Gray Panthers

Gray Panthers

http://www.zmag.org/zmag/viewArticle/21853

July 2009
By Eric Laursen

Gray Panthers
By Roger Sanjek
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009, 298 pp.

The second Bush administration had just begun and the American war in
the Middle East was grinding along in its deadly, directionless way
when I was contacted by an organizer with a New York City group
called Grandmothers Against the War. Eighteen of her comrades had
been arrested at the Times Square Recruiting Center the previous fall
when they tried to enlist to replace the young people serving in
Bush's occupation of Iraq. They were about to go on trial for
allegedly blocking pedestrian traffic.

Over the next year and a half, I helped write and circulate many
press releases for the Grandmothers. I sometimes took part in antiwar
actions with them and other groups they worked with. I also started
to learn more about these elder activists. They had a shrewd way of
going against people's stereotypes about older people, while using
those preconceptions creatively to connect with the public. It was
fun, it got attention, and it fostered a more decentralized,
inclusive activist culture.

That approach had its roots­as did some of the Grandmothers­with the
Gray Panthers, one of the more remarkable movements to emerge from
the 1960s. Superficially, the Panthers were a pressure group for the
rights and dignity of the aged. But like other emblematic 1960s
movements, including Students for a Democratic Society and the Black
Panther Party, they built their activism on a vision of a new society
in which elderly people could achieve greater control of their lives
by working through a model of community partly based on mutual aid.
They challenged every social assumption about how and where the
elderly should live, how they interact with younger people, and even
how they should conduct their sex lives.

If that put them beyond the pale of much conventional politics, it
also made them one of the most recognizable activist groups of the
time. That's partly because the Gray Panthers wanted more than simply
to secure more rights and resources for their "interest group." They
sought to change the way the public viewed the elderly and, beyond
that, the social role people were expected to play at every stage of
life. They launched a nationwide Media Watch that spotted and called
out stereotypical portrayals of the aged. Yet they also took full
advantage in the early 1970s when the media became enchanted with the
image of little old ladies and gentlemen forming picket lines and
borrowing the name of a black revolutionary movement.

They returned the favor in 1973 when Bobby Seale was running for
mayor of Oakland and the Black Panthers in that city were enduring
intense pressure from police, FBI, and other agencies. As part of
their Project SAFE (Seniors Against a Fearful Environment), the
Oakland Gray Panthers arranged for Black Panther teams to escort
seniors who lived in dangerous neighborhoods. An obvious and
practical response to an everyday problem, it also emphasized the
Gray Panthers' solidarity with the movements of other excluded and
disadvantaged groups. It was part of an endlessly creative effort to
muddle society's expectations and open up new possibilities for how
groups like the elderly and inner-city African Americans could
interact with each other.

The Gray Panthers have also persisted. Despite a period of decline
and identity crisis, the organization survived and began to
revitalize itself in the new century, meanwhile spreading its unique
activist approach through groups like Grandmothers Against War. But
the Panthers' social vision­which included intergenerational housing,
community-run clinics emphasizing preventive care, and a linkage
between social services and economic democracy­may be the most
intriguing thing about them today. In the early years of the
movement, that vision was built on the presumption that an affluent
society should be able to perfect itself. But it also offers at least
some partial answers to our current dilemma, namely, how to
collectively define and fulfill our social needs at a time when
government is retreating from the provision of social services and an
increasingly rapacious economic elite fights to maintain its grip on power.

"Gray Panthers are out to make old a beautiful thing, not something
to be hidden but something to be declared and affirmed," founder
Maggie Kuhn said, explaining the Panthers' project. "The thing that
we're up to is that life is a continuum and age is a period of
fulfillment, of continued growth and creativity where the inputs, the
experience of a lifetime can be related to the group of people who
are coming into their creative productive years, and to our young people."

This conception of life has clear practical implications today, when
more and more working families find themselves simultaneously raising
children and caring for aging relatives. A fruitful place to start
exploring such connections is the new book Gray Panthers, a long
needed history of the movement, by Roger Sanjek, a sociologist who
has also been an on-and-off participant for more than 30 years. His
book is concise and slightly breathless as it crams a great deal of
struggle, accomplishment, and personal drama into just under 300 pages.

