A Conversation with Harry Boyte about the Forgotten Meaning of "Citizen," Minneapolis ICE Protests and Much More

Heidi Burgess:  I'm Heidi Burgess, and I'm here with my partner, Guy Burgess, and we're talking today with Harry Boyte, who is a Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar of Public Work Philosophy at Augsburg University and Senior Scholar of the new Institute for Public Life and Work

Harry Boyte: And before that at the University of Minnesota, so I've had two academic homes 

Heidi: Right. More impressive than that, to me, is the fact that you've been working in the areas of citizenship and public work and nonviolent action for years in actual communities and local institutions . You also worked with Martin Luther King in the citizenship schools of the civil rights movement.  And that, I think, from earlier conversations that we had, really framed your image of what it meant to be a citizen and enabled to you to see citizenship as power, civic agency, not just seeing citizens as being victims of the all-powerful government or consumers of benefits. 

Harry: Absolutely. Powerful and dignified citizens.

Heidi: So we want to talk about a bunch of things that revolve around that theme. The other thing that's interesting at the moment about Harry is that he lives in the Twin City area. So he has been up close and personal with the events that have been unfolding there. And I want to get his insight on that and nonviolence and how that all plays out.

We came up with the idea of having this conversation when Harry told us about the brand new Civic Scholars Council, which is part of Braver Angels. Harry and a team of a few other people started this new entity last week.

So I want to start by asking you to talk about that and how it relates to all these other themes that we've been talking about. We'll see where the conversation goes. 

Harry: Okay. In Braver Angels there was a body called the Scholars Council, with about 135 people on it. I was on it. It was people who were reasonably well-known or well-known in the scholarly fields and the public conversation. But it didn't do anything. It just wasa list of prominent people. 

With the new well council, there are two factors, amplifying the organization’s new. On citizenship and also on action. As you probably know, there's been a group in Braver Angels, which I've been on, which has worked for a couple of years on the idea of adding civic action to dialogue and deliberation. Braver Angels is known for constructive conversations across differences, for workshops and other methods like debates, which teach people to listen to and respect other people with different points of view.

A number of Reds in the organization (Reds are the Republicans or more conservative people), started saying, "Well, talk is fine, but what are we doing?" We want to make an impact on our communities. And so, since my own background has been in civic organizing and civic change, I helped form a group now called the Citizen-led Solution Support Team. We have five people, and we just hired a new and very talented staff person. So we were pushing the organization to think about taking action, and also thinking in larger civic terms about impact, beyond simply depolarization. Depolarizing  is important, and it's continuing to be important. But it's not the same as making culture change or making a better community. Depolarization alone is on a more personal scale.

At the same time, Braver Angels has had a change of leadership.  We have a new president named Maury Giles, who is very action-oriented. He came in with a strong conviction that Braver Angels had to be a kind of catalyst, not itself the embodiment of a movement, but a catalyst for a broad movement encouraging culture change and putting the concept of courageous citizenship at the center of that. How do we make citizenship reappear in our society as well as "citizen" being an identity?   That’s a central question the Civic Scholars Council will address, through many angles.

The I work I did for the citizenship schools that were sponsored by Dr. King's organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference relates to that. We had about 900 citizenship schools. Tens of thousands of people went through them.  Andy Young called them the leadership base of the whole movement. And I think that's probably true in communities across the south.  Citizenship was far more than legal status. It was about a new sense of what King called “somebody-ness,” dignity, pride, self-worth. And this goes to the kind of conceptual work that the Citizen Scholars Council will need to do. 

Here there are two meanings of “citizen” that need to be distinguished. The second meaning, at the heart of American democracy, has largely disappeared .

 Political theorist James Tulley calls this “civil citizenship.” It is government-centered and defined by legal status. One enjoys certain rights as a formal legal member of a polity. But it's not empowering, really. There are only minimal duties like you have jury duty or you have to obey the laws.

The second concept of citizenship, powerful in the civil rights movement, was what Tulley calls “civic” citizenship. Civic could also be called horizontal while the first is vertical, involving the individual’s relation to the state. The second is among citizens, what people actually do to solve problems, build a better community, and create a democratic society. It's the activities of citizenship.

In our own theoretical work, as we probably talked about before, we add to volunteering and the focus on acts of kindness and service, all of which are important. This is the communitarian strand of civic citizenship. We stress work and work sites and institutions which are created by work at sites of citizenship.  I saw this in practice in the civic preachers and teachers and business people and truck drivers and sharecroppers of the movement. We’ve developed a conceptual language around the work of citizenship.

