Until the day I moved to Providence, Mom and I had never been to Rhode Island or even nearby. Still, she was certain she knew all about East Coast colleges, including what people wore.
Before leaving, we went shopping at the downtown Scarborough’s department store in Austin. Mom had lots of rules where clothing was concerned. In junior high I had perfected the art of wearing a mother-approved outfit to the breakfast table before school, then dashing downstairs, throwing on a tie-dyed T-shirt and patched bell bottoms, and racing away on my bike before she could catch me. It was my own personal act of resistance, and it became an ongoing battle once she caught on.
The college shopping trip was her last chance to put her stamp on my appearance. She decided I needed some wool, mid-calf A-line skirts (won’t show dirt, go anywhere), and wool turtleneck sweaters. This was a university where the students had recently occupied the administration offices, and we were coming from a state where the temperature never drops below 40 degrees, but that wasn’t about to stop Mom. Per usual, I had absolutely no say in the wardrobe decisions.
It was the fall of 1975. Mom’s life was changing too. Not long before, the local progressive Democrats had approached my dad about taking on the incumbent county commissioner, Johnny Voudouris, known locally as Johnny Voodoo. He was a classic good old boy. Everyone knew him; he put his name on every trash can in the neighborhood, just so nobody would ever forget he was the county commissioner. Dad knew his own gift for saying exactly what was on his mind with no filter would make him a less than ideal candidate. So in the kitchen one evening, after their friends asked Dad to run, he responded, “Well, why not Ann? She knows everything about political campaigns, certainly more than the rest of us.”
Mom recalled that there was dead silence. No one stepped in to say, “Ann, that’s a wonderful idea!” or “You’d be a great choice!” She realized no one was going to come begging, not even with her success on Sarah Weddington’s campaign. And so, after encouraging countless other women to run for office, Mom decided to take her own advice and give it a shot.
As I left Texas, it was clear to me that even if I returned home, nothing was ever going to be the same. By then Mom was into the women’s movement with both feet. She had met lots of other activists around the fight to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, or ERA, which would have guaranteed a constitutional right to women’s equality. Once Congress passed it, it would have to be ratified by the states, so women were organizing all across America.
The ERA provided the first window into my mother’s and father’s different attitudes when it came to so-called women’s issues. Dad had spent his entire career fighting for voting rights, civil rights, and expanded opportunities for minorities to serve in office. But even he couldn’t see why passing a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women’s equality was necessary. He had a wife who raised the kids, took care of every single dog and cat we brought home, threw dinner parties, and grew organic vegetables. Dad had grown up—and was living in—a household where women threw themselves into volunteer work and didn’t have careers. I realize now that for him (and so many other men of his generation), the prospect of total upheaval of the domestic scene must have seemed pretty frightening. Suddenly the tumult around women’s roles and aspirations wasn’t happening just on television; it was happening in our own home.
That women and men are equal might seem obvious to most people, but at the time it was highly controversial. (And of course even now we are living through a political era when men—including our president—are openly questioning women’s equality.) At one point during the ERA fight, the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly threatened that if the amendment passed, women would be drafted into combat and women and men would be going to the same bathroom. As Mom used to say, “Nothing gets conservatives more excited or frothing at the mouth quicker than what’s going on in other folks’ bedrooms.” Or bathrooms, as we’re seeing to this day. Eventually the ERA passed in Congress but failed in the states. Out of that disappointing loss came an entire generation of women activists who would go on to pass Title IX, run for office, and keep up the effort to pass the ERA—which continues even now.
In the midst of what was starting to feel like a national identity crisis, and Mom’s campaign for county commissioner, I was getting ready to start a new adventure of my own.
