My Second Wind of Activism: Unbroken, Unbowed and Unbought

By Alex Norman D.S.W

As a Professor Emeritus of a major university, Norman set out to write his memoirs until he was introduced to a volunteer experience that set him on a course of activism for the next 20 years.

That activism would take him to the United Kingdom where he would engage in an historic African Asian Solidarity Conference, aimed at securing the rights of Ethnic and Religious minorities in the forthcoming European Union.

Alex Norman, having taken an early retirement from a distinguished academic career in 1991, relocated to a seaside community in 1999 to write his memoirs and develop an independent consulting business in organization development.

For the next 22 years, he engaged in civic activities as an organizer, researcher, public policy practitioner and citizen activist to advocate and empower people at the neighborhood level, to secure their rights against powerful City interest groups.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9798350941784

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Copyright © 2023 Alex J Norman

All rights reserved.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

print ISBN: 979-8-35094-177-7

ebook ISBN: 979-8-35094-178-4

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to all of those people who have devoted their lives to the cause of social justice, especially those African Ancestors who did not survive the Atlantic Passage but yearned for their freedom no less. Special mention should be given to those Civil Rights Fighters and Freedom Riders of my generation for they set the tone and secured the gains that, though limited, we enjoy today.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There is an African Proverb that states It takes a Village to raise a child. The same may be said for writing a memoir. No activist’s accomplishment or failure takes place in isolation of the many people who set the context, and the allies and collaborators who are active stakeholders in the process. Although too numerous to name, I must give recognition to those teachers and mentors who served as an inspiration for my professional practice, beginning with Lillian Collins, my first Supervisor who cautioned me to keep a clear head with the warning of Those whom the Gods would destroy the first make mad. To Dean Whitney M Young, Jr. who advised me that Once your efforts to change a systems come to no avail, you have a responsibility to leave that system, lest you become infused with its pathology. To Lorenzo (Gip) Traylor, who introduced me to Dr. Howard Thurman and also taught me the art of strategic planning, and finally to Dr. Nathan Cohen, my academic mentor who introduced me to the time gestalt of Past, Present and Future.

Contents

MY SECOND WIND: UNBROKEN, UNBOWED AND UNBOUGHT

IN THE BEGINNING

THE IMPACT OF THE 1964 CIVIL RIGHTS BILL

THE UCLA URBAN AFFAIRS EXPERIMENT

OPPORTUNITIES FOR ACTIVISM

A PANDEMIC GAME CHANGER: THE IMPACT OF COVID ON ACTIVISM

MY PERSONAL, MEDICAL CHALLENGE

ZOOMING INTO ACTIVISM AND VIRTUAL COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

THE MEDICAL CHALLENGE CONTINUES

WHITE SUPREMACY ON THE RISE

FAST FORWARD

IMPLICATIONS FOR CITIZEN ACTIVISM

THE DECONSTRUCTION PERIOD: RETURN OF THE CONFEDERACY

A NEED FOR STRATEGIC, ORGANIZED ACTIVISM

EPILOGUE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MY SECOND WIND:

UNBROKEN, UNBOWED AND UNBOUGHT

By

ALEX J. NORMAN, DSW, Professor Emeritus

UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs

When athletes are engaged in rigorous exercise or competition they often reach a point of exhaustion in which they feel they can go no further. And then they catch a second wind, a situation in which they marshal up enough energy to keep going and often succeed. I can recall the first time this happened to me. I was a three-star athlete (1948-49) at Hillside High School in Durham, NC; a forward in basketball, an end in football and a sprinter in track. One day the coach, Nelson B. Higgins, in an effort to toughen us up, asked the sprinters to work out with the distance runners, who warmed up by running 440 yards. We sprinters were used to running 100 yard and 60 yard dashes, so it was a major effort for us to last 220 yard, at which times we were out of breath and our legs were gone, in other words we were exhausted. It was during one of those episodes that I was bordering on exhaustion and then it happened, I caught a second wind, an energy that made the rest of the run seem effortless. I was probably operating on adrenalin, but at those time who knew? We continued training in that manner, in addition to practicing running the sprints, and at the Southwestern Intercollegiate Meet in Charlotte that year we medaled in the 60, 100 and high jump, events in which we had never placed. We credited our success to our Second wind training.

Fast forward to Long Beach, CA 50 years later when my wife Margie and I moved from Los Angeles, where I had been a community organizer, administrator of human service organizations, and ending a 23-year career as a professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Social Welfare, to Long Beach, a smaller city 19 miles southeast of the City of L.A. Margie and I were married in 1976 after a 6-year courtship in which we traveled between Del Mar, CA where she lived with her two daughters Keri and Wendi, and Los Angeles where I was a weekend father to my developmentally disabled son Alex. I took advantage of an early retirement package from UCLA and retired in 1991 to build an independent consulting practice in organization development, and to take advantage of my academic status by spending 3-month sabbaticals at the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England, in Bristol, England as a Research Scholar in community economic development and community policing. In order to accommodate our absences from the U.S. we moved from the family home in Westwood to a small 2-bedroom co-op in Santa Monica, Ocean Towers and 5 years later to a condominium security living in Pacific Palisades, overlooking the Santa Monica Canyons, the coastline and the Pacific Ocean. We were set for life, we thought. Both of the girls had completed college at U.C. Berkeley, Alex had finished high school and was employed in a sheltered workshop at GoodWill Industries of Southern California. Since both all of our children were in their late thirties, we assumed that having grand children were out of the question. WRONG! Keri at 39 was the first to break the news that she and her husband Ken were going through in vitro processes to have children and Wendi at 38 and her husband Mark, were looking forward to adding to their family.

Margie and I agreed that the 6th floor of a condo overlooking the Ocean was no place to help raise grandchildren, so we began looking for single family housing and ended up choosing a lovely Cape Cod Cottage on Naples Island in Long Beach. This move gave me an opportunity to pause as to how I would use the occasion to either continue the urban work I had been doing in Los Angeles or develop new contacts in Long Beach. I decided that I would do neither. I was now 68 years old; had a successful career as an activist, organizer and administrator; had an extraordinary academic career that had blossomed into internationally recognized scholarship; and now was at the top of my game as