The idea that citizenship is much more than simply legal status was at the heart of the civil rights movement and the older freedom movement. Blacks didn't have legal status under slavery.

For instance David Walker in 1829, a Black journalist in Boston, made an “appeal to colored citizens of the United States.”He wasn't equating that with legal status. He was saying, in effect, "the citizen is an agent of culture change .We need to change the society. We need to institute a different understanding of human equality and dignity." So that just was DNA of the movement.

It's been kind of appalling that citizenship has shrunk in the last 20 years. George Bush made his campaign in 2000 about the call to citizenship, the communitarian service version, which is important. Barack Obama in 2008 said citizenship is us all doing our part. “All hands on deck,” was a slogan, along with “yes we can” and “I'm running to revitalize citizenship.” Government can't solve complex problems by itself. Those campaigns were  high-profile, but since then the language of citizenship has largely disappeared from public discussion. Horizontal or civic citizenship has been replaced with vertical citizenship -- this notion of  legal status.

It's a lapse of progressives as well as conservatives. The Trump team has been pushing a very narrow version of legal citizenship. But who on the progressive side has pushed back and said, "No, that's not the only meaning of citizenship. That's a very narrow, one-dimensional view." School districts across the country have taken citizenship out of their mission statements because they think it's racist and exclusive. They using the narrow definition.

I was just talking to some friends in a wonderful group of young people in Minnesota called the Civic Bridgers. They do worklike Beyond Intractability that crosses divides. They were doing a project with young leaders across the statewho were saying, "Well, we're not going to call people citizens of our communities because that's exclusive. We're just going to call them residents." You have an enormous loss when that happens

Robust citizenship that builds better communities is much more powerful. The other thing that's really important is the idea of citizenship as a kind of office. The Supreme Court Justice said "the highest office in a democracy is the Office of Citizen". Jimmy Carter said the same thing when he left the office of president. He said, "I'm going to the office that is more important than President," which is the Office of Citizen. 

It sounds rhetorical, unless you examine it carefully. What it means is that citizenship is an identity. It's rising above immediate conflicts. The [civil rights'] movement was very clear about this. The program notes of the March on Washington (I was there as an 18-year-old) illustrate. 

The program notes called for people to be nonviolent and disciplined and calm. The March wasn't a protest. It wasn't trying to polarize. Then there is this passage which points to the public elements in citizenship: 

“iin a neighborhood dispute, there may be stunts, rough words, and hot insults. But when a whole people speaks to its government, the quality of the action and the dialogue need to reflect the worth of the people and the responsibility of the government.” Now, that is a direct call to the office of citizenship.

When you lose that sense of civic citizenship, you lose a larger identity of people working together on common problems and building healthy communities. You lose “we the people.” 

We could transition into the situation in the Twin Cities if you'd like. 

Guy: Is this parallel to the distinction between the rights of citizens and the obligations of citizens? 

Harry: It's related to that.

Guy:  This is a time where we focus on rights, but don't think about obligations. 

Harry: It's related to that because the legalistic definition, it has some responsibilities like jury duty, or if you have a national military conflict like Vietnam, the government calls you into military service, and then you're supposed to obey the law. But the duties of the legalistic understanding of citizenship are pretty minimal.

The civic understanding of citizenship includes responsibilities to be a good citizen, to be a caring neighbor, to be involved in the community, to help make it a better place. 

But I would say the public work theory conveys the idea of building communities and building a democracy.  That adds to responsibilities a capacity focus. It's the capacities and the agency and the sense of dignity and ownership, one develops when you help to build something. So that's another dimension of it. 

Heidi: I think the notion of agency is extremely important. 

Harry: Yes!

Heidi: And it reflects, I think, one of the big problems that we're facing now is the notion of a good citizen is no longer widely seen as working together to help your community or your nation solve problems. It's seen as fighting for your side to beat the other side.

Harry: It's kind of a consumer. It's based on a consumer view. 

Heidi: So getting out the vote. So it is all seen as revolving around elections. 

Harry: And the government. 

Heidi: We were talking earlier before we started recording about the Inter-Movement Impact Project and other people have come up with this rubric of Block, Build, Bridge, and Belong, and they're trying to figure out how to balance those. But there's folks who are very much on blocking the bad guys. And the left sees that, of course, as Trump and MAGA supporters. And the right, when Biden or Obama were in power, was seeing it as the left. So it goes both ways.   I think it's sort of that a citizen, I think, is seen as working hard to block the bad guys, rather than working together to solve our problems.

Harry: It's also that citizenship has become a bad word on the left. As I was mentioning before, school districts are abandoning the word, because it's become so narrow. It’s been weaponized by the administration. So school districts are taking the term citizen out of their mission statements. I have a friend ,Johann Neem, who's a professor of history at Western Washington University. He told me that his little towntook the term citizenship out of the mission statement. He asked them,  "Well, what are you doing? Our schools are supposed to produce good citizens." They said, "No, it's an exclusive and racist term. We're not going to do it." They substituted "individual." Which is terrible. 

Some young people told me that city governments are taking the word "citizen" out of their description of who they work with, replacing it with "resident."

Who's inspired by that? Citizen has become a bad word in a lot of quarters, and that's a huge problem, because you not only lose the empowering quality of feeling like you're building a community that's better, and you get visibility, and you get ownership.

You also lose this whole concept of the station of citizenship, or the office of citizenship, or the kind of call to be a citizen. We still see it here and there, in places like jury duty. If people do a jury, if they have a good judge, they give an instruction to put aside their own personal beliefs and think about what do you know is true about this case? And what's going to be a fair judgment on the case based on what you've heard? That's a call to citizenship. Put aside your immediate passions. 

Heidi: The sad thing that I think of when you bring up jury duty is that we all groan when we get that notice in the mail. It's not something that most people look forward to. 

Harry: No. No. It's not something you take pleasure in or you  take pride in. 

 Coming back to the Civic Scholars Council, one of our tasks is to develop a many-sided and robust definition of courageous citizenship, which is the Braver Angels mission.  And then also think about how that can be enacted and taught and communicated in many, many forms, in many settings, including a re-look at American history. One of our initiatives, as you'll see from the charter, is to Rediscover Civic America, the history that's been lost and forgotten. I'll get to the Twin Cities situation now.

Heidi: I just want to say one more thing, and then let's go to Twin Cities. And that is that I think the magic of putting the word "courageous" in front of "citizen" is that you avoid the legalistic definition. 

Harry: Absolutely. 

Heidi: So that I could see schools that are saying we're taking citizen out of our documents might be willing to put it back in if the word courageous were in front of it.

Harry: Absolutely. Especially if they know that there's a different kind of citizen than the legal status. We were talking in our church yesterday about this. Courageous citizenship is appealing. You're right. It has a normative dimension and an action dimension that is really important.

I was talking to a really thoughtful  friend at church, asking him why why that people don't push back against this distinction between that they're citizens and non-citizens. ICE is going after the supposed non-citizens, which turn out to be immigrants who've been here for 10 or 15 years. They're non-citizens. ICE claims that they deserve to be deported. Even though 80% of Americans think that people who have been here a long time as contributing members of a community should to legal citizenship. 

Our church works with rural communities. One thing they really worry about is the loss of citizenship. They're very clear on that. Much more than people in the cities. They're very conscious of the erosion of a sense of commonality and responsibility, although it's still stronger. 

Going back to my friend Bob, he said "You know what? Nobody's ever talked about a different kind of citizenship. I thought the only kind of citizenship was legal." 

Still, the level of activation in the cities, in response to the 3,000 ICE agents who've come and been pretty brutal, is remarkable. Tens of thousands of people out in this deep sub-zero weather. Businesses closed on the day of the strike, January 23. Big businesses said "we have to de-escalate" and "you have to cooperate across jurisdictions." The Guthrie Theater and the great music site, the First Avenue, they all closed on Friday.

And then, as I was saying, on a person-to-person level, the response is cross-partisan and phenomenal. People helping their neighbors who are immigrants who are afraid to go to the store because they might be targeted. People providing watch around Spanish immersion schools. And the cell phone videotaping of ICE agents, which has made a lot of difference because otherwise, there'd be a lot of things that are invisible that should be known. All of that is this expression of civic culture. 

In the early 1990s I directed and founded a center called the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the Humphrey Institute . We did a lot of different things, including a youth citizenship initiative called Public Achievement that spread to many schools and more than two dozen countries.

