Richard W. Wise, Author

Even Peter Piper Picks

The Great South Kingstown Dump Picker's Rebellion

By Richard W. Wise

Copyright: 2023

"Hi, I don't know if you remember me," said the voice on the phone. "My name is Frank Frisella. I'm your mailman." Could there be a problem with the mail at 9:30 on a Friday night? I wondered. The voice continued.

"I was told maybe you could help us. Have you heard that the town council has closed the dump? Well, me and a bunch of other guys, you know, dump pickers—we don't see that the town has any right to stop us from picking at the dump."

I vaguely recalled Frank dressed in his gray postman's uniform, a dark-haired skinny guy with a long nose and a bright smile, but I'd had a tough week. My patience was wearing thin, but my curiosity was aroused. What does this nut want, I asked myself. He soon came to the point.

"I was told you are a community organizer and that you help people fight for their rights. Do you think you could help us organize for our right to pick the dump?"

Sure, I organize people. Groups against slumlords and neighborhood redlining, for constitutional and civil rights, but dump picker's rights? It sounded a little frivolous and totally beyond my experience.  I began to realize that the guy was serious and not wanting to jeopardize my mail delivery, so, I began asking questions. "Just how many dump-pickers are there?"

READ FREE: Fall Issue:Social Policy Magazine: 

https://www.socialpolicy.org/127-articles/current-issue/summer-2023/1283-fiction-even-peter-piper-picks.html

Moesha's apartment building was located on Boston's Boylston Street, just on the fringe of Jamaica Plain but still within the borders of Flynt's Project.  It was large, a nineteenth-century brick townhouse that had been broken up into rental units.  The outside looked ok, but the inside was another story.  The door lock was broken and the big entrance door yawned open into a dark hallway—unlit and dank, reeking with the sharp odor of urine. 

The entrance hall had been wallpapered, but whole strips had sloughed off the walls—like a snake shedding its skin—leaving exposed plaster and visible lath. Slum housing was nothing new to Flynt. He had grown up in the projects and as the sole black man training as a block organizer in South Providence in the early seventies, he had seen a whole lot worse. Read On

In her new book, After Redlining, The Urban Reinvestment Movement in the Era of Deregulation, Author Rebecca K. Marchiel, tells how a Alinsky style community organization discovered the economic underpinnings of urban disinvestment and developed a series of political strategies to successfully combat the forces that create urban slums. This is where the story begins, with The Organization for a Better Austin (OBA).

OBA's initial steps and mis-steps, eventually leading to effective solutions reveal a process whereby a group of neighborhood leaders, aided by professional community organizers, identified a process that had destroyed urban neighborhoods all over the country and revealed solutions that had stumped professional planners and urbanologists for decades.

Led by an Austin homemaker, Gale Cincotta and an Alinsky trained organizer named Shel Trapp, the peoples' organization expanded first to other Chicago neighborhoods. After determining that the solution required national legislation, organized a coalition of urban neighborhood groups called National People's Action (NPA) and pushed two pieces of legislation through Congress against the opposition of the Savings & Loan industry.

Meticulously researched and well written, Dr. Marachiel has told a story which badly needed telling. It is a story of ordinary people analyzing a problem, developing solutions, taking control of their shared destiny and making significant social change. For decades, experts viewing urban decay saw only what was in front of them; minorities, welfare recipients, municipal neglect, slumlords, blockbusters. They failed to detect the underlying economic conditions that permitted some of these actors to thrive. It shows the extraordinary things that ordinary people can do. I was one of the community organizers, working in Boston, who had a ringside view of this struggle. I highly recommend After Redlining.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHZz3Cfi4Ww&t=13s