities in what might be the “whitest” state in the United States, Lewiston
is home to Bates College and was probably chosen by Somali migrants because of its
relatively affordable real estate, low crime and drug rates, and proximity to Portland,
which was the initial point of arrival for Somalis in Maine. Through much of 2002,
the national news media did stories about this migration of African Muslims to this
small, white Maine college town.
Though there were many in the community who welcomed the Africans, there were
many who were concerned about the potential drain on municipal resources and the
potential changes to the character of the community. On October 1, 2002, the mayor
of Lewiston, Laurier T. Raymond, sent a letter to the Portland Press Herald requesting
that the Somalis who were living in Lewiston make an effort to discourage further settle-
ment by their countrymen. There was a national media scandal that emerged from this
letter and its implication that some people have more right to live in a place than others.
However, for many Somalis, the letter ultimately proved positive by bringing some of
the tensions surrounding their arrival into the open, forcing them to organize in their
own defense, and showing them and their new countrymen, through the January 11,
2003, Many and One rally, how many of their neighbors they could already call friends.
The following document is the original response from a council of Somali elders to
Mayor Raymond’s letter.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
1. Do you think that the Somali elders responded in the right way? Why
or why not?
2. Why do you think so many people came out to support the Somalis?
3. Do you think that the makers of Black Hawk Down had any obligation
to the Somali American community? Should they have approached
the film differently?

October 6, 2002
Mr. Laurier Raymond
Mayor, City of Lewiston
Re: Your letter dated October 1, 2002, Somalis in Lewiston
This letter is in response to your above referenced letter in regard to the move
of Somali refugees/immigrants to the city of Lewiston. First of all, with due
respect, we would like to indicate that your letter is not only untimely but
is also inflammatory and disturbing, to say the least. Your letter is untimely
because it is written and released at a time when the movement of Somalis
to Lewiston has naturally dropped and as per records no Somali moved to
Lewiston since the end of August 2002. The letter is also inflammatory and
disturbing as we are dismayed to see such a letter from an elected official and
leader who is supposed to show good leadership, co-existence and harmony
among the residents of this humble city.

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 311 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

312 Between History and Tomorrow POINTS OF VIEW

We react to your letter in mixed feelings ranging from dismay, astonish-

ment and anger. This is because of the fact that you have never given us a
chance to meet with you and discuss our future plans with you during your
term in office. Your predecessor Mayor Kalleigh Tara perfectly understood us
and was working with us as new additions to a city where she was the mayor.
We also had and were given opportunities to meet with and discuss our fu-
ture with elected and non-elected local and state officials. Most recently, such
meetings included those we had with Governor Angus King on September 17
and with the gubernatorial candidate, Congressman John Baldacci on Septem-
ber 27th, among others.
During all such meetings, the officials indicated their satisfaction with
our coming to live here in the state, they say, [that] is sparsely populated and
needs to attract more residents as both manpower and future electorates.
Those officials, after listening to us, applauded our efforts to try and “Fit in”
as much as we can. While we have had contacts with other leaders as stated
above, you have never given us a chance to meet and explain ourselves to
you. The first contact, which you ever had with us, is through your recent
letter, which prompted this response; something which we never thought
would happen and feel unwarranted at this time.
For your information therefore, our coming to Lewiston and living here
have revitalized this city in certain ways. Our presence has turned Lewis-
ton into a multi-ethnic, multi-racial city, which has embraced diversity and
change. A city of thirty-six thousand people, in the middle of the “whitest”
state in the country has suddenly become an international city. Lewiston’s
name appeared in papers and news clips around the country. We portrayed
the facts about this place and its humble people who we consider, by and
large, as generous Americans who understand our plight and are ready to
help in our initial days of settling down. Our presence here has also attracted
hundreds of thousands of dollars in state and federal funds to boost exist-
ing social services for all residents of Lewiston. This particular point was not
stated in your letter.
Apartment units located in the Lewiston downtown area which were
abandoned many years ago, were suddenly refurbished and made livable
as the arrival of Somalis generated funds and put money in the pockets of
landlords. This also raised the market value of real estate. Somalis were hired
to work in businesses and plants making them to be able to contribute to the
local economy as taxpayers. Back in April 2002, there were 249 able-bodied
Somali men and women who could work. Forty people worked at the time.
Today out of the 416 able bodied men and women 215 persons are currently
employed. This is over 50% of adults who could work. Also, there are three
Somali businesses in Lewiston which opened in less than a year.
While we thank the city of Lewiston, and the general public for their
understanding and accepting us in their midst, we would nevertheless like to
bring to your attention and to the attention of others in your line of think-
ing, that we are citizens and/or legal residents of this country. Although we
originally hail from the Eastern African state of Somalia, we renounced our

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 312 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

 POINTS OF VIEW 56 • Letter in Support of the Somali Community 313

Somali citizenship and taken U.S. citizenship. Over 80% of our children are
Americans by birth. Therefore, we believe we have every right to live any-
where in this country. So do other Somalis or any other legal residents who
choose to come and live in Lewiston or in Alaska for that matter.
In view of the above, and with due respect we consider your letter
Mr. Mayor, as the writing of ill-informed leader who is bent towards bigotry.
Therefore, by a copy of this letter we ask both the state government and law
enforcement to guarantee our safety here. If any harm in form of an attack
happens to any Somali-American man, woman or child in the wake of your
letter, we hold you squarely responsible for any such acts. We think your
letter is an attempt to agitate and incite the local people and a license to
violence against our people physically, verbally and emotionally.
Hope this is clear and let God show all of us what is right.
Sincerely,
Elders of the Somali Community
cc: Office of Governor Angus King
William Welch, Lewiston Police Chief
Lewiston/Auburn Community Task Force
Pierrot Rugaba, State Refugee Coordinator
Jim Bennet, Administrator: City of Lewiston

FOR CRITICAL THINKING

1. Do you think the Somalis could have approached settling in Lewiston
in a different way that might have avoided this conflict? How would
you have advised them?
2. What responsibilities do immigrants have to their receiving com-
munities? What responsibilities do receiving communities have to
immigrants?

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 313 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

 57
CATHY LANGSTON
When PATCO Went on Strike

In August 1981, in one of Ronald Reagan’s first major acts as president, he used the
U.S. military to break an air traffic controllers’ strike led by the Professional Air Traf-
fic Controllers Organization ( PATCO). Although PATCO had endorsed Reagan during
his campaign for president, thanks to his professed support for their demands for safer
and better working conditions, Reagan ordered all striking workers to return to work in
forty-eight hours or be terminated. Then, when less than 10 percent of them returned, he
took action, firing more than eleven thousand air traffic controllers, jailing key PATCO
leaders, and banning all strikers from future work for the federal government.
With no other unions supporting the strike or stopping work in sympathy, super-
visors and military controllers joined the two thousand nonstriking PATCO members
to ensure that air travel continued, albeit at reduced levels, until the Federal Aviation
Administration’s flight school could train permanent replacements. PATCO quickly be-
came isolated and neutralized. By the end of October, it was officially decertified by the
government.
Reagan had shown strong leadership and put a decisive end to a half century of
growing trade union power and rising standards of living for workers, particularly in
blue-collar fields. While national union membership had been slowly declining from its
peak in the 1950s, probably due to the growth of nonunionized white-collar and service
sector jobs, Reagan put a chill on organized labor, and union membership dropped dur-
ing his time in office from more than 20 percent to around 12 percent of the national
workforce.
At the time of the strike, Cathy Langston was the mother of two young children and
the wife of one of the strike leaders, Randy Langston. It was not until 2010 — almost
thirty years after the terminations — that she recorded her recollections of those difficult
days, excerpted here, and revealed the depth of the confusion and betrayal experienced
by workers at the hands of President Reagan.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
1. Many people have argued that Ronald Reagan’s firing of the PATCO
workers was overkill. What evidence do you find that his actions were
unexpected?
2. The PATCO strike is often seen as a major moment of change in the
history of American labor that permanently tilted power toward em-

Cathy Langston, What It Means When God Goes on Strike (N.p.: published by author, 2010),
2–8, 22, 30, 34–36, 57–60.

314

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 314 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

 57 • When PATCO Went on Strike 315

ployers, even at nonunion sites. What evidence do you find in this

document for that change?
3. How might Cathy Langston have told the story differently back in
the 1980s, at the time of the firings?

The headlines screamed . . .

