Longtime activist James Keck said he believes that there is tremendous validity to the expression "truth to power," and that the best exemplars of of that are young people.
"Young people have their own insight," he explained to Windy City Times. "Their tenacity and challenges to the status quo [are] healthy as all get out."
An exuberance and passion to do what's right for the community has long fueled Keck, who has been involved with organizing since he was in his teens. He took part in the work surrounding Rev. Martin Luther King's Chicago campaign in the mid-'60s, and went on to become "a full-blown professional community organizer" for labor and social-justice causes. Now a professional addictions and mental health counselor, he's also taking on his former employer, which he alleges promoted an abusive working atmosphere.
A native of the West Side, Keck began his activist work when he was a student at Quigley Preparatory Seminary North.
"The neighborhood was going through racial change," he said. "In those days, my home was right on the border where change was taking place. It could be extremely violent—house burnings, gang fights. It was extremely ugly."
He became interested in studying about racial politics and went to the library and asked for a book on the topic. A librarian provided him with a copy of Saul Alinsky's Reveille for Radicals.
"I read it, and I fell in love with it. I thought this was the greatest thing since Wonder Bread," recalled Keck. He saw in the book that Alinsky was from Chicago. Keck looked up Alinsky's organization in the phone book.
"I'm 15 years old and I call the office and I ask for Saul D. Alinsky, because I want to meet with him. The woman on the other end said, 'Saul is out of town but there is a local organizer named Tom Gaudette who you can talk to.' He was a Chicago organizer and an icon in his own right. He met with me for three hours and explained Alinsky-organizing to me."
Gaudette encouraged Keck to try to convince his local pastor to try to raise $5,000 for a neighborhood organizer. Keck and his father met the pastor.
"He wouldn't give it to us," Keck said. "As a typical 15-year-old, I'm really ticked off because this guy won't do the right thing."
The incident stuck with him for two years, until a sports injury sidelined him for a summer. A local priest whom Keck described as "a radical" invited Keck to help out at a priory in Garfield Park. One day, as he was mopping the floor, he overheard the priest take part in a meeting about the racial politics in Keck's neighborhood.
"From that day on, I was going to be a civil-rights worker," he said. "That was in '64 or '65."
In 1965, groundwork for Rev. Martin Luther King's Chicago Campaign began. Officially announced in early 1966 by King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Chicago Campaign was an expansion of their work from the South to the North, where they would fight inequities in housing, education and employment. Keck said his recollections were significantly different than how King's time in Chicago was portrayed in the press at the time.
"The Chicago press loves to frame things as one person against another, so when Dr. King came to Chicago, it was 'Old Mayor Daley vs. Dr. King,' and 'Old Mayor Daley Outwitted Him'—wrong. That's not what happened," he said.
Keck explained that King was invited to Chicago by local civil-rights groups who had a hard time coalescing themselves.
"He was given carte-blanche, but his team couldn't step foot into Chicago without the infighting starting all over again," he said. "It immediately focused on Rev. James Bevel, who was a genius when it came to strategy. There were civil-rights leaders who fought him tooth-and-nail, and undermined him and what Dr. King was trying to do here."
One such example, Keck explained, was when Daley and King met in order for Daley to prevent a march in suburban Cicero, a location the mayor feared would lead to a violent outbreak.
"[Cicero] was a scary place for Black people," Keck said. "Black people may have worked in businesses there, but they had to clear out before dark. In the middle of that agreement [meeting between Daley and King], two of the Chicago leaders lead a march in Cicero, in defiance of Dr. King. They took his hand away from him. It turned out to be a bust. The people of Cicero stayed away from the march. … It weakened Dr. King's bargaining position with the mayor. It fizzled."
Keck lamented that many of the city's organizers stayed in their positions for too long, effectively making Chicago a parochial, small town, adding, "Alinsky said that, for anyone with an organization for more than five years, it was time to move on. There's a lot of truth to that."
Keck now marvels at his own chutzpah at the time, and admitted that he at one point butted heads with King's team. When he was assigned as a marshal surrounding King, and was wearing a hard-hat, one of King's colleagues asked Keck to remove the hat per King's request, since it was "theoretically provoking violence by anticipating violence."
Keck refused. "I looked at him and said, 'You tell Dr. King, when it comes to this march, I know my people, and if I'm going to keep an eye on my own people, I need to protect my head.' Here I was, 18 years old, and I said that."
He eventually married, and did not come out of the closet as a gay man until the mid-'80s. "It had a lot to do with my becoming an alcoholic; I'm a recovering alcoholic. I had kind of a classic coming-out thing—I went to the bars every night. In my age group, that's what you did if you were closeted. You showed up at the bars, and they were the social scene. I had a high tolerance for beer, and I was stupid enough to think drinking beer couldn't hurt me. I was very fearful because I was a political personality in the city. Nobody picked up on it," Keck said.
He became a counselor, he said, largely because he wanted a profession wherein he could be open about being gay and being in recovery. But lately he's been making public appeals for persons in the mental health professions to adopt a grassroots-style embrace of organizing and unionizing, a stance fueled by the treatment of employees he alleges he saw at his former employer.
Keck said he's been distressed seeing mental health service providers favor models of leadership and decision-making that benefit the bottom line more than patient outcomes and employee morale. He has long been waiting to hear back from the Illinois Department of Human Rights about a complaint of discrimination and retaliation he registered against that previous employer, the Gateway Alcohol & Drug Treatment Centers.
In November, 2015, Keck summed up his position in an opinion piece he published for LinkedIn Pulse.
"Just as the use of idioms and metaphors is essential in our clinical work, the same can be said for organizing and advocacy," Keck wrote. "However, when dealing with adversaries as slick and amoral as can now be found leading all too many service providers, we must understand that pleasantries and appeals to conscience or reason are, for all intent and purposes, exercises in futility. Such folks will not concede wealth and dominance so easily or without a fight. We must, therefore, learn together to carry a new tune."
