ভূমিকা

[^2] “A Different Kind of Politics: John Dewey and the Meaning of Citizenship in the 21st Century,” Dewey Lecture, University of Michigan, November 1, 2001, on web at www.cpn.org; also published in A PEGS Journal: The Good Society , [^2004]: For evidence of millennials’ interest in such politics, see Nick Longo and Matt…, Students and Politics: A CIRCLE Working Paper (College Park: CIRCLE, 2005).

I continued King’s charge to organize poor whites in Durham in 1966 working for Operation Breakthrough, a poverty program that many saw as simply a “Black Power” agency (I believe that Howard Fuller, the dynamic African American director with whom I had many conversations, also identified with southern populism).

Dorothy Cotton recounted the excitement in SCLC when a group of poor whites came to the SCLC Dorchester Center, for a week of citizenship school training – a story that I believe remains untold. SCLC’s populism was very different than the politics of caution, evident in the national leadership of the NAACP, or the politics of alienation from American cultural traditions in the left wing of the movement, later widespread in the student movement.

My own writings over the years on concepts and topics such as community organizing (The Backyard Revolution and Community Is Possible), the wellsprings of democratic movements (Free Spaces, with Sara Evans), the commonwealth tradition in American political culture (CommonWealth), citizenship as public work (Building; America, with Nan Kari), and reintegration of political practices into everyday life (Everyday Politics), as well as this lecture, can all be seen as efforts to develop the populism I learned in SCLC.

In full disclosure, I should note that in addition to my own direct experiences in SCLC, my father, Harry George Boyte, a reporter for the Charlotte Observer, then manager of the Atlanta Red Cross, then on the Executive Committee of SCLC from 1963 to 1967, also identified with southern populism.