Fair Use Blog

Here’s the rules:

1. Pick a quote of one or more paragraphs from something you’ve read, in print, over the course of the past week. (It should be something you’ve actually read, and not something that you’ve read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

2. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, more as context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than as a discussion.

3. Quoting a passage doesn’t entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Here’s the quote. This is from Chapter 5 of Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh’s recently published book on the underground economy in the Southside of Chicago, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor.

When Mayor Richard J. Daley died in 1976, Chicago’s black leadership saw clearly an opportunity to mobilize for greater electoral power. Their hope was fulfilled in 1983, when African American congressman Harold Washington was elected mayor of Chicago. A victory for African Americans, Latinos, and progressive whites, Washington’s election was also a clear indication that the political machine now dominated by whites could be effectively challenged. In the first flush of victory, churches buttressed a powerful citywide organizing initiative, built around voter education and registration and led by progressive Chicagoans, that helped defeat the machine candidates. Black clergy labored to enfranchise the black community; this movement—as its leaders liked to call it—spanned all levels, from the grassroots to the middle and upper class. Temporarily, at least, it appeared that Chicago’s South and West Side black communities were politically unified and in line with liberal whites to successfully deflect the white vote.

A different and largely ignored outcome was the effect of Washington’s political mobilization within poorer communities like Maquis Park. Johnnie Xavier’s Milky Way description seems like an exaggeration. His view that black leadership continually capitulates to predominately white machine bosses does not make total sense, particularly given that the city had just elected an African American to the city’s highest office. However, black clergy had not been key spokespersons for African American interests. Political unity among black leaders did not necessarily mean political parity. There remained an enormous gap between the cathedrals and the storefronts in terms of their capacity to procure resources and effect social change. As with all political movements, in the efforts to elect Washington, there was a double-edged quality to the organizing initiative: namely, either join or be cast aside. One scholar writes, In Harold Washington black people had drafted a standard-bearer with the credentials and progressive orientation to be their candidate for mayor. Community leaders from all sections of Black Chicago were forced to keep step with this new electoral upsurge or be cast aside. At the least, one must conclude that Johnnie Xavier’s candy bar analogy proves accurate in its allusion to the persistence of some long-standing cleavages within the black clergy.

In the campaign itself, some of the disparities among clergy could be discerned. At one point, Xavier and Wilkins met with Minister Brantley Martin, perhaps the most powerful member of the Maquis Park clergy. Martin had the capacity to mobilize thousands of voters, and it was rumored that if Washington won, Martin’s success in getting out the vote would be reflected in an appointment as a high-paid city commissioner and numerous contracts for firms owned by his congregants. Xavier and Wilkins said they threatened Martin, telling him that they would take the votes of their congregants to another candidate if they were not told exactly what they would receive in return for supporting Washington. Martin recalls what happened when the two walked into his office:

I told them if they took their votes away, I’d see to it that they couldn’t stay in the community no more, said Martin. Simple as that. I would perceive their behavior as a destructive force, no more, no less. They were injuring the livelihood of the people who walked into their place every day for help. That’s how important the Washington campaign was for black folk.

That’s a pretty amazing statement, particularly from a member of the clergy, I said.

You wanted the truth. These guys just didn’t trust anybody. I mean, I gave them hundreds of dollars. I sent my people over to fix their church, I bought them a new roof. I mean, to come in here and say I was not helping them. I had had enough.

The storefront clergy’s awareness of their limits relative to the preachers with larger congregations may not always have been displayed so dramatically, in such direct confrontation. It could simply have manifested itself in differences in perceptions, with powerful people understanding fairly clearly what Washington’s election could bring about and the grassroots clergy being only cautiously optimistic. A director of a storefront church in the eighties, Pastor Barnes, said, It was just that you knew everyday that you were hoping that you would get something for what you were doing. Those guys never worried, they always knew what they were getting.

