The Mindful Marketplace with Joel Skene

Influential Figures in the Fight for Social Justice w/ Damien Durr - Part 2

• Joel Skene / Damien Durr

Share episode

How did a former mayor of Berkeley become a beacon of social justice and community empowerment? Join us as we journey through the impactful life of Gus Newport with our special guest, Damien Durr from DCD Empowerment and the Gus Newport Project. Damien shares his unique personal connection with Gus, detailing their encounters through the Children's Defense Fund and the National Council of Elders. We'll explore Gus's transformative tenure as mayor, where he led Berkeley to become a pioneer in divesting from South Africa and implementing groundbreaking policies like domestic benefits and commercial rent control.

Discover the often overlooked yet monumental contributions Gus made from lecturing at Harvard to leading the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston. With insights from social documentary filmmaker Leah Mahan, we delve into the community land trust model that empowered residents through eminent domain and discuss the creation of a documentary capturing this significant journey. You'll also hear about Gus's interactions with notable figures such as Danny Glover and Bernie Sanders and the formation of a nonprofit organization dedicated to sustaining his visionary values.

How does faith intersect with activism? This episode reveals Gus Newport’s enduring commitment to justice, influenced by faith leaders like Vincent Harding and Howard Thurman. We reflect on how a bottom-up theology and the teachings of Jesus shaped Gus’s approach to human dignity, anti-violence, and social issues like gentrification and homelessness. We'll challenge the misconceptions around the civil rights movement, shedding light on the critical roles played by women and unsung heroes. Tune in for a profound discussion on living a faith that promotes justice, mercy, and the well-being of all people, inspired by the unwavering spirit of Gus Newport.

https://dcdempowerment.com/

www.gusnewport.com

This program is brought to you by:
Arc Integrated

Be sure to visit BizRadio.US to discover hundreds more engaging conversations, local events and more.

Joel :

What if investing in each other could change the world? I'm Joel Skeen with bizradious, and this is the Mindful Marketplace. Welcome back to part two of my conversation with Damian Durr of DCD Empowerment and the Gus Newport Project. I'm really excited to get to dig in with him further here. If this is your first time, this is the show where we talk to the business, finance and community leaders who are all questioning the assumption that there's just one bottom line and also questioning the two-pocket thinking so pervasive in our economy and in our world. It's where we learn to really connect our values and our communities to our businesses and ourselves.

Joel :

I'm Joel Skeen and I'm just going to jump right back in here with Damien Durer. I was having a great conversation with him here on the first half of the part one of this episode. If you didn't get a chance to listen to that, please go back and do that. You're going to hear about Damien's story and about his perspective and what has shaped his life really, and it's a really fascinating journey and I'm excited to get to talk with him today about the Gus Newport Project. Damien, welcome back into the conversation. So happy to have you here today.

Damien:

Thank you, joe, glad to be here.

Joel :

So Gus Newport, I'm not an expert in the civil rights movement I would never claim to be but I knew about some of the figures that aren't quite as well-known your James Baldwins, your Stokely Carmichaels, some of these kind of folks and I actually got to live in John Lewis's district for about five years in Metro Detroit and got to meet him once and it was just this great moment. But I had actually never heard of Gus Newport and I was pretty astounded at just how central he seemed to be and yet kind of how overlooked he is. You actually had a personal relationship with Gus, is that right?

Damien:

Yes, yes, as we said in the previous conversation, based upon my work with the Children's Defense Fund, I had the opportunity to go to the Alex Haley Farm in 2015, as a result of being drafted by Reverend Janet Wolf from Nashville, tennessee, who was responsible for putting our Nashville CDF team together, and she's a part of an organization called the National Council of Elders, and so every year, biannually, this group of elders who are former organizers, faith leaders, activists, labor folks they get together with younger organizers, activists and faith leaders at the Alex Haley Farm, which is owned by the Children's Defense Fund. It's where Alex Haley used to live. It's 156 acres in Clinton, tennessee, so it's an opportunity for, obviously, intergenerational wisdom exchange and intergenerational sharing. And so, 2015, as a result of working for CDF, we went to share and James Lawson, of course, who worked with Dr King, was a part of the National Council of Elders and James Lawson, of course, worked with Dr King, was a part of the National Council of Elders and I was doing some ear hustling and I heard Gus talking about his relationship with Malcolm X and, obviously, because of my fondness and appreciation for what Malcolm X represented and still represents, I made my way over to the table and just began to engage him in a conversation, and so, in a very short period of time, he began to tell me about his relationship with Malcolm X, adam Clayton, powell Jr.

Damien:

And interesting, as you said, joe, he knew James Baldwin. He also knew Stokely Carmichael and then, of course, a host of others, and so once he said that for me it was, you know it was over, because I had never met anyone personally that knew Malcolm. So after that conversation, I brought him to Nashville, tennessee, and put together a series and litany of events that allowed him to meet different faith leaders and young people and organizers and public officials in the city of Nashville, and so that's how our relationship started in 2015.