At the behest of the National Conference on Citizenship, which is a congressionally mandated group, we studied the Twin Cities Civic Culture and the Minnesota civic culture It turns out the Twin Cities is the strongest civic culture in the country, a culture that's developed over decades. In fact, and it's developed through identifiable features like the creation of cross-cutting networks and programs and activities like music and sports and art and culture and education and adult education theater, and it's a very vital, vibrant civic culture; the emergence of a strong language of civic contribution from religious and other leaders, and campaigns like a movement to end anti-Semitism in Minneapolis.

The fact that people don't remember that that is citizenship, the work of citizens different than illegal citizenship reflects historical amnesia, historical forgetfulness. And some of it's manufactured. I think that you know we have a rewriting of history, now, in the new administration. 

But some of it is also that America is a consumer society, and you get distracted easily, and you think, "What's the newest thing?" And there's not a deep appreciation of where we come from.

So, the Civic Scholars Council is going to address that as part of the work of Braver Angels. 

Heidi: So talk a little bit more about Minneapolis and nonviolence more broadly. I've been talking with a fellow named Jonathan Stray. I don't know if you know Jonathan. He writes a Substack called The Better Conflict Bulletin. And he's really interested in nonviolence. We've been talking to him about this before the whole situation in Minneapolis blew up, and we were just talking about the No Kings marches. He thinks that nonviolence is the answer to our current problems, which we both define as eroding democracy. But his concern is that the nonviolent actors are not getting trained the way they did back in the civil rights era. There aren't these citizenship schools that you talked about. So people aren't prepared for the situations that they're getting in. And they're not being particularly effective. 

My concern was less that they aren't getting trained. But I just saw the amorphousness, if there's such a word, of the No Kings marches. It seemed like people were holding up placards demanding all sorts of things. It wasn't one cohesive message. It was all over the place. And I didn't think that it was really making a point. I thought that there was a lot of energy that was going into it and that a lot of people were saying, "Okay, I've done my part. I've marched in the No Kings" march, so I don't have any more responsibilities. 

And at the same time, this is going back to my comment on agency. They bemoan the fact that they don't have any agency. They're pretty much admitting that going out and doing the No Kings thing isn't going to have any effect. But, the Minneapolis thing appears to have had effect. Now we're still very early on, but Trump seems to be backing off. I'm curious to see if it looks like he's backing off.

Harry: As I was saying, the scale of activation is amazing in the Twin Cities. We came back from South Africa in mid January -- South Africa is where my wife Maris is from – after a visit of three months. 

The two things that struck me was the scale of activation, the civic activation . And everyday life and neighborhoods and neighbors as well as protests and stuff. But the civic movement lacked the hopefulness that I remember from civil rights. 

That was a product of a nonviolence and a vibrant vison of democracy. In recent decades nonviolence has become redefined as simply tactical. tactical. The change began in the late '60s with people like the Stokely Carmichael wing of the movement, and then Gene Sharp in 1973 with his Politics of Nonviolent Action, which explicitly eschewed the philosophy. He said nonviolent philosophy is only for a few true believers, not the movement. Well, he wasn't in the movement, so I know that was wrong. All you have to do is read King's first book, Stride Toward Freedom about the Montgomery Bus Boycott. King describes in detail the way people were transformed and developed what he calls a new sense of "somebody-ness" among tens of thousands of black people. There were church services on nonviolence every night. I was just a kid then so I only heard about them. The training was only a little part of it. It was actually the philosophy that was galvanizing and inspiring and uplifting. 

I don't know if I mentioned this before, but if you look at the six principles of nonviolence that King outlines in that book, Stride Toward Freedom in  a chapter called "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,". talks about intellectual influences from Gandhi in 1960, he wrote an article for Christian Century on the request of the editor who said, "Have you changed your mind about anything?" 

And he doesn't exactly say "this is what I changed my mind on," but you can see, the fourth principle of nonviolence in his first version is a Gandhian version about redemptive suffering. That is, if you don't fight back or hate the perpetrator of violence, you will reach the conscience of the perpetrator. In his Christian-Century version, he he talked about some of the things he'd been thinking about,  clearly because of what he saw. He said that the practitioners of nonviolence eventually may reach the perpetrator, the oppressor. But the most important thing about it is they change the person. If you practice the discipline of nonviolence and discipline your anger, in response to violence, if you act with calm and dignity and nonviolence, it unlocks and creates a recognition of strength and courage that you didn't know you had. It's transformative thing. He had seen that among tens of thousands of people who had felt scorned and abused and marginalized developed a sense of "somebodyness." And that was really quite remarkable. 