The Gray Panthers conceived of themselves as a multigenerational
movement and they worked on an astonishingly wide range of issues at
once, including social justice and antiwar causes not directly
related to aging. This is part of what continues to make them of
interest to contemporary activists trying to forge connections
between different but related struggles, and Sanjek was right to
encompass as much of their story as possible in his book.

By far the highest-profile Gray Panther was Kuhn, a career activist,
organizer, and program coordinator for the Young Women's Christian
Association­and later the United Presbyterian Church­who began
putting the idea together for a broad-based movement of socially
conscious elderly when she herself faced mandatory retirement at 65.
Sanjek does his best not to let Kuhn dominate his book, giving plenty
of space to other important Gray Panthers, including Lillian
Rabinowitz, who founded the Berkeley network, Frances Klafter, Elma
Griesel, and New York organizers Lillian Sarno and Sylvia Wexler.

But the center of gravity keeps shifting back to Kuhn who emerges as
a remarkable activist and visionary, as well as a media magnet who
made the Panthers a pop cultural presence as well as an effective
movement. Partly this was because she was an eloquent speaker and
conversationalist and a deeply appealing presence. Her appearances
with Phil Donahue and Johnny Carson were memorable and she was
constantly in the news and in print media during the 1970s and 1980s.
Another reason, however, was that she insisted, both within the Gray
Panthers and in public, on centering elder activism around a broader
social vision, not just the issue of the moment.

Kuhn lived in an intergenerational household in Philadelphia that
served as a prefiguration of the kind of community she wanted the
Panthers to help build. At a time when it was still considered
unseemly, she insisted on talking about sex as an important part of
life for the elderly, including her longtime relationship with a
married man and later her involvement with a 21-year-old male Black
Panther. Breaking taboos was her way of broadening the discussion of
what life could be for the elderly and keeping the movement focused
on possibility rather than on the next strategic compromise.

Elderly people were one of the last and, superficially, the least
likely identity group to come to consciousness in the 1960s. But they
had every reason. At the time, a far higher percentage of older
Americans lived in poverty than the general population. Social
Security was not yet fully indexed to inflation and Medicare was just
getting started. Many of the elderly were warehoused in nursing
homes, often in deplorable conditions. If they wanted to keep leading
active lives, the cards were stacked against them. Big employers
generally enforced mandatory retirement rules and nowhere were
workplaces or public facilities required to accommodate their special needs.

The term "ageism" was coined in 1968, the year of uprisings, by
gerontologist Robert Butler as a catch-all for the host of demeaning
prejudices heaped on the old, ranging from the nasty (doddering,
"senile," crotchety) to the patronizing (passive, old-fashioned,
cute). Older people were starting to complain, get active, and form
groups to fight for their rights. The American Association of Retired
People (AARP) was launched in the late 1950s. The following decade
other large advocacy organizations appeared, including the
labor-backed National Council of Senior Citizens and the National
Caucus on the Black Aged.

They quickly began to make progress. In 1965, Congress passed
Medicare as well as the Older Americans Act, which funded a
collection of new service and employment programs for the elderly. A
year later came the first iteration of the Age Discrimination in
Employment Act (ADEA), which started the move to abolish compulsory retirement.

The Gray Panthers, who coalesced in 1972, were different, however.
They didn't aim to be a mass organization directed by a Washington
staff that mobilized its members from the top down. Instead, they
organized through locals or "networks" loosely joined to a national
office. At their peak in the early 1980s, the Panthers had only 5,000
to 6,000 members and 122 networks, whereas AARP's rolls topped 30
million. But the Panthers were hard-core, committed activists, many
of them veterans of the old left and the radical wing of the labor
movement, who joined because they wanted to give significant time and
creativity to the cause.

As such, they helped push other elder activists in a more aggressive
direction. Kuhn described the Gray Panthers as "gadflies to keep
older, more established...organizations moving toward ever more
radical goals." In this they weren't always successful. To give one
instance, they fought against, but failed to prevent, a restructuring
of Social Security in 1983 that raised payroll taxes, cut benefits,
and boosted the retirement age.

Attempting to testify before the Greenspan commission, which set out
the main elements of the restructuring, Kuhn was hauled away and
arrested, making headlines. Other advocacy groups for the aged went
along, however, because they felt it was the best deal they could
get. Their willingness to compromise marked the end of more than 40
years of expansion and improvement for America's support system for
the aged. Soon after, the movement against Social Security would
start to spread its caricature of the elderly as "greedy geezers"
devouring the resources of the young.

