My Story: Egalitarian Community Organizing
By Wade Lee Hudson
My experience with egalitarian community organizing began as a child on the baseball diamond in Dallas. We’d gather, choose teams, and play ball without a coach or umpire. In high school, I initiated a leaderless chess club with a self-regulating method to structure the competition. As a freshman at UC Berkeley, I joined a 100-member room-and-board student co-op that managed itself, which introduced me to the cooperative movement.
My first political act was participating in a small rally protesting the blockade that led to the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. In the Spring of 1963, Bob Dylan’s music and James Baldwin’s speech on campus inspired me.
After reading Baldwin’s writings, I joined Campus CORE, a small member-run civil rights group. One action was a successful “shop-in” at the local Lucky’s grocery store. These disruptions and demonstrations at other stores led to an affirmative-action hiring program at Lucky’s grocery chain.
An overnight “sleep-in” with hundreds in the lobby of the Sheraton Palace Hotel in San Francisco helped establish inclusive employment at San Francisco hotels. Subsequent Auto Row demonstrations achieved similar results at local showrooms. The demonstrators accepted the compromises the organizers negotiated.
As the fall 1964 semester was beginning, between work shifts, I’d go in and out of a sit-in at the Oakland welfare office protesting their workfare program. However, my activism, job, and studies overwhelmed me, and I dropped out and returned to my family in Dallas. There, I joined a CORE action that successfully desegregated the Piccadilly Cafeteria and collected canned goods for Mississippi Freedom Summer.
The movement’s singing, chanting, and marching opened my heart. Working as an orderly in a Dallas mental hospital reinforced my emotional development. Participating in the human potential movement with sensory awareness, massage, and other workshops further helped me get in touch with and express my feelings. Psychedelics and backpacking in the Sierras produced a spiritual unity with the universe. William James and others educated me about the varieties of religious experiences.
I became immersed in the “counter-culture” movement, especially its music, and joined multiple anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. Live concerts induced sensual, spiritual trances. I rejected middle-class materialism and top-down hierarchies. On reflection, our judgments were harsh, and our extreme, confrontational tactics contributed to a backlash that helped divide the country for decades.
In early 1967, I participated in the San Francisco State College Third World Liberation Front demonstrations, which established an Ethnic Studies program. That year, I dedicated my life to organizing “communities of faith, love, and action” and entered the Pacific School of Religion (PSR) to work with “coffee house ministries.”
UC established an experimental Residence College during the 1967 summer semester. I was nominated and elected to serve as Coordinator. My focus was the work of Albert Camus, Paul Tillich, R.D. Laing, Ivan Illich, and Edgar Friedenberg.
At a panel discussion on race that included City Councilmember Ron Dellums, Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, spoke passionately from the back of the audience about police brutality and the realities of oppression in Oakland. Enraged about social and political injustice, I backed away from nonviolence, supported the Black Panther Party, affirmed armed struggle in the Third World, and became less willing to compromise.
During Stop the Draft Week, I declined to participate in the nonviolent demonstrations that Joan Baez and others organized. Instead, I joined the “street fighting” the next day. Though I never threw a rock, I hoped chaos would help end the Vietnam War.
As chair of the Education Committee at PSR, I resolved to push for significant changes in the school’s “Ivory Tower” educational philosophy. Other students with a similar commitment and I formed the New Seminary Movement. Our manifesto grandiosely advocated that all community members participate as equals in shaping the school.
Our actions prompted the President to expel several of us, but the Trustees reinstated us. They then fired the President and hired a new one, who led a gradual transformation of the school into a valuable community-involved resource.
During the spring of 1969, the fight for People’s Park induced a deep sense of communitarian closeness. Activists had built a lively park on vacant, long-neglected land owned by the University. When the University seized the land, sheriffs shot demonstrators with shotguns and killed one innocent observer. The overwhelming majority of City residents, students, and faculty wanted to preserve the Park, but the statewide Board of Regents refused.
Almost daily demonstrations snaked through the City. At night, meetings with 1-200 participants debated and decided on tactics for the next day. After the Governor called in the National Guard, the protests died down. However, on Bastille Day the following Spring, demonstrators cut down the fence, leaving the space open to the public.
Moving to San Francisco later that year and working as an intern minister at Glide Church, I moved into the Alternative Futures in the Ministry commune, which was based on my reports about UC’s Residence College. In September 1969, while U.S. Marshals were secretly transporting Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale to Chicago for the notorious Chicago 8 Trial, I joined a sit-in at the Marshal’s office organized by anti-war ministers protesting the secrecy. I was later convicted of a misdemeanor.