The night before we left for Brown, my folks went out to dinner and, as usual, had too much to drink. Mom came by my room, which was just down the hall from theirs, tipsy and teary over my leaving. I got the feeling she was deeply troubled. My parents were struggling in their marriage, but they’d done their best to keep their differences behind closed doors. Though he had encouraged her to run for office, Dad couldn’t have anticipated how Mom’s ascendancy would shift the balance in their relationship. He was used to being the smartest guy in the room and the center of attention. As her star rose, the marriage was coming apart and her drinking didn’t help matters. There was a sadness about both of them that I didn’t really understand, but I felt like I was leaving the scene of an accident by going away to school. My brothers were unruly—to say the least—and I had always been the typical first child who tried so hard to keep everything together. Years later my sister, Ellen, who was ten at the time, told me how abandoned she felt when I left. But whatever guilt I carried back then was watered down by relief over getting away—from my family and from Texas.
The next morning Mom and I woke up like nothing had happened and got in the car to head east. Our friend Sarah Meacham had baked us some homemade granola, and I picked out some Joni Mitchell and Carole King cassette tapes to bring along. Without much fanfare, we hit the road for Mom’s first and only trip to Brown.
I’d never driven more than a couple of hundred miles with my mother, but suddenly we were off on a cross-country adventure. Both of us were taking a big leap—me finally leaving home and her running for office. In fact she would be elected county commissioner that November. Our lives were about to change forever, but I don’t remember our discussing anything more substantial than the weather during those long hours on the road. As I look back, that trip is probably more remarkable for what we didn’t talk about: her conflicted marriage and my anxiety about starting over in a place I’d never been, with people I didn’t know. We couldn’t have helped each other anyway; I didn’t know anything about the demands of a marriage, and she knew even less about the journey I was about to undertake. Except for that brief time in Washington, Mom had lived her entire life within two hundred miles of Waco.
When we got to campus, Mom left me at the Wayland Arch on Thayer Street. Saying goodbye was hard for both of us. She was gone, and to say I was lost can’t possibly capture it.
My dorm was literally covered in ivy. Since most kids were from the East Coast, their entire families were there, helping them move in. They were unpacking beanbag chairs and mini refrigerators, and all I had was a turntable and a suitcase full of inappropriate clothing. Oh, and an iron my grandfather bought me that he’d hand-engraved with my initials. My friend Jill’s mother, Virginia, had even sent me off with a full-length Lanz flannel nightgown that she surely ordered from L.L.Bean—just the thing to impress everyone in the dorms. There wasn’t a tortilla in sight, and when I told the other students I was from Texas, I may as well have said I grew up on the Ponderosa Ranch from the TV show Bonanza. Which, for the record, was set in Nevada. That’s about the extent of what they knew of my home state.
All I wanted was to be cool. But I was the epitome of uncool. It seemed as though everyone else had been to the same summer camps and prep schools. They wore the same clothes, looking effortlessly hip, as though they hadn’t given their appearance a second thought. Rugby shirts and Top-Siders had not made it to Texas, but it looked like everyone at Brown had them. There wasn’t a wool skirt in sight, so I quickly hid them in the back of the dorm room closet.
From the very beginning I desperately sought out people who played against type at Brown. Amy on my dorm floor was an artist who would go on to be a cartoonist; she was definitely offbeat, with a sardonic wit. Julio, who was Puerto Rican, had been plucked out of his neighborhood in New York and sent to Andover.
There were a handful of other kids from Texas, but they weren’t in much better shape than I was. A friend from high school, Jonathan Royston, helped me get a job making sandwiches at the cafeteria, for which I’m forever grateful. My roommate was from Ireland by way of Vermont. She had a boyfriend from West Africa, smoked a lot of dope, and introduced me to all kinds of music, including the Chieftains and John Martyn. God knows she tried to help me out, but it was a tall order. She lent me her clothes until I could find some that didn’t make me look like a character out of Little Women. That first year she even took me skiing at her home in Woodstock, Vermont, where I nearly froze to death. Unlike the rest of my classmates, I had never gone to a rugby game, never ice-skated, and obviously never skied. Nothing could have prepared me for trying to make it down a mountain in subzero temperatures in enormous borrowed skis without killing myself or another hapless skier. I somehow persuaded someone to rescue me with a ride to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where I took a bus back to Providence and defrosted.
