 We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These words from the Declaration of Independence are familiar to many of us, and yet it took 143 years for women to get the right to vote and 189 years for Black people to get the right to vote. And still today, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are still only words for many people. Here in Boston, life expectancy varies by 30 years depending on where you live. In Roxbury, with many poor and Black people, life expectancy is 59 years. In the back bay, wealthy and mostly white life expectancy is 91 years. It's tough to have liberty when you are in prison. The United States incarcerates 716 people for every 100,000 people. Our rate of incarceration is more than five times higher than most countries in the world. Millions of people in our country don't have health care, a decent job, good education, a home they can afford, and that makes it pretty hard to pursue happiness. So on this show, you are going to meet people who are making it possible to have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. People today who are making the words of the Declaration of Independence come true. Hi, welcome. My name is Michael Jacoby Brown, and I'm your host today for We Hold These Truths. Today is February 2021, and we're very privileged and honored to have as our guest today, Walter Davis. Walter Davis was born about 75 years ago in Peewee County, Kentucky, not too far from Louisville. I hope I'm saying that right, Walter. Walter has worked for the last 60 years as a social justice organizer, starting when he helped desegregate the Democratic Party in Louisville. He's worked on civil rights. He served in the Peace Corps in Columbia, South America. He's worked for the Encampment for Children. He went to Canada to protest the war in Vietnam. He was indicted in 1970 for refusal to report for the draft, and that indictment was thrown out by the U.S. Attorney General about five years later. Bill has been married to his partner Bill. Walter has been married to his partner Bill Fields for the last six years. They've been together for over 45 years. He spent over 20 years training community organizers throughout the South. He spent five years as the director of the National Organizers Alliance, four and a half years as the director of the Tennessee Health Care Coalition in Nashville, Tennessee. He's currently an organizer and associate at the Appalachian Community Fund in Knoxville, Tennessee, supporting, among other things, LBGTQ Plus organizing in central Appalachian communities. Walter, welcome. I'd like to ask you a little bit about how you got started and who your mentors were early in your life. Well, I was really fortunate because I was exposed to Georgia Powers Davis and who was the first black and first woman elected to the Kentucky legislature. That was part of the fight to desegregate the Democratic Party in Louisville, Kentucky, which loved black votes but did not like to have black candidates elected. We worked really hard on that and scored some success, which is pretty heady when you're a teenager, and I was 15 when that happened, and I'd start off with a victory on something where you actually saw some marketable change. By the way, it's Pee Wee Valley, not Pee Wee Valley. What did I say? Pee Wee County. Oh, sorry, Pee Wee Valley. I hope you'll forgive me about that. They write. Thank you. I don't want to make that mistake again. Yeah, and can you tell me a little bit, you know, some of your early experience I know in elementary school even and junior high school with the few black students that were there, how did that lead you to working for justice, you know, as a white young person? What led you to be interested in that? Well, you know, I came from a primarily white rule background into the Louisville schools, and Louisville, Kentucky was one of the first places desegregated in the South, and it seemed to be peaceful, but that's because it was the desegregation really only integrated a small number of students. And years later, you saw the real reaction, the white supremacists who pushed back against the crude desegregation in the schools. So I saw that as a kid, these young African American students who came into a primarily white environment and had no preparation, no support. And when I was in high school, ironically, the first biracial group I was ever in was junior achievement. And out of that came a group that black and white students who organized to also to build a participation of equal numbers of black and white students. And so out of the young capitalists came the people who were young people who were fighting to desegregate the Democratic Party and to open up to the people of the state. Where do you think you did that? I'm sure not every white high school student had the reaction you did to those black students at that time. What do you think led you personally to react the way you did as opposed to the way, for instance, other white people did? Well, I think it, you know, we were a poor family. And I drew some lessons as a poor white from our experience and also experience the liberation of seeing people standing up and fighting and gaining some, if not power at least, some voice in public change. And it was very impressionable for the rest of my