It fed into a different story of America. So the movement was not only about activity around an issue as important as the segregation issue was. It was also about a democratic story of America and revitalizing and giving that new meaning and giving it new life, a new spirit and energy.

And the idea of citizenship was central.  I worked in the citizenship schools. And one thing we would do in the citizenship schools is begin —and this came from Dorothy Cotton—who was my boss. She wrote a wonderful book on this, her autobiography that I really, really commend. It's called If Your Back's Not Bent: the Role of the Citizenship Education Program in the Civil Rights Movement.  ""If Your Back's not Bent" came from a speech that King gave at the Dorchester Center where people came to learn how to create a little citizenship school. She said, "If Your Back's not Bent, then nobody's going to ride on it." Her book is wonderful because it describes what happened in the Dorchester Center and how people were transformed at the thought that they could be citizens. And then also, there's a chapter on nonviolence. 

And now, those two things are welded together. In fact, in Andy Young's preface to her book, he says that the citizenship school movement was combined nonviolence and citizenship, which is another way of saying it combined a philosophy as well as the new story of America. And that was what was so powerful about it. I think we need that again. 

 I think it's going to be a challenge, because we have this enormous kind of weighted amnesia. People forget what this is supposed to mean. 

Heidi: Well, we don't teach civics and we don't teach history anymore. 

Harry: No. And if we teach it, it is a one-sided version, I would say on the left, it's you know we have bad things.  I read a piece by Richard Kahlenberg, he directs the American Identity Project at The Progressive Policy Institute. They did a study of American Studies journals and found that 80% of the articles were attacking something about America. And 20% were neutral. There were no positives. So that's on the left, and then you get this kind of celebratory triumphalism on the conservative side. It's a mess on both sides. 

The challenge is recovering a strong, robust narrative of American democracy, which is not idealized. It's never been perfect, and it's a journey, not a destination. But it is an effort to build a better society. And there have been some triumphant moments — but this is even invisible in the academic literature.

But for example, there were 5,000 schools that black communities built during the dark days of segregation. They were called Rosenwald schools, for a fund at Tuskegee that they could apply to for a third of the cost of building a school. So they built schools, which were centers of community life and leadership. They had a very strong citizenship emphasis and hope.

Most of the leaders of the movement came out of the Rosenwald Schools, Coretta Scott King, John Lewis, Angela, Medgar Evers, and then thousands of local leaders went through Rosenwald schools. But that history is pretty unknown. 

I'm hoping that this year one of the tasks of our Civic Scholars Council can be to unearth great civic moments of everyday citizens building a better democracy and better communities. Beginning with the revolution. And one of the things that I mentioned in the article I sent you, came just after Thomas Paine's Common Sense in January 1776.

I don't think they have an exact figure. But Pauline Meyer, who was an MIT historian, wrote a book called American Scripture in which she says, "The Declaration of Independence grew out of somewhere between 80 and 100 local declarations of independence before July 4th. And it was because the "Common Sense" pamphlet ignited the population to have a vision of independence. And it was really a people's revolution. Leaders like Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin obviously played important part--we should not dismiss them. But to miss the fact that there was so much popular energy and creativity and ingenuity and independence thinking in those conversations--including, actually, my relatives.

My ancestors are from Scotland and then from Mecklenburg County in North Carolina, which is where a lot of Scottish people settled. And they were so eager to get rid of the rule of Great Britain that in March 1775, now this is contested, but my uncle spent half of his life collecting documents to authenticate this.

In March 1775, Mecklenburg County, a group of people in downtown, declared independence from Britain. And two guys from that group went up to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. And so they had some overlapping language between that declaration and Jefferson's. So it was significantly a people's revolution.

Anyway, there are all sorts of chapters in American history like that. Rosenwald schools and libraries were another example. I think one of my favorite chapters of government work was the support for the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration and the other works programs of the Great Depression, which really gave people a sense that they were addressing the problems of the country and building what Americans called the civic generation, because they felt they were creating things.

And I think about New England history and the settlers' history and the native people in the last 50, 60 years, the kind of revitalization of native traditions and native schools and native languages. And all of that is a citizens' chapter that people need to know. So we're hoping we can enlist local history museums and arts programs and cultural centers in school districts in discovering some of that history about their own area.

Heidi: Do you think if people know about the past, they will think, "Well, we ought to do that now," or will they think, "Oh, well, that was possible then, but it's not possible now?"

