In an annual commemoration of Rev.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mayor Cicilline will, for the sixth
year, induct three prominent members of the Providence community
to the MLK Hall of Fame tonight at 7:00 p.m. at the Rhode Island
Convention Center. City News got the honor of sitting with
Providence native and distinguished community leader Michael Van
Leesten, one of three recipients of this year’s award.
In his formative days as a young RIC student learning the
ropes of community organizing, Van Leesten responded early on to
Dr. King’s call for students across the country to converge in
Atlanta, Georgia in 1962, where they would be given the tools and
education to mobilize Southern blacks and register them to
vote. Ultimately, this remarkable experience is what planted
the seeds for a lifetime of outstanding achievement and service to
the King legacy for over four decades. Through his story we
learn how his work has made many lasting changes for the better in
the lives of so many neighbors in Providence and beyond.
In the aftermath of our nation’s historic inauguration of our
first African-American President, Van Leesten – one of
Providence’s important Civil Rights heroes - recounts the movement
that led him and all of us there.
How would you describe your experiences as a young
person, living through the era of the Civil Rights Movement in
this country?
Quite candidly, I was sailing along pretty easily, playing
sports, going to college from ’61 to ’65, and while there in
school, came to the realization that there was an important and
very serious Civil Rights Movement under way, led by Dr.
King. Someone suggested I read a book called The Negro
Revolt by Louis Lomax and reading the book created an awareness in
me that the constitution wasn’t really being applied to all
citizens and that I had a big responsibility to try to be a part
of this movement even though it wasn’t a popular movement during
those years. But I did recall in American history when the
colonists dumped the tea in the Boston Harbor, protesting against
taxation without representation, well, they weren’t very popular
either! So I realized then that in the business of change,
way back then, that you had to do things based upon your
philosophy, your commitment, and recognize that you were not going
to be amongst the majority of thinkers.
In Providence, I rolled with a small band of activists at
Rhode Island College. I organized RI Students For Equality,
which consisted not just of students from RIC but also coalesced
with Brown, URI, and PC and we protested for the Fair Housing Bill
in the state. We protested for it because there was a lot of
discrimination in housing back in those days. A lot of
people were limited to certain areas in the city and state.
We fought hard, we demonstrated, we conducted sit-ins, and we
finally got the legislation passed. But it required a lot of
direct action and a lot of education surrounding it for people who
didn’t understand the injustices involved in these housing
practices. So that got me then to think about Dr. King some
more.
There was a call out from Dr. King’s office for students to
come and help register voters in Atlanta, Georgia in 1962 because
Atlanta was going to be the beachhead for the whole civil rights
movement in the South. At that time, Atlanta had four
historical black colleges in town – Morehouse, Spelman, Clark, and
Atlanta University – and a couple of black-owned businesses.
It was one of the few places where there was a critical mass of
strong African-American people and institutions. So I went
there to register people to vote. My team leader was a young
guy named Andrew Young. That’s how I met and knew the Rev.
Andrew Young and I began with a group of students from the North
and South, registering people to vote in Atlanta.
The big relationship with Dr. King and the Southern Christian
Leadership Council came about when I graduated in the summer of
1965. Congress had just passed the Voting Rights Act.
Black people were denied the vote big time in the South, and
psychologically in the North as well. After the bill was
passed, it needed to get tested. Dr. King had a strategy for
testing it. That’s when his call to students came about, 365
students converged in Atlanta. We spent one whole week with
Dr. King and his folks on strategy and how we were all going to
fan out to Black Belt counties throughout the South and start
mobilizing and community-organizing, getting people out to vote,
challenging laws there, and bringing in the Feds – all that good
stuff that you read about.
We were steeped in the Ghandian philosophy of
nonviolence. Everybody had to be fully aware that
nonviolence was the power of the movement, and that if anybody
there had any violent inclinations then they were weeded out of
the group. A few were.
So in the first week, we determined what counties we’d be
going into. My group consisted of me and six other Brown
students and we were assigned to Choctaw County, Alabama.