• • •
If things were shaky for me, life for my family was going from bad to worse. By my second year in college, it was obvious even over the phone that my parents were not happy. Mom and Dad never got on the line together the way other parents did. Even distance couldn’t mask the tension between them. They always seemed stilted and preoccupied, and I began dreading every call. It wasn’t until shortly before Thanksgiving, when everyone else was going home, that I realized my parents hadn’t bought me a plane ticket. I called Mom and asked if it was okay if I came home for the holiday, and of course she agreed that it was. But I knew that for her to forget about me, her mind had to be on something much more pressing than cooking a turkey.
My memories of that Thanksgiving are blurry. I must have been glad to see everyone, but I have no idea how Mom and Dad got through that meal. By this point my mom was a county commissioner, working full time (and then some) outside the house. And she was getting a fair amount of notoriety already. After all, liberal women in public office in Texas were practically unheard-of—especially those in charge of roads and bridges and the county criminal justice system. When her fellow statewide county commissioners got together, Mom didn’t call it the “Boots and Bellies Convention” for nothing.
Mom was an anomaly for sure. She was smart and outspoken, and with her trademark Texas hairdo and sparkly blue eyes, you couldn’t miss her. She was also a practicing alcoholic. It seems incredible now that we didn’t understand what was going on—or maybe we were all in denial?—but alcohol had become a way of getting through her marriage, job, and motherhood. I should have known something was wrong when I came home for Christmas one year and she met me at the airport decked out in a Dolly Parton costume—and I wasn’t even surprised. Apparently she wore it later on to the local country music hall, the Broken Spoke, and got quite a few dance offers.
My folks had their hands full at home, and I imagine they were thankful that I’d landed somewhere safe. They were preoccupied with their own troubles, and I was one less thing to worry about. Out of sight, out of mind. It was a strange feeling: coming from a hippie-ish, loving, funky Texas family that seemed to be the perfect progressive nuclear unit, only to realize that everything I’d been led to believe might not be true after all.
So I started building my own life at school. Kids at Brown were smart and self-confident. For lots of them, Brown was just the continuation of prep school; it seemed like pretty much everyone knew someone who knew someone. They even knew the best professors and were playing all the angles to get into the right classes.
A lottery had placed me into a small freshman seminar with Ed Beiser, who I quickly learned was one of the most revered and feared professors on campus. The other students would have paid anything to get into his class on the philosophy of government. We studied Plato, Aristotle, and Locke. Professor Beiser used the Socratic method—meaning, you better read all the homework because, if you didn’t, he would instinctively know it and call on you.
One day we were discussing Plato’s Republic. Some of my classmates had already read it in high school, so this was old hat for them. I had never even heard of it until I saw it on the syllabus. I was incredibly intimidated, which I knew meant it was all but certain Professor Beiser would call on me.
Sure enough: “Ms. Richards? What do you think of Plato’s defense of justice?”
I swallowed hard and managed to say something. I desperately hoped it was coherent—to this day, I can’t remember what it was. All I know is that when I finished speaking, Professor Beiser nodded and moved on to the next student.
After class, he called me over to his desk. “Ms. Richards, that was a smart point you made today,” he told me. “You’ve got something to say. I wonder, why don’t you share your opinion like the other students?”
I was dumbstruck. Did he really think so?
He looked me square in the eye. “You are just as smart as any student from an East Coast prep school. Don’t be afraid to stand up for what you believe.” It was a rare word of encouragement from a man who believed in me more than I believed in myself.
I had the chance to follow Professor Beiser’s advice not long after, when the janitors on campus went on strike and suddenly this uber-cool, activist university became a battleground between a rich Ivy League corporation and the folks who cleaned our dorms. The administration told students the strike was uncalled for; they claimed the wages and benefits the janitors were protesting were fair. I felt caught in the middle, and never more than the day I left my dorm and saw Eddie, my freshman-year janitor, walking the picket line. I called my dad and asked what I was supposed to do. I had been raised to never, ever cross a picket line. This was the kind of parental advice Dad probably always dreamed of giving. He said that in all his years of working for unions, he’d learned that the workers never got a fair shake unless they organized. He told me to always support the workers.