Ultimately, it would be Harold Washington’s death, in 1987, that showed just how fragile political relations were among Chicago’s black stakeholders. His passing shed light on who might be cast aside if viewpoints became too difficult to reconcile. But even as Washington came into power four years earlier, it was possible to discern signs of discord, or at least differing and perhaps irreconcilable perspectives, within the black leadership. Part of the fragility arose from the movement’s having been built around Washington’s charismatic power as mayor—he was famously able to quickly mend cleavages as they arose—rather than through a more deliberate attempt to inculcate leadership and participatory democracy at all levels, so that the death of a leader might be survived by the appointment of a successor. As William Grimshaw has observed,

concern with elite self-interest points to the basis for the inability of the Washington coalition to survive his death. Washington’s inclination was to win over opponents rather than to exclude and punish them in the machine tradition… Washington’s reforms were not institutionalized as much as personalized. When he died, therefore, the reforms were put in jeopardy and promptly undermined by the very elements he had tolerated and left in place.

The tenuous nature of such alliances was reflected in the black clergy. Churches that brought out the black vote for Washington were a varied lot, with differences in denomination, political orientation, size, and relationship to local residents. They may have been unified in their response to racially based discrimination, but their interests could diverge considerably. Those in poor communities struggled with unemployment, poverty, and drug addiction in a way that black middle-class churches did not; conversely, the black middle class now demanded a fair share of city patronage and contracts, two issues that were very low on the list of priorities of an unskilled, jobless population living in substandard housing.

An important subgroup within the Southside black clergy were those who felt unable to advance their concerns in the Washington administration. Pastor Wilkins’s feelings represent frustrated clergy in Maquis Park who, after Washington came into power, grew at odds with him.

We said [to him], We need jobs, we got people with drug problems, we got people who need help, who need housing. What we got back, and I mean this is coming from black folk! We were told, We have to be careful because we can’t be seen as the poor people’s mayor. On one side of their mouth, they were for the people, but they were afraid to give the people what they wanted, because they would look soft. Giving of your heart. If that’s soft, then the Lord is soft. It was very frustrating not to get money for places to help people with their problems.

Father Michael Wilson, a white Southside progressive priest who supported Wilkins, remembers that eventually a segment of mostly black grassroots and storefront clergy began splitting off from the Washington agenda. Wilson deemed their return to servicing communities with noncity resources the embrace of a self-help agenda.

I really felt for Pastor Wilkins, Brother Patterson, Minister Hortons, and those folks. See, when Washington was mobilizing, you had a real neat group of what I will call grassroots and storefront ministers, priests—basically preachers who were really at the roots of the African American community. Daley never gave them attention, and, for that matter, neither did their own leadership. They did things for themselves, they responded to people with very minimal resources. Washington’s election was going to change that, at least that was the public promise made to them: he was going to build housing in those poor areas, he was going to give schools better classrooms, more medical clinics. But really, none of that happened, or at least not enough. So Minister Hortons, well all those people really, they all went back to helping themselves. Self-help I call it, because they must be given the credit for working by themselves with very tough problems around poverty and addiction. And then, then the gangs came, and well, you know the rest. I mean after that, that’s when you really had a separate, disenfranchised group. And I don’t mean just the people, but also the clergy. That’s when hope dissolves, when the clergy are not brought into the center.

When asked about his own view of ruling black leaders and the turn to self-help, Pastor Wilkins recalls a pivotal meeting in 1986 that he convened with clergy who were much closer to Mayor Washington—the so-called big preachers who were generally thought to be the most powerful figures in the Southside black community. Along with Brother Patterson, Johnnie Xavier, Minister Hortons, Father Michael Wilson, and others, he approached the big preachers—Minister Kevin Ashland, Minister Brantley Martin, Pastor Harold Brusser, and Reverend Calvin Lamar—to forewarn them of increased social problems in the black community. We asked them for specific kinds of help, Wilkins recalls. Brother Patterson, who joined in the conversation, listed the demands.

I can remember it like it was yesterday, said Brother Patterson. Down in Woodlawn, at First Baptist, sitting across a long table, like we was coming to the altar! The five [big preachers] sitting there, stone-faced, look like they lost even their hearts. We said, help us build housing, help us get medical care, help us stop police from beating on us like we were dogs, help the soup kitchens because we have homeless, meet with the gang leaders and hear what the youth are saying. What else, I can’t remember?