11,500 AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLERS FIRED!

However, to me they were only a whisper. I knew it was only a façade.

“Within days they would be right back at work, right?” I kept questioning.
PATCO had outlined to all of us exactly how it would go.
You’re fired!
Harsh words to ever have to hear, but especially from the President of
the United States. August 3, 1981, is the official date of the air traffic control-
lers strike. It is now a date in the history books. College students are assigned
term papers to write to analyze it.
We lived through it. It is more than just history to us. It is pain, heart-
ache, denial, tragedy, and finally, triumph.
I could not believe what was happening. My husband, along with 11,500
other air traffic controllers, was saying no to the President. Of course, they
expected to go back to work at some point, but not until some negotiations
had taken place. The leadership of PATCO ( Professional Air Traffic Control-
lers Organization) had promised that the salary of anyone fired would be
paid from a million dollar strike fund. So it didn’t seem like a tremendous
financial risk at the time.
I am a true Southern girl and I did not even believe in unions and strikes.
Nonetheless, since my husband, Randy, was the vice-president of the local
Raleigh-Durham unit, I knew I had to support him and what he was backing.
For a federal employee to strike is illegal. However, they convinced the
rank and file of controllers that all 13,000 who went on strike could not be
fired. There were 11,500 who were refusing to go back when ordered to do
so. The head of PATCO was then arrested. Several presidents of local unions
were put in shackles when they were arrested; one from Virginia was paraded
in front of the TV cameras in his shackles and chains as if he were a danger
to society.
The reasons behind the strike had to do with improving the safety for the
traveling public. The controllers had to use outdated equipment, work too
many hours with not enough personnel. They had worked a year and a half
with no contract. Also, every time there were negotiations, they were asked
to give up benefits they had already garnered. This was definitely unfair.
Air traffic controllers have one of the most stressful jobs that exist. It
affects both their health and families. Randy would be so stressed when he
came home from a shift that he would immediately have to go to sleep in

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 315 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

316 Between History and Tomorrow

order to decompress. Some controllers turned to alcohol to unwind, which

then caused more stress at home, in addition to their intense workday. Their
careers are short-lived. They often retire in their forties with disability.
In relation to pay being equal to the job, a pilot is responsible for 100 to
200 passengers and crew, while a controller is responsible for 10 to 12 times
that number at any given moment. An air traffic controller’s salary is 4 to 5
times less than that of a pilot.
To insure the public safety, it was felt that a controller should not be
overworked. PATCO thought a shorter work week was needed to accomplish
this. The FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) seemingly would not listen.
Drastic measures were called for, PATCO concluded.
The FAA was aware a strike was being planned. They had known for over
a year and had been making alternate arrangements to handle the work load
of the striking controllers.
Although Ronald Reagan had promised in a letter to PATCO before he
was elected that he would assist in easing the working conditions of the
controllers if they helped elect him, he chose to do the very opposite of that.
He chose to renege in true political fashion.
The following is a copy of the letter written to Robert Poli, PATCO presi-
dent, from Ronald Reagan. This was dated October 20th 1980, before Reagan
was elected as President of The United States of America:

Dear Mr. Poli:

I have been briefed by members of my staff as to the deplorable state of our
nation’s air traffic control system. They have told me that too few people
working unreasonable hours with obsolete equipment has placed the nation’s
air travelers in unwarranted danger. In a[n] area so clearly related to public
safety the Carter administration has failed to act responsibly.
You can rest assured that if I am elected President, I will take whatever
steps are necessary to provide our air traffic controllers with the most mod-
ern equipment available and to adjust staff levels and work days so that they
are commensurate with achieving a maximum degree of public safety.
I pledge to you that my administration will work very closely with you
to bring about a spirit of cooperation between the President and the air traf-
fic controllers.
Sincerely,
Ronald Reagan

I had just given birth to our second child in March [1981]. Nikki was
only five months old when Randy went on strike. Our son, Steve, had just
turned eleven. Randy was the vice-president of the local union and chose to
be the spokesman to the media to protect our local president. His outgoing
personality made him a natural for the role. Later he would regret this since
his face became synonymous with the aftermath. He was constantly inter-
viewed. At one point, to humanize the plight, the camera crew and reporters
even held an interview at the bowling alley, where Randy was attempting to

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 316 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

 57 • When PATCO Went on Strike 317

spend quality time with his only son. Furthermore, he was quoted daily in the
News and Observer, which at the time was the most read newspaper in North
Carolina. We even had Nikki in her stroller on the picket line. Our family was
whole-heartedly in this strike for the “greater good.”
Every day we woke up with renewed hope that the government would
relent and the controllers would be allowed to return to work. Regardless
of what we saw or heard, we just knew a deal was being worked out in the
background to get everyone back to work. Days turned into weeks, weeks
turned into months. No end. No deal. PATCO had been dissolved. “Who was
looking out for us, now?” I thought.
Those cocky controllers were beginning to crumble. Nothing like this
had ever happened before in the history of unions. The loyal obedient sol-
diers who were fighting to make their world better soon came to realize they
had been grossly misled.
The courts became a battlefield — seemingly our only means of returning
to air traffic control. We expected any day to hear that the controllers had
won their jobs back with back pay. . . .
We were so naïve and innocent to believe no hurt was possible. The hurt
and pain that followed that walk-out was unbelievable: suicides, failed mar-
riages, nervous breakdowns, severe depressions, foreclosures, heart attacks,
bankruptcies. I wondered if any of us would survive this. Surely no one in-
volved would ever be the same.
Within a couple of weeks of the strike I could see families already fall-
ing apart. We had been over to [controller] Tim Sanford’s house to discuss
the walk-out a couple of days before it was scheduled to take place. He and
his wife, Sandy, had just moved in and were not quite straightened out. The
wife was attractive and looked the professional she was. She had apparently
landed a good paying job and they were having a heated argument about
what might happen after the strike. Sandy did not want to leave the area
if the strike lasted for any length of time or if Tim were fired. Several days
after the strike and some violent arguments, Tim left, strung out on drugs.
Randy and several other controllers were asked to help his wife move to a
less expensive place.
The morning after the move, I drove to the convenience store with my
children to get a Pepsi. A haggard-looking woman, lined face, and hair pulled
straight back came over to the car to speak to me. I soon realized it was Sandy
Sanford, who, only a couple of weeks before looked youthful and well-kept.
What had this precious individual gone through in such a short time? I had
never seen anyone age so fast in all my life.
Another family heartbreak involved a striking controller named Matt
Burnette. He was able to put up a good front for about a year. He was in busi-
ness for himself, selling insurance. Of course, he had to drive a luxurious car
to look successful in order to recruit others to sell for him. That is part of the
strategy for directors or managers. His car was a brand new Cadillac de Ville.
Few people knew it was only leased.
One day, his wife, Patsy, came home to find a tape recording and a power
of attorney from him. Matt had recorded a message that said he could no

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 317 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

318 Between History and Tomorrow

longer continue living the lies and maintaining the charade. Bills had been
piling up and he was not making a lot of money. They would need to sell
the house. No one knew where he was. He had just disappeared. Patsy sold
the house and was quite distraught afterward. About nine months later he
returned and said he had had to get away from the bill collectors.
We read in the newspaper not long after this that a controller (who we
did not know) and his wife had placed all their bills on the kitchen table and
hung themselves.
Oh, the guilt we felt, especially Randy. Not only had we done this to our
family, but as an officer, Randy had tried to convince other controllers to
join the strike. Who knew?
Then, when a person is in a crisis situation that he caused himself, he is
subject to disdain, rather than sympathy. And who could blame others for
feeling this way?
The government had told us “Good-bye” and now they were handing
out retirement checks. I knew this meant finality. I wanted to say, “Take ours
back!”
Some controllers tried to start businesses with their retirement money.
More than not, these were not successful. . . .
Uncertainty is petrifying. Since striking federal employees can not draw
unemployment benefits, my teaching salary was all the income we had. That
would not cover our living expenses since we were still living on the same
level as before. That meant taking money out of savings to cover what Randy
normally brought home. No one knows the agony I felt every time we did
that. Our next home was dissolving with every dollar we spent.
Everything that was happening was taking a tremendous emotional toll
on me. As long as Randy and I had been married, he had had a paycheck on a
regular basis. Also, I was accustomed to being self-sufficient without depend-
ing on others. I had no idea what the future held. I was very frightened. I
remember crying and being nervous all the time. In fact, my nerves were so
bad, I felt like all my skin had been pulled off my body to expose bare nerves.
Raw! Oh, so raw! I was irritated and agitated. I wanted to be in the bed when-
ever I could. That was my solace.
Randy knew we had unknowingly sabotaged our lives. It’s hard to face
reality when you really don’t know what reality is. Aren’t there talks behind
closed doors that will settle this mess, give Randy back the career he loved
with back-pay? A lawyer in Fayetteville agreed to take the case. “Surely, we
have a chance, now,” I thought.
Meanwhile as weeks turn into months, hope turns into a dark depres-
sion for Randy. With each day and no resolution, the chances of his return
diminished.
He began to write his life story with the anticipation of the last chapter
ending in tragedy. I was very upset that he was not working, not bringing
in any money for our bills and our savings was dwindling. I was extremely
angry with him, but I was afraid to say anything to him in his state of mind.
I thought a new career would be good for him, because it would al-
leviate the stress that had been so difficult for him. Nonetheless, I had not

