Reaching those different than you

Sam Smith – I was the third of six kids and so learned early in life that not everyone agrees with you about a lot of things. But I also learned that this didn’t have to be a destructive or damaging relationship; you just had to find and emphasize the matters you had in common.

As a teenager I started my Quaker high school’s first dance band. You can’t play in a band unless you back up the other musicians. If, for example, there are four of you with solos, that means much of the time you’re backing someone else up. If you’re the drummer, which I was before switching to piano and vocals, you’re always helping someone else do their thing.

I went to college where I majored in anthropology, learning  quickly how different the rest of the world is from you and your friends.

We now live in a time where individual success is strongly emphasized over group achievement and while we talk repeatedly about reducing conflict with others we experience it with depressing regularity and take surprisingly few steps to change things.

One of the unusual exceptions in my life was living a lot of it in Washington DC during a period when much of the city was black, at one point 70%. I had returned to my childhood town as a radio reporter and quickly learned from that trade that I belonged to just one of a mess of subcultures. Reporters don’t talk about this much but their job assets include getting to know the real variety of their communities. 

DC was one of these places, but it got little credit. Although it had some riots in the 1960s, it became a city run, used and enjoyed by black as well as white residents. You learned that the adjective of color was often not a good way to describe folk or what was going on.

Looking back, it strikes me that one factor that doesn’t get much attention is that there were issues that blacks and whites shared. I was, for example, introduced to activism by taking part in a cross cultural  protest against a DC Transit fare increase. My article about driving 77 people on the day of the transit boycott attracted the attention of the protest organizer, Marion Barry, who would some years later describe me as a “cynical cat” but we had quite a few good years too.  

Also in the Sixties, DC civil rights leader Julius Hobson -- a statistician by trade and a Marxist by inclination -- sued the local school system not on the basis of race but on the basis of economic inequity. The result was a court ruling ordering equal per-student spending among the city's schools.

Then in 1970, I wrote an article on the case for DC statehood and got a total of one response. One guy sent me a check for five dollars and said, "If anything comes of this idea let me know." In writing, you get used to that sort of thing and move on to something else. That was in June  and I think it was in September that maybe a dozen of us met in the basement of a church on Capitol Hill to discuss a campaign for congressional delegate by Julius Hobson.

We were sitting around discussing the campaign, and Julius says, "Well what sort of platform am I running on?" And somebody there says, “Well, you know, Sam wrote this really interesting article about how DC could become a state.” So we talked about it a while. Next thing we knew, Julius says: "I like that, I'm going to run on that."

I like to tell that story because it shows how random history and politics can be.  

What I learned from all this was the importance of issues and causes that different groups can share. These days we emphasize things like race and class while downplaying how the right issues can bring people together. But this white guy learned how to work with black folk like Marion Barry and Julius Hobson because we both gave a damn about the same issues.