Border Crossing

As I gaze across my 80 year journey, I’ve been trying to make sense of the choices I’ve made.  I’ve been looking to see if there’s a coherent narrative that I can tell about myself.  This is an early installment of that story. 

Border Crossing

In 1958, when I was 16 years old, I learned about a march for civil rights in Washington, DC.  There was to be a gathering of youth to demand the desegregation of schools in our nation, and every school was asked to send a busload of young warriors.  Martin Luther King was to speak, though, as it turns out, since he was recovering from recent knife wounds, Coretta King spoke in his place.   

Every day for a month, I tried to recruit students from my all-White, lower middle class, suburban school on Long Island.  I thought I might have some cache – good student, good athlete, from a civic-minded family in town.  But not a single person, not even my friends, would sign on.  As only a naïve and idealistic boy would, I felt immensely disappointed and rejected, though, I might have known better.  This was, after all, the tail end of the McCarthy Red Scare and most people kept their opinions to themselves. Almost every political opinion I offered in those days, however diffidently, was disparaged by students and teachers, alike.  I had learned, for the most part, to keep my thoughts to myself.   

Soon enough, I accepted my recruiting failure and joined a busload of kids from Hempstead, a nearby town with a large Black population.  As I began the trip with my fellow protesters, singing freedom songs with them, songs I knew from family gatherings and hootenannies in Greenwich Village.  At first, it was strange for me and a little frightening to be the only White kid, but, with time, I felt much more at home.  We had found common ground in our desire to see America change—and to protest as strongly as we could. 

Over 10,000 young people showed up, representing schools from across the country. I had begun to understand then where I stood in society: partly out of the mainstream, partly inside.  And I learned to seek friendship among those who shared my odd positioning.  Throughout my life, I would make similar adjustments, creating a place for myself on the margins of society — not an insider but not far out.

The following year, 1959, I tried to make another statement.  With a few friends, I organized an alternative political convention to elect an American president.  We objected to the candidates, including Jack Kennedy, who we associated with the repressions of the McCarthy era.  Eventually about 200 seniors from tens of schools, needing to protest, nominated Pogo. It wasn’t much of a statement.  It wasn’t that imaginative or bold, and not that many people took us seriously, but we felt good and strong for stepping outside of the American mainstream. 

These youthful forays into political engagement were no anomalies.  My parents were passionate left-wing socialists.  Some of my earliest memories are of being pushed in my stroller for May Day parades, which called out for a revolution.  And throughout my childhood, every evening over dinner at our kitchen table, we reviewed the political events of the day.  We bemoaned the weakening labor movement, US imperialism in Latin America, and the racism embedded in the Southern bloc control of our Congress. 

In other words, I was a born outsider.  But not entirely.  My parents expected me to do well at school.  I excelled at football, basketball, and track, and they attended every one of my athletic events.  My father loved sports and reveled in my (and later, my brother’s) successes. In the early 1950’s, they saw the need for more school space and led a successful campaign to build a new, neighborhood high school. My mother served as the PTA president and my father headed a local civic association, aimed at planting trees and creating youth activities.  So, I was also a born insider. 

The tension between these two identities – their distant locations inside and outside – has been the context, or more accurately, the engine, of almost every creative activity of my life. 

It was often uncomfortable being both, and I never felt fully accepted by my peers.  So, I escaped with my cousin, Jonny, to Greenwich Village with its sing-alongs, and, one summer, to Grand Street Settlement Camp, where we would serve as “work campers,” keeping the grounds for the many hundreds of poor Black and Latino kids who flocked to rural Pennsylvania for two weeks in the sun.  There, I was among a group of 12 other 15-year-old kids who had been raised in left-wing homes like mine.  My relief, my joy, in their company—while serving those in poverty—was immeasurable, and, in a way, I have spent a lifetime seeking that kind of community for my home. 

Throughout my life, I would briefly find or build them.  They began with the same kind of rebellion and enthusiasm I had discovered during the March on Washington and the mock political convention.  In each case, those of us who participated grew very close.  We felt that, in spite of the odds, we were building new worlds.

Let me give you a quick sense of the next set of projects that animated me. The first was at Harvard, during the famous 1968 strike for civil rights and against the Vietnam War.  I supported these causes but focused my energy on creating what we called an “alternative college.” In it, professors and students broke with the hierarchies created when teachers simply lectured to student and, instead, emphasized conversations, where student views were treated more respectfully.  Almost instantly, a few hundred students and several faculty members signed on.

Our experiment was short-lived.  But here I was, again, at the margins: a Harvard student – just as Establishment as you can get—and a striking, educational innovator, or so I conceived of myself.  Even with the failure, I gained a great deal. Most of my choices and actions throughout my professional life are built on the insights and satisfaction of that kind of teaching. 

In the 1970’s, I helped to form a training institute (The Family Institute of Cambridge) to teach family systems therapy, which opposed the individualistic emphasis of the prevailing psychoanalytic models.  In the 1980’s, I formed a clinic and a professional journal to fight against the prevailing medical model, with its emphasis on microbes and physical organs, and its blindness to the ways that our bodies interacted with the psychology of individuals, the culture of families, and the disparate resources of communities.   

In those cases, I did my best to master or at least acquaint myself with the insider’s views, not wanting to be caught out as an ignorant outsider.  So, I learned a great deal by absorbing conventional wisdom, while developing alternative medical approaches, then trying to bring them together into a coherent whole.  That synthetic approach has pushed me, each time, to create something new. 

And at the age of 64, I founded the Institute for Nonprofit Practice (INP), to provide managers and leaders with greater skills and professional networks, which, in turn, would amplify their confidence in dealing with communities and funders.  We coordinated the practical curriculum with an emphasis on social justice and diversity, to reflect the communities served by nonprofits.  More than half of our faculty and students have, from the start, been people of color. This brought me all the way back to that 1958 march for civil rights.  It was like coming home. Every day, I could speak in what I learned was my mother tongue: social justice.  And “home” for the INP is now rapidly becoming the entire United States, as my successors seed new sites and create new programs in cities across the country.

There have been many times in this long life of mine when I had to admit that I’d have a larger audience, an easier recruitment experience, were I more, well, centrist. But I’ve never wanted, or probably been able, to pull that off.  I might also have been more obviously creative if I extended my thoughts to their logical conclusions.  But that’s also not me.

I feel most alive at the margins, energized by the tension generated by trying find solutions that include both the insider’s and outsider’s perspectives. That’s where my creativity is literally released. I am animated by the need to stretch across that inside/outside divide, to imagine what new, exciting possibility might find its home there with me.