Harry: I think both things. Sometimes people say the latter, but sometimes people say you know they did it. We could do it. They did it under worse circumstances than we're facing today. I mean, Jim Crow is a lot worse than today's racial climate. There have been real advances. But also, I know that's true because I see it. 

The two stories out of my own work were working with, I think I might have mentioned this before, but all nine HBCUs in Texas, historically black colleges and universities. It's organized out of Huston-Tillotson University in Austin.

Howard Thurman, the great black theologian, gave a famous series of talks that became his book Jesus and the Disinherited in 1949. But they're calling themselves the Democracy Schools Alliance because they're regaining the unknown democracy history of HBCUs and the Rosenwald schools and other educational centers. And the fact is, students are really inspired by that. They don't say that was then and this is now. They say, "Boy, if they did it then, we can do something now." Their vision is to revitalize the democratic spirit of the movement. So that's a good piece of evidence. 

And the other, and this is directly on immigrants, I might have mentioned this before, but our Center for Democracy and Citizenship created a partnership with new immigrants that's, first of all, with the Hmong from Southeast Asia, Laosian Hmong, who have a big population in the Twin Cities, but then also East Africans and Hispanics from Latin America and Central America.

We called it the Jane Adams School for Democracy. It met twice a week. There were learning circles, so people learned how to pass the naturalization test. And I must say, as far as we were able to tell, the Jane Adams School for Democracy was the only citizenship preparation site in the country where 100% of the people, and there were several thousand people, passed the test. But it's because they were done in pairs and they had a kind of relational quality and they weren't didactic and instructional.

 But they did a lot of other things. The kids in that Jane Adams School organized a movement of young people around the country which helped win the Hmong Veteran Recognition Act, which lived up to a promise the United States had made to the Laosian Hmong, which was that if they fought against the communists, they would get an expedited the path to citizenship and they just weren't keeping it. So the Veteran Recognition Bill put that into law.

A couple of things are really significant about this. One is that we had, across the Twin Cities, students from colleges and universities, including the University of Minnesota, involved. And I would have you know a good hunk of my students in my Humphrey graduate courses work there in learning peers and cultural circles.

The principle was everyone is a teacher and everyone is a learner. This is not teaching the poor immigrants. It's actually learning from the immigrants as much as teaching. The students went through an orientation if they wanted to work in the gen ed school for wherever they came from, they had to go through an orientation that explained, "This is not a service project. You're not trying to help the poor, needy immigrants. You're actually involved in a co-learning experience." And one of the things my students learned, and this was so many times. We had so many conversations in my classes. These are graduate students going into public service. They would say, in fact, one of them wrote a paper saying that working with Hmong made them believe in democracy. They felt so inspired by the patriotism and the energy and the sense of citizenship. We defined citizenship as contributing to the Commonwealth. They just got inspired by that. So that was an example of how you kind of tap in hidden energies and talents and capacities, assets, and it can have an enormous impact.

Heidi: So what do you see as the long-term prospects, both in Minneapolis, St. Paul area, for getting through the current crisis? And then for the country overall, is it going to be possible to clone the level of activism that the Twin Cities have had all along and are using to respond successfully to this day?

Harry:  No. As I said, Twin Cities has a very strong civic culture. And we found in this 2010 study, it was the strongest civic health in the country. And that aggregated not only voting levels, which were very high, but also levels of volunteering, levels of neighbors-helping-neighbors, philanthropic giving or charitable giving. And then we were trying to measure, but we didn't have good measures, the kind of civic culture of institutions and people in their work. Although we did see some measures that we could name. So for example, really into the '80s, maybe even through the '80s, there was a principle. If you had a business to the Twin Cities, you're expected to give back at least 5% of your profit to the civic culture of the Twin Cities.

Every manager, every owner who came to the Twin Cities would sit down with Ken Dayton at Dayton's department store, and he'd explain what the principles, what the expectations were. You've got to give back. So that's a work-related index. But anyway, so I think that's the history that is kind of coming back to life. The tragedy is that that's been forgotten. But we're not going to give up on this. 

This is civic citizenship. This is horizontal, community-oriented, citizen-to-citizen citizenship. It's not about government. It's about citizens working together. And I think we can make a dent here. I think we can enlist some partners, including the churches, actually. 

We're going to work on the Episcopals, who have a very traditional definition of citizenship, like everybody does these days. It's government-centered, not a whiff of, or not much of a whiff, of it being people centered. There's something about food shelters, but nothing about horizontal work to build a better community. So I think we can make a difference. 