Joel :

Yeah, that's incredible. I guess for those who have never heard of Gus, what were his, you know what were the biggest contributions that he made to the civil rights era.

Damien:

Well, you know, joe, you asked me about, we've talked about, obviously about the Fishing Differently conference, and what I realized about Gus's life is that Gus kind of always had fished differently. He was originally from Rochester, new York. First act of advocacy was when he was in the second grade. He saw someone being bullied. He stepped in between them and the bully, and he would go on to later explain to me how he felt about seeing and witnessing what he viewed obviously as an injustice. And even as a young person right, he realized that that would obviously kind of move him into where he would become. And so the values that he always said undergirded him is that he had a grandmother that took him to see Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson when he was young. He had a grandmother who would open up their house and of course his mother and father were present, but she would open up their house and would make sure that the community met the teachers that would be teaching their children. And so he said, his life to a great degree had been shaped by what he did understand at that point. Well, he saw it as beloved community in terms of making sure that children and adults would have what they would need to ultimately flourish. And so he talked about how that shaped his understanding of how he valued and viewed people. And though he would obviously get connected with Malcolm, he would ultimately move into leadership and become the former two term mayor of Berkeley, california.

Damien:

And so, based upon how he was shaped in his childhood, when he then became a public official, he was intentional about making sure that all residents would have the rights that they deserved, and so, while he was the mayor of Berkeley, berkeley was the first city to divest from South Africa under his mayoral ship. Berkeley was the first city in the United States with domestic benefits under his mayoral ship. Under his mayoral ship, berkeley was the first city to have a commercial rent control only akin to something that New York had done during Vietnam. So so his values as it pertains to how do you make policy that really reflects the needs of the people and that takes into consideration the needs of all people? And so one quick story that really undergirds, I think, his leadership when we interviewed his daughter, his daughter said she remembered being in city council meetings with him sitting on his lap, because she knew how to read when she was very young, and so if she had a question for him while he's the mayor leading the city council meeting.

Damien:

She would ask him and she said he would recline, you know, remove himself maybe from engaging dialogue, respond directly to her question and then go back to the meeting. And what Gus said is that, well, I believe that if the decisions that we are going to make in this room are going to affect the life of my daughter, why should my daughter be present in this space? So that's, that's just a small story that kind of reflects how he understood and how he committed himself to making sure that they took into consideration. How are these decisions going to affect the tender age, the teenage, the young adult age, the middle age and the very age living in this community?

Joel :

There's an indigenous saying that says when we make decisions, we shouldn't just make them thinking about ourselves, obviously, but also not just our children, but we should actually be thinking about seven generations out from now and I think, whether it's in business or it's in faith or it's in community, in any way, having that longterm approach is it's. It's something that seems so simple and so obvious, yet so often never even thought of or even completely ignored. If it does get get brought up, Obviously, Gus has had. You know, Mr Newport has had such a huge impact in this world and you've actually gone on to work to create a documentary and kind of a library and a project commemorating and, you know, preserving his life and his work. Tell us about how that came to be.

Damien:

Well, when I went to visit him in 2018, because obviously, as you just heard, just hearing about the uniqueness of his life he had been told by students across the country and different people that he should make a documentary and that, or that he should write a book, and so obviously I echoed those sentiments tremendously. So when I went to visit him in 2018, he took me to meet Leah Mahan, who was a social documentary filmmaker who he had met when he was lecturing at Harvard in the 80s, and so she heard him at a lecture she had just been doing some work on Eyes on the Prize she went up and introduced herself, and so at that time, he was the executive director of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston. Director of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston. And the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative is the first and only nonprofit in the United States to get eminent domain using the community land trust model. So he had just became the executive director when they had gotten eminent domain, and so Leah ended up doing a documentary on that community and that process, that that narrated how they got him in a domain and then what they created in terms of the W Street Neighborhood Initiative, and she recorded the whole process of that transformation, and Gus made sure that he bought the camera equipment and got her into the, got her into the community.

Damien:

So once he introduced me to her over the years, we began to just kind of do some get some B-roll footage of him as he went across the country.

Damien:

His best friend is Danny Glover. He's good friends with Bernie Sanders, so we captured different moments with him moving around the country, speaking and engaging with Danny and with others, and so as a result of COVID, that was the first time that he was in a central location for that, as many of us right for that long period of time, and so during COVID we were able to record about 32 interviews with people from his unique journey, and so that gave us a greater understanding of how other people obviously understood his leadership and what his leadership had meant to their lives, and that's a and it's a wide range of personalities that we had the opportunity to interview, and so we then ended up creating a nonprofit that would ultimately also serve to share his values to share his values, and the story is just obviously kind of the lead but his values, of how he understood leadership, how he empowered young people and how he really committed himself to trying to make a better world.