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 318 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

 58 • The Wall 319

anticipated how difficult it would be for him to leave air traffic control and
move on.
First of all, no future employers would even talk to someone who was a
fired controller. The ex-controllers were all black-listed. It was hard to even
pickup a part-time job.
Furthermore, Randy didn’t want a new career. He wanted the one he
loved so much. It was challenging and invigorating to him, as well as many
of the other controllers, in spite of the difficulties and stress of it. . . .
We had begged God to end the strike, put the controllers back to work
and give them their back pay. Apparently God was on strike also. He would
not budge.

58
The Wall

In August of 1961 the East German government ( DDR) erected a wall dividing the city
of Berlin between the communist East and the capitalist West. It was the first inkling for
many that the communist Eastern Bloc might be a weaker opponent than strategists in
the West believed. The Soviet Union had launched the world’s first satellite into space in
1957, and, only months before the wall went up, they had decisively beaten the United
States into space, sending Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit and safely bringing
him home. Soviet allies in China had taken the world’s most populated country into
the communist bloc, most of southeastern Europe had gone communist at the end of
World War II, communists in North Korea had recently fought the United States to a
draw, Vietnam was sliding away from capitalism, and the Cuban revolutionaries who
had seized power in 1959 were, at the time, also flirting with communism. For many in
the West there was a genuine fear that Marx’s prediction that capitalism would create
its own gravediggers was correct. And then there was the Berlin Wall, which divided
families and neighborhoods in the same city. To those who supported communism, it
was a shock that a wall was necessary to keep people in, and for those who supported
capitalism it was a confirmation that they were right about the bankruptcy of a system
built around the idea that people should be equal.
For twenty-eight years this wall stood as a symbol of a world divided by political
philosophy and by the two camps supporting these different visions of the greatest good.
Called the Cold War, both sides mobilized proxy wars across the globe, spent unimagin-
ably large sums of money building weapon systems designed to threaten each other, and
sometimes ran to the brink of nuclear war. Everyday life on both sides was radically
reconfigured around this battle. Individuals, both innocent and guilty, were rooted out
of their lives in political purges and witch hunts, as little children huddled under their
school desks in air raid drills and studied Cold War curriculum like the Florida public
school system’s Americanism vs. Communism.

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 319 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

320 Between History and Tomorrow

Then suddenly, with only a little warning, on November 9, 1989, seventy-two years
after the Russian Revolution that had started the communist Soviet Union and twenty-
eight years after the Berlin Wall was erected, political changes in the Eastern Bloc and
protests in Europe forced East German authorities to open the border. Parties, celebra-
tions, and dancing in the streets ensued. Soon, an open border was not enough for the
millions of Europeans who had long been kept separate by the wall and its two economic
systems. On November 12, 1989, they decided to begin to remove the border itself, by
opening up a large gate through which Westerners and Easterners could easily and freely
pass without the approval of authorities. This was the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of
the communist Eastern Bloc, and the start of a radical change in how the United States
and its allies viewed world security.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
1. Why do you think these people are on top of the wall?
2. What events in your life remind you of this public moment in
Germany?
3. How do you think such a big change occurred without rioting or po-
lice violence?
4. At the time the Berlin Wall went up, “separation barriers” between na-
tions were very rare and generally viewed as unacceptable. Since the
fall of the Berlin Wall, they have become more common. How would
you explain the difference between the Berlin Wall and, for instance,
the wall that currently separates the United States and Mexico?

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 320 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

 59 • Homophobia in the Heartland 321

Berliners celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall.

© Regis Bossu/Sygma/Corbis.

59
DENNIS W. SHEPARD
Homophobia in the Heartland

On October 12, 1998, Matthew Shepard, a twenty-one-year-old University of Wyoming

student, died from injuries suffered five days earlier in a gay-bashing incident. Lured

Dennis W. Shepard, victim impact statement, November 4, 1999, www.wiredstrategies.com

/mrshep.htm.

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 321 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

322 Between History and Tomorrow

into a truck by two men he had met at the campus bar, Shepard believed he was going
with them to discuss gay liberation politics. Once inside the truck, the men told the five-
foot-two, 102-pound Shepard that they were not gay. They robbed and beat him and
tied him to a split-rail fence. He was found there eighteen hours later — barely breath-
ing, with a crushed skull, and with blood covering his face, except in those spots where
his tears had washed it away. The image of the gentle and delicate Shepard tied to a
fence post and left for dead became a national symbol in the fight against intolerance.
The outrage over the attack and the outpouring of sympathy for Shepard’s parents
suggested how far most of the country had come in its tolerance of sexual minorities.
The trial prosecutor sought the death penalty for Shepard’s murderers, despite its unpop-
ularity in Wyoming and pressure from the Roman Catholic Church. People organized
tributes and memorial services for Shepard. President Bill Clinton held a press confer-
ence at the White House, where he and Judy Shepard, Matthew’s mother, spoke out in
support of federal hate crimes legislation. Many states have since passed their own hate
crimes laws.
There were, however, reminders that homosexuality remained far from universally
accepted. At Shepard’s funeral, members of a Kansas City Baptist congregation dis-
rupted the occasion with signs that read “God hates fags” and “No fags in heaven.”
Although the trial judge disallowed a “gay panic” defense — that one of the killers had
been compelled to commit the crime because he had been humiliated as a child by ho-
mosexual experiences — the compromise defense, that Shepard’s sexual advances had
triggered a murderous rage, struck a chord with many Americans who believed homo-
sexuality to be immoral and wrong. Additionally, many people objected to the new hate
crimes laws, arguing that they created a two-tier justice system and punished ideas as
well as actions.
The following selection comes from a statement by Dennis Shepard, Matthew’s father,
that he read to the court after the second of his son’s killers, Aaron McKinney, received
two life sentences without parole.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
1. Why did this case become so important to so many people?
2. Why do you think Dennis Shepard read this statement in court?
3. Do you think hate crimes laws might have prevented the death of
Matthew Shepard? Explain.

Your Honor, Members of the Jury, Mr. Rerucha,

I would like to begin my statement by addressing the jury. Ladies and gentle-
men, a terrible crime was committed in Laramie thirteen months ago. Be-
cause of that crime, the reputation of the city of Laramie, the University of
Wyoming, and the state of Wyoming became synonymous with gay bashing,
hate crimes, and brutality. While some of this reputation may be deserved, it
was blown out of proportion by our friends in the media. Yesterday, you, the
jury, showed the world that Wyoming and the city of Laramie will not toler-
ate hate crimes. Yes, this was a hate crime, pure and simple, with the added

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 322 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