life that people found their voices through organizing. Right. You mentioned Georgia Powers Davis as a mentor when you were very young. Can you tell me a little bit more about her and what she did to influence you to become an organizer for the past virtually 60 years now? Well, I think the biggest thing she taught me was that you have to have a strategy. You have to understand tactics. And she was very good in the legislative on the legislative front when she got there of being able to work across the not only race lines, but party lines. When she first went to the Capitol to Frankfurt, she couldn't stay in a hotel because it was still a segregated system. And so she had to work on all levels. Ironically, we have a mutual friend in Kentucky who still experiences some of those obstacles. Attica Scott, a dear friend, who is in a similar place of isolation in the Kentucky legislature, but has stood up and given a lot of people a voice for the who been left and excluded. Yeah, hopefully we can get Attica Scott on this show. She's a young woman and now the only female black legislator in the Kentucky legislature. I know you were involved in the civil rights movement early on, even met Dr. Martin Luther King once. Can you tell us a little bit about what your involvement there was, Walter? I was mainly an activist. I wouldn't say that I was playing any leading role except getting some people out from my small Baptist college to take part in activities. But I remember the first time there was what was called open housing in Louisville and seeing white supremacists show up and actually stoned Dr. King with police sitting and watching from across the roads. So the Louisville's got a long history of dealing with the police issues when it comes to race. And so I learned from that. But I was not at that point, really an organizer. I was one of the people that, you know, you don't always hear about who may have lived their whole lives being an activist, supporter, community leader, who don't get the cameras turned in their direction. Can you a little bit say a little bit more about what you actually saw when you said Martin Luther King was stoned and by white people throwing stones and rocks at him? Yep. He was, the rock was thrown at his back as he was marching to go to the auditorium to give a speech. And he was fortunately not severely hurt. But that was pretty common, if you'll recall, on civil rights protest. And, you know, nonviolence was a pretty high marker for most people to follow through on and all the civil rights protest in Kentucky at that time were nonviolent, peaceful. But it was the people who opposed you who were the violent. And it's interesting the parallels we see to today of with Black Lives Matter, which the protests have been largely peaceful and overwhelmingly involving people who did not come to create violence. And yet the other side carried off such capricious violence and hasn't been punished. I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about your years at college in Kentucky. And then I know you went to Canada after that. But what was it like when you were a young man in college? Well, I was out of small Baptist college. And I got my degree in two years and eight months because I was in a hurry to get out of school. And so we had a trimester system, small progressive Baptist college at that time, and which was Kentucky Southern College, which was strangled by a growing conservatism in the denomination. And so I actually share with Mitch McConnell a degree from the University of Louisville because they brought all of the former Kentucky Southern students under their umbrella. And so I was very much a political activist while I was student body leader at this small college and also a volunteer in Appalachian communities with the Appalachian Volunteers program. I don't know what's more. I was certainly not the, I wasn't the representative of the majority of the students politically, but I was student body president. So most of them were Republicans. Right. And I know about that time you were certainly like many of us protesting the war in Vietnam and refused to join the US Army as part of the draft at that time. Can you tell us a little bit about what that experience was like and you're eventually being indicted and going to Canada. What was that like? Well, I went into two years in the Peace Corps in Columbia as a community development volunteer in rural communities, working with Indian communities and Afro-Columbian communities. And by the way, that was the first place I ever heard of Saul Alinsky. I never had had any training in community organizing. It was a different Peace Corps in those early years of training people and when power and tactics and strategies. So that's where I got my Saul Alinsky part of the training. Anyway, so I came out of the Peace Corps. I'm sorry that Alexis is trying to talk to me. I came out of the Peace Corps, worked that summer for the encampment for citizenship, which, yeah, which, which was, I still have a relationship with today is boarding it, which was wonderful high school kids from all over the country, very diverse, probably the most diverse organization I'd ever met and kids in their teens. And I was leading the politics workshop while fighting the selective service. I