For a guy who’s retiring, Si Kahn seems awfully busy. Kahn announced late last year that he will step down May 1, 2010 as executive director of Grassroots Leadership, the Charlotte-based, community organizing group he founded 30 years ago. The 65-years-old-but-looks-10-years-younger rabbi’s son may be finished helping ordinary people around the South and Southwest organize to protect their rights and interests, but he certainly hasn’t slowed down yet. When we caught up with Si at GL headquarters in Elizabeth, he had just come off a tour in which he spent time visiting, talking and singing with the organization’s supporters around the country. The next day, he was set for a trip to Seattle, and then on to New York with a meeting to find a producer for a musical he wrote.
Did I forget to mention? Si Kahn is also a songwriter and folk singer — an internationally known folk singer, in fact, with fans all over the U.S. and in Europe, where his records sell well and he fills halls. He writes songs about many things, but he’s most known for his music about workers and their families, such as “Aragon Mill,” which over the years became a labor anthem.
It’s been said that Si is the most famous Charlottean whom most people in Charlotte don’t know about; that’s probably because he’s spent so much of the past 30 years on the road with Grassroots Leadership, on top of his concerts and folk festival appearances.
The way Si sees it, he’s combined the two things he does best. In his organizing efforts, he helps regular folks, “ordinary heroes” who are working to improve their lives and the world. Those people, in turn, often become the inspiration for his songs, which he then sings as part of his organizing work. Most of the profits from his concerts have gone back into Grassroots Leadership.
It’s a way of life that has kept Kahn incredibly busy for decades, and has won him the respect of many — including Pete Seeger, the one person most associated with combining singing and political action. In 1986, Seeger and Kahn joined singer Jane Sapp on a trio album, Carry It On: Songs of America’s Working People. Afterward, Seeger told writer Frye Gaillard, “I’m a great admirer of Si Kahn. He’s a solid thinker who is able to humanize the political — an absolutely extraordinary guy. I hope he lives to be 120.”
Under the extraordinary guy’s leadership, GL’s racially diverse staffers have helped people get organized for grassroots activism, centering on a variety of social justice issues. Kahn emphasizes that GL provides resources, advice and experience to groups who already want to fight for their causes; the organization doesn’t pick an issue and then find locals to take it up. “Grassroots Leadership isn’t the type of group that tells people, ‘These are the most important issues and here’s what we need you to do about them.’ If someone is working on an issue that we believe in, and think we can contribute something to, we’re glad to get involved,” he explains.
In recent years, GL has aided campaigns to end for-profit, private prisons, and in support of immigrant rights. GL was among those who worked behind the scenes to stop a proposal for an immigrant detention center, first in Mecklenburg, and then in Gaston County. But it’s in Texas that GL enjoyed its most recent big victory, when they joined with and helped other groups, including the ACLU, to stop the imprisonment of immigrant families in the Hutto Residential Center, a state prison in Taylor, Texas.
“[Hutto] had 150 children locked up with their parents behind razor wire — not overnight, but six months or a year or more,” says Kahn. “We had six-and-a-half paid staff members, that was it, and here we are taking on the U.S. government, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], and the for-profit/private prison industry. One of the things we did, in effect, was create a people’s lobby. We did it through house meetings, through vigils, every week. We stood out there in front of the prison; we brought presents to the kids at holiday times; and made sure it all got in the media, and pointed out to people in power that the media was covering the issue. We collected over 75,000 signatures of support and were willing to take them to Washington to present them to President Obama, and to the head of Homeland Security.”
Last August, the Obama administration announced that it would immediately stop sending families to Hutto, as part of an overhaul of the way the nation detains immigration violators. The families who were at Hutto have been moved to the much-smaller Berks Family Residential Center in Pennsylvania, where kids are educated and other family services are provided.
Locally, GL is working on a campaign to do away with the 287(g) program, which deputizes local law enforcement officers to enforce federal immigration laws. The program was a favorite of former Mecklenburg County Sheriff Jim Pendergraph, and was promoted by Rep. Sue Myrick. The program has been criticized by the Police Foundation, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which say 287(g) undermines police forces’ core mission of public safety, and actually hinders normal police work by greatly lowering levels of cooperation in the Latino community when police are investigating non-immigration related crimes.
Si Kahn’s retirement will start almost 45 years to the day that he got his first taste of organizing. That’s when he came to the South from the D.C. area to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, an integral part of the civil rights movement. His experiences with that important struggle led him to become a citizen of the South, and to focus his organizing talents — and passion for social justice — down here in the hot, humid section of the country.
He moved to the southern Appalachians, which reminded him of the Pennsylvania mountains where he was born. In the 1970s, Si was attracted to the struggle of a group of coal miners in eastern Kentucky. They were demanding that Duke Power Company (now Duke Energy) recognize their membership in the United Mine Workers, and install more effective safety measures in the Brookside mine, which Duke Power owned. That particular labor struggle became a landmark case, and the subject of one of the greatest documentary films ever made, the Oscar-winning Harlan County USA. It was during the Brookside strike, Si says, that he realized he wanted to help others get organized to fight grassroots battles for their rights and well-being.
