My Activism Story
Wade Lee Hudson
Born in 1944, my adult life has been dedicated to nurturing mutually supportive, egalitarian communities. My opinions have evolved and continue to do so, but my core values, grounded in the Golden Rule, remain much the same.
My experience with egalitarian community began on the baseball field. As a child, we’d gather, choose teams, and play ball without a coach or umpire. In high school, Bertrand Russell and other freethinkers opened my mind, and a few fellow students and I formed a leaderless chess club with a self-regulating system for managing the competition.
As a freshman at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962 I joined a student co-op that managed itself. This experience introduced me to the cooperative movement’s rich history.
My first political act was participating in a small rally protesting the blockade that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis. A few months later, James Baldwin and the civil rights movement (with its focus on winnable objectives and a willingness to negotiate and compromise) activated my conscience and sense of communal solidarity. Bob Dylan turned me on to the blues. Albert Camus alerted me to the dangers of blind ideology. Stokely Carmichael educated me about the oppressive aspects of the paternalistic welfare system.
Working full-time for a year as an orderly in a Dallas mental hospital in the mid-60s further opened my heart. Participating in the human potential movement helped me get in touch with and express my feelings. Paul Tillich and Christian existentialists enabled me to reinterpret the fundamentalist myths of my youth. Psychedelics and backpacking in the Sierras induced a spiritual unity with the universe. William James educated me about the varieties of religious experiences.
In early 1967 I frequently crossed the Bay to participate in Third World Liberation Front demonstrations at San Francisco State College that led to the establishment of an Ethnic Studies program. That year I dedicated my life to helping to organize supportive communities dedicated to love, shared values, and political action, and entered the Pacific School of Religion (PSR) to work with “coffee house ministries.”
During the summer semester, UC established an experimental Residence College at the Cloyne Court student co-op. Students were free to design their own course of study. I served as coordinator. My focus was the work of Paul Tillich, R.D. Laing, Ivan Illich, and Edgar Friedenberg. At one panel discussion, from the audience Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, spoke passionately about police brutality and the realities of oppression in the Oakland ghetto. Becoming enraged, I walked away from nonviolence and affirmed Black Power, the right of armed self-defense, and an unwillingness to compromise. That fall, the student newspaper asked me to write a report on the Residence College.
At PSR, as a believer in the priesthood of all believers, I never intended to preach from a pulpit but wanted to establish activist cultural centers. At the end of the first year, I was elected chair of the students’ Education Committee and resolved to push for major changes in the school’s outmoded educational philosophy. Some other students entered with a similar commitment, and we launched the New Seminary Movement, which advocated that all members of the community should participate as equals in shaping the school. This notion was utopian, but our radical agitation led to liberal reform. The Trustees fired the elderly President and hired a new, young President, who led a gradual transformation of the school into a valuable community-based resource.
During the spring of 1969, the open, participatory fight for People’s Park gave me a deep sense of communitarian closeness. Moving to San Francisco later that year and working at Glide Church as an intern minister, I moved into the Alternative Futures in the Ministry commune, which was based on my reports about UC’s Residence College. 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. And I co-convened immersive weekend Urban Plunges that exposed participants to gay bars and encounters on racism and political oppression, the women’s movement, and the negative impacts of the repressive dominant culture. At the end of each weekend, the planning committee invited the participants to design and conduct the next Plunge. From these efforts, the Alternative Futures Community, a network of several group households that shared a weekly meal, emerged.
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 very bad LSD trip that led me, extremely paranoid, to be locked up in the same hospital where I had worked. My previous boss, 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, and their support helped me get back on my feet. I became a co-editor of Madness Network News, which was influenced by R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz, and initiated the Network Against Psychiatric Assault (NAPA), which consisted of ex-patients, mental health professionals, and concerned citizens opposed forced treatment. Our demands for informed consent, a successful push for independent patients’ rights advocates, and various peer-support groups led to some reforms. But a radical caucus tried to take over with a demand to limit the group to ex-patients, which led to a demobilizing 50-50 split, and I dropped out to move on to other issues. The organization continued for a few years and then disbanded.
Soon I joined the Citizens Action League (CAL), which was 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 planned to form an alliance 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 saving the Other Avenues Community Food Store, a neighborhood consumer food co-op near the beach, whose future was threatened by years-long transit construction in front of the store that cut into business. While working there as the only paid employee, I coordinated volunteers who convened clambakes on the beach, square dances, and other social activities that contributed to a strong sense of community. I also initiated the District Eleven Residents Association, which registered voters and worked on some successful elections, including city-wide controlled growth and tenants’ rights measures and district election of Supervisors. We also stopped an attempted conversion of my house into a high-rent condo.
