From Dying Well: the Resurrected Life of Jeanie Wylie-Kellermann

A mighty, mighty union?

            One of the issues Jeanie and I produced together for The Witness covered organized labor, by way of a newspaper strike, then ongoing in Detroit. It’s funny, I think of our active participation in that strike as epitomizing our marriage in certain ways. We moved together in it with such unreflective intuition.

Our political instincts and theological sensibilities simply ran the same way. Our gifts complemented and encouraged each other’s. We were yoked in that struggle. Jeanie was always, to be sure, more organized and more of an organizer than I, but she pushed me in that regard, and I stepped up.

            I remember the conversation in which we hatched a plan to pull together our own community group to play an active, even aggressive, role in the strike. It was over eggs and hash browns in a booth at Jordon’s, a breakfast place across the street from what would become the Witness office. Our friends Deb Choly and John Zettner were in on it.

It was late winter of 1996, and the strike had been going since summer. We were all astonished at the timidity and ineptitude of the council of newspaper unions running the strike, and at the major boring uselessness of their community outreach efforts. In my own version of the history, Readers United, as yet unnamed, was conceived at that table.

            It’s only in writing this that it occurs to me how clearly we were moving in Jeanie’s vocational turf: journalism and media, combined with a righteous fight. After all our years of struggling in campaigns such as anti-nuclear work – up against the entirety of empire and its military-industrial complex, clinging to the hope of simple faithfulness just to keep at it – this seemed like a local, winnable fight, for a change.

Boy, were we naïve. For one thing, “the company” was anything but local. The papers were owned by Gannett and Knight-Ridder – chains, or media conglomerates really, with total profits approaching a billion dollars a year.

Since the last successful strike against the Detroit Free Press, it and the Detroit News had fused their business management in a “Joint Operating Agreement,” which pre-empted competition, reduced work force, presented a single bargaining front, and earned profits of a million dollars per week the year prior. Unknown to the 2,600 workers who bet their mortgages and car notes on a successful strike, the chains were prepared to lose a quarter of a billion dollars as a one-time cost to break the union.

            Great writers on serious city subjects let go of their newspaper careers by walking the picket line. And others virtually made careers – lucrative ones – slipping as “replacement worker” columnists into other people’s chairs. 

            Jeanie had sometimes written as a stringer for both papers, and had even applied once for a job on the city desk of the Detroit News. However, the day the editors were making their decision, she was an item on the front page of the paper, for her arrest at Immaculate Conception Church in the Poletown struggle. I suppose that clarified everything a little too much, and they decided not to hire her. As things turned out, best for us all in the long run.

            The beginning of the strike in the fall of 1995 was pretty bloody, and virtually all of the blood belonged to the strikers.  I’ll come back to that. By November the New York Times had essentially declared victory for the company. That winter was cold and bleak, with strikers clinging to picket signs in threadbare gloves.

So when Readers United announced itself in leaflets and stepped onto the streets, we were like a breath of spring air. The union council had so often looked over its shoulder, staying legal and tiptoeing around the National Labor Relations Act as if it were a pro-union document. But we were not bound by such fears or strictures. Straight to it: We organized nonviolent direct actions, blockades mostly, at the newspaper headquarters.

            Readers United met in our living room and around our dining room table. It was essentially a letterhead of religious and civic leaders who were committed to the strike and trusted us publicly with their names. Their endorsement helped our organizing, and they stood behind it in the long run.

Picture some 300 arrests (all non-strikers), including county commissioners and state representatives, four City Council members, three bishops, veterans and teachers and retirees, and lots of prominent pastors and lawyers. Our Detroit Peace Community stepped up, and activists from other unions were quick to help as well, with outreach, nonviolence training, press work, and legal support – all cranked up again weekly. Meanwhile, 800 clergy and members of religious orders signed an appeal denouncing the hiring of so-called “permanent replacement workers” and urging the community to boycott the newspapers as morally unreadable. Subscriptions went down by as much as half.

To be frank, in a black majority city, the unions were partly up against their own history of racially guarding the gates and apprenticeships. The company openly played on and accentuated this by hiring replacement workers from the community and advertising the racial shift. The boycott could have gone even further.

For at least a year Jeanie and I were consumed with it, but in a life-giving way. A year or more along, the National Labor Relations Board summoned us to testify. Coming at the instigation of the newspapers, it seemed partly a tactic of intimidation. On the premise that we were simply fronting for the newspaper unions, and with their direct assistance, they wanted to probe us in sworn testimony. We showed up with a roomful of religious, civic, and community leaders, all asserting our integrity and independence. The letterhead host meant something.  