In early December, I went to Los Angeles to participate in an immersive weekend Urban Plunge organized by the New Adult Community, which Rev. Jim Donaldson, a Methodist minister, had founded. The Plunge featured confrontational encounters focused on racism, political and economic oppression, the women’s movement, homophobia, and the repressive dominant culture. On early Monday morning, we received a call asking us to serve as moral witnesses to an attack on the Black Panther Party headquarters by the Los Angeles Police Department. When we arrived, a line of police blocked our advance. Some demonstrators, not including me, threw a few rocks, and the police attacked. They surrounded me, split open my head, and beat me up. On the way to the station, they convincingly told me they were going to kill me. They then charged me with a felony assault on a police officer. Eventually, the judge convicted me of two misdemeanors. The whole experience profoundly enraged me and deepened my reservations about nonviolence.
Back in San Francisco, I soon initiated our own Urban Plunge, based on the L.A. model. At the end of each weekend, the planning committee invited the participants to design and conduct the next Plunge. The Alternative Futures Community, a network of several households, emerged from these efforts.
During these explorations, Robin Morgan taught me sisterhood is powerful. Wilhelm Reich integrated the personal and the political, advocated sexual liberation, and clarified the mass psychology of fascism. Kate Millet blew my mind about sexual politics.
As a leader in the local anti-war movement, I proposed that we nonviolently shut down the Financial District on May Day in conjunction with a similar effort in Washington, DC. The demonstration turned into a police riot, and afterward, I became paranoid about the Nixon Administration’s efforts to imprison anti-war leaders.
Within this atmosphere, I had a terrible LSD trip that led me, extremely paranoid, to be locked up in the same hospital where I had worked. My previous boss, Dr. “Bob” Beavers, who had become a good friend, was my therapist. After two weeks, I returned to San Francisco. Several peers invited me to live with them. Their support helped me get back on my feet.
I became a co-editor of Madness Network News, influenced by R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz. After co-editing Glide’s anthology, Madness Network News Reader, I initiated the Network Against Psychiatric Assault (NAPA), which opposed forced treatment. Members consisted of ex-patients, mental health professionals, and concerned citizens.
Our demands for informed consent, a successful push for independent patients’ rights advocates, and various peer-support groups led to valuable reforms. However, a “radical” caucus tried to take over the group. They wanted to make it only for ex-patients, which led to a demobilizing 50-50 split, and I dropped out to move on to other issues.
Soon, I joined the Citizens Action League (CAL), led by disciples of the famed Saul Alinsky, and worked with its Muni Committee, which focused on improving the municipal transit system. We opposed a statewide effort to raise fares, but when we tried to form a coalition with other community groups, the CAL leadership objected; they insisted that CAL focus on building its own organization. So, a few of us left CAL, organized the Muni Coalition and the Bay Area Transit Coalition, and mobilized scores of passengers to oppose the fare increase, to no avail.
Then, I focused on keeping the Other Avenues Community Food Store, my neighborhood consumer food co-op, open. Years-long transit construction in front of the store cut into business and threatened the store’s future. While working there as the only paid employee, I coordinated volunteers who ran the store democratically. Clambakes on the beach, square dances at a local church, and other social activities contributed to a strong sense of community.
I also initiated the District Eleven Residents Association, which registered voters door-to-door and worked on some successful City elections, including controlled growth, tenants’ rights measures, and district election of Supervisors. We also stopped an attempted conversion of my house into a high-rent condo.
When Governor Jerry Brown’s statewide emergency food relief program offered me a large salary and invited me to serve as a food co-op manager in the low-income South of Market neighborhood, I accepted the offer. I had subsisted on poverty-level wages and expected to do so for the rest of my life, but the State’s money seduced me to leave my wonderful neighborhood-based community. I also wanted to be downtown, closer to the city’s political action. When a faction tried to take over the South of Market Grocery, I organized a successful effort to protect the democratic nature of the co-op.
To help preserve low-income housing and nurture tenant empowerment, some priests persuaded Franciscan Charities to buy single-room-occupancy residential hotels in the low-income Tenderloin neighborhood. At one, the Aarti, the organizers knocked down walls to create communal spaces with kitchens and large living rooms on each floor.
I was one of the first forty tenants. We screened applicants for a commitment to democratic, tenant-run decision-making. The communal kitchen and large living room facilitated shared meals, lively parties, and tenant meetings that guided life in the building.
While living in the Aarti, The Tenderloin Times, an award-winning monthly publication, offered me a job as an assistant editor. Later, I served as co-editor.
I suggested the Aarti Co-op take over the commercial space on the ground floor, where we established the 509 Cultural Center for the arts and educational events. This project fulfilled my dream of “coffee house ministry.”
After several years, the Co-op negotiated a one-year contract with the non-profit owner to manage the building and hired me as manager. We met the budget and fulfilled the terms of the first one-year contract.