Some students were building a support group for the strikers, and so I dove in headfirst, finally feeling I’d found kindred spirits at Brown. We organized support for the janitors, coordinating fellow students to protest in solidarity with them. We handed out leaflets at campus events and demanded to meet with the administration.
Soon the campus librarians also organized and went on strike. One night we held a candlelight vigil. We created a V-formation of students leading up to the Rock, the primary library on campus, so anyone who wanted to get in had to walk through all of us. I guess it was easy enough to support the janitors, or at least no great inconvenience, but now students had to decide whether to cross a picket line of the library staff they depended on in order to do their research. An upperclassman acquaintance, a good guy as far as I knew, walked in that night. I could tell his conscience was bothering him because he muttered something about having to finish his thesis. Not being able to use the library hit some of us harder than others. I was disappointed as I watched people I knew cavalierly cross the line. It hurt, and I lost friendships over it.
To me, though, the choice was clear. The popular button of the day declared “Question Authority,” and that’s precisely what we were doing. Late at night we would put up strike signs around the university, on electrical posts and the sides of buildings, painting over them with wheat paste, which was basically impossibly sticky glue. It was absolutely prohibited by campus authorities, but it was our best way to call for students to get involved. We also knew that the strikebreakers had to remove all the signs, so that probably added to our motivation. I was afraid to get arrested, but some students weren’t. At one point I called my dad and asked, “Just in case I get arrested, can you make sure you can bail me out?” He laughed, but I’m pretty sure he would have been proud if I had—though he would never have said so out loud. Eventually the university settled with the union, and to this day the janitors and librarians at Brown have union representation.
In high school I’d organized food support for strikers at the Longhorn Machine Works in Kyle, Texas, during a bitter labor battle. I’d grown up marching with the farmworkers with my family. But Brown was the first time I’d gotten in so deep, where I really understood the words to the labor anthem “Which Side Are You On?” It was also how I met folks who would become part of my world for the rest of my time at Brown, as we moved on to other battles with the campus administration. In my classes I was learning about the American Revolution and reading We Shall Be All, a book about the Industrial Workers of the World. It was dawning on me that history wasn’t just something to read about in books—it was being made right in front of us.
Once you start questioning authority, it’s hard to stop. The strikes and the aftermath made me question whether Brown and I were meant to be together. Being a student felt like a terrible ethical conflict, and after spending so many months on a nonstop campaign for the janitors and librarians, I couldn’t imagine just going back to class. I was one semester into my sophomore year and starting to wonder whether I was supposed to be there at all. I wanted to find a place where I could figure out what I was doing in college, and more than that, what I was supposed to do with my life.
The second semester was rapidly approaching, so I had to figure something out. The ACLU was looking for an intern in Maine, which sounded, well, cold. An organization I’d never heard of was working on Title IX and women’s equity in education in Washington, DC. I thought, I’ll give that a try.
I called my parents and told them I had found something much more important than going to school and was going to drop out. They were shocked.
“What in God’s name, Cecile? You are just throwing away your education,” said Mom.
Try as I might, I couldn’t get them to understand me or the bizarre, conflicted contradictions of life of at Brown. They were embroiled in their own issues and their other kids. Even still, they knew they couldn’t stop me.
I moved to Washington, short on street smarts and with zero experience but thrilled to be on my own. With no place to live, and long before the days of Craigslist, I found a note tacked up at the local food co-op advertising for a roommate. I moved into a group house at 1927 S Street—no air-conditioning and totally bare bones. It was so hot in DC that at night, when it became unbearable, we’d go to the movies where at least it was cool.
The internship I’d found was working with the Project on the Status and Education of Women. They were fighting to implement Title IX, which required for the first time that women and men have equal opportunities in education. By dumb luck I had landed in the heart of feminist organizing in America. The world was starting to open up for women, and the women’s movement was putting some life-changing wins on the board.
When I arrived in DC in 1977, Title IX was finally starting to have some juice, five years after becoming law. The big fights at the time were over athletics and employment in higher education: at publicly funded universities, women and men now had to have equal opportunities to be professors, and a university that spent $50 million on football had to spend $50 million on women’s sports. As a Texan, I knew about the immense resources poured into football, and the thought that the same amount now had to be spent on girls’ sports was really exciting. Maybe they could even play full-court basketball!
