November 2006
STREETVIBES
Who was buddy gray? buddy gray (he preferred his name in lower case letters) was a war resister, carpenter, preservationist, poet, community journalist, baseball coach, and friend to many. And he was known best as a relentless and uncompromising advocate for low-income housing and other services for the poor. He came from a small-town working-class family to live in Over-the-Rhine because he believed in the cause of liberation. He had decided when he was still a young man that he could not tolerate the poverty and discrimination he saw in the world around him. So he entered what his brother Jack called “a journey of fearless, selfless service.” Many people are dedicated to feeding and housing the poor. Others are dedicated to organizing for change. Buddy’s insight was to bring these two ways of service together. He saw the people of Over-the-Rhine, not just as downtrodden souls to be given a meal or a bed for the night, but partners in a struggle to change the system and heal society. Therefore, buddy worked to organize people and groups into an Over-the-Rhine Peoples Movement that includes organizations like the Drop Inn Center, ReSTOC, the Over-the-Rhine Housing Network, and the local, state, and national Coalitions for the Homeless. He worked with many homeless people who are now leaders in that movement. His capacity for work was legendary. Within a day’s time, he might attend a City Council hearing, work on the plumbing of a ReSTOC
building, help an old man get off a park bench and into the shelter of the Drop Inn Center, write a poem, and do the notes for the next day’s meetings. He lived very simply, in an apartment on Race Street, owned little, and cared nothing for fashion or show. As Jack Gray said at the memorial after buddy’s death, “He feared no man. He took nothing and he served everyone. He worked to feed the hungry, free the captive, and heal the sick.” Many people are alive and living healthy lives today because of the work of buddy gray. He earned, thereby, the respect and love of many. He also earned the bitter hatred of some real estate developers and some politicians, including, of course, some developer-politicians. For months before his death, an unknown person (or persons, or class of persons) maintained a hate campaign which featured death threats, stop-signshaped stickers reading “NO WAY BUDDY GRAY,” and, if you called a certain number, a seven-minute, antibuddy recorded phone message. On November 15, 1996, during a meeting at the Drop Inn Center, buddy was shot and killed by a mentally ill, formerly
homeless man buddy had befriended. buddy was 46 years old. No one knows if the asassin had contacts with the NO-WAY-BUDDY-GRAY campaign. No one knows how he obtained the expensive pistol he used in the shooting. Within an hour of buddy’s death, the phone recording was disconnected. Eight days later, over two thousand people from Cincinnati, Boston, Washington, Chicago, and other cities marched silently through the streets in buddy gray’s honor and in support of the homeless. buddy gray lives on because the work he started lives on. He lives on because his vision lives on. He lives on because we carry on his work and his vision.
Learning from buddy gray by Thomas A. Dutton buddy was arguably the most misunderstood man in Cincinnati. I first met buddy in 1981, when I started attending meetings that resulted in the Over-the-Rhine Comprehensive Plan of 1985. I have learned much from buddy gray. Let me just share two examples. First, buddy was not alone in his founding of institutions like the Drop Inn Center and his leadership of the Over-the-Rhine People’s Movement. Not by a long shot. And while my words here remembering buddy’s lessons may glorify a single, heroic life (as commemorations tend to do), I do not forget the many that worked closely with him. This was one of buddy’s greatest strengths, to effect a democratic, multi-voiced leadership. Decisions made in the interest of the People’s Movement always came out of the voices of many. Second, buddy was a thinker who integrated all sorts of issues into a whole. This was especially so in how he analyzed Over-theRhine through an internationalist lens. He saw the circumstances in Over-the-Rhine— homelessness, economic injustice, class inequality, inadequate housing, intractable poverty—as different colors of the same painting, a painting that now due to globalization is of worldly proportions. For buddy, Over-theRhine was the domestic face of world imperialism, where the for-profit system of capitalism, now penetrating everywhere in its transnational corporate form, constitutes the
greatest threat to democracy the world-over and oppresses people of color and immigrants here at home. Over-the-Rhine is an example of America’s own structural adjustment program. Imperialism and democracy are not bedfellows. The former kills the latter. Similar to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who “didn’t believe that capitalism as it was constructed could meet the needs of poor people,” buddy was not overt in his use of this kind of language, though it came out in many of his poems. Consider this stanza from his “How Did It Happen”(1989): As long as churches and synagogues and temples do reverent rituals for rightsand speak in pious platitudes of peace and take no angry action that stops American Business as usual to end homelessness, imperialism. Some may interpret this stanza as a critique of religion, but I am more fascinated by his linking of homelessness and imperialism. Imperialism and homelessness are bound together. You cannot know one without the other. And again, the stakes are high: imperialism kills the homeless. This was buddy’s important insight and a lesson for all of us. All movements organized for social justice and social rights should continue to see themselves in this larger picture and analyze liberation movements the world-over in order to
understand their own conditions more deeply. Early on, buddy sensed the constriction of “community organizing” and recognized that organizing at the community level had to link to national and international levels. For those of us who have learned from buddy and remain inspired by his vision, we need to be vigilant against what scholar Arjun Appadurai calls “econocide,” which refers to new modes of violence that are playing out across the world in light of the massive inequalities and the rapidity of change produced by world capitalism. To Appadurai econocide does not just mean that whole sections of the world are undergoing death by economic means. He has something more sinister in mind: “Econocide is a worldwide tendency to arrange the disappearance of the losers in the great drama of globalization.” “Arrange the disappearance”— displacement by gentrification? Crime “prevention” by police sweeps and mass incarceration? Social cleansing by criminalizing the homeless? Relocate the Drop Inn Center? buddy had the insight of econocide 35 years ago, which is why he aligned with the homeless and the poor, so that they would not disappear and hopefully come to be understood by those more fortunate as having their own gifts to contribute to the human struggle. A lesson to us all is to overcome the obstacles of our privilege and power that too often restrict our own learning, so that those less fortunate are not made to disappear.
Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless