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JAMES C. DICKSON: DON’T MOURN: ORGANIZE!
By Kathi
Wolfe
James C. “Jim” Dickson, head of the American
Association of People with Disabilities Disability Vote Project, is a man on a
mission. Dickson, who is blind, not only works to make the world more just, but
he organizes oppressed communities, including the disability community, so that
they, too, can work for justice.
Dickson, who has been engaged in community organizing for 38
years, boasts a number of accomplishments. With the Sierra Club, he organized
the first grass-roots congressional mobilization for the environmental
movement, which resulted in passage of the first Clean Air Act. He was a
co-founder of Project Vote!, a national, non-partisan organization that has
registered three and a half million African-Americans. He led the National
Organization on Disability’s VOTE 2000 campaign and the movement that
successfully placed the statue of FDR in a wheelchair at the entrance to the
Washington memorial. For five years, Dickson has led the AAPD Disability Vote
Project, a coalition of 36 national disability organizations that works to
close the political participation gap for people with disabilities. He also
co-chairs the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights’ Help America Vote Act
Task Force.
In a recent interview in his office on K Street in Washington,
D.C., with his guide dog Yankee lying on the floor beside his desk, Dickson,
60, related how he landed his first professional position in 1968.
“I’d just graduated from Brown College (in Providence, R.I.),”
Dickson said. “I didn’t have a clue about what I wanted to do. I just
wanted to make things better.”
One of his roommates was working with a Catholic priest who
dealt with welfare-rights issues. “He told me: ‘I don’t like to
hire Brown students. You like to show how smart you are and to work things out
without conflict. I want someone to stand up for welfare rights.’”
That wasn’t a problem for Dickson. “You want someone
to give social workers a hard time!” Dickson said. Growing up in Boston,
he’d had some bad experiences with a few of the social workers in the
Massachusetts Commission for the Blind. “I couldn’t do anything about
that, but I could have some fun with the social workers who weren’t
treating the welfare recipients fairly,” said Dickson, who subsequently
signed on with the Rhode Island Fair Welfare Rights Organization.
He and his co-workers trained people on welfare to speak up for
their rights. “I’d say to them: ‘This is what the social worker
will say. This is what you’ll need to say. I’d say, can’t you
say this in a more confrontational way?’” When conditions for welfare
recipients failed to improve, Dickson and his colleagues pasted “Most
Wanted” posters of the “worst five” social workers on churches,
offices and other places in the community. Eventually, those tactics paid off.
Dickson was called away from his summer vacation to attend a meeting with the
governor. “The governor told us he’d found a million dollars to be
used to provide every child on welfare in the state with new back-to-school
clothes in the fall,” he said. “I was hooked.”
Dickson has worked for 25 years in non-partisan voter
registration and get-out-the vote drives. He got excited by election-year
campaigns in 1972, when he volunteered for the McGovern campaign in Boston.
After volunteering for a while, he applied for a job opening and didn’t
get it. Said Dickson: “I had credentials as an organizer. I did some
probing and found out that the campaign director didn’t think a blind guy
could do the work. I waited until they had a big meeting with staff and donors.
I said, ‘If you offer me the job I wouldn’t take it. Someone as
stupid as you is going to lose the campaign!’” Dickson got called to
work in the McGovern campaign in California.
Dickson said he won’t stay in a job when he no longer finds
it challenging. “I’m always thinking, ‘How can I do this
better?’” he said. “If I’m not saying, ‘I don’t
know what the hell I’m supposed to do now,’ then I’m
bored.”
Like many community organizers, Dickson is a follower of late
American philosopher Saul Alinsky. “Alinsky believed that change happens
from the bottom up...that democracy only remains healthy by constant agitation
from the bottom,” Dickson said. “He believed that if you bring
together oppressed people, get them talking, trusting each other, that you can
win major change.”
Voting needs to become as much a part of the culture of the
disability community as “I have a right!” or accessibility, Dickson
said. It will happen, “but slowly, in increments,” he added.
Dickson offered these tips to individuals and organizations who
want to get people with disabilities to vote:
- Instead of a long piece about voting, include a sentence in
every newsletter article that mentions it, such as, “If you want this
legislation passed – vote.”
- In your e-mail, put a quote about voting (such as “I
vote, do you?”) on your signature line.
- Record a message about voting (such as: “I have a
disability and I vote. I hope you do, too.”) on your voice mail on your
land or cell phone.
- Include a reminder to register and vote on every alert about
anything.
Getting people to the polls requires many phone calls, Dickson
said. “I’ll tell a disability group, say, a state council of the
blind: ‘You have 1800 members. You need to make 1800 phone calls this
weekend to get people to vote on Tuesday.’ They’re shocked that they
have to make that many calls. I tell them, ‘That’s the only way to
get people to the polls.’”
Kathi Wolfe is a free-lance writer from northern Virginia.
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