In the ensuing years, Kahn also worked in the long effort to unionize J.P. Stevens textile mills. That battle, which the Chicago Sun-Times, called “the biggest labor-management war of the last two decades,” finally ended in 1980 with the unionization of 10 Stevens plants in the Carolinas and Alabama.
Staying in N.C., Si became part of the Carolina Brown Lung Association, an aggressive and creative advocacy group that changed the way textile plants operate. Kahn says the brown lung struggle was one of the most rewarding experiences of his life.
“It was immensely gratifying,” he says. “The group was actually led by disabled mill workers, heroic people who’d been in the mills for years and who could barely breathe — they knew it was too late for them, but they fought on for the remaining mill workers. And in North Carolina, they won compensation for thousands of workers. It meant people had money to make their lives more tolerable; they could buy the medical equipment to keep them going, they became less of a burden on their extended families, and they cleaned up the mills; they got an OSHA standard so strict, no one had to get that terrible disease anymore. So that was something that made a concrete difference in the lives of thousands and thousands of families — and we changed national policy.” Shortly after the brown lung fight, Kahn founded Grassroots Leadership, and it was on.
Such a rich history is probably enough life experience for three people, but not for someone with Si Kahn’s drive. In addition to four-and-a-half decades of organizing, 16 albums of music (including his new CD, Courage, with Kathy Mattea), plus touring here and in Europe, Kahn has also written four books and three plays, including Immigrant, a musical about the life of legendary union organizer/songwriter Joe Hill.
A life story that busy would wear out many people, but Kahn says burnout has nothing to do with why he’s retiring from GL. “I have a wonderful marriage [to educator and philosopher Elizabeth Minnich], and I want to stay home — it’s that simple. I just want to stay in one place long enough, and be unencumbered long enough, so that I can see if there’s anything else I might want to do that I haven’t done. I’m feeling inspired, really. There are lots of possibilities out there … I’d like to do a lot more writing and co-writing, and there are three musicals and three CDs in process.” Plus, he’s finding a producer in New York for Immigrant. And getting ready for the full production of another musical, the “political love story” Silver Spoon, in Boston, a year from now. And oh yeah, he’s been commissioned to write a play about the historic 1912 “Bread and Roses” textile strike in Massachusetts. And he may want to do something with Charlotte theater professionals, too. In other words, fading away or crawling back into the woodwork isn’t in the cards for Si Kahn.
I had to ask: How does Kahn, who has been through so many ups and downs and political battles, keep up his preternatural level of optimism — particularly in the face of big corporations’ and high finance’s stranglehold on the country?
“First, so what else is new?” he replies. “I mean, it’s better than trying to organize against a feudal monarch [laughs]. Seriously, I don’t think it’s ever been different. I don’t buy the notion that ‘this is the worst of times.’ People who say that, I want to ask them if they’ve ever heard of slavery, or the Civil War, or the Depression. You know, with a knowledge of history that lets you put things in perspective, you realize you’re part of a long, long chain of events. I take the long view of history — none of the work of changing things so that people can lead better lives ever happens quickly … Plus, what else do you do? In the new book [Creative Community Organizing], there’s a section called ‘If you don’t fight, you lose every time.’ That pretty well sums up one of the ways I see things.”
On April 9, 7 p.m.-9:30 p.m., Grassroots Leadership will celebrate its 30th anniversary, Si Kahn’s retirement, and new GL director Donna Red Wing, at “Community Organizing in Charlotte, Then and Now” at the Levine Museum of the New South. The event will include music, a panel discussion, dessert and cash bar. It’s free. For details, visit www.grassrootsleadership.org.
But before I leave. . .
In conjunction with Grassroots Leadership’s 30th anniversary, and his retirement from GL, Si Kahn is releasing his fourth book and 16th music disc. Here are our brief reviews of those works.
• Creative Community Organizing by Si Kahn (Berrett-Koehler, 212 pages, $17.95).
I love the subtitle of this book: A Guide for Rabble-Rousers, Activists, and Quiet Lovers of Justice. Beyond the subtitle, though, Creative Community Organizing is genuinely fascinating reading, consisting of as much great storytelling as sound advice for organizers. Kahn has a great way with a story, and over the years has become expert at applying lessons learned from life stories to, well, the rest of life. He also includes lyrics from some of his stellar folk songs, throws in some autobiography and some pretty smart humor, and unlike most books that are fundamentally political, this one makes for a very lively read. It’s a smart, fun read, and you’ll be more knowledgeable and feel smarter after finishing it. What more can you ask?
• Courage by Si Kahn (CD).
It’s not every political singer who starts off an album with a song about the existential angst of a Labrador Retriever who thinks he can fly. That’s the subject of “Otis Is Flying,” the first song on Si Kahn’s Courage CD, and it could just as well be an indication of the singer’s own newfound feelings of release and inspiration. This album has some of the sharpest, most spirited arrangements Kahn has presented, and his strong tenor is touched and highlighted by singer Kathy Mattea’s gorgeous harmonies. (Mattea also wrote the album’s liner notes.) Si Kahn is, indeed, a political singer, but his albums are usually a mixed bag of love songs, personal stories, memoirs, and yes, anthems. This particular mixed bag is one of the strongest of Kahn’s career. Now, if we could just get to hear some of the musical theater material he’s produced and others he’s still working on.
— John Grooms
This article appears in Mar 30 – Apr 5, 2010.