While at the Aarti, Sylvia Marcos invited me and three other former NAPA associates to participate in an international Alternatives to Psychiatry conference in Cuernavaca, Mexico. The event featured David Cooper, a close associate of R.D. Laing, and Franco Bassaglia, renowned for closing a mental hospital in Italy and replacing it with thriving community-based programs.
This exciting experience inspired me to initiate the Bay Area Committee for Alternatives to Psychiatry (BACAP) with a mix of professionals and ex-patients. We convened an international conference in San Francisco, opposed the return of electroshock treatment, and negotiated the distribution of honest drug information fact sheets to patients. But when a shock doctor sued one of our members for libel, our psychiatrist members became afraid of losing their licenses and backed away, which led to the group's dissolution.
The Tenderloin Times staff and I participated in numerous organizing projects, including the Tenderloin Jobs Coalition that pushed local developers to hire neighborhood residents. We also agitated for better mental health services in the neighborhood. My initiative prompted the Health Commission to fund the Tenderloin Self-Help Center with a half-million-dollar contract.
At first, the client-run concept behind the proposal worked. The clients held regular community meetings and selected the Director. But soon, the non-profit that administered the contract undermined the client-run philosophy, and I backed away.
On reflection, the Franciscans made a utopian mistake when they promised to turn over ownership of the Aarti hotel to the tenants. The rooms were small, and the neighborhood was unpleasant. Consequently, high turnover undermined stability. The slow transition to tenant ownership provoked ongoing conflicts between the owners and impatient tenants. A better model would have been tenant self-management, as with the student co-ops in Berkeley, which a board of directors managed.
Not wanting the co-op to depend on me, I didn’t run for re-election as manager, and the co-op selected another manager. But it became troubled with hard-drug use, and I sensed it was crumbling. I had lived in the Aarti for six years and was close to burnout.
My experiences there were rich, rewarding, and often joyous, but my disappointments with BACAP, the Self-Help Center, and the Aarti Co-op led me to buy a motorcycle and wander. After I left, the tenant co-op collapsed, but the 509 Cultural Center thrived and expanded to a larger space on Market Street, the Luggage Store Gallery.
I ended up on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. There, I decided national economic policies greatly aggravate the issues my associates and I struggled with in San Francisco, creating an avalanche of poverty, homelessness, and misery. This decision led me to Washington, D.C., to research national economic policies and efforts to change them.
I walked into the Social Concerns office of the National Methodist Church, and the director, George Ogle, asked me to research how to end poverty in the United States. He published my “To Abolish Demoralizing Poverty” in Christian Social Action, and I presented my results to a workshop at the Institute for Policy Studies. At the National Methodist church, Metropolitan Memorial Church, Rev. William A. Holmes, who had led my church in Dallas, discussed my article on poverty during three sermons.
The overall response was positive, and I returned to San Francisco to work on the issue in the Tenderloin. For money, I worked part-time as a cab driver (which enabled me to do my community work without having to prove anything to anyone), conducted public opinion surveys with passengers, and did my community work as a volunteer without having to prove anything to funders.
Some associates and I convened an open meeting and invited community members to participate in a Solutions to Poverty Workshop to define a concrete program for abolishing poverty. About fifteen members met monthly, reviewed research reports, and after one year, drafted a ten-point plan for how to end poverty in the United States, with specifics about how to pay for it. The San Francisco Antipoverty Congress ratified the proposal, launched the Campaign to Abolish Poverty (CAP), and persuaded Congressman Ron Dellums to introduce legislation to advance it.
However, ambiguity about the relative powers of the staff and the governing body led to internal conflict. During this struggle, Penn Garvin recommended John Carver’s Boards That Make A Difference: A New Design for Leadership in Nonprofit and Public Organizations. This book rang one bell after another for me with its scheme for a partnership between board and staff based on the adoption of clear, written guiding policies. However, these ideas failed to resolve CAP’s conflict, and I resigned from the board. Still, CAP persisted and contributed to the growing national living wage movement.
I then wrote a book, Economic Security for All: How to End Poverty in the United States. After my agent failed to find a publisher, I published it on the Web, and over the years, many students expressed appreciation for it. (Now, the Green New Deal and others are pushing for many of the same ideas).
Shortly thereafter, I went to Chicago to participate in forming the national Alliance for Democracy, which was prompted by a strong response to a 1995 article by Ronnie Dugger, “A Call to Citizens: Will Real Populists Please Stand Up.” We formed a local chapter in San Francisco and I joined the national steering committee but withdrew after a few years due to discomfort with what seemed to me to be a lack of democracy in that body.