When a statewide emergency food relief program offered me a substantial salary and invited me to serve as manager of a food co-op 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 neighborhood-based community. I also wanted to be downtown, closer to the city’s political action. When a faction tried to take over the store, I led a successful effort to protect the democratic nature of the consumer co-op.
During those years, as a way to help preserve low-income housing and nurture tenant empowerment, some priests had persuaded Franciscan Charities to buy several single-room-occupancy residential hotels in the Tenderloin. At one, the Aarti, the organizers knocked down some walls to create communal spaces with kitchens and large living rooms on each floor. I was one of the first tenants, which soon numbered forty. We screened applicants for a commitment to democratic, tenant-run decision-making.
While living there, I was offered and accepted a job as an assistant editor of The Tenderloin Times, an award-winning monthly publication, and later served as co-editor. During those years, I read The Nation regularly and was inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson and captivated by Murray Bookchin with his history of domination in The Ecology of Freedom.
After two years or so, I suggested we take over the bar on the ground floor and establish the 509 Cultural Center, a venue for the arts and educational events. After several years, the tenants’ association negotiated a one-year contract with the non-profit owner to manage the building and hired me to serve as manager.
During those years, three former NAPA associates and I were invited to Cuernavaca, Mexico to participate in an international Alternatives to Psychiatry conference with 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. The experience inspired me to initiate the Bay Area Committee for Alternatives to Psychiatry (BACAP) with a mix of professionals and ex-patients. We soon convened an international conference in San Francisco. BACAP opposed the return of electroconvulsive therapy and negotiated the distribution of honest drug information fact sheets to patients. But at the last minute, the mental-health department unilaterally made an unacceptable modification in the fact sheet. And 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 dissolution of the group.
The Tenderloin Times staff and I participated in numerous organizing projects, including the Tenderloin Jobs Coalition that pushed local developers to hire Tenderloin residents. We also agitated for better mental health services in the neighborhood. In response to my initiative, the Health Commission funded a self-help center with a half-million-dollar contract for the Tenderloin Self-Help Center. At first, the client-run concept behind the proposal seemed to be working. The clients held regular community meetings and selected the Director. But soon it became clear the non-profit that got the contract was undermining the client-run philosophy, and I backed away.
I lived in the Aarti for six years before I burned out. On reflection, the Franciscans made a mistake when they promised to eventually turn over ownership of the hotel to the tenants when they proved themselves capable. The rooms were so small, the turnover was very high, which undermined stability. The goal of tenant ownership was utopian. A better model would have been tenant self-management, as with the student co-ops in Berkeley, which a board of directors managed. Nevertheless, the tenants’ association met its first one-year budget successfully, but not wanting the co-op to be dependent on me, I stepped aside as manager at the end of the year. Troubled by hard-drug use, the co-op soon dissolved.
These disappointments with the Aarti Co-op, BACAP, and the Self-Help Center led me to buy a motorcycle, wander the nation, and explore the north coast of the Dominican Republic. While there, I decided the issues with which my associates and I had been struggling in San Francisco were greatly aggravated by national economic policies, which were creating an avalanche of poverty, homelessness, and human misery. This decision led me to Washington, D.C. to research those policies and efforts to change them.
When I walked into the Social Concerns office of the National Methodist Church, the director asked me to research how to end poverty in the United States. When I presented my results to a workshop at the Institute for Policy Studies, the response was positive and I decided to return to San Francisco and collaborate on the issue in the low-income Tenderloin neighborhood.
Some associates and I convened an open meeting and invited community members to participate in a Solutions to Poverty Workshop to define a specific program for abolishing poverty. About fifteen members met monthly, reviewed research reports, and after one year drafted a concrete ten-point program for how to end poverty in the United States that detailed how to pay for it. The San Francisco Antipoverty Congress then ratified this proposal, launched the Campaign to Abolish Poverty (CAP), and persuaded Congressman Ron Dellums to introduce legislation to advance it.
But ambiguity about the relative powers of the staff and the governing body led to considerable internal conflict. During this struggle, Penn Garvin, a consultant, recommended John Carver’s Boards That Make A Difference: A New Design for Leadership in Nonprofit and Public Organizations, a book that 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. But these ideas failed to resolve CAP’s conflict. I resigned from the board and wrote a book, Economic Security for All: How to End Poverty in the United States (1996). After my agent was unable to find a publisher, I published it on the Web. Over the years, many students expressed appreciation for it. (Now the Green New Deal and others are pushing for many of the same ideas we advocated).
