Who’s Afraid of Art in a Democracy?

The exploiters know unchecked corporate rule isn't a winner at the ballot box. So they started by going after the theater.

There’s a reason you haven’t heard from me in a little while. Art in a Democracy: Selected Plays of Roadside Theater — a two-volume collection of plays and original essays chronicling 45 years of Appalachian and intercultural grassroots theater, organizing, and community development — comes out today. I am the series editor. Information on ordering the books and attending upcoming events, as well as lots of free additional material, is available at artinademocracy.org.

In 1971, a janitor in North Carolina named C. P. Ellis was asked by his union to help lead a project about racism in the schools. Ellis, who at the time was president of the local Ku Klux Klan, was not expecting this invitation.

Then the same union leader nominated local Black leader Ann Atwater to be Ellis’s co-chair. Ellis later told Studs Terkel he “hated” Atwater “with a purple passion.” But he took the position anyway. Mostly, he said, he did it out of “a sense of pride. . . .Here’s a chance for a low-income white man to be somethin’.”

Atwater, of course, had every reason to walk away. But she didn’t. And so began the transformation of a Klansman into an anti-racist union organizer:

I had some real great ideas about this great nation. (Laughs.) They say to abide by the law, go to church, do right and live for the Lord, and everything’ll work out. But it didn’t work out. It just kept gettin’ worse and worse. . . .

 I really began to get bitter. I didn’t know who to blame. . . . I had to hate somebody. Hatin’ America is hard to do because you can’t see it to hate it. You gotta have somethin’ to look at to hate. (Laughs.) The natural person for me to hate would be black people, because my father before me was a member of the Klan. . . .

We’d load up our cars and we’d fill up half the council chambers, and the blacks the other half. During these times, I carried weapons to the meetings, outside my belt. We’d go there armed. We would wind up just hollerin’ and fussin’ at each other. What happened? As a result of our fightin’ one another, the city council still had their way. They didn’t want to give up control to the blacks nor the Klan. They were usin’ us. . . .

When I began to organize, I began to see far deeper. I began to see people again bein’ used. Blacks against whites. I say this without any hesitancy: management is vicious. There’s two things they want to keep: all the money and all the say-so. They don’t want these poor workin’ folks to have none of that. . . .

It makes you feel good to go into a plant and butt heads with professional union busters. You see black people and white people join hands to defeat the racist issues they use against people. . . .

I never met Ellis, but we have a mutual friend. Harry C. Boyte was a young civil rights organizer when he talked himself out of getting killed by a group of Klansmen. Martin Luther King heard the story and assigned him to organize poor whites into the movement.

I met Harry almost a half-century later, when I was just getting into organizing. He became a friend and mentor, one of the people who taught me what populism really means.

It was Harry who introduced me to Roadside Theater, from the coalfields of east Kentucky. Roadside, like Ellis, specialized in surprising partnerships. I first met them in the Bronx, making a play with their Puerto Rican collaborators at Pregones Theater. Roadside and Pregones had worked together since the ‘90s, performing in each other’s community and touring their work to thousands of communities across the country. Pregones, I soon learned, was just one of Roadside’s many unlikely allies — alongside a Southern Black theater company that came right out of the civil rights movement, an Indigenous theater company whose founder helped give birth to the written language of Shiwi’ma Bena:we (Zuni), and many more.

The plays these companies made were not always pretty. They faithfully represented the experiences of their own communities, which meant taking on issues like racism, economic exploitation, environmental destruction, domestic violence, and the prison system. But they also had a lot of jokes. And singing, and dancing, and telling of tall tales, and irreverent banter with the audience.

This was not the pious “social justice” art I knew from academia. This was what happens, in Roadside’s own words, when the means of cultural production are put in the hands of the people. When a prominent journal once asked Roadside about their place in the tradition of American protest theater, they responded: “Roadside is not a theater of protest. It is a theater of affirmation.”

My five years working with Roadside showed me there are a lot of people out there like C. P. Ellis. The circumstances of their lives have turned them toward fear and isolation. If we write them off, we’ll never reach them. But if we extend the hand of fellowship, they will often take it — even when it means working with people they’ve been taught to hate.

But Ellis’s story also has a tougher lesson to teach us, one that often gets lost in these kinds of heartwarming stories of we-all-can-work-together. Yes, our neighbors of different races and religions and political ideologies are not the enemy. But there is, in fact, an enemy.

Ellis met that enemy in the form of race-baiting city council members and union-busting factory management. Their goal, as he put it, was to keep “all the money and all the say-so. They don’t want these poor workin’ folks to have none of that.”

This enemy started coming together, in its current form, during the Depression. Mass movements around the world were successfully securing labor rights, bank regulations, and a social safety net. Banks, corporations, and other members of the elite saw these victories as a grave threat to their profits and their power.

So they began to organize. They knew unchecked corporate rule wouldn’t be a winner at the ballot box, so they went about their task in a more covert manner. And one of their first targets was the theater.

The Federal Theatre Project, founded in 1935 as part of the WPA, made live theater accessible to more people in the United States than at any time before or since. Federal Theatre plays were a major inspiration for Roadside. They tackled the hardest issues ordinary people faced, in those people’s own words. They were both educational and genuinely entertaining. They offered an appealing alternative to mass-consumer culture.

So of course, they must have been full of Reds.

Congressman Martin Dies, an outspoken opponent of organized labor and immigration, convened a committee that shut down the Federal Theatre Project in 1939. But that committee stuck around — and turned into the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which destroyed the careers of a generation of artists and helped erase the movements of the ‘30s from popular memory.

Behind specious claims of Bolshevism, what truly frightened Dies and his backers was just how popular the Federal Theatre was. If plays that challenged racism and cultural elitism were embraced by communities across the country, how long before they would start demanding greater democracy offstage, too?

