About town, George is best known, and most loved, for his storytelling. One of my favorite stories so far is one he related during our conversation in June, after his remark about the Civil War and its failure to abolish slavery.

GSS:  Let’s imagine toady’s  black experience, I’m a black in the South, and I didn’t go to a good school, don’t have a good home, and no matter how good I am I can’t rise here  economically; and I know white people who think I’m shit…Isn’t that a slavery of its own kind? I do have lots of stuff, I can vote, I used to vote democratic…. But it didn’t and won’t make any difference.  I’m free to take any job offered, I can get on a bus and go to work, but I cannot expect that my kid will get a good education either… - That’s a form of slavery.

NBS: But how about this guy I was speaking to yesterday; he’s Italian but really admires the Jews because they’ve made futures for themselves – a small number of people with a powerful army. He just doesn’t have any tolerance for blacks who haven’t organized like the Jews have. How do you respond to that?

GSS: I have a lot of Jewish friends in universities, and the affirmative action issue comes up, oh how deft we are with words! What positive spin for unequal college admission procedures, typically favoring blacks and with the apparent motive of making amends for American slavery and its continuing aftermath. My Jewish intellectual friends argue that this is unequal, unfair and that they too suffered and struggled and overcame and nobody went about making amends or doing favors for them along their way.

NBS: But they weren’t picked up, uprooted, moved somewhere else, and became slaves. They might have become slaves where they already were. It’s very different to be shipped somewhere –

GSS: Oh, that’s very different.

NBS:  - than to say I’m going to leave this situation.

GSS: No, the Jews were basically driven out, they weren’t captured and shipped, but were told you can’t be here so you’re going to have to find a new place.

NBS: So, what’s your response then? Do you think it’s fair for the Jewish professors to say that?

GSS: You know, I…fair, yes I agree, but is it just? In a lot of ways I disagree with them, actually. Black racism happened both here and now; anti-Semitism happened mostly then and on another continent. I figure it really was a serious atrocity, the worst side of  human nature. Whether the black experience has been worse or just different, it’s hard to tell.

NBS: But it’s fundamentally different.

GSS: It’s fundamentally different. And I would say, we need to get more blacks in the colleges now, in the better jobs, in the middle class, real participation in American life, and that’s the social imperative that’s so important. We have to do things that I wish we didn’t have to do, but we have to do things that we wish we didn’t have to do. You learn that.

NBS: And is the Needmor Fund doing things around that?

GSS: The Needmor Fund doesn’t directly do things around that. We do things around community organizing, supporting communities that have come together to eliminate injustices in their common life; injustices usually related to low income.

Like down in Mississippi, the Mississippi Woodcuters. A group of blacks that have pick-up trucks and chain saws. Louisiana Pacific would go through a big forest and take all the good and easy stuff with their big machines and leave behind the scraps. And the blacks went in with their pick-ups and chain saws and cleaned it all up. They’d haul it to Louisiana Pacific’s plant, and the man there had a stick - that’s what they call it - and when the guy measured how much wood was coming in on the black’s pick-up truck, he short-sticked them.

So, the black pickers decided to organize. They went to Louisiana Pacific and said, you need to be fair. We’re going to call the press, we’re going to get on television, we’re going make a big fuss, you’re going to look bad. Maybe we won’t even sell you the wood, if everything doesn’t go right. You need to change. And you can, obviously, you pay everybody else fair, you can pay us fair. So, you need to change. They negotiated, made demands, and the abuse was ended. Needmor was a proud supporter of this group.

A subset of Needmor formed a company called Economic Development, Inc (EDI), based in Boulder. I traveled 150 days a year back then. What we were looking for were groups that had consolidated over some issues, had formed a strong group that worked together, were democratic, that know each other, that can do something. And what they need now is economic development. They solved the social problem, they got the oppressor to treat them fairly, they got the man at Louisiana Pacific to treat them fairly, but what have they really done that will stick? They need to work on root causes, low income.  They need to have investment.

The Woodcutters looked like a fit for EDI. They have a sort-of business plan, it’s a purchasing coop, buy their truck tires, chain oil and other supplies in bulk; EDI would provide the capital for the initial inventory. Karl and I flew down to Mississippi to work out how much capital they will need and what would be our share of the profits in return. Our model was social entrepreneurship, like the Manaus Fund. You tell us what you want to do, whatever’s going to build you economic power. If it looks like it work we’ll provide appropriate capital.

Well, we’re sitting there trying to explain the difference between a charitable grant and an investment, the idea that if they’re successful and make money then they owe us our share because we took the risk. So we’re talking about becoming “partners,” having a relationship based on being in business together. Now I can’t pretend that I’m not white and I know damn well I don’t understand what it’s like being a poor black in Mississippi. And we’ve got the money they need and I understand that their experience with the white man has not been positive and full of mutual trust. It’s challenging, and in fact you can’t do it, build trust just like that, you can’t, and you just do the best you can. You do the best you can with what you’ve got …

Every time we talked about “being partners, when you win, we win too,” we got that look that said, “White boy, you just don’t understand nothing.” And Columbus was sitting there, he was one of the stronger leaders, Columbus said, “You mean, if we pays you back, you don’t go away?” I said, “No, you pay us back, we’re still with you, we’re still partners. We’re in this together, and we stay with you.” And he says, “But if we pays you back, I wants you to go away.”

It was a powerful lesson. He did not want any partnership with a white man. I didn’t hear it well at that time. So, we ended up not doing very much with them. Sure enough, it was 15 years later, and I’m down in Austin, Texas, and we’re doing a big accountability meeting, and there’s the organizer who I’d met in Mississippi, and he says, “Do you remember me?”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember you” I said. “What’re you doing?”

“I’m organizing in Louisiana now…Remember Columbus?”

“Yeah, I remember Columbus.”

“He owns the second biggest pallet company in Mississippi.”

I said, “No shit.”

“Remember that little coop the woodcutters started? It’s the third biggest credit     union in Mississippi.”

“No shit.”

NBS: That’s a good story.

GSS: That’s a good story. We thought we’d failed, yah, and we just hadn’t realized how much race was out there to make real partnership impossible. And so we sort of sat with our wounds, and left, but we left a seed there.

NBS: Wasn’t your sister married to somebody who was black?

GSS:  I believe my little sister had a black lover.

NBS: So they can come together.

GSS: They can, well, come together, but not in the manner we envisioned at EDI.

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