remember this was Muhammad Ali's Cassius Clay Stratford and they'd already taken their stand about religious independence, religious freedom and the right to refuse on that basis. And so, and one of the side stories on working for the encampment was that the kids found out I was facing this situation. And the they started debating what I should do, go into organize inside the army, go to Canada, just not show up and go underground. And so I let them have it to have the discussion that was their right to talk about it too. Then I got a call the next morning that from Fort Knox, from the MPs at Fort Knox, that this group of young people had shown up and were leafleting soldiers talking to soldiers of Fort Knox against the war. And fortunately, they didn't arrest the kids and they were returned to Louisville and things were all right. But a short time after that, I moved to Canada after losing my last appeal on being a conscious objector. It's been 20 years. And you spent 20 years, what was that like up in Canada? Well, it was where I am really sorry that there, there's something trying to interfere. The, you know, I went like, you know, I don't know if you know, 75,000 at least went to Canada. And I found a place, I found a home and was able to become very active politically as well. Even while I was working for the Canadian government, worked in immigration for the Canadian government while I was organizing in several, several areas, including when the first Prime Minister Trudeau declared martial law under the War Measures Act. So after being there a lesson a year, I was out organizing, talking to people about building a movement against martial law. And so those, wow, you know, these were great times. I was, I worked for every level of Canadian government, and I organized anti war, some of the largest anti-war protests in Toronto. And, and also did, did work on many other issues, learned to have a great deal of respect for what are called now First Nations peoples, the leadership of, of Indians in aboriginal peoples in Canada to this day. I have a special place for them and in my consciousness. So throughout those years, and I know back in 1975, you were able to come back to the United States. And I know you worked for decades, organizing and training people throughout the southern part of the United States. I wonder if you can tell us, I know it's, you can't cover more than 20, 30 years of work in a couple minutes of the short time we have, but you can tell us something about where you worked and who you met and what that was like working with the Southern Empowerment Project and the training and the organizers and the organizations that you worked for in those days. Well, it's every possible kind of organization. We trained organizers from Louisiana to West Virginia and, and everywhere in the southeast and, and worked with people in other regions who were doing different issues that were similar. A lot of the groups that are well known, Kentuckians through the Commonwealth, they work on the mountains. Jonah, which was, was a primarily African American organization in western Tennessee, just all kinds of places where people had not necessarily had an opportunity to work across racial lines before. And that was important for us that it was, there were several things that when we started off, people weren't necessarily bought into fighting racism, despite the fact you can't organize in the South without dealing with racism. And, and later on other, other issues that were used as wedges to divide people, gender equality and discrimination based on sexuality and sexual identity. They, we, I'm proud to say we helped introduce some of those discussions. We didn't always close them, but they continued in their own fashion all over the place. But I deeply admired local leaders in communities who were prepared to face the issues and talk about them and be honest, even if they had differences. And I think that's one of the critical things that's been missing for a number of years now is that we, we can't seem to talk to each other, even when we have areas of agreement. We've let, we've let people create, build walls that divide us when we have more in common than we have difference. I wonder if you could tell us something about some of the people you actually met, who they were, particularly the ones that impressed you for all those years working in the southern part of our country? Oh, I would be, I would be careful about that, because people have deep memories in the south if you leave them off a list. But I'm one of the most treasured relationship was with a co-working named Rosemary Derek, who was a long term, she was also very involved at one point in the National Organizers line, but she was a long term transplant survivor, African American, from a rural African American community. And she was one of the most natural organizers, always hesitant to use that term. She certainly was a natural leader. And she brought so many people along in understanding the forces that were operating on them. And she, she just was such an example. And unfortunately, she, she passed away. And, and another was Vicky Kwapman, who told us, who taught a lot of us how to do fundraising. And that you couldn't do organizing if you're not willing to raise the money, that