But the Gray Panthers were influential beyond their numbers in
pushing for nursing home reform, an end to age discrimination in
hiring, long-term care insurance, and better services that would help
the elderly to lead more independent lives. They fought hard for a
national health care system and forged strong alliances with
influential figures such as Representatives Ron Dellums and Claude
Pepper, Senator Paul Wellstone, and Ralph Nader. They participated
just as actively in the campaigns for a nuclear freeze and an end to
U.S. intervention in Central America and its support for apartheid
South Africa.

From the beginning, the Gray Panthers regarded these other causes as
integral to their mission. This had fundamentally radical
implications, tying the Panthers philosophically to other groups that
understood the need to establish a degree of autonomy and control of
their environment if they wanted to improve and achieve respect for
their lives. For instance, the innovative Over 60 Health Center,
which the Gray Panthers opened in Berkeley in 1977, was the product
of their desire not just for a clinic that specialized in their
needs, but one that emphasized preventive care and was run by the
community of users, not just professionals who provided the service.

Shared housing­"congregate living arrangements" in which people from
a span of generations came together to form a household or family of
choice­was one of the Gray Panthers' most ambitious concepts.
Networks in Berkeley, Brooklyn, Denver, and Boston explored the idea.
A group of Gray Panthers in Boston actually secured a grant to open a
Shared Living Project residence, and the practice continues to spread
modestly in some neighborhoods.

What the Over 60 Clinic, shared housing, and some other Panther
projects had in common was an underlying, if not always conscious,
critique of the New Deal-Great Society model for social progress.
That model put the definition and fulfillment of social needs into
the hands of technocrats: those schooled, trained, and indoctrinated
to provide a professional "service." While it accomplished quite a
bit in the decades before Reagan and the "Great Reversal," it
provided very little voice for the people who participated in
government social programs and received government assistance.
Besides a name, one of the things the Gray Panthers shared with the
Black Panther Party was a desire to bring social assets back under
community control.

"Planning in an economic democracy must be under the control of
elected representatives of the people while utilizing the expertise
of scientists, technicians, economists, workers, [and] consumers," a
Gray Panther manifesto from 1977 said. "Some planning [should be
done] on the federal level, but much can be by regional and community
bodies [with] as much local control as possible."

The Gray Panthers, like most social democratic-leaning movements in
the 1970s, advocated a kind of decentralized mixed economy that
firmly subordinated private enterprise to public need. But that kind
of synthesis became less tenable after Reagan, when the continuing
conservative dominance in Washington persuaded many grassroots
progressive groups that they had to move to a more top-down model to
defend their gains and survive.

The Gray Panthers experimented with such a structure, which meant
investing more control in a Washington office that would mobilize the
local networks when an issue or a bill came up that required
"turnout" or contact with an elected official. They were also trying
to cope with a decline in the movement itself. Panther membership
fell in the 1980s, with the passing of some activists and, more
importantly, the failure of many younger members to stick with the
group, undermining the lifecycle model Kuhn and other early
organizers had hoped would sustain it. However, the movement survived
and in recent years has attempted to move back to the original network model.

But why the decline? The Gray Panthers were in part victims of their
own success. Many of the large and small initiatives they pursued in
the early decades­annual indexation of Social Security benefits, an
end to mandatory unemployment, kneeling buses­became reality. Others,
such as nursing home reform, national health care, and the
mainstreaming of the disabled have been tougher slogs, but now claim
much broader support. Meanwhile, the Gray Panther model of activism
has been diffused: in the U.S. with groups like Grandmothers Against
the War and in other countries through organizations that directly
copied it (Graue Panther in Germany, Les Panthères Grises in France, and more).

All of which points to the effectiveness of the simple but shrewd
frame the Gray Panthers presented: a group of elderly women and men
adopting a militant style of organizing that people had previously
assumed was reserved for the young. But the movement's survival also
suggests that they have benefited­may, ultimately, depend on­Kuhn's
insistent focus on a radical vision: in housing, health care
provision, sexual relationships. This aspect of the movement is
where, if the Gray Panthers persist, they could play an important
role, not only in pushing against social and economic barriers, but
in creating new ways to live beyond them.

"Until rigor mortis sets in," Kuhn said, "do one outrageous thing
every week," and she meant it.

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