Going to Roanoke

With over a month to go before Trump returns to office, a lot of people have written to me or said in person that they don’t know what’s going to happen. They’re afraid of the threats against immigrant families, both undocumented residents and U.S. citizens alike. They’re worried about trans kids, about a rollback on civil rights for Black people and LGBTQ+ folks, and a lot more.

Though the almost-comically unqualified characters already disgorged from Trump’s appointee clown car have identified some of their targets, it’s hard to be sure how far they’ll be able to take things or how best to trip them up. People are saying they can’t figure out how to prepare.

I spoke at an event in Roanoke last week devoted to that puzzle—an event I’ll discuss more later. One person there asked me to go through worst-case scenarios of what a second Trump administration could look like, based on history of other countries I’d studied. I touched briefly on a few things but encouraged everyone to think about how to take action, instead of spending tons of energy trying to picture the worst outcomes. It’s necessary to ponder this scary possibilities enough to choose what direction to go. But it’s just as important not to drown yourself in despair get paralyzed. Instead, it’s time to plan and prepare.

To that end, I want to address organizing that people have done under repression and authoritarian regimes around the world. Some of their actions were planned, some were improvised, and a lot of them were carried out in very difficult straits, ones far worse than we face now.

Then I want to tell you about a project aimed at effective organizing that one person in Virginia (the state where I live) has put together in the month since the election. And at the end, I’ll offer some thoughts on the kinds of things just about everyone might be able to do.

At war and in camps

The examples of past organizing I’ll give are situations in which everyday people were caught up in circumstances in which they had little time to plan or respond. They also had little on their side at the time in terms of legal and governmental protections. But they responded collectively in ways that demonstrated their power, drew attention to injustices, and in some cases, forced real change.

The first case case is modest but very much worth looking at. In Chile after the military coup that brought Pinochet to power in 1973, thousands of citizens were disappeared and killed. The government detained and tortured tens of thousands more.

Under dictatorship, women were encouraged to hew to traditional gender roles, focus on domestic issues, and stay out of politics. They began to meet in sewing and craft groups that turned into grass-roots pro-democracy groups. The women made these tapestries, arpilleras, that often illustrated the political repression they experienced. The tapestries were then were smuggled out of the country and sold abroad, with the funds helping these women and their families survive.

Meanwhile, the Archbishop of Santiago tried to protect human rights and organize against Pinochet’s government, eventually asking Pope Paul VI to help. With the backing of the pope, a religious human rights organization, the Vicariate of Solidarity, was established. The group tracked detentions, helped with legal defenses, and also fed and supported the poor during some of the most brutal years of suffering.

When I was in Chile, I met with Haydee Oberreuter, who had been a young member of Chile’s left-wing party, MAPU, when the generals seized power. Oberreuter, her mother, and her child had been held in various locations, and abused or tortured under the dictatorship. She talked to me about her time at Tres Alamos concentration camp, where the Vicariate of Solidarity actually managed to get a sewing machine into the camp for use by the women there. They were able to make crafts that could be smuggled out and sold to support their families while they were detained. It’s amazing what kind of organization and resistance can happen, even under severe conditions.

The next example took place in the camps of the Soviet Gulag in 1952. After guards had opened fire on some prisoners at Ekıbastūz, all the detainees refused to work the next day and, in the middle of a concentration camp, went on strike. They launched a parallel hunger strike, and both efforts went on for five days, until their demands were met.

The prisoners understood that they would eventually be punished. And in fact, Gulag officials ended up splitting up the prisoners who had joined together in solidarity, shipping them off in smaller groups to other camps.

In his book Death and Redemption, historian Stephen Barnes notes that this dispersal had the unintended effect of seeding organized dissident groups in other concentration camps across the Soviet Union, including resistance at the mines of the brutal camp at Vorkuta in the Arctic.

The third overseas example I want to talk about is very recent—civilian protests in Myanmar’s Kachin state just last year. The country of Myanmar has been under authoritarian rule by military junta for most of its history since gaining independence from Britain in 1948. I was in Western Myanmar in 2015, going into detention camps that held Rohingya Muslims, which I’ll talk about in another episode.

I went there during a period of transition away from dictatorship. But in 2021, the generals staged a coup to regain power, and the country erupted in civil war.

Heavy rare earth elements are used in electric vehicles and wind turbines, and mining these elements is a billion-dollar industry in Myanmar, with most of it happening in Kachin state. But the mining itself is illegal—Myanmar’s civilian government outlawed it in 2018, years before the coup.

And for almost as long as Myanmar has been under military dictatorship, the Kachin Independence Army has been fighting the dictatorship. Some mines in Kachin state are in areas under the control of the military dictatorship, while others are in regions controlled by the Kachin resistance. In either case, Chinese companies have been allowed to extract these elements, causing tremendous harm to the environment and residents.

