The last decade has seen a surge of social movements and grassroots organizing on the left. There's been Occupy, Black Lives Matter, The Sunrise Movement, the Parkland student activism against gun violence. And of course, the resistance that sprang up after Trump's election, which spurred the creation of groups like Indivisible and Swing Left.
Not since the 1960s has there been so much grassroots activism on the left. One sign of that renaissance has been the emergence of the Working Families Party as an important national player in progressive politics. I first became familiar with the party in New York City years ago. Back then it was a small regional third party, mostly focused on one state. Today, the Working Families Party is striving to build power in 11 states, with a mission focused on creating a strong, multiracial working-class movement. It's more prominent and better funded than ever before. And it's headed up by a leader who's generating a lot of buzz in progressive circles named Maurice Mitchell.
As we discuss in this conversation, Maurice has worked as a political organizer since he was a teenager on Long Island. He first got involved in national work in 2014 as part of the Movement for Black Lives. He became the National Director of the Working Families Party in 2018. I talked to Maurice recently about the nature of grassroots organizing, and about how a third party like Working Families can make an impact in our two-party electoral system.
You can listen to our conversation, which is the latest episode of my podcast Inside Change, or read a condensed version of the interview below.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
David: Hi, Maurice, thanks for coming to the show.
Maurice: It’s good to be here.
I’m excited to talk about the Working Families Party, but first I want to start with your background as an organizer. You started organizing as a teenager. You’ve been doing this work ever since, and I’m curious about what it’s like to build a career like that, and what it takes to succeed in that role.
It did not start as a career for me. You’re right, I started very young, and as far as I could remember, I grew up in a household that was pretty forward-thinking politically. My parents weren’t organizers. They both were trade unionists. When I first had opportunities to volunteer, I’d gravitate toward the more ideological volunteer opportunities. I first volunteered as an organizer with this student group called the Long Island Student Coalition for Peace and Justice, which worked on antiwar, anti-nuclear-proliferation issues, and local environmental issues. I was a politics nerd. So I ran for student government. I was president of Model Congress. I just gravitated to any opportunity I could to sharpen my skills and sharpen my analysis for social justice.
It was my experience as a college organizer at Howard University where I first started doing real campaign work, mainly on criminal justice prison and jail divestment, on police brutality. One of our classmates was killed by an undercover police officer, and that politicized so many people on campus. I did my first direct action on campus.
I decided after undergrad to go back home and to organize. It took about a year before I stumbled on the Long Island Progressive Coalition, which was a very small, under-resourced organization with a very skeletal staff. It was me and the executive director who were the two organizers at that time. This is 2001. I built my chops on the ground in this very under-resourced organization that had a very broad mandate—the entire region of Long Island. I was doing on the ground, door-to-door base building, issue-based campaigns and electoral campaigns for seven years. Winning some, losing some, and developing that rigor through those fights.
I was working mainly with working-class and poor communities of color to build that organization and to figure out how to leverage very meager organizing capacity for the most impact. I still draw upon those experiences as I approach the national context.
The issue-based organizing on the very hyper-local level brought me to electoral organizing because there were political barriers. The local organizing brought me to working on the state level because, ultimately, state power preempts local power.
Then, recognizing that my particular institution—as strong as it was—needed to be nested in an ecosystem of powerful institutions, [it] brought me to collaboration, and brought me to organizing organizations and to the unique role of coalition organizing in our movement.
When Trayvon Martin’s killer got off and when Michael Brown was murdered, it brought me to leave the work that I was doing in New York State. And I went to the organization for black struggle in St. Louis. It was really out of my recognition that we needed new tactics. We needed new forms of power. We needed new movement muscles to respond to the murder of black people and the centuries-long struggle for Black liberation.
There’s a long story, but the short story is, I spent a few days on the ground in Ferguson supporting the organization for Black struggle. I was mesmerized and taken by the unique courage of many, many people. Many of the young people on the ground were doing extraordinary things.
That community was organized in an organic way and inspiring way. I felt my highest purpose would be supporting that community, learning from that community, flanking that community, and bringing all of my skills, all the resources, all of the experiences that I had into that fight. Well, that five days turned into five months on the ground at St. Louis, where I was living in the attic of an activist and supporting the organization of Black struggle. Those five months in Ferguson and St. Louis turned into the next four or five years of my life, helping to birth and build and catalyze the movement for Black lives to become an international movement.