Then, Pastor Wilkins continued, They told us they were not sure what they could do. That’s when I realized we had a whole new boss system in Chicago. Black preachers! It was like being down South. They got what they wanted, wasn’t interested in helping everyone. Just taking care of themselves. That’s when I threw up my hands. I knew then, I knew then…

What he’s trying to say, Brother Patterson interrupted, is that that’s when we knew we were doing the right thing, but that we were going to be alone. Like we were before Washington came. There was nobody who was going to hear these cries. No one was really going to take that hard look, in themselves and in the community, seeing what was going on. That’s when we all got back together and said, Okay, let’s just do this, do it with our hearts and what we have. ‘Cause we ain’t getting no more, at least not from these so-called preachers.

The outcome of the meeting, according to those present, was that Wilkins and his colleagues realized that they would not be able to call on the mayor to address their constituents’ needs. What Brother Patterson calls the big-ticket items in Maquis Park, like high unemployment, gang crime, and housing shortages, were not going to improve appreciably in the immediate future as a result of rising black power in City Hall. But it was not entirely clear that the preachers’ alternative self-help program would be a viable means of addressing community concerns. In fact, there was no such self-help strategy in place, says Pastor Wilkins, only a feeling that whatever was going to happen was going to be coming from us—but no one knew what to do. By the mid-1980s, the only clarity the preachers had achieved was the recognition that City Hall would provide them only limited help.

The view from City Hall did not necessarily coincide exactly with the perceptions of Wilkins, Barnes, and the other modest Maquis Park clergy. Bill Owens was a senior advisor for Mayor Washington, in charge of liaising with Southside Chicago communities. He says that many of the storefront clergy could not adequately articulate their demands; they were angry, and even when they discussed specific issues like unemployment, their demands were abstract (Deal with the youth who are unhappy and turning to gangs) rather than rooted in specific programs, and therefore were not helpful to the city administration.

They would come into my office and start spouting on about how the community was going down the drain. Crime, gangs, drugs, people dying. And then they’d say that Harold Washington was responsible! They would just moan and never say exactly what they wanted. I’d say, okay, we’ll get you each ten jobs for the summer for kids. They’d say, Ten is nothing, we have thousands of people who are hopeless. I’d say, true, but let’s reduce that by ten and then we can move on.

Owens went on to say that the smaller clergy often lacked the organization to receive assistance from the city. They did not have a staff and did not have the capacity to build affordable housing (which the city might fund). Some did not have a charter or were unincorporated, so they were unable to receive money from many external parties, like foundations, charities, and city departments that contracted with local organizations to provide social services to families.

Minister Kevin Ashland, one of the big preachers and a critic of Pastor Wilkins at the time, openly described the hostility of the powerful religious bosses toward Wilkins and other storefront clergy members. In particular, he points to one of the specific self-help initiatives the storefront clergy developed to reduce crime: instead of working with police, around 1985, he says, the grassroots ministers worked directly with gangs and other criminals to solve crimes and restore order.

Black people in Chicago, then and now, have only been as powerful as the preachers around them. You know what political bosses are, right? Well, we were religious bosses. There were probably ten of us on the Southside, maybe two or three in Maquis Park. I fought long and hard to get at the table, I could do things for my parishioners: I could call the mayor and say, We need more money for this school, we need a new traffic light. These are not small things. Did the other ministers need to get our permission before they went and got in the mix with the gangs? Well, some would say no. I would have hoped that we would have been consulted, at the very least, because, well, there are consequences.

If you’re working with a beat cop, then I can’t work with him—or his commander. If you’re helping gangs smooth out their business, I can’t get the police to get them to stop. There are consequences. The white folk downtown, all they see is that there’s some crazy preacher trying to help gangs deal drugs or pimps get money from their prostitutes. Now we were trying to control what information got out [of Maquis Park]. We didn’t want to hurt our own ability to get things done. And I don’t know if there weren’t long-term problems. You help the gang leader, he becomes more powerful. Then what? He’ll kill you.