Joel :

You know, having you on here, haven't you done so much? You have personal connections and you've also obviously done a lot of studying and you know research on the history of that time of the civil rights movement. I guess when you think about whether it's from Gus's perspective or the movement as a whole, do you feel like there's anything that's like a biggest misconception, like what's the biggest misconception that you feel like is out there about the civil rights movement and maybe Gus's involvement too?

Damien:

Yeah, that's an interesting question, Joel. I think oftentimes movements, as we both know, can become so personality centric that they don't necessarily take into consideration, right the broad stroke of people that were involved and obviously we know, as we mentioned, people like even a John Lewis or Martin Luther King Right. They become such large figures that they may be and not to their desire, overshadow the many different people that were a part of the movement. Obviously, one of the challenges that has come up is obviously the women right that were involved in the movement that possibly did not get the notoriety that they deserve but were central right to so, as they are to the black church, as they are to our society, that are central to moving the movement forward and being bold and being unapologetic about continuing the fight for justice, and so I think that's that's one thing.

Damien:

And then another thing sometimes is, if you say civil rights, if that's connected maybe just to nonviolence, there may be the misconception that nonviolence was not a, was not the best approach to dealing with the challenges that took place, or that the misconception is that nonviolence may be too passive and nonviolence may be a, might have weakness to it, when in fact those in the movement understood nonviolence as a as a very significantly powerful way Right To challenge, because the challenge of not responding with evil not responding and living in fear. So I think that's a sometimes that's another, uh, misconception around the methodologies, right, that were used, but there were multiple methodologies, uh, because we're not monolithic as humans, um, and trying to solve a problem has to have, as you said, right, avoiding the two-pocket approach. So I think those are just some of the things that you hear and see that are sometimes misconceptions or just shallow interpretations of what the movement represented.

Joel :

Yeah, and I know that Gus Newport passed away not too long ago. It was in the last few years. I'm curious. You know the world has changed a lot since that time and since he was mayor at Berkeley. And you know the world has changed a lot since that time and since he was mayor at Berkeley and you know now we're seeing Berkeley back in the news. You know I saw that he was one of the people doing student protests back in the eighties around. You know African, south African apartheid and obviously you know some things have changed, some things are still the same. I'm curious if you got to glean any perspective from him in those later days of his life about kind of the way the world is now and what he would like to see happen and how to go about that.

Damien:

Yeah, we obviously would talk multiple times a week and again the tragic nature of his, of his death, because he was 88 years old and he was still running right um like he was 48 years old. And so then the family has a um wrongful death lawsuit in san francisco superior court currently based upon the way in which um he died. But he was still seeking to uh challenge right um the realities that were taking place and what he saw right as the moral bankruptcy that he saw apparent in our world. And he was the vice president to the World Peace Council. So when you talk about right, his positions on South African apartheid, he obviously had a relationship with Castro. He had made Berkeley a sanctuary city because, for him, the values of human dignity a sanctuary city because, for him, the values of human dignity, for him the values of what it meant to be considered significant and important right, went beyond that two pocket approach. It went beyond the narrow ways in which we try to confine people to just a very shallow way of understanding their own humanity. And so for him, he was still engaged and involved locally in terms of politics, in terms of the Berkeley, california area, but he was also still connected to many different people across the United States. He worked with an organization called Project South that was obviously working against Cop City in Atlanta. He was he's on Project South board. He was still connected to the national uh council of elders.

Damien:

He was still being sought after um by communities who were dealing with, obviously, gentrification and, based upon the work that he had done in dublin street, he was obviously significantly concerned with, uh, the increase in the housing market. He always talked about homelessness because obviously living in california right, it's on a whole nother scale. So he was always concerned about those not having safe space, not having opportunity to raise their children in safe space. And obviously he was concerned about violence. So he was still an advocate of, he was anti-violence, if you would, and still challenging the ways in which policing takes place in this country. So he was still speaking to those issues and looking at the intersection of those issues and ultimately, how does policy reflect a sense of moral depth that addresses those issues that ultimately kind of diminish people's hope and diminish their desire to want to live and desire to want to, you know, become their best self.

Joel :

Yeah, you mentioned the intersection. You know of a lot of different things there and I'm curious if you saw for Gus Newport the intersection you mentioned. You know your faith at the beginning and coming out of that but I'm wondering did you see the intersection of his work in civil rights and in activism? How did that intersect with his faith?