I want to ask you about the Movement for Black Lives and how it has evolved over the years. But let’s first go back for a moment to the organizing work, because what struck me in your trajectory of telling the story is that, for the first seven years, you were in Long Island knocking on doors. I think a lot of people can hack that work and they burn out. I wonder about the challenge of building these networks of organizers and sustaining them, finding talented organizers, and keeping them. What does that take?
I’ve thought about this a lot because I now lead a team of more than a hundred people, and some of them are new to this work. We need to build a pipeline of young people that develop these skills. I feel that we need to take organizing seriously as a discipline, and you need your organizing apprenticeship. You need that concentrated, roughly two years of really rigorous organizing where you’re engaging in hundreds, thousands of conversations. I think canvassing is a proving ground.
We also need ideology. Ideology is important because it’s like the gospel, it’s your reason for being. Why engage in this really bone-hard work? It’s to ultimately realize the gospel.
The missionaries know why they’re out there.
Exactly. This is like missionary work. I think that our movement has been too skills-heavy and maybe too process-heavy, and not visionary enough. We need to nest that work into the vision.
Let’s talk more about ideology and that vision piece. How do you teach this and how do you spread that gospel in your ranks?
You have to invest in it. You have to believe in it. It can’t just be a side dish. You have to recognize that ideology is the main course. I think the far right gets that. I think one of the things that the far right does is, they have a long arc mission. They have an ideological mission.
At Working Families, we invest in ideology by having political educators on our staff who weave in political education in every single thing that we do. We’re constantly feeding our folks ideology, as we do peer-to-peer texting. We try to weave it in.
This is a broad question, but what kinds of resources and support do you think are still needed to build stronger organizing networks on the progressive side? If one of these billionaires was willing to just start writing checks and said, “Maurice, give me the plan. I got a couple of hundred million dollars to put into this.” Where should it go? Where would you begin?
I would say, number one, if you’ve got billions of dollars, throw out your interest in proximate victories. Throw out your desire for wins and let’s build infrastructure. If we build infrastructure, the result will be sustained wins. The results will be durable power. If we focus on wins, we will look back at 10 or 20 years of trying to get wins, we will not have built anything sustained or durable. That’s the first thing I would share with them.
Where shall we build infrastructure? I would say the most important thing we could do is build a 50-state, robust pipeline of organizers and leaders that are aligned with the progressive vision. Wherever they go in the ecosystem, they will add value. Let’s focus on places that are under-resourced and under-invested. We should focus in the Southeast, in the Midwest, outside of the coastal areas that have high concentrations of progressives. We should focus on small and medium-sized cities. We should focus on counties that are considered Trump country.
What we’re ultimately trying to do is to develop a new American identity, a new multiracial democracy. That’s going to take a generation. Invest in that generational change and we’ll have all the wins that we could imagine because we’re shifting the culture. Culture beats strategy every single time.
I want to ask you about the Movement for Black Lives. You, as you said, became very involved in 2014. You went to Ferguson, you were a key organizer of the Movement for Black Lives convention in Cleveland in 2015.
Fast forward to today, it’s six years later. We’ve talked about the need to change the culture. We’ve talked about the need to build infrastructure. That movement exploded in the last year and has had a profound impact on the culture, at least for the moment. How well do you think the gains that have been made are embedded in infrastructure?
How well do you think the movement has done at affecting elections and who holds power in America? What have been the strengths? What have been the weaknesses? Where do you think there’s more work to be done?
I’m very, very proud and impressed with how far the movement has come. I think it’s undeniable that it had an indelible impact on the culture. In 2014, just the use of the language ‘Black lives matter’ was controversial. Fast forward to 2020 you had Mitt Romney saying that Black lives matter at a march. You had corporate actors like SoulCycle writing these essays about the movement. To me, that’s a proof point that we’ve shifted the dial. Now, there’s a risk when you’re ubiquitous as a movement of becoming co-opted. I think also the fact that these corporate actors are saying that doesn’t mean that they’ve somehow transformed into anti-racist institutions. But it just demonstrates to me how deep the movement is and the fact that they did the calculus that they wanted to be on the right side of history.