Choctaw County had about five to six thousand potentially eligible
black voters. Out of that, there were 110 that were
registered to vote. The laws in that county, which were
typical of all the other counties in the South, was that you were
eligible to vote the first Monday of every month between the hours
of 9 to 3 at the County Courthouse, which was one of the most
oppressive places you’d ever want to see in your life. So
you wouldn’t dare go down there to register to vote! Our job
was to get those places open 9 to 5, five days a week, and to
create safety for the citizens to come in to vote. In order
to do that, you had to have a confrontation. So we mobilized
our community, brought them to the courthouse, worked with all the
church groups – and in the midst of getting stoned and getting
sprayed with tear gas, you can’t help but get so inspired by the
courage of the people that had to live there and deal with
it. The Ku Klux Klan, too, was very active in Choctaw
County, which was right on the Mississippi border. Our place
was about 24 miles in Philadelphia, Mississippi where three
activists - Schwerner, Goodman, and Cheney - were murdered.
So we were right in the hotbed of all that violence.
We didn’t make any progress other than being able to connect
with the Justice Department and the Vice President and call for an
investigation into these acts. They sent down the
Feds. The Feds opened up the courthouse from 9 to 5 and told
the town that folks had the right to come in and vote.
Slowly but surely, over a four-month period, we registered 1,500
people – which was huge. That was the critical mass of an
organization that lives still to this day. So that was the
time when I got involved and served as the greening of my life in
terms of what I wanted to do.
After that remarkable experience in the South, how
did you take those lessons and organizing skills back to your
hometown in Providence?
When I came back, I worked with the State Commission Against
Discrimination, which enforced the State Housing and Employment
Laws for RI. While there, we looked at ways to create change
and do things. I was introduced to Cliff Monteiro who worked
with the Council of Churches to an organization called OIC, stood
for Opportunities Industrialization Center.
The OIC was just starting in Philadelphia then and was
started as a response to black people not having skill sets to
take on new job opportunities. So we had to create a
training and placement institution in cooperation with businesses
to place people in jobs. I was the volunteer that started
that whole process here in RI, thanks to Cliff who introduced me
to it and to a whole bunch of great people, we built an
organization that I led up to 1985. I was there for 18
years. We did an awful lot of things – creating jobs and
opportunities for thousands of RI residents.
Where was the OIC located in
Providence?
Where the CCRI Providence campus is now. It was a
five-year journey to get there. We had been operating out of
different offices around the city. It started out with a few
square feet of storefront and we just started building it out and
building it out to a point where we reached a critical mass of
training opportunities and I saw the need for a centralized symbol
of something, for many it meant hope and opportunity. I got
denials and rejections, one after the other, until I went to see
former Senator John Pastore who was then the Chairman of the
Appropriations Committee on the project. Long story short,
he told me, ‘Mike I like your idea. If it can be done, I can
do it.’ A few weeks later, he had me down to Washington, DC.
A few months later, I signed a contract for $4.5 million to build
this building, raised a few more million dollars, and in the end,
we built a $6 million building, which is now CCRI.
The OIC was involved in the development of some of our
state’s key black-owned companies - Omni Development Corporation,
Banneker Industries, the RI Black Heritage Society, the Langston
Hughes Center for the Arts – so many people and institutions came
through and out of that organization. It created so
much opportunity and jobs for thousands of people. We even
built the first small business development center with Bryant
College. We went to Africa and did some community
development there too. And so that’s how I manifested my
civil rights work, and what I was going to do for the
community.
It’s been a life commitment to do things that enhance the
black community and which then enhances the whole community.
I’ve always felt that when we put the mission statement for the
Black Rep, for example, we talk about building bridges, creating
hope and opportunity, provoking thought – those things they
transcend the Black Rep’s mission statement. It’s pretty
much my own mission statement and it speaks to the work that I
do.
I remember once I asked the Jewish philanthropist and
activist, Irving Fain, here in RI, who was a strong supporter of
the civil rights movement and supported all the things I was
involved in. I asked him, why do you support black causes?
His response to me was, ‘Because as a Jew, my theology tells me
that I have to reach out to others. But that you should
remember, Mike, that I’m a Jew first and that I take care of my
people first. All the other things follow.’ That’s how
I feel. I feel that I’m committed to African-American people
first and foremost, but in the context of helping a whole.