            Only once were Jeanie and I arrested together, and that was impulsively spontaneous. Sweet, but a little reckless. I have a dear photo of us – pensive, her arm in mine, just prior. Otherwise, we took our turns. She brought the resources of The Witness to bear on things, not only her time but also allowing the office machine to spit out broadcast faxes about the actions. She was often the press spokesperson, and I can see her now talking to reporters or the cops, with Lucy on her hip.

            The girls were thoroughly present to this. I remember them climbing a pile of hardwood dumped for the winter drumfires of a printing plant picket line. In fact, they sat atop that pile to hear Charlie King, movement troubadour, sing yet again his reviving medleys from labor history. I can hear a picket chant working its way into their own repertoire of playsongs: “We are the union, the mighty, mighty union…” I see them peeking from behind the flow of Jeanie’s skirts as I’m taken off in the police bus. And playing puzzles or reading books on the floor through those endless meetings.

            Among the folks at those dining room table sessions was Grace Lee Boggs, dare I say one of the most notorious community activists of our time. Jeanie had known Grace for 15 years, going back to Poletown days. I want to say Grace is an organic intellectual – but, actually, she has a Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr, though at street level she wears it well. Her husband, Jimmy, an Alabama-born African American who came to work and organize in the auto plants, was the true organic intellectual in real deal. He had just recently died, and Grace, then 80, was pressing forward in the work without benefit of their amazing partnership.

I’ll spare you the history, but Grace had participated in virtually every transformative movement to emerge since the 30’s. For example, they put together the Grassroots Conference – as in Malcolm X’s “Message to the Grassroots” – and were among the invisible organizers of Martin Luther King’s Detroit march in the spring of 1964, which convinced him to undertake the better known March on Washington. I’m only hinting at the scope and import of Grace’s work.

            Grace understood and helped us see that the absentee conglomerates had long put profits not only before their employees, but before their readers as well. The contempt they demonstrated for their workers was one and the same with the contempt they were showing for our community. Globalization and the technological rush had not made them better papers by any means. Marketing predominated, and real news shrank.

In fact, we could see the establishment news slant exposed by strike coverage that, if not an outright lie, was crafted as though by ad agency spin-doctors. Reporters came and went in the system without lives or roots in the city’s life (or the union’s, for that matter). Crucial management decisions (such as those affecting the strike) were made by people who no longer lived among us, either. The company strategy was little more than a calculated assault on the political culture of a union town.

            That was Grace’s critical take, though the translation is entirely my own. She helped us understand that while globalization was uprooting the shop floor as the location for organizing, community-rooted unionism offered the possibility of reclaiming place-based organizing. Readers United attempted to reframe a labor struggle as a community struggle.

Were we inadvertently on the cutting edge of something? Perhaps. One upshot had to do with the community’s impact not just on the company, but on the unions. We suddenly felt a prerogative to hold their feet to the fire as well.

I mentioned that the strike was quite bloody. The company had brought in Vance Security, a paramilitary outfit that presents itself as a strike-breaking operation. They advertise in Soldier of Fortune and have big mercenary security contracts in Iraq.

One of their skills, as advertised, is the ability to provoke striker violence, capture it on video, and turn it into ads denouncing the union – or even employ it to secure injunctions. (The company did both, in this case). Indeed, I was present when riot-equipped forces charged or postured to provoke a reaction, filmed from the roof above. Driving a truck into an angry, and then wounded, crowd drew sticks and rocks, equally photogenic. The company’s ubiquitous commercials would “deplore striker violence” (in order to mask its own). Some of them even showed burning vehicles that I believe were actually set afire by their own security forces.

            Not that the strikers were disciplined in their nonviolence, or even broadly committed to it. We’re talking partly Detroit Teamsters here. So Jeanie and Grace took Clementine Barfield to meet with the union council. Clem, the mother of a murder victim, founded an anti-violence movement in Detroit in 1987. The city was suffering on average one murder every day. Clem’s group, SOSAD (Save Our Sons and Daughters), was holding weekly vigils, running griefwork sessions for families of shooters and victim s, mounting anti-gun campaigns, and running programs in the high schools.

Here was the pitch to the union leaders: Imagine a creative and actively nonviolent labor struggle that could be a gift, a learning moment for the city and its youth. Sadly, blank stares – they didn’t get it. No light went on for them. No opportunity was seized. My own read in part is that they didn’t get that community and labor meant a two-way street. They eagerly sought solidarity and support for the strike but couldn’t feature how the strike could truly be shaped to serve the community.