Now, we have a lot more work to do. This is a 500-year struggle. Racial capitalism and white supremacy are embedded in the DNA of our culture and our history. It’s going to take a lot of work to challenge those things, but I think it’s undeniable that the movement technically is the largest social movement in U.S. history. 26 million people during a pandemic hit the streets in response to the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and many other people. You take all of those proof points and I would say that the movement is strong.
Social movements are at their best when they render the invisible visible and they rendered the impossible possible. The movement has done that.
You went from the Movement for Black Lives to the Working Families Party. The party suddenly seems to have reappeared as this much more robust national organization with a multi-state strategy, integrated into other elements of the progressive coalition. I’m wondering how that happened and what the strategy is here. What is the Working Families Party all about today?
Working Families started in the late ’90s in New York. New York is one of the handful of states that has fusion voting, which allows a political party to cross-endorse candidates of other parties. Those votes come together and fuse to be a candidate’s final vote total. We built a lot of power in New York State, and eventually, we moved to Connecticut and made fusion real in Connecticut. Then eventually, we entered several other states.
Where my story meets the Working Families story is after Donald Trump became president. Like many other people, I’m horrified by Donald Trump achieving his victory, riding that white Christian identity wave to the White House.
White supremacy and white identity are a solidarity movement. The solidarity of whiteness. We needed to develop a multi-racial solidarity movement that was as powerful, more powerful, than the white Christian identity movement that Donald Trump had ridden to the White House. I felt very clear about that in my analysis, and that the movement needed to be multiracial. It needed to be grounded in working-class people. It needed to have an analysis specifically around anti-Black racism.
If we could create that alliance in the context of our politics, then we could build something that could be big enough and deep enough to take on Donald Trump. That analysis brought me to the Working Families Party. I felt, at the time, WFP was the institution best positioned to take that on—if it was willing to transform.
When Dan Cantor, who was the founding director, left, my proposition in taking the job was that I would lead that transformation. For the past two and a half years almost, I’ve been leading that transformation in the party—bringing folks from the Movement for Black Lives, from organizations like Mijente and other organizations closer to the party, and staying close to labor locals around the country. We’re bringing together the organizing power of grassroots organizations and being explicit about both race and class. The fact is that we need to talk about both with all people. We need to have the same message with white folks, Black folks, Latinx folks, native folks. If we do that, we could build an electoral united front that could have the power to defeat Trumpism.
That’s the reason why I chose to leave the Movement for Black Lives work to take on Working Families Party, to build an instrument that could do that, and do that to scale in enough places.
Two challenges in this ambitious project you’ve taken on jump out at me right away. One is getting white working-class people into this coalition. There’s a lot of work to be done there. Trump won 67% of those voters. He even won a huge number of voters in union households and there’s some line of argument among progressive strategists of, “let’s stop trying to get those voters back. They’re not coming back.” So what gives you optimism that you can make inroads with non-college, white voters who’ve been so hard for the Democrats to reach?
To me, it’s a silly debate—do we focus on “base voters” in the cities who tend to be people of color? Or do we focus on these swing voters in rural areas and the suburbs who tend to be white people?
My question is, how do we support the progressives or the folks who are continuing to be repelled by the interest of the Republicans, or continue to be repelled by the organizing of white Christian identity folks? How do we support those people, and grow them, marginally, cycle after cycle?
You can’t only win the victories that we have to win in coastal cities, metropolitan areas, or college towns. We need to contend for people everywhere. To me, there are young people in all of these counties, all of these districts, all of these demographics, who are singing a different tune, but they have to be organized.
I would argue for the idea of organizing everywhere. We’ve spent billions of dollars in this last cycle. A lot of it just went to television ads and digital ads, and a lot of those buys just went to the second house or the second yacht for some of these consultants. We can be more efficient in how we use resources. We have to invest in organizing. The problem is, the upside of organizing isn’t manifested neatly in an electoral cycle. It takes time. You have to make those investments, those are long-term investments.
Maurice. Thanks for coming to the show.
Thank you.