You know we’re only as good as the sum of all of our parts and I
firmly believe that. I love this country. I’ve been
around and I know what other places are like and I want to make it
stronger.
In most recent times, in
Providence, your work as the Chairman of the Black Rep is one of
many noteworthy things you’ve accomplished. You mentioned
that the essence of their mission speaks to your own life’s
work. Tell us briefly about this work.As far as Black Rep is concerned, we’ve amassed a great
amount of activities that have made the company an important part
of the art and cultural fabric of the city, especially through
Sound Session and all the theater, education, and public programs
that we’ve done for more than a decade now. Going forward,
like most other organizations, we really got to re-trench and
rethink how we go forward because these are new days. It’s
going to require new ways to keep the organization not just
surviving but growing. Just like the civil rights movement,
the same principles are going to be applied. The institution
is important. It will go beyond survival if we can maintain
a critical mass of people involved and on board to keep it
moving.
This Tuesday, the country inaugurated its first
African-American President Barack Obama. Many say that this
marks the realization of Dr. King’s Dream. Do you feel that
way?
It’s a realization of a major portion of the dream.
When Dr. King talked about ‘one day we ought to be measured by the
content of our character and not by the color of our skin,’ I
think this inauguration is a manifestation of that point that he
made so clearly. Yesterday, for me, taking the work of Dr.
King from 1962 to the present, trying mightily to recognize that
back then the majority of the country was not supportive of the
Civil Rights Movement, and that the blacks and whites involved in
advancing civil rights were in the minority – to now –
40-something years later, that black-white coalition is in the
majority, and brown and yellow and red, is in the majority of
public thinking now.
I just feel and understand, as a history major, that things
change over long periods of time. It has to be balanced out
with patience because change doesn’t just come, it has to evolve,
and it has to have the activism to push that evolution
through.
What were you thinking or feeling as you watched
President Obama take the oath?
I was at home watching it with my youngest son, Jordan.
I felt really gratified. I had a lump in my throat so big
yesterday I could hardly talk. I couldn’t explain it or
express it. I didn’t go to the inauguration, but I was
there. I didn’t go to the March in Washington, but I was
there. Not everyone understands that.
But one of the parallels I see between Dr. King and President
Obama is their intellectual capacity. They are so deeply
intelligent at a time when the world really requires
intelligence. They’re both so deeply international.
Back then, Dr. King understood the relationship with the
international community and part of his strategy was knowing that
if the world is going to respect democracy, how was it going to
respect it if its black citizens were being treated
unjustly. And so by making those kinds of public sit-ins and
marches and demonstrations, we were gaining international
attention and could bring the question to bear on the Congress of
the United States to do something about it. Obama has an
international understanding of the world and how it relates to all
that is going on now.
I’ve been in the company of both of them. They’re both
humble yet strong and ambitious – ambitious not in a negative way
but ambitious in the way of trying to get something good done for
the people of the world.
You mentioned you shared the inauguration with your
son. To that, what do you say to the younger generation
today about civil rights, tolerance, justice, and
equality?
I would say that we all have a responsibility to do the best
we can to become good human beings, to prepare ourselves
educationally obviously but also philosophically and
spiritually. And I’m not a theologian and I’m not talking
about any kind of religion, but just recognize that there’s
something bigger than yourself, there’s something more powerful
out there moving around, and that you’re just a small but
important part of that. You have responsibility to advance
things and to shed yourself of selfishness to the extent that you
can and to respect the rights of others – basic kinds of
stuff. And most importantly, find the time to help
somebody. Work hard.
Everyone is invited to attend the Mayor’s MLK
Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony to be held tonight at 7 pm at the
RI Convention Center Rotunda Room. Event parking is
discounted at $4 a car. For more on Mike Van Leesten’s
work today, go to www.vanleestengroup.com.
Mayor David N. Cicilline,
representatives from the Rhode Island building trades, YouthBuild
and advocates of green job growth today sent an urgent message to
Washington. Surrounded by several displaced workers at the
offices of netWORKri, the Mayor urged Congress to act quickly on
President Obama’s $825 billion American Recovery &
Reinvestment Plan currently pending before the
Congress.