But what about the argument that you [religious bosses] were not doing anything to help people day to day? I mean, didn’t someone have to help keep order?

I’d call what they did messing about. And you see what happened. We grew apart for many years. A lot of the friendships? Well, they can’t be repaired now. And who was hurt? The people. For many years, all these preachers, if they wanted something, it’s the gangs they call, not us. Now the gangs are in jail and they’re calling us. Of course, we’ll help, but not all the time, and not without some recognition of what they did. So that’s what I mean when I say there were consequences. There’s a real divide now in the community. I’m a man of faith, but I’m not so sure it can be healed.

Ashland’s link between the clergy and street gangs points to some of the long-term consequences of the kind of self-help being developed by Wilkins and other storefront clergy. Namely, in terms of the kinds of issues they were taking up, there was a chasm growing between those at the elite churches and those working at the grassroots. As a result of citywide political transformations, a social cleavage in the black clergy had risen beyond the level of backroom griping. Pastor Wilkins and his colleagues were losing hope that participation in the Washington movement would bring about desired improvements in quality of life for local residents.

As a consequence of the meeting, the grassroots and storefront ministries perceived that their work must be supported without resources from the now black-controlled city administration. Effectively, this meant they would have only limited access to city and state funds. They also could not build on patronage jobs as vehicles to increase donor contributions. And they stood little chance of reaching black middle- and upper-class supporters of religious causes; these patrons had risen in number and stature as a result of Washington’s mobilization, but they typically aligned with the larger Maquis Park churches that were embedded in the Washington coalition. Consequently, in 1987, at the height of the Washington administration, the preachers’ focus had grown inward. This meant that they were increasingly attentive not only to local issues, but also to local sources of manpower and funds as opposed to external resources from the municipal, civic, and philanthropic community. In an economically depressed Southside region, this meant a closer relationship with the underground economy.

—Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh (2006), Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor. 231–241.

Here’s the rules:

1. Pick a quote of one or more paragraphs from something you’ve read, in print, over the course of the past week. (It should be something you’ve actually read, and not something that you’ve read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

2. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, more as context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than as a discussion.

3. Quoting a passage doesn’t entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Here’s the quote. This is from Mark Kurlansky’s recent book Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea (2006):

In the years leading up to the American Revolution, the radical revolutionaries, those who wanted to break away from Britain and were prepared to go to war, were a minority, but they were the most vocal and articulate and the best organized faction. Proponents of nonviolence know that it is often not the largest but the best organized and most articulate group that prevails. It is not clear that the decision to go to war against the British was the majority opinion of most of the revolting colonies, but the radicals proceeded and made it a fait accompli.

Another enduring lesson of history is that it is always easier to promote war than peace, easier to end the peace than end the war, because peace is fragile and war is durable. Once the first shots are fired, those who oppose the war are simply branded as traitors. All debate ends once the first shots are fired, so firing shots is always an effective way to end the debate. The silence may not last for long, as the War of 1812, World War I, Vietnam, and Iraq, all unpopular wars, demonstrate, but there is always a moment of enforced silence when debate and criticism are banished and this moment gives the war boosters at least a temporary advantage.

In February 1775 the British sent 240 soldiers to Salem, Massachusetts, to seize ammunition and weapons that the rebels were amassing. Though the nonviolent defense of a weapons cache does not truly qualify as nonviolence, the townspeople’s plan averted violence and prevented the opening of a shooting war. They simply pulled up the drawbridge into town and made the British negotiate entry, which the British did by giving assurances that they would not disturb the town. Apparently the colonists at the drawbridge were less concerned about the fate of the weapons than the principle that the British army had to ask permission before entering their town. According to Hobbesian logic, such happy solutions only put off the inevitable, which came on April 19, when another British column attempted to seize another rebel arms cache, this time in Concord. Whether or not this qualified as what Hobbes termed Natural Law, the reality was that elements among the rebel movement had decided that they wanted a shooting war, and once that kind of decision is made, it is, as a rule, almost impossible to avoid it. American revolutionaries intercepted the British column in Lexington. The rebels only exchanged a few shots and a number of them were killed. Each side claimed the other side had fired first, though all the casualties of this brief first engagement were on the rebel side. The British marched on to the supply depot in Concord. But the shots had been fired, the war begun, and the debate ended.