The women I worked with were making policy and creating opportunities for hundreds of thousands of women and girls across America. I loved what we were doing. It was the first office I’d ever worked in, and it was a hodgepodge of out-there feminist women—led by the iconic Bunny Sandler, one of the early leaders in the women’s movement. I’d go to congressional hearings, research legal issues, and generally help out and try to learn what I could. I couldn’t have known at age twenty how much the work I was doing would influence my daughters’ lives. Decades later, Hannah would be a softball pitcher and soccer player, and Lily would be coxswain of the men’s high school crew team, both embodying the change that was ultimately made possible under Title IX.
I met two women at that internship who would be part of my life forever. Judy Lichtman and Marcia Greenberger were the badass lawyers taking on every important feminist cause at the National Women’s Law Center and the Women’s Legal Defense Fund. They were fearless in fighting the powers that be in Washington, and they still are today. What I saw confirmed my suspicion that there were all kinds of exciting things going on outside of college, which was the reason I had left Texas in the first place. Who knew that instead of just protesting unfair laws, you could go out and change them?
By the time my internship was up that summer, I wasn’t the same person I had been when I left Brown, but I knew I was going to go back. It seemed like the right thing to do, I wanted to get my degree, and I had a renewed sense of purpose. Maybe the organizing I did between classes at Brown could actually become my career, even my life. It was clear to me that my path was to take classes by day, but spend all my free time fighting for social justice.
Going back to dorm life, however, was unthinkable. I had been living on my own and cooking for myself, and had a taste of what freedom was like. And I couldn’t imagine ever eating another meal in the campus cafeteria. So I moved into the Milhouse Co-op, ironically named after President Richard Milhous Nixon. It was the epitome of the counterculture at Brown—full of artists, proto-hippies, and people who wanted to live in a communal space—the perfect reentry to college for a nonconformist. We did everything together, including cook all our meals. I joyfully learned to make food for twenty-four people. All those years with Mom had made me physically incapable of doing anything halfway, so forget macaroni and cheese—I learned to make eggs Florentine and crepes for two dozen. My biggest fight with our co-op food committee was on the day I demanded they spend the money to get good half-and-half so I could make quiche for the whole house. I was thrilled when people made a point of coming home for dinner on the nights I was on deck; my meals were a nice alternative to the typical vegetarian chili.
I had to work, so within a few months of being back I got a job at the campus coffeehouse. That’s where I met the entrepreneurial wizard Sally Stuart, an upperclassman who ran the place and was constantly coming up with new ideas. Sally had wild curly hair, talked with her hands, and had only one speed, which was high-octane. One day she turned to me and asked, “What would you think about starting a food co-op at Brown?”
I thought it sounded like a grand idea. So naturally she got me to run it. We started with fifty households of Brown students, and we called it the Thursday Food Co-op. Each week we’d take grocery orders from everyone. Then, on Thursday mornings, I’d get up at the crack of dawn with Henry, who ran the food co-op in town and had a truck. We’d drive to the produce market that served all the restaurants and groceries in downtown Providence and pack the truck with dozens of crates of tomatoes and lettuce (never iceberg) and whatever was in season. This was heaven! It required a crazy amount of coordination, especially when it came to finding students to fill shifts dividing up oranges and artichokes, weighing peanuts, and cutting cheese into one-pound chunks. Running a food co-op was a perfect job for an organizer: people would stop me on campus saying, “We ran out of cashews!” or “Household 32 never picked up their order!” Food pickup days were chaotic and wonderful and communal—like bringing a little bit of Austin sensibility to the Ivy League.
I was also eager to get back into politics. One day a flyer on a campus billboard caught my eye. Students were organizing support for the global movement to end apartheid in South Africa by pressuring their schools to divest stock in companies that were doing business with the Afrikaner-led government. In my freshman class on South Africa, I had met several African students. While the professor was trying to argue for patience and calm around change in South Africa, these students were knowledgeable and vocal, and brought a deeply personal perspective to everything we were reading and discussing. There was an organizing meeting the next day, and I decided to check it out.