On the effects of mining, one resident of Kachin state has said, “There are no longer fish in the waters… When the animals drink the water, they die.”

In the middle of a civil war in 2023, more than 1,000 villagers gathered to protest the mining and its effects on their communities, opposing the machinations of both the local independence forces and those aligned with the dictatorship. For a time, they forced a halt to mining operations. Their resistance has pressured the independence leadership to confront Chinese mining companies and is shifting the nature of geopolitics in the region.

These three cases may feel like an odd assortment to consider. But I wanted a wide range of examples to show how, even in the worst circumstances, everyday people can come together to consolidate their power and push to make things better. And I’ll note that though the settings for these actions are civil war and concentration camps, all three examples have to do with labor rights or exploitative bosses and corporations in some way.

An American legacy

That brings us to some extraordinary examples here in the U.S. Lately, we’ve heard Trump allies praising a vicious, racist deportation campaign against immigrants under the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s. But racist immigrant policies have been a mainstay of U.S. politics for more than a century. One particular example from 1931 known as the Lemon Grove Incident is worth exploring here.

At that time, Mexicans made up part of the population in Lemon Grove in San Diego County, California. In the wake of the economic hardship resulting from the Great Depression, anti-immigrant sentiment had been on the rise and was capitalized on for political ends. Following claims about Mexicans being unassimilable and alien, “Americanization” schools were launched as a fig leaf to create a more hostile environment for Mexican immigrant families and to introduce segregation in ways it hadn’t existed in many districts.

Returning from Christmas vacation that winter, the Mexican American children of Lemon Grove—the overwhelming majority of whom were U.S. citizens—returned to school only to be intercepted by their principal, who sent them to a different building for separate instruction. The children instead went home and told their parents what had happened.

The parents had no prior warning or time to plan, but they told their children not to go to the segregated building. They came together and formed a Comité de Vecinos—a neighborhood association—and brought a lawsuit.

Parents simply reacted in the moment and organized as best they could. In the end, their efforts would result in one of the earliest cases of successfully fighting classroom segregation in the United States. San Diego Judge Claude Chambers ruled in favor of the parents’ committee. Ironically, the school board’s failure to appeal the case to a higher court—one where they might have prevailed—led to this history being largely forgotten for decades.

In another example that took place more than a century before the Lemon Grove Incident, Elizabeth Freeman, an enslaved woman then known as “Mum Bett,” brought a court case in Massachusetts. Her master, a judge, had been involved in writing the 1773 Sheffield Declaration, which announced that “mankind in a state of nature are equal, free, and independent of each other, and have a right to the undisturbed enjoyment of their lives, their liberty and property.”

Similar rhetoric soon appeared in the Declaration of Independence then the constitution of Massachusetts in 1780. Reportedly, overhearing the discussions of those documents led Bett and an enslaved man to approach Theodore Sedgwick, an attorney who had also been involved in developing the Sheffield Declaration.

They asked Sedgwick for help with gaining their freedom. Their struggle became one of the test cases for slavery in Massachusetts—cases that led to it becoming the first state to abolish slavery in 1783. Bett changed her name to Elizabeth Freeman, and went to work for Sedgwick, later buying her own home and living a life of freedom and independence.

Much more recently—less than a decade ago—there were protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline. Amid reports that the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers moved the route of the pipeline away from Bismarck, the state capital, for fear any spill might contaminate the city’s drinking water, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe asserted treaty rights to bar the pipeline being rerouted through their territory.

The company building the pipeline dug through areas delineated as ancestral burial grounds. Private security guards set dogs loose on protesters. The protesters had some early wins, but eventually the Trump administration gave an easement for pipeline construction.

After court challenges, the easement was revoked, but the pipeline was allowed to stay in operation while a new environmental impact statement was prepared. This in-between state means that on a technical level, the pipeline is not operating legally, leaving it vulnerable to future challenges—though these challenges may be unlikely to succeed in the coming Trump administration, just as they were ignored under Biden.

Yet these protesters raised awareness nationally of the cruel and petty treatment of Native Americans, denied sovereignty even on reservations they were forced to accept—reservations which have been diminished and disturbed again and again. It’s a history that won’t be forgotten, because of the stand the community took. And the work that’s been done has left the door open to future progress.

In each of these cases, foreign and domestic, people were confronted with a danger in a vulnerable moment and found a way to resist. In some cases, the ways they organized led to clear victory. In other cases, they brought attention to something that would have happened invisibly. Even where harm could not fully be stopped, the people who organized laid down a marker to preserve a true history, one still being used to educate today, and one that may prevent future harm.

Closter to home

Some of this history may feel far away or distant in time. It might still be hard to think about what to work on before looming threats and strategies are put into action by the next Trump team. So I have an example of planning from the last month to share with you. It’s the kind of thing a lot of us could do.