I then convened several strategy workshops to explore how the progressive movement might be more effective. Generally, 20-25 activists participated in these sessions. I approached this project with an open mind, a general commitment to encouraging the integration of the personal and the political, and a belief that activists need to modify how they operate. People who work in the personal-and-spiritual realm are rarely interested in the political realm, and those who work in the political realm are rarely interested in the personal-and-spiritual realm. My hope was to develop an agreement about how to integrate the personal and the political — to encourage personal-and-spiritual people to organize political action and encourage political people to incorporate lessons learned from personal-and-spiritual people into their work.
I soon concluded that an explicit dedication to spiritual development is essential, read and worked with Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path of Higher Creativity, read Claudia Horwitz’s The Spiritual Activist: Practices to Transform Your Life, Your Work, and Your World, and participated in a week-long workshop with Horwitz in New Mexico. I joined the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples as I reaffirmed a commitment to nonviolence.
During these years, I circulated email questionnaires, pursued the Strategy Workshop online, and experimented with open-ended “soul sessions” and self-published Global Transformation: Strategy for Action (2007). For money, I worked part-time as a cab driver and conducted public opinion surveys with passengers.
In late 2002, as the United States was gearing up to invade Iraq, to oppose the war I joined the Iraq Peace Team, which had been organized by Kathy Kelly and Voices in the Wilderness, a group that had been providing humanitarian support to the Iraqi people for years due to years of punishing sanctions. We wanted to be in Baghdad during the invasion to provide support to the Iraqi people and be a public voice against the war. As troops were moving in, we held demonstrations, spoke with Western media, and sent dispatches back home as bombs were falling. During the chaos, I facilitated productive meetings and edited the dispatches, which I later published as the Baghdad Journal. Unfortunately, our predictions concerning the consequences of the occupation proved true.
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 management resisted, and at times I pushed the council too hard to follow my lead in confronting the management without adequate consensus among the members. At the end of my one-year term, I decided not to run for re-election, partly due to the atmosphere of tension and great hostility directed toward me from one tenant. After the election of a new president, the council soon fell apart.
Recently, however, some very promising developments have emerged. Another resident initiated a monthly “spiritual support group” (four members take turns sharing a reading which we discuss after checking in) and a larger weekly “coffee klatch,” during which participants discuss whatever’s on their mind. These groups are examples of leaderless, self-perpetuating support groups that others can adopt.
This life experience shapes the worldview expressed in this website. As a self-taught community organizer, I didn’t want to be elevated above others with a credential. I wanted to relate to my peers as an equal. (I overlooked the fact that my college education created a barrier with those without degrees). Never trained in any of the major schools of organizing thought, my lack of training left me with weaknesses and blindspots, but it also enabled me to follow my own instincts and intuitions rather than those of experts. Working part-time as a cab driver enabled me to avoid having to prove anything to funders.
But the lack of organizational support was limiting. Whether my self-taught, solo, repeated initiation of new organizations was the right direction is uncertain. I probably made mistakes I could’ve avoided, but I also learned lessons I would’ve missed. Through it all, I initiated numerous projects and left them to others to perpetuate (which they did successfully at times and not so 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, and at other times I was a liberal insider. At times I focused on self-reform and mutual support, and at other times, I focused on reforming public policy. At times I tried to be a strong leader, and at other times I collaborated with fellow activists. At times I took a moral stand with little regard for consequences, and at other times I focused on pragmatic, achievable goals. At times I participated in a supportive community, and at other times I worked on my own. How these roles can best interact and be balanced is an issue explored on this website.
Though my core principles have remained much the same, my thinking about how to implement these principles has evolved — and is still evolving. My hope, in collaboration with others, is to digest helpful lessons from my experiences and ongoing research and share them in a way that helps people overcome the widespread self-centeredness that undermines activism. Specific proposals for action presented here are designed to serve this purpose.
Drawing on my life experience and my recent reading and research, with this site, sith major support from associates, I consolidate information, ideas, and proposals for action. I hope this knowledge base will help advance a transformative, independent social movement that’s powerful enough to persuade Washington to respect the people’s will. Unless activists learn how to treat others and themselves with deep respect, fragmentation will persist.
Regardless, constantly updating and clarifying my thinking is intrinsically rewarding. So I’ll continue to pursue truth, justice, and beauty by trying to nurture mutually supportive, egalitarian communities and sharing and discussing my discoveries on this site.