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Progressive activist/singer Si Kahn hangs up his organizing shoes
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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.
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