As is true of today’s fossil fuel divestment movement, we students were viewed as 100 percent unrealistic. Our critics said it would be financially irresponsible for universities to make investment decisions based on politics, but we didn’t care. The international movement against apartheid was growing, and nothing short of full divestment was acceptable. We traveled to Yale to meet with student organizers from other campuses and coordinate strategy and actions.
To raise awareness among the students and create pressure on the administration, we organized protests and held concerts. The great Gil Scott-Heron came and played in a small chapel off campus. His and Brian Jackson’s song “Johannesburg” became an anthem for the movement across the United States. “I know their strugglin’ over there ain’t gonna free me, but we all need to be strugglin’ if we’re gonna be free,” he sang.
It seemed impossible to impact a movement that was oceans away, but we were gaining momentum and we knew it. I felt so passionately that later, on my graduation day, while the rest of my classmates accepted their diplomas, I volunteered to unfurl the “Free South Africa” banner from the second floor of Sayles Hall. Someone had to do it!
At the time we had no idea if the organizing would pay off, but in fact Brown became one of the first universities to divest. Several others followed suit, and now, as the history has been uncovered and written, it’s fascinating to learn how important the international pressure was to overturning apartheid. The genius of Oliver Tambo, the revolutionary leader in exile, was his understanding of how effective it would be to make the imprisoned Nelson Mandela the face of the inhumanity of this horrific regime. In light of our fights with the university, I found it was incredibly meaningful to return to campus and receive an honorary degree from Brown in 2010, the year Mandela was awarded the same.
• • •
As an equal opportunity agitator, I didn’t pass up any chance to make a commotion. During the summer of my junior year, the environmental movement was in its heyday, which is how I found myself signing up for the Clamshell Alliance along with my surfer boyfriend. The “clams,” as they were known, were a Quaker-led group fighting against nuclear power. The big target of the moment was the planned Seabrook nuclear plant, which was being built in New Hampshire. The fight over Seabrook had been going on for a few years, and this felt like a last-ditch opportunity to raise public awareness of the danger of nuclear power and hopefully stop the construction.
Every detail of the occupation had to be planned by consensus; that was how the Quakers rolled. We would be camping overnight, so the entire group had to agree on all kinds of weighty issues, like whether to bring crunchy peanut butter or smooth. Our group had to organize the tents and gear—perfect for me, being a veteran camper. But we had also been warned to get gas masks, since folks were pretty sure that the police would teargas anyone who tried to break into the construction site.
I called my friend Vicki, who was the only person I knew with a running car, and asked, “Would you be up for a trip to the Cape?” She agreed immediately, and I went on: “There’s an army navy surplus store, and I’m in the market for gas masks for the Seabrook occupation.” Vicki was always game, so we drove out to Provincetown and picked up gas masks for the group at a bargain price, along with some industrial-grade wire cutters and utility gloves for taking down the fence at the nuclear site. I’ve always wondered what the army navy store manager thought of these two college students buying equipment for what could have been a bank robbery.
Soon we resolved all lingering matters and were off. I left a sign on the door of the campus coffeehouse I was managing: “Gone to Seabrook!” We made the two-hour journey in beat-up old cars, armed with tents, snacks, and homemade signs that said Split wood, not atoms!, Fishing, not fission!, and No nukes! (It was the ’70s, after all.) Folks were coming from all over the Northeast, as part of the larger movement—the Ocean State Alliance, the Granite State Alliance—and meeting near the Seabrook construction site.
It was gray and rainy when we arrived, and the land around the site was a wet mess as far as the eye could see—which, it turned out, wasn’t very far through the small window on my gas mask.
The odds against us were ridiculous. Although there were hundreds of us, we were taking on the nuclear power industry and the state police. Still, it felt satisfying. There were plenty of organizing ventures I’d participated in, where, if we ever actually stopped and thought about our chances of success, we never would have done it. Seabrook definitely fell into that category.
