The Southeast Project on Human Needs and Peace

The Southeast Project on Human Needs and Peace, which has served as a catalyst for the victorious organizing by tenants in Marrero, Louisiana, was initiated in 1982 by the Institute for Southern Studies. 

The Institute launched the project to complement its publication of Waging Peace, and then, as is its practice with organizing efforts — spun off the Southeast Project as an independent entity. The Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice (SOC), and War Resisters League Southeast, which work to link the issues of peace and human needs, joined as co-sponsors of the original project and have continued its work. 

The initial strategy behind the project called for building a stronger peace and justice movement in the South by creating coalitions between existing grassroots economic-survival groups and peace groups. In 1982, veteran journalist and organizer Pat Bryant left his job as an editor at Southern Exposure to direct the project. For the better part of a year, Bryant traveled the South and worked intensively in six communities to put diverse groups in touch with each other and build working relationships. Some tenuous coalitions emerged but did not last. 

"We soon realized that this was not the way to build a lasting movement," Bryant says. "It's the way people have usually tried to build coalitions, and it has usually failed. It's going at things backward." 

Bryant notes that such coalitions necessarily involve bridging formidable chasms. "Most organized groups of poor people are black; most existing peace organizations are white," he says, "so that means you've got to bridge the black-white chasm. And then there's the barrier of class." 

Such coalitions, Bryant maintains, are possible. But unless they start with grassroots groups that have developed their own strength to the point where they can provide leadership, the white middle-class groups become the central force and the needs of poor people get lost in the shuffle. Then the coalition falls apart, says Bryant, not because anybody gets mad and goes home, but because poor people lose interest. 

So the Southeast Project on Human Needs and Peace decided to start at the other end: to build the strength of grassroots groups first, with the expectation that these groups would then reach out to form coalitions. 

The project chose the tenant movement as a starting point, according to Bryant, because tenants in public and federally subsidized housing are literally struggling to survive today and desperately need organization. They also have a proud heritage of struggle in the South; tenants formed one of the strongest and most lasting movements that grew out of the civil-rights upsurge. Furthermore, Bryant notes, the housing issue should be a great unifier: everybody needs decent housing, and a massive program of housing construction could solve the nation's unemployment problem. 

With limited resources, Southeast Project strategists knew they could not work everywhere. They picked the Gulf Coast, because by 1982 tenants were beginning to organize anew there and were asking for the project's help. "We felt that if we could build a good model it could be replicated in many places," Bryant notes. "And that is what we have done." 

Bryant says the thrust of the project's work is a training program that helps grassroots leaders develop and become effective organizers. He also says the project operates on the assumption that some important victories can be won right now, things that will improve the lives of tenants, as has happened in Marrero. 

"But we also know the basic problems of poor people cannot be solved until national priorities change from war to the meeting of human needs," he says. "Local organizers are being dishonest if they don't tell people that. So we link up the local and global issues." 

The Southeast Project is not trying to recruit troops from among the poor for the peace movement that exists, Bryant stresses. Rather, it envisions a new peace movement — a peace and justice movement, led by poor people, mainly people of color, with the needs of the grassroots at its center. 

"In Marrero and elsewhere on the Gulf Coast," he says, "we've taken a giant step toward our objective of building at the grassroots. People in these organizations are now asking others — peace activists, church folk, union members, students — to join them in a new coalition. We hope the response of other groups will be positive. If it is, we'll have the kind of coalition that can turn the country around."