Lloyd: Now the situation in the state, here in Massachusetts, with regards the civil rights of gay and lesbian people and their civil rights to get married. What has been your experience in terms of all the dialogue that is happening on the different levels?

Chuck: I think it has been unfortunately a very hostile caustic discussion going on. I know there are Black ministers in my community, and I think some of the Black ministers in Cambridge, who have joined together and called for a ban on marriages between gays and lesbians. Fortunately the Black leadership in the State House took the contrary position.

Lloyd: I didn’t know that. I’m very happy to hear that.

Chuck: My understanding is that they took the position that an amendment wasn’t the appropriate way to go and essentially saying that the court had made a decision and that we should abide by the perspective of courts. I know that Senator Wilkerson and Byron Rushing had spoken out against the position of the Black ministers who were supporting the ban, and drawing attention to the fact that from their perspective there were many similarities between the struggle for civil rights on the part of Black people and the struggle for civil rights on the part of gays and lesbians. And so our political leadership has been very clear in opposing the ban.

Lloyd: Now the challenge of being able to do outreach at the grassroots level in these days. I find it very discouraging to see how the American public has been hoodwinked and depressed and frustrated into a state of inaction. Whereas at the same time my sense is a growing change of direction in that regard, especially with the presidential elections these days, there is a lot of noise that’s being heard.

And I’m thinking about in your background and your experience what has it been like, what is it like, to involve a constituency at the grassroots level? It’s not an easy task. How do you go about doing that? How did you do it? How do you do it? And if you have some experiences that you could tell us?

Chuck: I think there are many elements involved in that. One of them is finding ways to make contact with people who are in the community. We have a number of vehicles for doing that in terms of my work as a District 7 City Councilor. We established an office in Roxbury in the Dudley Square area that we maintain with funds that we raise from supporters and constituents. And the presence of an office that has a staff there five days a week from 10 till 6 provides an opportunity for me to keep in contact and for us to strengthen the relationship.

We have monthly meetings at the Parish Hall at the First Church in Roxbury so that we are able to provide an opportunity for people to come together to talk about the issues that are confronting the community as well as come and share particular concerns and then have the opportunity to socialize with their friends and neighbors who are also coming out to those meetings.

Lloyd: How successful would you say that the whole effort has been? Is there much participation or no?

Chuck: We have an average of about 50 people who come out once a month. Sometimes if it’s a hot topic we’ll have 75. We think we are going to have a very high turnout this Saturday when we’re going to be focusing on the beginning of a petition drive to ask our federal elected officials to focus on reducing the military budget as a way of providing the needs of people at the local level here in Boston as well as throughout the country. So we’re expecting we’ll probably have maybe 80, 90, 100 people there. But on average we have about 50 or 60 people who come and participate in the discussion and then stay for lunch. And that kind of relationship-building process is a very important one.

We also have made use of an electronic telephoning machine that the Service Employees Industrial Union has that they make available to politicians. And so we advertise our monthly meetings, as well as other major events, through making electronic calls to probably about 3000 people in the district. We send out, to people who come to the roundtable meetings, a letter each month letting them know about the roundtable and other things that are happening. And we probably send out about 1200 letters a month just trying to remind them that we’re still there. I think the combination of these efforts has built up a constituency that is aware and gets involved.

We also have what we call an email listserv. It’s called the Chuck Turner Daylight Network. And we have probably between one and two thousand people who receive electronically information that we send out on an every-other-day basis in terms of meetings or issues or concerns.

Lloyd: And they’re able to participate in a dialogue? I don’t know anything about computers.

Chuck: They’re able to put information onto the Daylight Network so other people can receive it, and get responses, replies from them. So if anybody is interested in that they should call Lorraine Fowlkes at our City Hall office. She maintains the network. if you are interested in becoming a member of the Daylight Network then you should call Lorraine Fowlkes. And her number is 635-3510.

The newspaper, our local community newspaper, the Bay State Banner has been very helpful by covering the issues at the City Council and in the community in general. They have helped to provide a base of knowledge and information to the residents. So it is something where there is no one strategy, but just you have to apply a number of different strategies for getting the word out initially and then just keep building on that information base that you create.

Lloyd: The thing I find striking about this is that my only experience with any matter like this is that this is only when there is an election. Laughs Your work is all year round throughout the term.