And I think if Braver Angels lives up to its aspirations or to Maury Giles' aspirations, it will have a big cultural impact. But it's not going to be next year. It'll take awhile.

Heidi: So let me pull you back to the article that Bill Dougerty put out about resist, replace, repair. And you sent an email that suggested that you had a different way of framing that whole rubric. I'm curious what it is. 

Harry: One could say the task is also to reframe. And if you reframe, resist, repair, and replace in civic terms, you add a kind of horizontal identity and practice of robust citizenship, civic work, to every one of those. So you don't simply resist or block. You think about how to create relations. And there are some good examples.

Music, for example, or the amazing following that's followed that this group of 19 monks from Texas has generated walking across the south from Texas to Washington. Have you followed that? 

Heidi: No. 

Harry: If you just look it up, the Monks March for Peace, that's what they call it. And they have a little dog called the Peace Dog. But everywhere they go in the deep south, they've been having crowds of thousands of people because they're monks, they're calm, they're friendly.  They like to stop and have meals and talk to people. A few of them are walking in their bare feet and now they're going up into North Carolina. I don't know how they're doing that. But it's just such a hunger for something that's not antagonistic and rancorous and mean-spirited, but something that's alive and kind and generous. And so that's one thing.

And actually, Marie [Harry's wife], last Friday, participated in an hour-long session of Minneapolis monks from South Minneapolis who were doing meditations and chants, praying for peace and good will across the cities. Now, that's constructive. It's resistant, but it's civic. They were praying for the whole Twin Cities, everybody across every line. It wasn't simply factional. It wasn't partisan. I also think the ICE demonstrators were partisan, although people across party lines don't like the way they behave.

But I think all of this mutual aid and help and kindness and concern for neighbors who were afraid to go out and Mexican kids going to schools, that's civic. It's positive. It's not simply resistance It's actually creating and connecting. So that's one and you could go through all three. I think the reframing of well, you could actually do four.

So reframing of repairing is thinking about "what can we do together?" So it's adding action. It's what Braver Angles is talking about now. Adding action to dialogue. 

Heidi: Adding the together part— because I don't think the folks who are talking about structural change and the build block, well, the block build part aren't really thinking together.

Harry:  And then the third thing is, you could call it "replace", but I would call it reframing democracy. Democracy is not something you get. It's not something that's delivered. It's not a consumer good. It's something we do together to build a better democracy. And government is a piece of that, but it's only one instrument. And actually, after all, the preamble to the Constitution say, "We the people create government to do some of our work or to help us with some of our work." It doesn't say, "Government's we're going to turn it all over, and now government's going to fix everything." So I think reframing is really, in civic terms and democratic terms, is really a different way of thinking about this.

Heidi: Great. Guy, do you have anything you want to add or ask? 

Guy: Well, I think the thing that I've been thinking back on is the '63 March on Washington, which I showed my students time and time again. 

Harry: Did you use that CNN documentary? Have you seen that? 

Guy: There's a great Eyes on the Prize video. It has all of these terrible scenes from the ruthless suppression of the civil rights protesters, and then leading up to the March on Washington. I also showed them the movie tone news clip of the march, that even as tense a time as that was, it was phenomenally respectful of the marchers. And the fact that everybody was in coat and tie, and they took this to be a serious petition to the government for the redress of grievances, asking for America to live out the true meaning of its creed. It was a persuasive enterprise. And then, we're from the Vietnam era, where protesters were just sort of straggly hippies that wanted the world to know that they're mad, and they didn't want to build anything.

And the No Kings Protests , rather than trying to build something going forward. We talk about retrospective and prospective reconciliation. If you try to even all the scores of the past, you will be fighting for a long, long time. But if you try to build something better together, then that could be a pretty exciting thing.

Harry: I think you're exactly right. And of course, as I said before, I was at the march. I heard King practice I Have a Dream the night before. My dad had just gone on staff on the executive committee, the only white guy on the staff. And he had been involved in school desegregation efforts in the south. He was southern and he managed the Atlanta Red Cross. And I was an 18-year-old and I was hitchhiking around the country, wondering if I should go to college or be a seafaring poet. And Dad called and said, "Well, you have got to come back to Washington. We're going to have this march to get the attention of the nation." So I found somebody to drive across the country with, and hitchhiked. He had the car. We took turns driving. And I put my sleeping bag on dad's floor and heard King practice in the next room. I Have a Dream. The thing about the CNN documentary was that it had oral histories of people who were at the march. This was in 2013, the 50th anniversary. And I have a little cameo appearance saying I heard King practice. And I thought the King's speech was marvelous.