Curiously, up until those few shots were fired in Lexington, the rebels, even while arguing for war, had been spectacularly successful at what could be considered nonviolent resistance. Both demonstrating and rioting for a wide range of causes were commonplace in eighteenth-century America. One historian, Paul A. Gilje, counted 150 riots and street actions in the thirteen colonies just between 1765 and 1769. Though rules of class conduct were not rigid, generally the upper classes wrote pamphlets and negotiated, while the lower classes took to the street. The lower classes would cart around effigies of officials at their demonstrations before hanging, burning, or beheading them. Even before television there was a belief that effective nonviolence needed to be visual, needed a sense of theater to attract an audience. When the British passed the Stamp Act in 1765, the colonists staged a series of demonstrations throughout the colonies. In Charleston, South Carolina, two thousand demonstrators protested taxes by burning effigies and then staging a mock funeral for the death of American Liberty. The stamp officials were forced to resign in every colony but Georgia. The demonstrations were accompanied by a boycott of British goods. The result of all this was that within a year the act was repealed. But the following year the British attempted another taxation scheme, the Townsend Acts, which, because they only taxed imports indirectly, the British hoped would be more palatable.

The working poor were angry about their economic plight and they were not always nonviolent. They attacked and destroyed homes of officials, and looting was not uncommon. The intellectual leaders, being largely men of property, opposed these acts of destruction and tried to keep the street protests orderly. There was clearly a class division, and the upper-class leaders had to negotiate with the street leaders. The former tried to keep elements that they thought of as rowdy out of demonstrations. They sometimes banned black people from participating in demonstrations, convinced that they were an inherently unruly race.

In 1768 the Massachusetts Assembly dissolved rather than collect the Townsend duties. Not entirely nonviolent, the revolutionaries formed mobs to harass customs officials. On March 5, 1770, boys began throwing snowballs at British troops in Boston. The troops began pushing. Men came to the aid of boys. When one British soldier was struck with a club, he responded by firing into the crowd. Other soldiers also fired and five colonists were killed. When the British soldiers were brought to trial, John Adams, a moderate, defended them and noted in defense of the troops that black people were in the crowd. As a matter of fact, a mulatto man, Crispus Attucks, was among the victims. The British were acquitted.

By 1770 the British recognized the Townsend Acts to be another political and financial disaster and repealed them. But the tax on tea remained. This led to the most famous act of nonviolence in the American colonial period.

The American revolutionaries, in their prewar days, were particularly effective in their use of an important nonviolent tool, the boycott. Women began weaving cloth by hand rather than buy fabric from British mills. Homespun became the fashion. Spinning bees became patriotic gatherings. One result of the tea boycott was that Americans very quickly became coffee drinkers. But there were many debates in Boston on how to take the tea boycott even further. On December 16, 1773, sixty revolutionaries, dressed as Mohawk Indians, boarded three ships in Boston Harbor and dumped 342 chests of tea valued at £10,000 into the sea. This was a perfectly managed act of nonviolent protest. There were no incidents of looting or vandalism. According to legend, one padlock was broken and the revolutionaries replaced it.

Though far less famous today than the Boston Tea Party, the crowning achievement of American colonial civil disobedience, the one that John Adams considered the turning point of the American Revolution, came in 1774, before any shots were fired. The colonies were becoming ungovernable and unprofitable. The British were responding with repression, including the so-called Coercive Acts, which cost them more money and tied up more troops. From the point of view of the rebels, the British response was ideal, as it was mobilizing public opinion against England. One of the new repressive measures enacted by the British Parliament, intended as a response to the Boston Tea Party, was the Massachusetts Government Act passed in the spring of 1774. It removed the right of Massachusetts’ elected representatives to have a say in the appointment of judges. When the new British-appointed Court of Common Pleas for the county of Worcester tried to sit in September, thousands turned out to block them. Of the estimated six thousand, about one thousand were armed. They stopped the court from coming to session and formed a convention that effectively took over, closing courts and freeing prisoners.