Damien:

Yeah, you know what Vincent Harding, who was Martin Luther King Jr's speechwriter, and Vincent Harding is who drafted Gus into the National Council of Elders, and so when he always would say, when Vincent asked him to be a part of the National Council of Elders, he would say, saying his deep, lion-like baritone voice, he said well, you know, vince, I'm not really into the church like that. And Vincent Harding told him at that point you know, gus, you are doing the work the church is supposed to be doing. And so that became for him, as he said. That really did something to his spirit and really what I always would say about Gus is that he was a mystic. He loved Howard Thurman and of course I'm a big Howard Thurman fan the pastor of the first integrated church, the Church of the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco, california, and so Gus's faith, maybe not having a particular denominational affiliation or maybe having a particular claim, he had, what I told him all the time is, I believe, that his love for people and I believe that if god is love, gus reflected such a deep love for people. That is how I saw him live that into moving into public policy and still being involved, um, in challenging um empire.

Damien:

Uh, if you will, because his his faith, and he was in relationship with a lot of faith folks, right as he was challenging sometimes how their faith maybe was more individualistic than communal, because faith can become so I'm good, I'm fine, my family is fine.

Damien:

That doesn't mean that it's an outward looking faith that says, like the sign that I used to see in nashville, all the time and as people see that sign now, that sign that says drive like your kids, live here.

Damien:

Which means what? Don't just be concerned about the safety of your children, be concerned about the safety of all of the young people that are in this community. So he lived out of a deep love for people, open to all perspectives, even if he disagreed vehemently with somebody's political ideology that led them to to obviously making decisions. He was able to cross the aisle in very unique ways and listen and consider, while while still being unapologetically black and still being unapologetic about what he believed. But he was able to to hold differing perspectives in consideration because he was not a categorical thinker and he wasn't a linear thinker. Right, he thought about it all as a collective, which is why he was sought after by multiple groups, from El Salvador, from Cuba to Africa, to those who were of the Jewish faith. So he had such a wide array of relationships because he really lived, I think, out of a spirit of love for all people.

Joel :

Yeah, I love that as you're describing kind of his approach. It reminds me, I think it's. I'm a pastor's kid so I should probably know this, but I know it's in the Old Testament it's do justice, love, mercy and walk yeah. I'm curious if, if you have anything that you would expand on uh, just to close us out here on on, if that's sparking anything for you.

Damien:

Oh well, see, Joe, I know we got to go, so you shouldn't even went there, but I'll say this very I'll say this very swiftly since you, since you want to close on a question, a question like that, and again, it is grounded in a bottom-up theology, right, there is a way in which we live in a world and the ways in which King and others Fannie Lou Hamer and Ida B Wells and Mary McLeod Bethune had a bottom-up theology over against the world, and we have a top-down, toxic theology, right, that looks at people maybe from a perch right Above, instead of considering. And when we think about how we understand Jesus, jesus ministered to those who were on the margins. If he in fact his narrative is, we understand impoverishment, but being born under the conditions and circumstances under which he was born under Roman Empire, conditions and circumstances under which he was born under Roman Empire, but also born in conditions no prenatal care for Mary, born in a barn urine, feces, animal feces, rodent's rat. So when you talk about, it doesn't get any more hood, as we would say, it don't get any more coming from the mud than that. Right and literally right being born in the mud. Right and literally right being born in the mud, but yet he decided when he, when he and again the fishing differently concept who he calls. He calls folks who are uneducated, who are untrained, who are unproven, and he empowers them right to what impact.

Damien:

I came not for those who are well, I came for those who were sick, and so what I learned and this is what I'll close on, what I learned and what Jesus, I think, manifested and I got this when I was in grad school is the expansion of how we understand poverty, and Jesus ministered in this way. I took a class called God, poverty and economy and it looked at the five spheres of poverty economic poverty, being I have no bread. Political poverty, being I have no power. Bread. Political poverty, being I have no power. Spiritual poverty, being I have no hope. Physical poverty, being I'm sick and I have no health care. And cultural poverty, being I have no name and I have no identity.

Damien:

And the work and ministry of Jesus sought to eradicate all of those impoverishment. So when Jesus said that the poor will be with you always, he was not just talking about the lack of money. He was talking about those who didn't have hope, those who didn't have access to health care, those who did not have a name and an identity that gave them a sense of value. And so for me, and how I think, gus live, and for others I've been so privileged. To me, it is understanding that the jesus that we talk about, because when people say jesus, we may not be talking about the same one. We're talking about the one who ultimately was lynched by the government as a result of having an agenda that gave power to those who were never supposed to have it, who gave life to those who were never supposed to have it, and because of the life and the power he gave them, they began to what, spread that word, empower others and challenge the systems that ultimately created the poverty in the first place.

Joel :

We'll end on that, man. I love it. Damien, thank you so much for your time here today, for you listening out there. Make sure to tune into us here on BizRadio US, as well as all the podcast services that are out there YouTube, spotify, itunes, everywhere else. And, man, until next time, take care of yourself. Youtube, spotify, itunes, everywhere else. And man, until next time, take care of yourself. Take care of someone else and remember we are each other.