King had a gift that I think is not really understood very well. This was kind of like this rising to the station. He could sense the mood of a crowd and then kind of uplift it to a higher level, a sense of one's better self. And the speech did that. But he was also playing off of the fact that the marchers themselves had the decorum and the discipline and the calm that you describe.

And I thought this was amazing. I was an 18-year-old kid, angry at the world. And I was just dumbfounded by the marchers of all ages and backgrounds and some walking hundreds of miles to get there and buses and trains. So the dignity and the discipline, which are well captured by the program notes, they convey that. And I think that actually had an enormous impact. That's not often remarked upon, but people could see it. They could see some things that worked there. Something different. Some people have a higher sense of who they are, a bigger, larger, more uplifted sense of who they are. And that's an extraordinarily significant moment in the movement history.

Heidi: Do you see that in Minneapolis now? 

Harry: No. Because people don't have the same narrative of where this is going. They have a tremendous sense of resistance and also compassion towards their neighbors and a lot of things that reflect the civic history and culture of the Twin Cities. But hope, no.  People are pretty discouraged and desperate.

There's a little bit of change now that it looks like Trump's worried about his poll numbers and it's backing off a little bit. And the huge defeat for the Republican in the Fort Worth Senate race. But I think it's not a partisan thing, really. And in fact, I don't think the politicians in the Twin Cities have been nearly as good as the people. They've been more polarizing. 

The people have been better.  In our church, for example, which has been very involved. We have a moderate church. It's an Episcopal Church. It's pretty diverse. Probably most people vote Democratic, but they are not progressive. We have an Anglican priest who's very good. But they came back and of course, I know we've been working with Braver Angel stuff for a couple of years. But they had all sorts of stories of people working across partisan lines.

For instance there was a little group of MAGA people who were going to have a counter demonstration. And the leader of that group was getting pelted by a much bigger group of protesters with water bottles and stuff. A black guy came over and sheltered him and led him away to be safe. They had stories like that. They had stories of people crossing divisions. They were really good stories.

But there is not yet  the larger sense of where this is going to go, which was so powerful in the movement. . And that is what I would say is the mission of Braver Angels. It's called "courageous citizenship," which is a good term. But we can have a better day.

Heidi: Well, that's both a powerful and sobering thought. I could end there, but I always end by asking whether there is anything that we didn't cover that you were hoping that we would cover. 

Harry:  I think it's been a good through discussion. I do want to come back to the philosophy of nonviolence interwoven with a civic sense of possibility of democracy, a better society as a whole. Not simply, you know we're going to treat our enemies with public love, not personal love. Don't have to be buddies with them.

And connected to that, which is really important to always stress, is that the movement believed that every person is divine. And that even the people who seem to be oppressors, they have some divine spark in them. So the hope is that nonviolence will reach them, but it's also transformative for the practitioners of nonviolence. And I think that's so important to lift up the sense of "somebodiness" because most people feel really diminished by the culture, devalued and marginalized and powerless. 

Heidi: I love "somebodiness." I'm going to start using that one. It goes right along with my focus on agency. 

Harry: Yep. Absolutely.  

Guy: There's almost a sense in which nonviolence seems too simple. To call this movement or this strategy that we're talking about, just non-violent, sort of conveys the illusion that, well, if you're not violent, that's all there is to it. And what it's really about is a whole set of persuasive arguments, articulating the kind of society you want to live in. 

Harry: Yes, it's a different story.

Guy: One in which we live by the golden rule that binds us together despite our differences, despite our different circumstances, beliefs, and all of that. But it isn't just nonviolence. It's much more than that.

Harry:  Well, that's why it was they were called citizenship schools. Citizenship schools taught not violence, but they also in depth talked about a different kind of citizenship. And people would have long conversations, very animated, energized conversations about what is a citizen? Dorothy Cotton was wonderful on that. 

Heidi: Clearly, we need those again. 

Harry: Yep. I think so. 

Heidi: So there you go. Start off at the age of 80. 

Harry: One of my hopes is that this Citizen Scholars Council can help birth some citizenship schools. 

Heidi: Great. Well, as always, this has been wonderful, uplifting, informative. We really enjoy talking and learning from you. 

Harry: Well, it's great to talk. . And I respect your work so much. And as I said, I use your power-with, not power-over a lot. 

Heidi: Great. Thank you!