that's part of the work of social change. And you can't necessarily wait for the foundations to pay for the revolution. And so Vicky really taught us a lot about how the two things are related. And she died in the Highlands, Bolivia, helping women form sock making co-ops for, for develop self development. So everyone, there's hundreds, I could go through hundreds. It's usually been colleagues and local grassroots community folks that I drew the greatest strength from. And like I said before, they don't tend to be ones that are going to get their name in books. That's why it's important to remember those people. And I wonder if you can look back over the, all these years, it's been now over 60 years, what are some of the lessons you would draw for younger people who are interested in organizing for justice today in 2021 and into the future? What are some of the things you'd like them to to know? Well, some of it comes from my own experience of being realizing this is a privilege to do this kind of work, especially in my case for the whole life. You know, you're, you're privileged to meet these folks who are in struggle standing up and speaking for themselves and taking some control over events. That's why it's important for not only the young to listen to the elderly who've got mentorship experiences to draw upon, but for us to pay it as older organizers, pay attention to what young people are saying. They've brought new methods, they've brought new energy. And we have to learn from one another because that's where we're going to go forward. Let's say celebrate. We are at a point where it's very hard to celebrate because you can't do it in a box. You've got to actually be out, out in the world. And so the pandemic's forced us to do things differently. But relationships and art and music and celebrating and creating beauty, that's part of organizing too. It is. It's not an extra. It's, it's essential because that's what that's, I think, what you're saying, right? Right. Yeah. And, and I guess less than I have from the many years of being aware of racism is that to be, to be aware of your own privilege as a white person, that you, you know, and as if you're male and if you're heterosexual, that you enjoy privileges and which give you power over people who are oppressed. And it's hard to be an ally if you don't own where, where you are privileged. And, and I would say the other privilege I've enjoyed in my life is to do this just to be able and to understand a little bit of why things happen in the world and to do something about it. And I, you know, people also, why would you choose to do that all? Well, I didn't make any money, but I have had a hell of a ride. Right. Right. But you have a home and you have a, you have a husband now. And what's, what's that been like a little bit? I know you've worked on LGBTQ plus issues throughout Appalachia. I just, we have just a couple minutes left, but I know you're now working for the Appalachian Community Fund. And I wonder what is it important, particularly for people outside Appalachia, like those of us in Massachusetts and the Northeast to understand about Appalachia? Don't believe the stereotypes. You know, this region has been controlled by Boston and New Haven and other places from people who had drained the wealth from the region. There's an incredible creativity and strength at the community level in, in Appalachia. And we're going to be part of the solutions in this country. And so don't read it. Don't believe every stereotypical novel that comes out or sounds are some New York Times article that slams the create the people who are trying to bring about change. You've actually been there. And do you have any final words for other younger organizers, whether they're they're in Appalachia or whether they're in South America or wherever they are? You have any final words from all your 60 plus years of experience, Walter? Well, I guess I draw on the LGBT movement and say it gets better. There will be times when it doesn't seem like that's true. And, you know, despite the tragedy of the pandemic, people working together will make a better world. And you, you are needed. My generation is pretty well done in terms of solutions. We're, we're now supporters of young people who are leading the fight. And I mean young under 50. That's young now. But God bless the Black Lives Matter. I think they, they change the, the language and the what's happening in America. And we'll need that inspiration for the future. Well, thanks a lot, Walter Davis, an organizer for over 60 years. My name again is Michael Jacoby Brown. I'm your host at We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident. We hold these truths that all men are created equal, but it's taken people like Walter Davis to make those words in the Declaration of Independence come true, not only for people in Appalachia, but for people all over the country. So I want to thank you, Walter. We're really privileged to have you on We Hold These Truths today. And until next week and the week after, we hope to see you and we thank you for all you've done over so many decades. Thanks a lot. And now again, I'm Michael Jacoby Brown. This is We Hold These Truths and I'm signing off. Thank you very much, Walter. Hope to see you soon. Okay. Bye-bye.