Chuck: I think particularly for Black politicians and politicians of color in general in an area like Boston where our numbers are relatively small, we have to realize that our power individually, or even collectively as elected leaders, is very limited and that our power comes from people in our communities being clear about what the issues are and moving into action and creating the atmosphere where the other elected officials know they have to take our positions seriously because our people are active, and just as they vote for us they could vote against them, as well as have demonstrations, sit-ins, other ways of putting pressure on politicians and bureaucrats.

Lloyd: A little bit about your background and amazing experience as far as I’m concerned.

Chuck: I was born in Cincinnati in Ohio, and came out to school in the East when I was 18, and then basically have just stayed in the area. I spent a little time in DC and did some organizing work on the Washington DC Afro-American back in the 60s, and spent some time in Hartford and New York doing organizing, and came back to Boston in 1966 and have been living and working in Roxbury ever since.

I made a decision after I got out of school to focus on doing community organizing work. I thought about going to law school. But I enjoy working with people, enjoy helping to put groups together, and so essentially I’ve been working as an organizer for the last 40 years. It‘s a very fulfilling way of challenging the practices in this country that have oppressed people of African decent as well as oppressed almost everybody else.

Lloyd: There’s a dividing line in this country, in this culture, between ethnic groups, between the genders, dividing lines through the community, a lot of fault lines through and through the community. How do you see bridging that gap between Latinos and Blacks and Asians? Boston for one thing is a very diverse community in that way. And the neighborhoods are very distinct. What can you tell us? Your experience and your sense of the direction that we’re moving in and your whole participation with this?

Chuck: Myself and Felix Arroyo and a number of others worked with the institutes at UMass Boston last year. We actually approached them and asked them if they would sponsor a coming together of activists of color in Boston. And they agreed to do that. We spent about a year in the planning, and on October 18th of last year we held the first New Majority Conference based on the thought that people of color are now the majority in this city but having a numerical majority doesn’t relate to anything unless you’re really dialoguing and thinking about a common agenda and developing strategies to work together.

So the Trotter and Gaston and the Asian-American Institute at Northeastern did a magnificent job in terms of helping to put together a conference with a steering committee of activists from the communities of color. One of the results of the conference was the development of a steering committee, or the ratification of the steering committee that had helped put the conference together, and now there are regular meetings taking place of the New Majority Conference, and they are setting their goals for the coming year, beginning to look at how to set up an office and raise money so that they could have some staff that will be working as the base of a mechanism through which people of color, and in particular activists of color, can dialogue regarding the establishment of a base of power that can serve all of us well.

It is very important, I think, that we have that going right now in Boston. And it’s a model that I think other cities need to look at. At the same time we have to realize that there are tensions, there are always issues.

And right now we have a major dispute involving the leadership of a health center in the Whittier Street area of Roxbury. I won’t go into the details of it. But it has led to a friction, a tension, between the Latino staff members and the leadership of the health center, which is Black. It has created a situation where a number of people, elected officials as well as activists in the communities, are trying to figure out a way to both ease the tension in the Whittier Street situation as well as to develop policies, particularly around the use of language, which is what the dispute at Whittier Street has focused on. So I think we have to, one, organize ourselves as people of color to come together, and then realize that there are going to be tensions, there are going to be frictions, given the situation that we’re in, the question of the economy, the questions in general that we experience, unfortunately those tensions often are taken out against each other. So there are no magic answers, just a question of continuing to be aware of what the objectives are but sensitive to the tensions and trying to find ways to work to relieve those tensions.

Lloyd: Where do you get what I consider to be the spiritual power that you manifest? I’m not saying that in a complimentary way either. I’m saying that in a very serious and very sober way. Where do you get that kind of spiritual power from that allows you to have the kind of vision to see the truth of injustice, to be able to speak out and bear witness about injustice, and yet at the same time not become embittered and hateful and to spread bitterness and hatred, but instead become a leader of intelligence and integrity? How were you able to do this? Is it prozac? Where are you getting this from?

Chuck: I’m getting it from the same source that is available to all of us. One of the dilemmas of Western education is that our education is not very advanced in terms of understanding human beings and the nature of the environment in which we operate. We acknowledge the existence of physical energy because it’s all around us. We acknowledge the existence of emotional energy because we feel those emotions running through it. We acknowledge the existence of thought although we don’t understand where thought comes from.

But because thought is the basis of our functioning as human beings, we acknowledge that we do have thoughts and that thoughts create actions. The dilemma we have is that we’re like children when it comes to another form of energy: spiritual energy. Spiritual energy is as real as physical energy is. In fact physical energy is really the illusion. Einstein said that E=MC squared, and that is that matter is just energy that has for a moment in time clumped together and that we perceive it as solid but the reality is that it’s really atoms.