 59 • Homophobia in the Heartland 323

ingredient of robbery. My son Matthew paid a terrible price to open the eyes
of all of us who live in Wyoming, the United States, and the world to the un-
just and unnecessary fears, discrimination, and intolerance that members of
the gay community face every day. Yesterday’s decision by you showed true
courage and made a statement. That statement is that Wyoming is the Equal-
ity State, that Wyoming will not tolerate discrimination based on sexual ori-
entation, that violence is not the solution. Ladies and gentlemen, you have
the respect and admiration of Matthew’s family and friends and of countless
strangers around the world. Be proud of what you have accomplished. You
may have prevented another family from losing a son or daughter.
Your Honor, I would also like to thank you for the dignity and grace with
which this trial was conducted. Repeated attempts to distract the court from
the true purpose of this trial failed because of your attentiveness, knowledge,
and willingness to take a stand and make new law in the area of sexual ori-
entation and the “gay panic” defense. By doing so, you have emphasized
that Matthew was a human being with all the rights and responsibilities and
protections of any citizen of Wyoming.
Mr. Rerucha took the oath of office as prosecuting attorney to protect
the rights of the citizens of Albany County as mandated by the laws of the
state of Wyoming, regardless of his personal feelings and beliefs. At no time
did Mr. Rerucha make any decision on the outcome of this case without the
permission of Judy and me. It was our decision to take this case to trial just as
it was our decision to accept the plea bargain today and the earlier plea bar-
gain of Mr. [Russell] Henderson. A trial was necessary to show that this was a
hate crime and not just a robbery gone bad. If we had sought a plea bargain
earlier, the facts of this case would not have been known and the question
would always be present that we had something to hide. In addition, this
trial was necessary to help provide some closure to the citizens of Laramie,
Albany County, and the state. . . .
My son Matthew did not look like a winner. After all, he was small for his
age — weighing at the most 110 pounds and standing only 5'2" tall. He was
rather uncoordinated and wore braces from the age of thirteen until the day
he died. However, in his all too brief life, he proved that he was a winner. My
son, a gentle, caring soul, proved that he was as tough as, if not tougher than,
anyone I have ever heard of or known. On October 6, 1998, my son tried to
show the world that he could win again. On October 12, 1998, my first-born
son, and my hero, lost. On October 12, 1998, my first-born son, and my
hero, died. On October 12, 1998, part of my life, part of my hopes, and part
of my dreams died, fifty days before his twenty-second birthday. He died qui-
etly, surrounded by family and friends, with his mother and brother holding
his hand. All that I have left now are the memories and the mementos of his
existence. I would like to briefly talk about Matt and the impact of his death.
It’s hard to put into words how much Matt meant to family and friends
and how much they meant to him. Everyone wanted him to succeed because
he tried so hard. The spark that he provided to people had to be experienced.
He simply made everyone feel better about themselves. Family and friends

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 323 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

324 Between History and Tomorrow

were his focus. He knew that he always had their support for anything that
he wanted to try.
Matt’s gift was people. He loved being with people, helping people, and
making others feel good. The hope of a better world, free of harassment and
discrimination because a person was different, kept him motivated. All his
life he felt the stabs of discrimination. Because of that, he was sensitive to
other people’s feelings. He was naïve to the extent that, regardless of the
wrongs people did to him, he still had faith that they would change and
become “nice.” Matt trusted people, perhaps too much. Violence was not a
part of his life until his senior year in high school. He would walk into a fight
and try to break it up. He was the perfect negotiator. He could get two people
talking to each other again as no one else could.
Matt loved people and he trusted them. He could never understand how
one person could hurt another, physically or verbally. They would hurt him
and he would give them another chance. This quality of seeing only good
gave him friends around the world. He didn’t see size, race, intelligence, sex,
religion, or the hundred other things that people use to make choices about
people. All he saw was the person. All he wanted was to make another per-
son his friend. All he wanted was to make another person feel good. All he
wanted was to be accepted as an equal.
What did Matt’s friends think of him? Fifteen of his friends from high
school in Switzerland, as well as his high school advisor, joined hundreds of
others at his memorial services. They left college, fought a blizzard, and came
together one more time to say goodbye to Matt. Men and women coming
from different countries, cultures, and religions thought enough of my son
to drop everything and come to Wyoming — most of them for the first time.
That’s why this Wyoming country boy wanted to major in foreign relations
and languages. He wanted to continue making friends and, at the same time,
help others. He wanted to make a difference. Did he? You tell me.
I loved my son and, as can be seen throughout this statement, was proud
of him. He was not my gay son. He was my son who happened to be gay. He
was a good-looking, intelligent, caring person. There were the usual argu-
ments and, at times, he was a real pain in the butt. I felt the regrets of a father
when he realizes that his son is not a star athlete. But it was replaced with a
greater pride when I saw him on the stage. The hours that he spent learning
his parts, working behind the scenes, and helping others made me realize he
was actually an excellent athlete, in a more dynamic way, because of the dif-
ferent types of physical and mental conditioning required by actors. To this
day, I have never figured out how he was able to spend all those hours at the
theater, during the school year, and still have good grades.
Because my job involved lots of travel, I never had the same give-and-
take with Matt that Judy had. Our relationship, at times, was strained. But,
whenever he had problems, we talked. For example, he was unsure about
revealing to me that he was gay. He was afraid that I would reject him imme-
diately so it took him a while to tell me. By that time, his mother and brother
had already been told. One day, he said that he had something to say. I could

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 324 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

 59 • Homophobia in the Heartland 325

see that he was nervous so I asked him if everything was all right. Matt took
a deep breath and told me that he was gay. Then he waited for my reaction.
I still remember his surprise when I said, “Yeah? Okay, but what’s the point
of this conversation?” Then everything was okay. We went back to being a
father and son who loved each other and respected the beliefs of the other.
We were father and son, but we were also friends.
How do I talk about the loss that I feel every time I think about Matt?
How can I describe the empty pit in my heart and mind when I think about
all the problems that were put in Matt’s way that he overcame? No one can
understand the sense of pride and accomplishment that I felt every time he
reached the mountaintop of another obstacle. No one, including myself, will
ever know the frustration and agony that others put him through, because
he was different. How many people could be given the problems that Matt
was presented with and still succeed, as he did? How many people would
continue to smile, at least on the outside while crying on the inside, to keep
other people from feeling bad?
I now feel very fortunate that I was able to spend some private time with
Matt last summer during my vacation from Saudi Arabia. We sat and talked.
I told Matt that he was my hero and that he was the toughest man that I had
ever known. When I said that I bowed down to him out of respect for his
ability to continue to smile and keep a positive attitude during all the trials
and tribulations that he had gone through, he just laughed. I also told him
how proud I was because of what he had accomplished and what he was
trying to accomplish. The last thing I said to Matt was that I loved him and
he said he loved me. That was the last private conversation that I ever had
with him.
Impact on my life? My life will never be the same. I miss Matt terribly.
I think about him all the time — at odd moments when some little thing
reminds me of him; when I walk by the refrigerator and see the pictures of
him and his brother that we’ve always kept on the door; at special times of
the year like the first day of classes at UW or opening day of sage-chicken
hunting. I keep wondering almost the same thing I did when I first saw him
in the hospital. What would he have become? How would he have changed
his piece of the world to make it better?
Impact on my life? I feel a tremendous sense of guilt. Why wasn’t I there
when he needed me most? Why didn’t I spend more time with him? Why
didn’t I try to find another type of profession so that I could have been avail-
able to spend more time with him as he grew up? What could I have done
to be a better father and friend? How do I get an answer to those questions
now? The only one who can answer them is Matt. These questions will be
with me for the rest of my life. What makes it worse for me is knowing that
his mother and brother will have similar unanswered questions. . . .
Matt officially died at 12:53 A.M. on Monday, October 12, 1998, in a hos-
pital in Fort Collins, Colorado. He actually died on the outskirts of Laramie,
tied to a fence that Wednesday before when you beat him. You, Mr. McKin-
ney, with your friend Mr. Henderson, killed my son.