The weapons, which were not used, were unnecessary, since no armed force opposed them. Everywhere else in Massachusetts where the British tried to open a Court of Common Pleas, they were also stopped by huge crowds, which often had no weapons at all. The crowds were large enough to keep the courts closed, force the judges to resign, and keep the army helplessly at a distance.

The revolution had overthrown the government in Massachusetts without a shot being fired. Why, then, did the rebels turn to arms? Sentiment was already strongly anti-British. John Adams wrote to Jefferson late in his life, The revolution was in the minds of the people, and in the union of the colonies, both of which were accomplished before the hostilities commenced. So why was the war necessary? Jonathan Schell in The Unconquerable World astutely noted that the participants in other revolutions had reached similar conclusions. The Romantic writer François René de Chateaubriand, who lived through the French Revolution, said almost the exact same thing: The French Revolution was accomplished before it occurred. And Leon Trotsky, one of the authors of the Russian Revolution, wrote, The declaration of October 23 had meant the overthrow of the power before the government itself was overthrown.

So if revolutions are accomplished in the minds of the people, why must they be followed by force of arms? Why do almost all political theorists—not only Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau, but later ones such as Marx and Lenin—insist that a revolution must be an armed movement? If the outbreak of war is inevitable, as seventeenth-century thinkers believed, history teaches the lesson that its inevitability does not rest, as they believed, on natural law, but on individuals incapable of conceiving of another path. Is the source of violence not human nature, as Hobbes contended, but a lack of imagination?

In the case of the American Revolution, could independence have been accomplished without warfare? The British gave up on America even though the Americans had scored very few military victories in the war, because they wanted to get on with other business, including their European wars, and could not afford to tie up military and money in these colonies any longer. But the path of disruption and protest had already been tying up British troops, costing British money, making the colonies unprofitable—the very reasons that Britain later gave up the war and negotiated peace. Colonies were supposed to earn, not cost. It seems quite possible that the British withdrawal could have been achieved by continuing protest and economic sabotage.

—Mark Kurlansky (2006): Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea. 75–80.

Here’s the rules:

1. Pick a quote of one or more paragraphs from something you’ve read, in print, over the course of the past week. (It should be something you’ve actually read, and not something that you’ve read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

2. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, more as context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than as a discussion.

3. Quoting a passage doesn’t entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Here’s the quote. This is from the introductory chapter of Shana Penn’s 2005 study, Solidarity’s Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland (ISBN 0-472-11385-2). Penn is discussing what she found when she went to Poland to research Solidarity, the worker’s opposition movement that played a decisive role in the collapse of martial law and the Communist regime itself in Poland during the 1980s.

The prisons and internment camps made up another major locus of dissent. After the imposition of martial law, defiantly irrepressible intellectuals such as Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuroń communicated from their jail cells, appealing to the nation to stop living lies and, instead, to live as if we are free. The imprisoned writers penned dazzling essays that were smuggled to the illegal press for publication.

It was the opposition press, which flourished illegally for most of the 1970s and 1980s, that was the third of the major, nonfactory sites of resistance. That enterprising, albeit clandestine, industry, brought people together on the same page, so to speak, to get real news, not state propaganda, and to debate what an open society might look like. The illicit newspapers, magazines, bulletins, and books it published were called bibuła, the Polish term for illegal papers produced during periods of censorship. Analogous to the Russian word samizdat, to self-publish, bibuła had the advantage of being a Polish word.

It was the illegal press that provided 1970s oppositionists with a practical vehicle to activate and coalesce support from the three, very different social groups that were fundamental to making change: the Intelligencja (a nineteenth-century way of saying public intellectuals and a term that continued to be used through 1989); the Workers, with a capital W (a purely communist term that the opposition brilliantly appropriated to argue for free trade unions); and the Polish Catholic clergy, the spiritual leaders most tolerated in the antireligious Soviet Bloc. (The political restraints on their power made the clergy unusually tolerant. They turned their backs on abortion and divorce, and they assisted women activists, even those who were single mothers, such as several of the protagonists of this story.)