Lloyd: It’s all energy.

Chuck: It’s energy that will never be destroyed. This table that we’re sitting at is now a table, but one day it will be atoms of energy that are in the universe. One of the advantages I’ve had was just being raised in a family that appreciated the reality of spiritual energy. And as I became an adult I spent time trying to understand it more concretely and in fact used spiritual energy in my daily practice as all of us should use it. And when you tap in to spiritual energy you get the benefit of knowledge that comes from other sources.

The dilemma is that we don’t appreciate the fact that we are constantly surrounded by mind, that is that there are in fact consciousnesses that are giving us information regularly. Where does your thought come from? It’s in you. There are messages that might be around you, conversations that you have, but each one of us has thoughts. But we never question where those thoughts come from. We too often don’t sit back and say, "If I’m receiving those thoughts, maybe those thoughts are a transmission of energy from a disincarnate source."

And the reality is that I happen to believe that in fact there is a higher mind as well as minds that are guiding the activities of us as human beings to a higher purpose, and that if you appreciate those energies and tune in to them, you will be able to be guided by them in terms of how to move forward to be a more harmonious force in the universe. And yet if you think that the material world is all there is, then you in fact feel that every slight is something that you want to fight over, or that everything that seems like a problem is a problem, rather than realize that a problem could have been created as a way of helping you see another level of reality. To a large extent I feel blessed to have been able to discover the larger nature of reality and then try to in my work help people appreciate the power that they have to transform our material world through tuning in to the spiritual guidance that is always there for us.

Religions are designed to try to help people have an appreciation for that, but unfortunately the message, particularly in the West, is so garbled that people have really lost sight. The church edifices, the synagogues, the temples, they are almost blocking the light of spirit from us so that we can’t realize the nature of the world that we live in and the power that we have. Our perception of death. Death is just the opportunity to reflect on the learnings in life and to work on another level of energy. And yet we get so wedded to our physical bodies and to this physical world that we act as if death is something to be feared or despised when the reality is cultures for thousands and thousands of years have emphasized that death is just part of life.

But the Western culture has, for necessary reasons, focused on the physical reality because it was the task of the West to shape physical nature in a new way. The Western culture, the European culture has done a very good job with the transmutation of physical reality. But in that process we have lost a sense of the fact that physical reality is the lowest level of reality. And we act as if physical reality is the be all and end all of life. It’s just very foolish. I try to use my role as a politician to help people appreciate the fact that politics is a very limited practice if you focus on just getting power and acquiring power.

Power is ultimately coming from another source. And if you tap in to that power then you will in fact be powerful. If you tap in to your ego then ultimately you will be destroyed by your ego. I get my power from the place that we all get our true power and that is the spiritual energy that is here for us. We all could live a much more positive life, not just by going to church or synagogue or to the mosque, but by appreciating that we have that energy inside of us, and if we tap inside of us and begin to use that power in the world there is nothing we can’t accomplish.

Lloyd: I’ve never had a chance to sit down with you until now. So unlike the custom of journalistic interviews, I must acknowledge a very powerful personal experience of great satisfaction in meeting with you for the first time this way and hearing you articulate your being in this fashion. I’m feeling the presence of a kindred soul. Very much in the sense that I would say to people, I’m not at all religious – I’m too intelligent to disparage a religious view – but I’m not religious at all. I’m extremely spiritual though. And I just felt a whole flow of that same kind of consciousness speaking, and not that divorced from the Western teachings either because the Western teachings have evolved over such a long period of time now that it’s getting close now to a whole new discovery in quantum mechanics about parallel universes, so the physicists are beginning to discover what we’re talking about here today.

Chuck: The scientists have a higher appreciation for the nature of reality than we do. And I just hope the social sciences eventually catch up and have that amalgamation which will enable us to understand the true nature of who we are.

Lloyd: At the opening we mentioned the business of the firewall that separates the military budget from the domestic needs of the community. And we also referred to the need to include communities’ needs and consider communities’ needs in that regard: education and healthcare for everyone. And now we hear a lot of the discussion happening too as the debates take place. The Green-Rainbow itself has now come forward with three potential presidential candidates, I believe, who also made their statements recently. Green-Rainbow at presidential, national, federal, state, local – what’s your sense of vision?