Roadside Theater and its multicultural allies tried to pick up the torch. They were helped along by another product of the civil rights era: the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The 1965 bill that established the NEA declared: “The arts and humanities belong to all people of the United States.” This expansive, democratic, and not-quite-capitalist view of belonging echoed the Federal Theatre’s populist vision, and it was equally well-liked. By 1980, the NEA had become the nation’s largest single arts funder.

But the enemies were waiting. In 1947 they had formed a group called the Mont Pelerin Society, named for the Swiss resort where they first met. (They were actually incorporated in Illinois — specifically, in the University of Chicago Law School office belonging to the soon-to-be brother-in-law of economist Milton Friedman, known for his support of the Pinochet coup.) From the ‘40s through the ‘60s the members of the Mont Pelerin Society quietly amassed foundation support, took over academic departments, and laid the groundwork for the profusion of “free market” think tanks, media outlets, and pseudo-populist organizations that would soon burst on the scene — with the help of a new lifelong member who joined in 1970, named Charles Koch.

Ronald Reagan was their man. In 1981 they started establishing the regime of anti-community policies we are still living with today. They privatized public goods and public spaces, defunded community-led organizations, and worked hard to create a cultural and economic reality where there isn’t enough to go around. At the same time, they poured lots of cash into convincing people to blame their declining quality of life on the rise of secularism, homosexuality, and abortion. Thus began the so-called Culture Wars.

This all was not just a Republican Party affair. The most crippling blows to the NEA came during Bill Clinton’s administration. In the mid-‘90s, right around when Fox News went live, the NEA stopped giving grants to individual artists. They also closed the programs that gave life to Roadside and its allies: the presenting and touring programs that let them reach poor and working class audiences across the country, and the multicultural Expansion Arts program, a direct legacy of the civil rights movement.

Private foundations soon followed suit. They cut back support for touring artists and grassroots multicultural organizations, in favor of the large urban institutions attended by their wealthy trustees and executives. Lots of community-based cultural organizations closed their doors. And the ones that remained, like Roadside, were shadows of their former selves.

It’s important to understand that politicians were only part of the problem. As former NEA Expansion Arts director A. B. Spellman explains in Art in a Democracy: “our major opposition came from the ‘fine’ arts world, which denied that there was art of any merit in Expansion Arts and saw the program’s budget as a waste of money. Give the money to us, they whined, and we can serve those ‘culturally deprived’ (a vile term) communities better with our outreach. People who would never go to the South Bronx to see a play by Pregones, or to Lowndes County, Alabama, to see a production of the Free Southern Theater, or to Whitesburg, Kentucky, to see Roadside at work had no compunction about screaming ‘inferior’ at us in all their exalted ignorance.”

This is the mentality that continues to dominate. After George Floyd got killed in 2020, most of the diversity, equity, and inclusion dollars went not to communities’ own centers of power but to big institutions run by mostly-white professionals, who claimed they could represent everyone.

Here’s a story that shows the way such institutions usually behave. In the mid-1990s, as the NEA was being taken apart, Roadside had been invited to host a year’s worth of community story circles in and around Dayton, Ohio, to gather people’s perspectives on race and class. The biggest theater company in the area used some of this material to create a new play, which regional critics selected as the year’s best drama. When the play closed, Roadside asked the theater’s leaders about their plans for future homegrown plays. They just laughed. Yes, the play was very successful, but the process just took up too much staff time and too much money.

As funds dried up and budgets tightened, this behavior became the norm. No matter how successful the project, the institutions very rarely invest the resources to keep the work going. They may not have anything against it. They may have even really liked it. But bureaucracy demands what’s most efficient. And democracy is, by its nature, inefficient. So the status quo returns. The walls of the gated community, temporarily breached, get rebuilt. Roadside’s founders have often observed that the field of the grassroots arts is littered with the corpses of its own successes.

If there is still hope — and I believe there is — it lies not in the big institutions that try to exist apart from communities, but in the organizations that are of, by, and for communities themselves.

This hope was on full display in March 2020, at Roadside’s last live engagement before the pandemic took hold, when a van full of white folks from East Kentucky pulled up in front of the oldest Black social organization in West Baltimore.

It was no chance encounter. Roadside ensemble members, including me, had worked for years with the people on both ends of the exchange. But today, many of them were meeting each other for the first time. They represented communities on opposite ends of the country’s racial, political, and rural-urban divides. Yet they quickly saw themselves in each other.

In one memorable moment during the Kentuckians’ play, a Trump-loving volunteer fire chief went off script and talked about the Narcan kit he saw by the front door of the club in Baltimore. Hardly a weekend went by back home when he and his fellow firefighters didn’t use this same emergency medicine to save the lives of neighbors who had overdosed on opioids. An audience member responded, “I didn’t realize white people had those problems, too.”

The message was clear: Our exploiters are organized, united, and powerful. To defeat them, we must be, too. The stories collected in the two volumes of Art in a Democracy — and the how-to guides and other supplementary materials on artinademocracy.org — offer a place to start.

In brief: find a community’s centers of power. Get to know the people there, and what they care about. Get involved with whatever they are doing, and show them what you care about. Help them connect with other communities that care about some of the same things, including (especially?) communities they thought they’d never have anything in common with.

One way or another, it always works. That’s why the descendants of Mont Pelerin and their fellow wealth hoarders pour so many resources into keeping us apart. No matter the depth of the divides, given the chance to share and create together in a place they know they’ll be safe and heard, people will find ways to connect. They will eat and drink and dance and sing and shout and argue. They will create works of inspiring beauty. They will experience the joy and struggle of an expanding world, with unexpected challenges alongside unexpected opportunities and allies. And they will recognize that together, they — we — can make tomorrow look different from yesterday.