            The other example of that same blind spot was the matter of the boycott. Readers United supported it and even coined a phrase, calling the papers “morally unreadable.” But boycotting the dailies and refusing to talk with scab reporters was entirely different from refusing to buy Gallo wines or eat Mt. Olive pickles.

A newspaper is not just a news commodity, it’s a vehicle of public conversation. People who refused to talk with the papers, including the best of the politicians, had their public voices substantially silenced. Political discourse was weakened at a moment when major decisions about the city’s future were being made.

Jeanie and I went to the union council, asking them to publish an alternative news source for the community. “No go,” said the local Teamster president. “We did that in ’68” – during the last successful strike – “and the members liked the alternative better than the company’s and didn’t want to ratify the labor agreement. We’re not doing that again.” Another version of not getting it.

A few weeks later, leafleting at the Detroit Free Press, Jeanie recognized the national president of the Newspaper Guild and flagged her down. Pure providence. Right there on the sidewalk, we had our meeting. She’d never heard tell of our request, but she thought it made total sense and promised to pursue it. Within a month or two, the unions began publishing a weekly, the Detroit Sunday Journal.

In the long run, the Journal was a disappointment. Great on strike reporting and union news, it never developed into the community-based investigative journalism source the moment required. Far better was the Michigan Citizen, another weekly. Focused on the black community and being the self-declared “most progressive paper in the country,” it did step consciously into the gap. Grace began writing a column for them and til the day it ceased publication in 2014 I counted it the most important source of Detroit news available.

Reading the building, seeing the powers

On a theological note, I’m struck even now how our biblical view of the “powers that be,” Stringfellow’s influential take on the principalities among us, figured into that struggle. Of a particular principality, we were in effect asking, what is the vocation of a newspaper? How is it called to serve human community? What is a paper for? These are radical questions which, in the biblical view of things, humans are authorized to ask.

One time during a large picket around the newspaper headquarters, I noticed high above the street, nearly out of sight and mind, epithets etched in stone, ringing the façade above. I pointed them out to Jeanie, and we read as we circled. Later at the rally in front of the edifice, I took the microphone and asked, “Have you ever read the Detroit News building?”

It was a confusing moment for the strikers. Then I pointed aloft and began to utter the names, among them: Friend of Every Righteous Cause, Reflector of Every Human Interest, Mirror of the Public Mind, Dispeller of Ignorance and Prejudice, Bond of Civic Unity, Protector of Civic Rights, Troubler of Public Conscience, Scourge of Evil Doers, Exposer of Secret Iniquities, Unrelenting Foe of Privilege and Corruption, A Light Shining in All Dark Places.

            Were these intentions a pretense from the beginning, a mere “facade” covering the machinery of power and profit – or did they publicly remember the true vocation, the calling of a community newspaper? In Jeanie’s and my biblical reading, every structure of power with a life and integrity of its own, every “principality and power,” is called by God to serve the human community in particular ways, notably in this case by being a servant of the truth, and even justice.

These phrases written in stone, romantic and pretentious as they were, actually suggested the very bases on which Detroit Newspapers Incorporated stands before the judgment of God.

As I read out each one at the rally, the strikers laughed. Their laughter identified the incongruity. It signaled their theological understanding of the Fall.

            The News was indeed a “troubler of the public conscience,” but in a way exactly opposite of that intended. It had become the trouble, when it should instead be the conscience. I noted that Turner of Profit was not even mentioned in the auspicious list. Neither was Master of Marketing, Doctor of Spins, nor Twister of Truth – let alone Buster of Unions. This is to say that in the Fall, the vocation of a newspaper becomes distorted or even inverted. It gets turned upside down.

Instead of serving the community, it imagines the community exists to serve the interests of the newspaper. It puts profit before both readers and workers. It has contempt for both, actually assaulting the community. That is the reality of the Fall. The work of redemption in that moment had to do with exposing the lie, rebuking the distortion, and calling the papers back to their creaturely purposes. If you think about the work of Readers United from this standpoint, you’ll notice that we were also exercising the same discernment with the unions, recognizing them as creaturely powers.

The New York Times may have been premature, but in the end it wasn’t wrong. We did lose that strike. It slipped away in whimpers. That’s a source of grief in our life. Certainly for the workers who lost cars and homes. Some fell off the 12-step wagon, and others saw marriages go belly-up from the strain.

But you also had to grieve for Detroit, a union town taking another hit, “Murder City” losing another of its lives. The dailies never fully recovered their circulation as they’d presumed. And, to be honest, two decades later, I still hesitate to buy one at a box, let alone subscribe.