What’s your sense of possibility for the Green-Rainbow in terms of those who don’t even know what Rainbow means, the Green-Rainbow viewers who don’t even know what I’m talking about here? Can you introduce that notion a little bit and flesh that out a little bit including the merger too by the way because I feel there is a lot more about Green than there is about Rainbow. I know in my experience I know a lot more about Green than I do about Rainbow. I have scarcely no knowledge of what Rainbow is at all. Introduce us a little bit and then give us your sense of vision there.

Chuck: The Green Party as I understand it, I think it came out of Europe, that is I think out of Germany and some other places, where people came together particularly around environmental concerns and were able to build a base that won support in the legislatures over in Europe. And I think that that created the momentum for people in this country beginning to focus on Green politics. And the initial focus I think was on environmental affairs and the appreciation of the Earth, the conserving of Earth’s resources, the ending of pollution, etc. It was primarily a White middle-class, upper middle-class, kind of movement, as I understand it, that gained maybe more prominence here in the middle to late seventies and in the eighties and nineties.

In the eighties here in Boston, Mel King ran a campaign that involved Blacks and Latinos and Asians and Whites and actually coined the phrase "the rainbow coalition" that Jesse Jackson …

Lloyd: I thought it was the other way around.

Chuck: No, no. Because Mel’s campaign was ’83. Jesse ran in ’84. And so my understanding is that actually either it happened synchronistically that is just in two places at the same time, but the campaign worked in Boston in ’83. I think that’s the first time that that concept of everyone working together across racial lines, across gender lines, across class lines really was developed. So that the Rainbow, even though Mel didn’t win the mayoral race, the Rainbow Coalition stayed together in Boston, worked with Jesse and the national Rainbow Coalition once he started that, and then just continued even after the national coalition splintered, somewhat splintered and with separate parts going their own way.

But there was the maintenance of the Rainbow Coalition here in Boston. And then about three or four years ago, the discussions began in terms of the merger of those two elements, the merger of the Green Party given its emphasis on the environment and appropriate use of the resources of this country and the Rainbow Coalition with its focus on dealing with the issues of racism in this country, dealing with the issues of structural poverty, dealing with the nature of classism. And the discussions eventually led to the merger of those two forces with the merger taking place last year in an official type of way.

In terms of what the vision is, I think it’s early. It’s really early to talk about the vision. And also I think the reality is that while there was a Rainbow Coalition in Boston and in Massachusetts to merge with the Greens, there isn’t necessarily a similar kind of situation as you go state to state. So the question of the development of an enhanced social consciousness by the Green Party is a work in progress. And how it will be developed and nurtured is still something that is being pondered on. My feeling is that there is an awakening that has yet to happen among people of color and particularly among Black people, that is people of African descent, particularly those of African descent who have been raised in this country, because we have gone through probably the most – it might not be the most horrific experience that human beings have ever suffered on the Earth – I sometimes read about the Dravidians, those of African descent in India and what they have gone through in the caste system, and think that their experience has been difficult – but we as Black people have been in a very unusual …

Lloyd: Here?

Chuck: Here in the United States

Lloyd: On the continent. As opposed to the Caribbean, South America.

Chuck: In the United States. See because there was nothing to stand behind the thought of the Europeans who had driven the Indians off the land and the thought that they had that they had a right to treat us as animals.

Lloyd: In the constitution?

Chuck: It was in the constitution. It was, and continues in a variety of ways, to be part of the practice of this country. And so as human beings, those of us of African descent have had 400 years of treatment by those in power which denied our basic humanity. It’s an amazing, amazing experience. It’s an amazing experience to have generation after generation of people growing up in a situation where those in power even debated whether they were human beings. And yet we gave our labor. We built the country. We’ve given inventions. We’ve served in the armies.

We have not gone to war with them. They’re very lucky that the people who they enslaved and brutalized had the nature in them to be able to endure without copying them in terms of their bestiality. After essentially 400 years of this experience, our young people, our young men are just enraged: killing each other and brutalizing our women and each other. Young women are beginning to adopt practices and behaviors that wouldn’t have been imagined a few years ago. It’s part of the product. It’s horrendous to look at. But when you look at what we’ve been through and continue to experience, you understand how this situation developed. You also understand that the consciousness of the White leaders of this country and their collaborationists who are Black or Latin or Asian …

Lloyd: Very important to mention that.