Significantly, the illegal press was the chief playing field on which women were able to carve out distinctive, influential roles for themselves in the opposition. They distinguished themselves as editors, publishers, journalists, and communications strategists long before the world beyond Poland’s police-patrolled borders had begun talking about the Information Age. Much of my research leading to this book was to take place in the realm of the opposition press, but I had no inkling of that when I began my journey.

Arriving in Warsaw in the summer of 1990, I was aware that women made up approximately 50 percent of Solidarity’s ten-million strong membership—proportional to women’s presence in the labor force. However, their political representation in the formal solidarity structures was significantly smaller. As one rose in the Solidarity hierarchy, the numers of women diminished. Only 7.8 percent (69) of the 881 delegates to the Solidarity Congress [in September 1981] were women; only one woman sat on the National Executive [Committee], reported U.S. historian Barbara Jancar.

As I began collecting Polish women’s stories, I kept the following questions in mind: If Solidarity’s political leadership was male dominated, in what ways, then, had women participatd? Were there particular issues or activities to which they gravitated? Did they demonstrate special organizing styles? Were there unsung heroines among them or any forgotten events?

The first clues surfaced when several women I interviewed in the summer and winter of 1990 made statements such as the following:

A group of women in Warsaw managed the Solidarity Press Agency after Solidarity was created; then they organized Tygodnik Mazowsze [Regional Weekly] during martial law; and after 1989, they created the first free press, Gazeta Wyborcza [Election Gazette].

When martial law was declared, woemn started the underground in Warsaw.

Men thought they were in charge, but women pulled all the strings.

Listening to first one woman’s memories and then another’s, I heard a subject (a group of women), a place (the Warsaw underground), an occupation (the media), and a date (after the Decemer 13 declaration of martial law) repeatedly linked. Alerted to the possibility that something of consequence might connect the individual stories being told, I formulated a new core interview question: Where were you when martial law was declared, and what did you do? The following picture emerged:

After Solidarity spent sixteen months flexing its newly legal political muscles, the government declared martial law and immediately arrested some ten thousand activists—around nine thousand men and one thousand women. With most of the male leadership either imprisoned or driven into hiding, a core group of women rose up to reconnect Solidarity’s nationwide network of contacts, to protect the leaders in hiding from the secret police, to arrange meetings, and to smuggle money and equipment into the country. By January 1982 a uniquely all-female team based in Warsaw had pulled together unions and volunteers, moved typewriters and printing presses into attics and back rooms, and begun producing Tygodnik Mazowsze, which became the voice of the Solidarity underground.

Working as a team, the women possessed the management skills, confidence, and media savvy to organize a large-scale, illegal publishing operation that served the entire nation, mobilized hundreds of thousands of individuals in support of Solidarity, and enlisted the help of thousands of supporting players—from reporters and printers to distributors and smugglers. The paper thus bolstered the growth of civil society under the repressive conditions of martial law, when it was humanly and technically almost impossible to coordinate nationwide activity.

Like nearly everyone else, the secret police were unaware that the leading newspaper of the 1980s underground was a female-run enterprise and that the thousands of people who helped produce and distribute it took their instructions from an all-woman editorial team. Blinded by sexism, the secret police hunted diligently for the men they assumed to be behind the newspaper—Solidarity men in hiding whose names had appeared in bylines. Keen to arrest and silence the paper’s key personnel, the police completely overlooked its editors and publishers—Helena Luczywo, Joanna Szczęsna, Anna Dodziuk, Anna Bikont, Zofia Bydlińska, and Malgorzata Pawlicka. They also overlooked Ewa Kulik, who coordinated the operations of the Warsaw underground in collaboration with Tygodnik Mazowsze. These seven women called themselves Damska Grupa Operacyjna (Ladies’ Operations Unit), or simply DGO, and they form the core group of this study.