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 325 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

326 Between History and Tomorrow

By the end of the beating, his body was just trying to survive. You left
him out there by himself but he wasn’t alone. There were his lifelong friends
with him — friends that he had grown up with. You’re probably wondering
who these friends were. First, he had the beautiful night sky with the same
stars and moon that we used to look at through a telescope. Then he had
the daylight and the sun to shine on him one more time — one more cool,
wonderful autumn day in Wyoming. His last day alive in Wyoming. His last
day alive in the state that he always proudly called home. And through it
all, he was breathing in, for the last time, the smell of Wyoming sagebrush
and the scent of pine trees from the Snowy Range. He heard the wind — the
ever-present Wyoming wind — for the last time. He had one more friend
with him. One he grew to know through his time in Sunday school and as an
acolyte at St. Mark’s in Casper as well as through his visits to St. Matthew’s in
Laramie. He had God. I feel better, knowing that he wasn’t alone.
Matt became a symbol — some say a martyr — putting a boy-next-door
face on hate crimes. That’s fine with me. Matt would be thrilled if his death
would help others. On the other hand, your agreement to life without parole
has taken yourself out of the spotlight and out of the public eye. It means
no drawn-out appeals process, [no] chance of walking away free due to a
technicality, and no chance of a lighter sentence due to a “merciful” jury.
Best of all, you won’t be a symbol. No years of publicity, no chance of a com-
mutation, no nothing — just a miserable future and a more miserable end. It
works for me. . . .
Matt’s beating, hospitalization, and funeral focused worldwide attention
on hate. Good is coming out of evil. People have said, “Enough is enough.”
You screwed up, Mr. McKinney. You made the world realize that a person’s
lifestyle is not a reason for discrimination, intolerance, persecution, and vio-
lence. This is not the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s of Nazi Germany. My son died
because of your ignorance and intolerance. I can’t bring him back. But I can
do my best to see that this never, ever happens to another person or another
family again. As I mentioned earlier, my son has become a symbol — a sym-
bol against hate and people like you; a symbol for encouraging respect for
individuality, for appreciating that someone is different, for tolerance. I miss
my son but I’m proud to be able to say that he is my son. . . .
. . . Every time you celebrate Christmas, a birthday, or the Fourth of July,
remember that Matt isn’t. Every time that you wake up in that prison cell,
remember that you had the opportunity and the ability to stop your actions
that night. Every time that you see your cell mate, remember that you had
a choice, and now you are living that choice. You robbed me of something
very precious, and I will never forgive you for that. Mr. McKinney, I give you
life in the memory of one who no longer lives. May you have a long life, and
may you thank Matthew every day for it.
Your Honor, Members of the Jury, Mr. Rerucha,
Thank you.

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 326 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

 60
U.S. Security Policy after 9/11

On the mild autumnal morning of September 11, 2001, a group of militants hijacked
four airplanes and intentionally crashed two of them into the twin towers of the World
Trade Center in New York. Another plane was flown into the Pentagon, destroying a
section of the building, and a final plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. While
the roughly 2,600 people who died in these attacks was far fewer than the 20,000
who died in the Gujurati earthquake of the same year or the 250,000 who died in the
2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the political nature of the crime and the response on the
part of the U.S. government made this a moment of world historic importance that is
remembered as 9/11 or September 11th.
Among the many responses to 9/11 were the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the
war in Iraq, the intensification of counterinsurgency against Muslim militants in the
Philippines, and a whole new approach to international security. The increased screen-
ing and inspection at airport security checkpoints changed the way people travel; how-
ever, this was largely uncontroversial and has mostly been memorialized in everyday
travel stories. More controversial were the changes in laws and practices governing
civil liberties and jurisprudence. In January of 2002 the U.S. government set up Camp
X-Ray in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where suspected terrorists were indefinitely detained
without trial and outside the jurisdiction of courts or international treaties governing
the treatment of prisoners of war. For many Americans this was a small price to pay
for security from terrorism. For others this denial of the basic right to a trial, combined
with increased surveillance of citizens, suggested a dark new world of unchecked state
power. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz distilled the debate for the nation with
his “ticking time bomb” scenario, in which a terrorist knew where a giant bomb was.
Dershowitz asked if it was right to use torture to find out where it had been placed. For
many people, including former president Bill Clinton, the answer was an obvious yes.
Dershowitz proposed “torture warrants” that would take the form of presidential ap-
proval for enhanced interrogation. Throughout the Bush presidency, suspected terrorists
were regularly brought to Guantánamo or “black sites” through “extraordinary rendi-
tion,” or abduction, and subjected to “enhanced interrogation.”
There had been much debate, at first, for and against torture, using Dershowitz’s
ticking time bomb scenario, but as the public became increasingly disgusted by the
abuse and seemingly unending scandal connected to detention without trial and en-
hanced interrogation, and as the prisoners at Camp X-Ray became increasingly discon-
nected to the struggles going on outside the camp, cooler voices emerged. The discovery,
capture, and execution of Osama Bin Laden — the man believed to have masterminded
9/11—in 2011, which drew on clever interrogation rather than force, brought to the
fore some of the problems with Dershowitz’s either-or thought problem. Suddenly other
choices seemed to emerge, such as those suggested by psychologist Saul Kassin, whose

327

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 327 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

328 Between History and Tomorrow

groundbreaking research suggests that innocent people are more likely to confess than
guilty ones, and that the more pressure is exerted to obtain a confession, the more likely
incorrect information will drive out real discovery.
Though prison camps continue to exist at Guantánamo, the Obama administra-
tion radically reduced their population and largely eliminated enhanced interrogation,
preferring to pose security as less of an either-or thought problem and more of an ev-
eryday set of practices. The picture reprinted depicts one of the early prisoners at Camp
X-Ray who was caught in the initial struggle between Americans who supported “secu-
rity” and those who supported “legal rights.”

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
1. The army allowed journalists to publish only a few photos of Camp
X-Ray. Why do you think they might have chosen to release this one?
2. Imagine you are debating with a classmate whether or not Camp
X-Ray should exist. List the arguments you might make for and
against its existence based on what you see in this picture.
3. How do you think Americans might have seen a different story in this
photo than people abroad?

U.S. Army military police escort a prisoner at Camp X-Ray, Guantánamo Bay,
Cuba. U.S. Navy iPhoto Inc./Newscom.

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 328 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

 61
AHMIR QUESTLOVE THOMPSON
Walking While Black: The Unhappy Marriage
of Race and Criminal Justice

Concerns about unequal justice for blacks and whites have been a part of American life
since the eighteenth century, and many of the urban uprisings of the past fifty years
have been in direct response to an incident involving police. In August of 2014, a young
African American man, Michael Brown, who was accused of theft and assaulting a
police officer, was shot to death by police in Ferguson, Missouri. The incident touched
off days and nights of running battles between the nearly all-white police force and pro-
testers. As similar incidents occurred in towns and cities that did not have such racially
skewed police hiring patterns, the national discussion expanded to the bigger problem of
unequal policing and what many African Americans refer to as “walking while black.”
First and foremost among these other incidents was the strangulation death of a
middle-aged father of six who was caught illegally selling cigarettes on the street in
Staten Island, New York. Captured by a cellphone video, Eric Garner’s last dying pleas
of “I can’t breathe” were played on computer screens across the country. Shortly after
this incident, two Cleveland, Ohio, policemen were captured on a security video shoot-
ing twelve-year-old Tamir Rice to death for carrying a plastic toy gun. Adding to the
national dialogue was the fact that instead of attempting to administer first aid to
the dying child, they tackled and arrested his teenage sister. Critics and defenders of the
police across America disagreed about who was at fault, but most Americans seemed
to recognize that there was a larger problem between police and African Americans.
President Barack Obama, the United States’ first nonwhite president, also joined the
national debate, seemingly struggling to balance his expressed concern for the high rates
of African American incarceration and death in police custody with his concern for law,
order, safety, and the law enforcement apparatus that he was charged with leading.
Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson is an African American musician, journalist, writer,
and record producer who was born in Philadelphia in 1971. He grew up during a pre-
vious generation of conflict between police and African American communities that
culminated in the 1985 police bombing of a house inhabited by the black liberation or-
ganization MOVE. Drawing on his childhood experiences in Philadelphia and later en-
gagements with the police, he became an influential part of the discussion that emerged
in 2014 around racialized policing.

Ahmir Questlove Thompson, interview, Democracy Now! August 14, 2013. http://www
.democracynow.org/2013/8/14/questlove_on_police_racial_profiling_stop.

329

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 329 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

330 Between History and Tomorrow

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
1. Thompson recalls his own experience with racial discrimination in
this interview. Why do you think that he talks about his father’s ad-
vice about how to act when confronted by the police? Why does
Thompson tell the story of the police officer suggesting he is driving
the wrong type of car?
2. Thompson compares himself to Trayvon Martin. Do you agree with
this comparison? In what ways do you think Thompson is similar to
Martin and in what ways is he different?
3. Thompson argues that police treat him differently because he is
black. Do you think his evidence is convincing? Why or why not?

There was a point where I was coming home from — from Bible study, like
teen Bible study on a Friday night, and there was a Tower Records on South
Street. And a friend of mine wanted to purchase U2’s The Joshua Tree album,
which just came out. And they were coming to Philly at RFK Stadium, so he
wanted to, like, study the record and know all the material before they came,
and so we went and purchased The Joshua Tree. And we were driving home,
and then, seconds later, on Washington Avenue in Philly, like, cops stopped
us. And he was holding a gun on us.
And there’s nothing like the first time that a gun is held on you. Like,
we’re 16, mind you, like 16, 17 years old. And, you know, I just remember
the protocol. I remember my father telling me, like, “If you’re ever in this
position, you’re to slowly keep your hands up.” I mean, he did it in sort of
a humorous way that Richard Pryor did. You know, Richard Pryor told a
joke of, whenever you’re stopped, “Yes, officer, my hands are on the steering
wheel.” You know, it was that type of thing. I remembered that lesson. So,
my friends didn’t know that, so they just thought that it was normal. And I
was like, “Yo! Get your hands up! Get your hands up!” Like, how I knew that
was the protocol at that young age, I mean, it’s probably a sad commentary,
but it was also, you know, a matter of survival. . . .
I mean just two, three weeks ago — I mean, I wasn’t frisked, but I was — I
definitely know that was I stopped for, you know, unknown reasons, that I
was just the wrong person in the wrong automobile. . . .
I was leaving my Thursday night residency. I do a regular DJ night at
Brooklyn Bowl in Williamsburg, and right before we got on the Williams-
burg Bridge, we got pulled over. They walked up, asked to see license and re-
gistration. And it was like four of them with flashlights everywhere. And I
played a risky card: I was like — I pulled this [the book he is author of ] out of
my backseat and was like, “This is me,” you know, hoping. And nine times
out of 10 when I’d play that card, it never works. . . . so I showed them the
book, and they looked, and they kind of had a meeting for five minutes. And
then, it was like, “Oh, OK, you can go.” And phew, you know, but this hap-
pens all the time. . . .

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 330 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

 61 • Walking While Black 331

Probably, in my lifetime, I’ve been stopped — one, two, three — I mean,

the memorable ones are probably six times. But it’s definitely in the twen-
ties and thirties. I mean, probably, since 1994, twenties and thirties. The
worst one was after Super Tuesday in Orange County. I was campaigning
for Super Tuesday. . . . For Obama. And after it was over, a friend of mine,
Jurnee Smollett, who’s an actress on True Blood, she and I were done cam-
paigning, and we decided to see a movie. After the movie, we went to Bor-
ders to get — I wanted to get a housewarming gift for my manager. And we
pulled over. I pulled over to take a phone call from my manager, because,
you know, I thought, being a law-abiding citizen, you’re not supposed to
drive and talk. So I pulled over, talked, finished the conversation, pulled off.
Five cars stopped us, and pretty much that was like the — that was the most
humiliating experience, because, like, we had to get out the car. They made
us spread on, you know, the car. They searched the car. We sat in the back
of . . . their car. And the whole time I was thinking, like, “God, please don’t
look in the trunk.” Like, first of all, I felt like a criminal already, like, OK,
I’ve got stuff in the trunk. But the stuff I had in the trunk were psychology
books and some Scrabble games. And in my head, I was like, there’s no way
that they’re going to believe that that stuff belongs to me. Like, there’s no
way that they’re — and so, the whole time I was just like, “God, please don’t.
Please don’t.” She was trying to get like her camera phone. She’s like, “This
is unconstitutional! They’re not — this is an illegal search. They’re supposed
to have a protocol for” — you know, so that — you know, I’ve been — this is
like the night before the Grammys, the night before the Grammys in 2010,
when I won. So, it’s like, this happens all the time. . . .
It is absolutely probably the most humiliating, lowest, lowest feeling a
human being can have. Twice this happened in front of dates. And all I kept
thinking about was like, man, like, nothing’s more emasculating than to be
emasculated in front of a girl that you like. You know, like there’s just no
coming back from that. And it’s sort of like an unspoken thing, like I always
felt like, even afterwards, like there’s this unspoken cloud of the question of
my manhood, because — you know, that’s why I’m often shocked when I
see footage of people and they talk back to cops. Like, I want to do that, but
it’s like — you know, even watching Fruitvale, like I was like, “No, don’t —
don’t — like, just get on your knees! Just don’t — you know, you can die.” And
that’s — it’s the most humiliating, emasculating feeling I’ve ever had. That’s —
I only feel low when that happens, you know, even — even if it’s playful.
In Philly, whenever we finish a Roots album, I give it the car test. So,
even driving up and down Broad Street in Philadelphia, I once got stopped
three times. And, you know, the first two times, they were just like — they
looked, they were just like, “Oh, it’s you.” They let me go. Third time, this
guy, “Oh, man, it’s you!” And then I felt safe enough to sort of have casual
banter with him. I was like, “This is the third time I’ve been stopped. Like,
what’s going on here?” And he was like, “Well, you know, I mean, you’re
kind of in Temple University’s neighborhood.” And I was like, “Yeah? And?”

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 331 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

332 Between History and Tomorrow

He’s like, “Well, look at the car you’re in.” I drive a Scion. And my logic for
getting a Scion was like don’t get a flashy — like, I come from the ‘80s, so in
the ’80s, when you saw someone in a BMW, in a Mercedes, they automati-
cally got pulled over, because they were a drug dealer. So I thought, OK, I’ll
get a Scion — well, first of all, it was free; it was given to me. And it was boxy;
it was afro-friendly, like it didn’t smoosh my afro down, and so it’s a com-
fortable car. I like it. He said, “You know, in this, you kind of look like you
stole it from a college student.” And I was like, “Oh, well, OK, I get it.” So,
in even choosing the car in my mind that would sort of not put me in that
position, I actually wound up putting me in that position by driving that
car, because he said, “If you were in a SUV, we would have just thought you
were one of the Philadelphia Eagles or something.” Like, oh, OK, that’s the
car you belong in. . . .
[ M ]ost people, when they finish their records, they try and find a really
good speaker system. When you mix your records, you do it on horrible
speakers, so that way, if it sounds great on horrible speakers, it’ll sound great
elsewhere. So when you finish your record, the first place you want to take it
to is to a good car system. I mean, mine is not — I mean, it’s satisfactory, but,
you know, I just wanted to drive around with it. I always do it, with every
Roots album. I just drive around for five hours, making sure that I like the
mix and I’m fine with it. I just happen to drive between the hours of 2:00 A.M.
and 4:00 A.M., and, you know, that was another unfortunate circumstance
I found myself in. But even then, it’s just like, what do you do? Do you — I
mean, how much more can I play it safe? Like, I’m already like taking — pur-
posely taking myself out of situations because I want to avoid that. But I
don’t know how much more I can — I can suppress myself to not seem like a
threat or be a threat. . . .
I think there’s just a bit of our soul that sort of just melts away when
things like this happen. I mean, first of all, you internalize it. Like, as I
watched the case, I mean, I identified with Trayvon Martin, like I felt like,
OK, that would have been me in that situation. I mean, there’s definitely
been times where I’ve been watching either a sporting event or the Grammys
or any sort of television event, and then I’d be the person that would run
to the store to get something. Like, that could have easily been me. I live in
hoodies. I opened a hoodie shop. I have a hoodie shop that sells nothing but
hoodies. Like, I love hoodies, because it gives me anonymity, like I get to go
to movies, and no one bothers me. . . .
And so, when the verdict was handed down, you know, I just felt
like — half of me, I instantly felt like, well, yeah, I knew that was going to
happen. But then the other half of me was upset that I had just resigned to
that fact. And, you know, because I was on an international flight — I was in
Holland the day that the verdict was handed down, so that whole eight-hour
trip on the plane, I just felt like, oh, well, you know, nothing matters any-
more, like this really — life doesn’t matter, like you’re guilty no matter what,
and you just now have to figure out a way just to make everyone feel safe and
everyone feel comfortable, even if it’s at the expense of your own soul. . . .