When the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) formed the Progressive Challenge based on its Fairness Agenda for America, I initiated a local chapter, the San Francisco Progressive Challenge, to promote the Agenda, hoping to set an example for the formation of similar chapters in other cities. Once again, I was looking for a national project I could join. IPS staff person, Karen Dolan, came to San Francisco for a workshop to help promote the effort. The workshop went well, but no other cities followed suit, and I withdrew from the project.
With these efforts, I initiated numerous projects that I left to others (which they did successfully at times and not at others). I didn’t want the projects to be dependent on me, but sometimes they were. At times, I was an uncompromising radical outsider; at other times, I was a liberal insider. At times, I focused on self-reform and mutual support; at other times, I focused on reforming public policy. At times, I tried to be a strong leader; at other times, I collaborated. At times, I took a moral stand with little regard for consequences; at other times, I focused on pragmatic, achievable goals. At times, I participated in a supportive community; at times, I worked as an individual. Now, my colleagues and I are exploring how to balance these roles.
Since publishing Economic Security for All, I’ve convened several strategy workshops to explore how the progressive movement might be more effective (and participated in numerous other workshops on similar issues convened by others). Generally, 20-25 activists have participated. These efforts encouraged political activists to incorporate insights from personal-change activism — and encouraged personal-change activists to integrate insights from political activism. The goal has been to promote holistic communities whose members support each other with self-development and compassionate political action.
These workshops opened with a general question, and participants formed breakout groups focused on more specific questions they proposed. The results were informative, but no clear consensus emerged about a new direction, and few people saw the need to shift their approach. The “political” people didn’t become more “personal,” and vice versa.
In 2003, I joined the Iraq Peace Team led by Kathy Kelly to oppose the Iraq war. We gave aid and moral support to local Iraqis, held demonstrations, spoke with Western media, and sent dispatches back home as bombs were falling in Baghdad. During the chaos, I facilitated membership meetings and edited the dispatches. Later, I published the Baghdad Journal.
After I moved into a seniors’ housing project in San Francisco in 2014, I was elected President of the residents’ council and tried to establish a partnership between management and tenants. But, the administration resisted and invited me to a private meeting, which I mistakenly accepted. They insulted me and the Council with irrational attacks. Provoked, I pushed the Council too hard to follow my lead in confronting the management. Nevertheless, we eventually persuaded the Manager to meet with the Council monthly to discuss issues, and the Council achieved some other positive goals. However, at the end of my one-year term, I decided not to run for re-election, partly due to the tense atmosphere and vehement hostility directed at me. After the election of a new president, the Council soon fell apart.
The common thread that runs through my life is a commitment to building egalitarian communities whose members support each other with enriching their lives, including self-development and political action. Though my core principles have remained the same, my thinking about how to implement them has shifted over time and will likely continue to do so.
For some time, I’ve believed our main problem is that society socializes everyone to climb social ladders, look down on, dominate, and exploit those below, and submit to those above — for personal gain. Domination and submission are justified if they serve the common good, but if they primarily serve narrow selfish interests, they’re oppressive.
Recently, I’ve become more focused on this dominate-and-submit dynamic that society inflames. Unfortunately, most people don’t work on undoing or controlling this conditioning. They’re too self-centered, not other-centered. They conform and submit when they can’t gain a sense of superiority — even if they might alleviate suffering if they resisted social pressures. One result is serious turmoil within activist organizations.
I’ve looked for a holistic community to join. I’ve circulated email questionnaires inquiring about people’s thoughts and feelings on these issues and asking for references to holistic communities. But I still haven’t found a holistic organization of the sort I believe is needed.
Over these years, I’ve experimented with many new methods individuals and groups can use to nurture self-improvement. The results from most of these experiments have been promising. The monthly leaderless “spiritual support group” that a resident in my building initiated is particularly interesting. Five members take turns sharing a reading, which we discuss after checking in. She also started a larger, open-ended, self-regulating weekly “coffee klatch.” These groups are examples of self-perpetuating peer support groups.
These experiences have led me to be more assertive, put my key ideas on the table rather than just asking questions, and ask people if they agreed. I invited a small, diverse set of strong community leaders to participate in a compassionate action workshop to consider a proposed mission statement for a new project. Though they proposed some minor changes, they affirmed the proposal, which heartened me.
Affirmations like these led me and some colleagues to establish the Compassionate Humanity Community website, a never-ending work in progress where we collect resources and post proposals for action. We constantly reconsider, modify, and add to the site’s content, with input from numerous supporters.
Our numbers are small. Nevertheless, we persist. Our perspective is unique and vital. It fills a void. If enough people take on this work, we could change the world. Moreover, constantly updating, clarifying, and improving our thinking is intrinsically rewarding. And thinking together is the best way to learn.
We invite you to join us in pursuing Truth, Justice, and Beauty while staying grounded in concrete realities.