We made camp, then trudged through the mud, making our way to the chain-link fence. As a Quaker group, we practiced nonviolence, but that did not apply to property. The people armed with wire cutters made their way to the front. There was a loud snip, and we let out a cheer.
We had just begun to tear down portions of the fence when suddenly the state police were on us. They ripped the gas mask off my head and confiscated it—they must have figured that was simpler than teargassing the hundreds of protesters. I was outraged—I bought that gas mask fair and square!
We had hoped for arrests—unlike the days of the janitors’ strike, I was no longer afraid to go to jail—but the police refused to take us into custody given the limited accommodations of the Seabrook city lockup. Since we weren’t going to get arrested, and we’d been routed away from the nuclear site, it was time to come up with Plan B.
Before everyone scattered and went our separate ways, we decided we couldn’t let our protest signs or our enthusiasm go to waste. We stopped in Concord, New Hampshire, and held a makeshift march outside the capitol. We were proud to have taken a stand against the plant, and it was gratifying to be part of the movement to resist nuclear power. As one of our protest signs said, “Better active now than radioactive tomorrow!”
Seabrook wound up being one of my less successful ventures. The plant was up and running by 1990 and is to this day one of the biggest nuclear plants in New England. I knew taking on an entire industry with my fellow “clams” wasn’t going to change the course of history, but we had set out to make a statement, and that’s just what we had done. It felt so much more rewarding to go out and do something about environmental policy instead of just talking about it in class.
• • •
As college was winding down, I began talking to my co-conspirators at Brown about what to do next. We were on our way to massive social change, I just knew it. We had developed our organizing skills, and now we would be set loose in the world. But to my total disbelief, most of the folks I had been in the trenches with were actually going straight! They were heading to law school, becoming psychiatrists like their parents, or going to New York to work in publishing. What about the revolution we were building? What about all the issues we had fought for and were committed to?
Right around this time I read Living My Life, the autobiography of the 1930s radical Emma Goldman. Goldman would travel the country, lecturing on college campuses and urging students to recognize their privilege. In no uncertain terms, she would tell them that they would not be where they were without the blood and sweat of working people who had sacrificed for them. Reading her words, I felt she was talking right to me: I was in college because my grandfather, who had owned an Iowa seed company, had put aside the money for my tuition, and I wanted to pay back the opportunity I’d been given.
I had no idea how I’d make a living, but by now I’d seen enough people fighting for social good that I knew it was the life for me. Applying to law school like my dad was not in the cards; sitting in more classrooms was near the bottom of the list of ways I wanted to spend my time. I decided that my path would be to get an organizing job with a union. I had no idea how tough that would be and soon learned that organizing jobs were few and far between. Most labor organizers had come up through the ranks of their unions, so it was hard for outsiders to break in.
Part of the challenge was (and still is) that no one was traveling to college campuses looking for gregarious young activists to hire. Recruiters had come to Brown from every law firm and graduate school, and even from Wall Street. But no one had showed up to enlist organizers. For most of my classmates, organizing was a passing phase—a part of college life they were ready to leave behind as they moved on to adulthood. In a way it was understandable that so many of my fellow students were taking what I saw as the easy route. I couldn’t blame them. Being a troublemaker wasn’t exactly a career, and nobody’s folks paid for four years at Brown University to have their child choose that path. There were certainly exceptions: Tom Israel and Rich Pepper, for instance, joined the labor movement and continue as organizers to this day. Like them, I wasn’t ready to give up. With help from my dad, I sent letter after letter to unions. They began, “I am interested in any openings you have for union organizers, anywhere in the country. I can start immediately and I speak Spanish.”
As I watched my friends pack up and move to new places for new jobs or, more often, move back to where they came from, I felt the familiar pangs of being an outsider who just couldn’t take the conventional route. I was restless and eager for my next adventure. Brown had actually prepared me for the career I wanted: I may have majored in history, but I minored in agitating. I learned something from each thing I did—organizing with the janitors, supporting the librarians, protesting in Seabrook, even running the campus coffeehouse and food co-op. My time in college taught me a lesson I have carried through my life: Don’t sit around and wait for the perfect opportunity to come along—find something and make it an opportunity.