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 332 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

 62
RYAN J. DOWNEY AND HANNAH APPEL
Personal and Social Debt

In 2008 the world economy plunged into the worst crisis since the 1930s. Coinciding
with the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007–2009 in which massive unpayable home
mortgage debts threatened to put major international banks out of business, the ensuing
crisis came to be called “the Great Recession.” Debt became one of the key political and
social issues for a generation of Americans who faced economic crisis and declining real
incomes. Talk show hosts, bloggers, and pundits threw around statistics like “77 percent
of Americans are in debt” and “one in seven Americans is being pursued by a collection
agency,” while ordinary Americans worried about maxed-out credit cards, “underwater
mortgages” (where more is owed than a home is worth), and the impossibility of paying
off massive student loan debt.
While some of it proved to be fear and hype, expanding consumer debt was a real-
ity that negatively impacted millions of Americans. For over thirty years since 1985 the
ratio of debt to personal disposable income and personal savings increased dramatically.
In that same period, the cost of a year at college had increased over 500 percent — all
of this during a period of low inflation; student loan interest rates were often two or
three times higher in the United States than in other wealthy countries, many of which
provide a free college education. By 2010 the Federal Reserve Bank reported that Ameri-
can consumers owed $11.74 trillion in debt, of which $882.6 billion was to credit card
companies, $8.14 trillion was for mortgages, and $1.13 trillion was for student loans.
The United States was drowning in debt, much of which likely would never be repaid.
Both the Bush and Obama administrations developed programs to address crushing
debt, but the debt was too big for these policies to cover more than a small percentage of
citizens. A generation of Americans continued to find that debt was defining their life
decisions about home, security, education, and participation in society. The two selec-
tions that follow suggest the differing ways that individuals thought about the debts
they had incurred and some of the solutions that they were able to envision — both in
their individual lives and in the communities in which they found a sense of belonging
and home.

Ryan J. Downey, “How to Walk Away.” The Huffington Post, October 8, 2011. http://www
.huffingtonpost.com/ryan-j-downey/mortgage-walk-away-what-happens-_b_993756.html;
Hannah Appel, interview. Tavis Smiley, September 26, 2014. http://www.pbs.org/wnet
/tavissmiley/interviews/economic-anthropologist-hannah-appel/.

333

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 333 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

334 Between History and Tomorrow

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
1. Whom do these two authors blame for the debt crisis?
2. How would you contrast the solutions that these documents offer
individuals with crushing debt?
3. Hannah Appel describes her approach to the debt crisis as a “social
hack.” What do you think she means?
4. How are the policy changes suggested by these two authors different?

RYAN J. DOWNEY
How to Walk Away

I made my last mortgage payment on November 1, 2009.

Bank of America changed the locks on my house on September 29, 2011.
What happens when you walk away? Are you arrested? Are you shunned?
Do your kids decide they hate you?
When I signed a mountain of loan documents to purchase my first home
in 2006 I had the same attitude as most people. “Do whatever you can to pay
your mortgage: run up credit cards, work out payment plans with the IRS,
eat Ramen noodles. But pay your mortgage, every month, always. Because
when you miss a few payments, a sheriff shows up with a cardboard box and
throws you and your family onto the sidewalk. Or maybe if he’s friendly he’ll
give you a lift to a shelter.” . . .
This is what happened when I decided to walk away. And it’s not nearly
as nightmarish as you might think.
I purchased a brand new home in Riverside County, California in April,
2006 for $422,000. As I write this more than five years later, Zillow.com es-
timates the home’s value at $253,000. I had an interest only, nothing down
loan with an adjustable rate mortgage through a lender called First Franklin.
( Yeah, I’m one of those guys you’ve been reading about.) I had a 711 FICO
score when I bought my house but the woman who worked out the mort-
gage assured me that because I’m self-employed, I would never get anything
better than an interest only, nothing down adjustable rate mortgage.
When the housing bubble burst I had some friends who purchased new
houses––which they told their banks were “investment properties”––only
to move into them while letting the first “underwater” house slip voluntary
into foreclosure. At first I thought this was bananas. . . . I spent eight months
trying to get a loan modification. I faxed close to a hundred pages of docu-
ments to them. . . . the bank told me in no uncertain terms that they were
denying my request because, well, I hadn’t ever missed a mortgage payment
and therefore I wasn’t viewed as an “imminent risk of foreclosure.” That’s
right. They wouldn’t help me because I was paying them every month and
on time. . . .

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 334 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

 62 • How to Walk Away 335

The same month I made my last mortgage payment I read an article

about an Arizona law professor who was advising people to do exactly what I
had decided I must do. Two months after that, I read about how investors in
the largest residential real estate deal in U.S. history had walked away from
11,232 properties at once.
The banks call it “writing off a bad investment.” But when a private citi-
zen does it, we’re scum? Please . . .

THE SCARY NOTICE TAPED TO YOUR DOOR. PFFT!

The bank first taped up the scary “your home is going to be sold at auction
in three weeks” papers on my door in March, 2010. The actual auction didn’t
take place until August, 2011. But of course, at the time, I was sweating
bullets.
What’s interesting was that I never really formally requested postpone-
ments of the auction dates. I would call in to get updates throughout my
third attempt at a loan modification and they would tell me in ominous
tones, “Mr. Downey, I see here you have an auction date for April 29. That’s
in a week. What are you going to do about this today?” I would call back the
next day and a different person would tell me in the same manner, “I see
here you have an auction date of May 5.”
This continued all the way until September when I got a letter from
Bank of America politely informing me they had become my new mortgage
servicer. It turns out First Franklin had “charged off” my second mortgage
and sold my first mortgage to Bank of America, or so I think . . . Who knows
really? They don’t seem to know themselves. . . . Then on August 9, 2011
they finally took my house to auction. Nobody bought it and it went back
to the bank.

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE AUCTION?

I’m told that if investors buy it they will eventually show up on your porch,
give you a call or write you a letter. They’ll tell you they’ve purchased your
home and they are prepared to offer you some “moving expenses” cash to
get outta Dodge. If the bank takes your house it’s more or less the same
thing. A realty company came by my place on BOFA’s behalf.
In either case the bank or the investors could evict you, which you can
fight. This process will cost them money and give you even more time in
the house––anywhere from thirty to ninety days, I’ve heard. It makes more
sense to them to give you cash to get out faster so they can be sure you won’t
trash the place on the way out or let the lawn turn brown. If you decide to
stay this extra bit of time, be aware that an eviction looks much worse than
a foreclosure to a landlord.
In my case it took the realty company a few days to show up and (sur-
prise, surprise) they had to wait on Bank of America to finish up some details

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 335 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

336 Between History and Tomorrow

before they could work everything out with me. I’m not saying I worked out
a “cash-for-keys” agreement. I’m pretty sure those agreements have a non-
disclosure mechanism. But I hear they’re offering about $5,000. I handed
Bank of America’s representatives the keys nearly two months after the day
they took the house to auction.

BUT WHAT ABOUT MY CREDIT SCORE?

American Express lowered my spending limit for a few months when I

stopped paying my mortgage. A few months later they raised it again. I kept
all of my credit cards and auto loans current. When it came time to rent a
house I was accepted by the first landlord at the first rental property I looked
at with the only application I turned in. I simply explained the entire situa-
tion to him in our first conversation. He wanted to see my bank statements
and ran a credit report. That was it.
It’s my suspicion that a foreclosure is going to be much less detrimen-
tal when it comes time to getting credit to do anything––including buying
another house––than it used to be. Think about it. If people won’t rent to
folks who’ve lost their homes, who will they rent to? It would be McDonald’s
deciding they won’t sell food to people who are out of shape.
The place I’m renting is costing me less than half my monthly mortgage
and property tax bill used to be.

WHAT WILL THE KIDS SAY?

My three-year-old daughter loves our bigger house and our nicer neighbor-
hood. She announced recently that, “One time I saw an ant sleeping on my
bike in the garage so we had to get a new house.” Our dog loves the new
house, too.

FINALLY, WHAT WILL THE NEIGHBORS SAY?

The honest ones will ask you for advice. The proud ones will probably end
up with papers taped to their doors, too.

HANNAH APPEL
Interview

. . . the Rolling Jubilee is something we could think of as a social hack, right?

It’s an action that allows us, that in fact forces us, to rethink, to reimagine
what we thought we knew about debt.