I met Dina Imbriani earlier this year. She’s a good friend of a good friend of mine, and has made the Roanoke, Virginia, community her home. She runs an outdoor skills business that helps a lot of people. We stayed in touch.

We talked the week after the election, and she said she wanted to put an event together. She wanted to try to find a way to protect the people she saw as most at risk of being targeted in a second Trump administration: immigrants, refugees, trans kids, and women in need of reproductive health care.

The event took place on December 2nd. A few days later, I talked to Dina about exactly how she put it together. She said she’d called up Sam Rasoul, a Democratic Virginia state delegate representing part of the city of Roanoke.

“Sam being the guy he is,” she said, “of course he took the call and chatted, and was very much a voice of reason.”

Sam asked her questions like “What’s bothering you?” and “What matters most to you?” She mentioned her worry about women’s reproductive health, the refugee community, and the LGBTQ+ community, as well as veterans and seniors losing benefits.

Then, she said, Sam asked her, “What talents to you have?”

Dina realized she knew a lot of people, and many of them felt similarly about the results of the election. Sam asked if she thought she could bring twenty or thirty people together for a meeting. She was sure she could.

She approached the owner of the Grandin Theatre in Roanoke and asked for use of part of their space. She began by inviting people who were at least marginally known to her, because there had been a white supremacist banner hung, reportedly by Patriot Front, in Roanoke recently. She didn’t want the first gathering to be crashed by anyone looking for trouble.

I mentioned to Dina that not everyone has as much confidence as she does and asked what she would say to someone interested in doing something similar but who might feel intimidated.

“I would say to work from your strengths and talents,” she said, “and think about what talents are needed to pull something together.” If someone goes through the network of people they know, she suggested it would be possible to gather individuals with all the necessary skills.

Dina invited speakers from groups in Roanoke to talk about refugee and immigrant assistance, women’s reproductive health, diversity initiatives, and the LGBTQ+ community. (Roanoke, Sam mentioned, is not only a hub for refugees but also for women’s healthcare, now that pregnancy management is in crisis across many of the states that lie south of Virginia.)

Some sixty people showed up. Each speaker got five minutes to present the work they’re currently doing and the projects they hope to establish going forward under the new administration.

I drove down from northern Virginia to attend, and my friends Beth Macy and Tom Landon were there, too. The author of Dopesick and Raising Lazarus, Beth talked about harm reduction as a response to the opioid epidemic, something near and dear to her heart for years, as well as the new diaper bank in the city, Huddle Up Moms.

Tom, who works for Blue Ridge PBS, talked about how local media has been decimated. He stressed the importance of supporting a number of outlets, including Cardinal News, The Roanoke Times, and The Roanoke Rambler, so that the public can stay abreast of what’s happening in their community.

I spoke, too. I talked a little about who would be most vulnerable under a second Trump administration, and I told people to plug into networks now, before any new crisis hits. I encouraged the audience to contact their representatives about what was happening on the national level but to get busy building the kind of country they want to see right there in Roanoke on the local level.

By the end of the night, Sam had gathered an action list of specific tasks to help various groups and names of people willing to spearhead them. The audience called for a second meeting. Dina is planning a website for Do Good Virginia (though it’s still under construction for now!), and she’s coordinating with the many additional people who heard about the event by word of mouth.

Of course most people don’t live in the Roanoke area and can’t participate in Dina’s initiative. But anyone can look around in their own community for the kinds of groups she reached out to in hers.

Or you can consider helping out organizations from Mariame Kaba’s recommended groups, from the Palmetto State Abortion Fund to Chicago Books to Women in Prison and more. Kelly Hayes just posted a list of ways to support native people right now, which includes Indigenous Women Rising and Four Directions, a Native-led voting rights organization.

If you don’t have time, donations are crucial to some of these groups. If you don’t have money, then allocate the time you can carve out. Even if it’s not much, a little bit done regularly can make a difference.

You don’t need to assemble a huge group like Dina did. Elizabeth Freeman started out with just herself and a compatriot who was likewise enslaved. Sometimes tiny associations have a huge impact.

At this point, it might be tempting to say, “Why bother? The House and Senate will be against us and will just do everything Trump wants.” Or “The Supreme Court is just going to rubber stamp every stance the administration adopts.”

But no one is asking you to go on strike in a concentration camp of the Soviet Gulag. No one is asking you to sew crafts to support your family while being tortured in a Chilean detention camp. And if the courts are a challenge now, just recall how much more stacked against Elizabeth Freeman they were in 1781, or against the Lemon Grove immigrant families in 1931.

There’s really so much we can do. We still have five weeks to dig defensive lines and fortify the trenches to protect our communities and find ways to take care of the most vulnerable among us.

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