Chuck: Tax policies are giving away our monies to the corporations to make weapons of destruction. So you realize that change isn’t going to happen from the standpoint of the White population in general or the leadership. You just can’t see it. But being someone who believes that this is all part of a process of evolution guided by spiritual consciousness, there has to be an answer because it’s not by chance. So the only answer that I can imagine has to be an answer of the elevation of consciousness among those who have been oppressed through which they transform …

Lloyd: Awakening?

Chuck: Awakening. The dry bones coming to life through spirit. So I think what‘s going to happen in this country, there is going to be a spiritual awakening among people of African descent that will quickly spread to other people of color and to Whites who are open to feel the spirit and hear the message. And that that spiritual awakening will then transmute itself into the progressive political forums that have been developed. And through that infusion of spiritual consciousness the political practice will move to a higher level of strength.

And so I think it’s too early to talk about the evolution of the Green-Rainbow Party because I think it can only evolve at the point where there is an infusion of a higher level of spiritual consciousness that has elements that are here but hasn’t manifested in a way to have cultural impact. But once it manifests, because of the internet, because of the rapidity of communications, it will ignite the world. Ironically hip-hop is in many ways – there is a negative aspect, there is gangsta rap – but hip-hop which is the expression of a culture that affirms spirituality …

Lloyd: from bebop

Chuck: from bebop to hip-hop.

Lloyd: Quincy Jones talked about that last night. I saw him live at the Brattle Square Theater. There was someone in the audience, one of the people complaining, and asking him how does he feel about music and what’s happened to music right now, and he said, "You know it’s another progression. From bebop to hip-hop, and this is only on the way. And if the young people think that this is a conclusion of some kind, then they’re going to discover that as much as it was from bebop to hip-hop, we have another elevation coming right out of it and we can hear it right now, "and he gave some examples.

Chuck: I think hip-hop is setting the stage. And what is interesting about it is it is worldwide. That is the hip-hop culture is a worldwide culture in that the songs and the music are being sung and played in other countries of the world. So I think as that spiritual awakening happens, there is an atmosphere that has been spread throughout the world so that its impact will not just be on those of us in this country, but it’s going to transform, I think - well I know eventually - it will transform the entire world. I used to think I would die and be, like so many of our ancestors, just have done your share and then pass on and not see it. But now I’m beginning to think that I have the chance of seeing more of the end to the madness than I had ever imagined. If I do I’m blessed.

Lloyd: I share that with you. And while you were speaking, I heard the echo, though I never learned the words, I wish I did right now, know the words to ‘I Have A Dream that someday…’. I heard it echoing all through everything you were saying now about the transformation. And I do feel its presence. It’s not that far away. I feel its presence.

Chuck: And King said, "I’ve been to the mountaintop. And you’re going to get there. And I’m not." We’ve been so blessed. We’ve had prophets and prophetesses, or whatever the gender equivalent of prophet is. Because of the horrific nature of the situation, we don’t even appreciate them for being the modern day equivalent of the biblical prophets. But they are. I don't mean that Martin Luther King was an Isaiah, was an Ezekiel.

Lloyd: Certainly a voice.

Chuck: A voice and a presence and a transforming presence of the consciousness of America. And we don’t appreciate yet what he was trying to help us see because we are still so mired as a culture in a very low form of humanity.

Lloyd: Thank you so much. The thing I walked away from here, more than just the encouragement from my own personal experience in meeting with you, is a renewed sense of great hope for the young because that’s what matters more than anything else to me is the future world for the young. How are we contributing and what are we offering for the young. And you lighten me up with that, being with you here today.

Chuck: Historians sometimes talk about poetry as the indications of the rise of a new culture, that is that new cultures express themselves initially in poetic form. So with all the difficulty around the education of our children, when I hear them rapping and rhyming and just creating out of their own reality the poetry that speaks to their life experience, I see, as difficult as their physical situation is, and mental and emotional situation, this spirit is there. And spirit is speaking through them. And that is what is going to transform them.

And really we have to catch up with our youth. In many ways we have to become as a child so we can appreciate the poetic themes that are rippling through them because that is spirit speaking through our children to our reality. I’ve loved being with you.

Lloyd: Thank you so much. And I’m going to invite you sometime to come visit with me on my show in Cambridge, so the Cambridge community will be able to see you, on Cambridge CCTV Access on the station there. Godspeed. Thank you very much.

Chuck Turner is District 7 Boston City Councilor and a member of the Massachusetts Green-Rainbow Party. Lloyd Smith is Male Co-chair of Mystic River Green-Rainbow Action.