Most of these women could trace their roots as oppositionists back as far as high school; many were involved in the brutally suppressed student protests of 1968; and by the mid- to late 1970s the majority had already anchored their activism in the arena of illegal publishing, which was just becoming a mainstay of the growing democratic opposition. When Solidarity became legal, many of the DGO women ran the Solidarity Press Agency, called AS, communist Poland’s first uncensored news service and digest. During martial law they made Tygodnik Mazowsze a reality. And when it was time to clear the political ground for democratic governance in 1989, they founded the first postcommunist daily, Gazeta Wyborcza.

Beginning with their work at AS, the women shaped illegal publishing into an instrument of civic activism. They made a point of building up their communication channels so they could be used to foster a well-informed society. They planned media strategies on the premise that knowledge is power and communication is the underpinning of action. By December 13, 1981, they were already skilled at publishing and distributing newspapers, organizing protests, and petitioning the government, and when martial law craced down, they reacted immediately. Determined to outmaneuver the military junta, these women were poised to lead the telerevolution.

Martial law was not a time for spectacular actions, for demonstrating, for organizing public events, or making speeches. To throw a bomb against [the authorities] would have been suicide, Polish émigré author Irena Grudzińska-Gross told me in 1991. The road to salvation [was] in thinking and creating. … Without Tygodnik Mazowsze, the underground could not have existed. It was a form in which political opinions and declarations could be made. It was a link among people in finding sympathizers in a dangerous time when people were dispirited.

In a 1999 interview that appeared in Media Studies Journal, Polish-born journalist Anna Husarska confirmed what Irena and several Solidarity women had told me years earlier. The media and especially the print media were Solidarity. All right, Solidarity was a trade union and the workers had demands and the intellectuals supported the workers, but the civil society in Poland was built through the underground press. Almost everybody was involved in either the writing or the printing or the distributing or the transporting or even the producing of the ink. Everyone felt involved. What Husarska did not note or explore, either in this article or in her 1989 piece in the Book Section of the Sunday New York Times, were the identities of the women behind the underground press she described and analyzed.

In 1985 Barbara Jancar published an essay that discussed women’s role in the Polish opposition in the 1970s and 1980s. She concluded that Solidarity’s leadership was male dominated and that its reform agenda did not consider women’s interests outside the family. She also characterized women’s activism at the time as having been spontaneous, symbolic, and endorsed by men. While her essay remains an important introduction to gender dynamics in the Polish opposition, it does not uncover the identities or the roles of women spearheading the opposition press, who were intellectuals, not working-class women. Jancar’s main focus was on women workers because Solidarity was regarded as a working-class phenomenon. There was no indication in her findings that some women had already begun to institutionalize their distinctly female methods of operation at locations outside the realm of workers’ strikes.

The view from inside the movement looked wholly different from what those outsiders had recorded. It came as a great surprise when I listened to Wroclaw activist Barbara Labuda characterize women’s role in the underground during our first interview in 1991. Men didn’t have the skills to manage the underground. Women were the brainpower, she declared. The women chiefs, as she referred to the regional activists, rebuilt the communication channels, organized secret meetings, arranged for the transfers of money, found contacts at Western embassies, spoke to the press, and developed relations with local and foreign clergy. When Solidarity members needed aid, they came to the women. When Western reporters requested interviews, they met with the women. I gave a lot of the interviews but not in my name. I wrote all of the men’s speeches, Barbara admitted. My women friends in other regions share experiences similar to mine—we had to protect our own identities.

In order to protect their identities from discovery by the government or the secret police, the Tygodnik Mazowsze editors insisted on anonymity when speaking to the Western press and perpetuated the myth of working-class men as the superstars of resistance. They worked behind the scenes as invisible organizers in order to publicize the words, deeds, and leadership of their male colleagues. Strategically, they felt that this was the way to gain popular support and to rebuild the splintered movement. And they succeeded.

—Shana Penn (2005): Solidarity’s Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland, ISBN 0-472-11385-2. 7–12.