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 336 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

 62 • Interview 337

In the past, debtors experienced debt as isolating, shameful, a reason to

be afraid, a reason not to open the mail, a reason not to pick up the phone.
And the Rolling Jubilee and Strike Debt work more broadly in saying what
if debt was not about individual isolation, shame, fear? What if debt was a
platform for collective action?
So the Rolling Jubilee, by buying up what’s called distressed debt for
pennies on the dollar and then sending a letter to the debted that says, hey,
we have forgiven this debt. We don’t try to collect the debt. We abolish it. It
asks people to rethink that, to look at it and say, wait a minute. First of all,
you can buy debt for pennies on the dollar?
Most people think that, if their debt is $1,000, they owe $1,000. They
don’t know that it circulates on secondary markets for mere pennies on the
dollar, that debt collectors are making hundreds of percent profit by forc-
ing me to pay the full amount when in fact the debt collector bought it for
only pennies on the dollar.
So we really––in part, it’s really about public education. It’s really about
asking people to step back and to rethink that just as you introduced it in
the beginning of the show as a systemic problem and not as a problem of the
failure of individuals.
And, of course, in the Rolling Jubilee project, we’re able to help thou-
sands of debtors along the way and that’s wonderful, but it really is about ask-
ing the entire nation and beyond to rethink debt as a political platform. . . .
Certainly medical care and, at this point, student debt, and that really
has been over the last three decades when there hasn’t been as much public
funding and people are having to go into radical debt just to send a kid to
college. Kids are currently graduating with about $30,000 worth of debt on
average from all schools in the country. . . .
Student debt right now is approaching $1.3 trillion dollars. So we could
turn that adage and say, if I owe the bank $25,000 for my student loans, then
the bank owns me. But if we as student debtors owe the bank $1.3 trillion
dollars, then we actually have a tremendous amount of power, an untapped
power, in our hands.
Millions of students are defaulting on their loans every year already, but
we’re not doing so in an organized fashion. We’re not doing so in a way that
brings the sort of collective power of that figure whether as student debtors,
whether as mortgage debtors, whether as medical debtors, to begin to have
power to actually negotiate terms with creditors.
On September 17, which was the third anniversary of Occupy Wall
Street, we announced that we had bought and abolished $4 million dollars
of student debt for students at a college called Everest, which is for-profit col-
lege, national chain under the Corinthian Colleges, Inc. corporation. And I
feel like that’s a really good example of how we can start to mobilize because
that has actually attracted a lot of media attention. . . .
Given how many of us are in debt and given where public opinion is
in this country about the banks right now, I actually think we could have a
tremendous amount of legal decisions on our side. I think a lot of the media
will be on our side. In other words, I feel like public pressure against the

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 337 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

338 Between History and Tomorrow

banks, public pressure to get us out of what we might call odious debt, of
what we might call exploitative debt, and into reimagining how we fund so-
cial services in this country, working class kids, low income kids, middle class
kids, should not graduate from “public schools” with $30,000 worth of debt.
I actually think the vast majority of this country across the political spec-
trum would agree with that. And that kind of unity is not something the
banking lobby can fight easily. We are out to be kind of a new labor move-
ment in certain ways. We work alongside the labor––the idea is not to replace
the labor movement, but to say the way that the labor movement changed
working conditions for working people, we would like to be that same
movement for indebted people, especially because in certain ways so many
more people are indebted than have good jobs.

63
STANLEY CROUCH
Barack Hussein Obama: Black Like Whom?

Although President Obama is the first African American to be president of the United
States, other African Americans before him have served in elected office. Wentworth
Cheswell became the first African American elected official in the United States when he
was elected town constable in 1768 in Haymarket, New Hampshire. During the period
of Reconstruction (1865–1877) many African Americans were elected to offices at the
national, state, and local levels, including one governor, several U.S. congressmen, and
one congressman who was briefly Speaker Pro Tempore of the House of Representatives.
However, the presidency was the domain of white male Christians until the 2008 elec-
tion of Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a white American mother and an immigrant
African father from Kenya.
From the day that Obama first appeared as a legitimate candidate for the Demo-
cratic Party ticket, Americans began debating what his election might mean for race
relations in the United States. Some argued that it was the harvest of the civil rights
movement, demonstrating the possibility for racial democracy; others dismissed it as
tokenism for an Ivy League graduate at the top. For a few it signaled the newest version
of a longstanding process, described by anthropologist Karen Brodkin as “becoming
white,” in which immigrants, this time from Latin America, Asia, and even Africa,

Stanley Crouch, “What Obama Isn’t: Black Like Me on Race,” New York Daily News,
Thursday, November 2, 2006. http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/opinions/obama-isn
-black-race-article-1.585922.

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 338 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

 63 • Barack Hussein Obama: Black Like Whom? 339

find acceptance, success, and belonging in America, often by climbing over the backs of
African Americans. Black journalist Stanley Crouch, the author of the following com-
mentary, was probably the first public commentator to suggest this last interpretation in
a column written in 2006, long before most Americans had any idea who Obama was.
During the early days of his campaign against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic
Party nomination, African Americans struggled to warm to Obama, confirming some
of Crouch’s criticisms. However, after Clinton began to court conservative white rural
voters in the South, Obama became increasingly popular among black voters. When he
won, African Americans celebrated an unprecedented milestone for one of their own.
But the honeymoon did not last. As he journeyed deeper into the presidency it become
increasingly apparent to African Americans that whether he was black like them or not,
his presidency was not the sea change many had hoped for. As the children of new im-
migrants like South Asian Bobby Jindal and Hispanics like Marco Rubio, Susana Marti-
nez, and Ted Cruz took the national stage in this same period, it seemed that Crouch’s
concerns had been prescient. Instead of signaling a new era in relations between black
and white, the election of Barack Obama may have reflected an age in which Latin
Americans, Asians, and even Africans might become white. However, for those who
were black like Stanley Crouch, and born into the American caste color system, most of
the longstanding inequalities and frustrations remained.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
1. Stanley Crouch talks about a distinction between a black American
politician and Obama, whom he describes as an African American.
Why does Crouch think this is significant?
2. Crouch says that “Obama is being greeted with the same kind of
public affection” that General Colin Powell, the son of Jamaican im-
migrants, received when he was considered a presidential candidate.
What do you think Crouch means?
3. Do you think Crouch is right that Americans might be more accept-
ing of a candidate who has black skin, but does not “share a heritage
with the majority of black Americans, who are descendants of planta-
tion slaves”? Why?
4. What do you think that Crouch means by the phrase coming into the
White House “through a side door”?

If Barack Obama makes it all the way to becoming the Democratic nominee
for President in 2008, a feat he says he may attempt, a much more complex
understanding of the difference between color and ethnic identity will be
upon us for the very first time. Back in 2004, Alan Keyes made this point
quite often. Keyes was the black Republican carpetbagger chosen by the el-
ephants to run against Obama for the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois. The
choice of Keyes was either a Republican version of affirmative action or an
example of just how dumb the party believes black voters to be, since it was
obvious that Keyes came from the Southeast, not the Midwest. That race was

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 339 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM

340 Between History and Tomorrow

never much of a contest, but one fascinating subplot was how Keyes was un-
able to draw a meaningful distinction between himself as a black American
and Obama as an African-American. After all, Obama’s mother is of white
U.S. stock. His father is a black Kenyan. Other than color, Obama did not––
does not––share a heritage with the majority of black Americans, who are
descendants of plantation slaves.
Of course, the idea that one would be a better or a worse representative
of black Americans depending upon his or her culture or ethnic group is
clearly absurd. Even slavery itself initially came under fire from white Chris-
tians––the first of whom to separate themselves from the institution were
Quakers. The majority of the Union troops were white, and so were those
who have brought about the most important civil rights legislation. Why
then do we still have such a simple-minded conception of black and white––
and how does it color the way we see Obama?
The naive ideas coming out of Pan-Africanism are at the root of the con-
fusion. When Pan-African ideas began to take shape in the 19th century, all
black people, regardless of where in the world they lived, suffered and shared
a common body of injustices. Europe, after all, had colonized much of the
black world, and the United States had enslaved people of African descent
for nearly 250 years. Suffice it to say: This is no longer the case. So when
black Americans refer to Obama as “one of us,” I do not know what they are
talking about. In his new book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama makes it clear
that, while he has experienced some light versions of typical racial stereo-
types, he cannot claim those problems as his own––nor has he lived the life
of a black American. Will this matter in the end? Probably not.
Obama is being greeted with the same kind of public affection that Colin
Powell had when he seemed ready to knock Bill Clinton out of the Oval Of-
fice. For many reasons, most of them personal, Powell did not become the
first black American to be a serious presidential contender. I doubt Obama
will share Powell’s fate, but if he throws his hat in the ring, he will have to
run as the son of a white woman and an African immigrant. If we then end
up with him as our first black President, he will have come into the White
House through a side door––which might, at this point, be the only one
that’s open.

07_MAR_2968_Ch07_303_340.indd 340 Achorn International 11/04/2015 02:29PM