Radical Success
Dan Clore
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
http://www.baltimoremagazine.net/article.asp?t=1&m=1&c=30&s=481&ai=87446
Radical Success
Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse defies the economy with a progressive
agenda and a new free school.
By Ron Cassie
On a late summer evening, a dozen students in their 20s and 30s take
seats around an oversized picnic table and on rows of bleachers inside
the Baltimore Museum of Art's geodesic dome. John Duda, one of the
founders of Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse collective, prepares to
lead tonight's class, "Urban Development as Counterinsurgency," but he
can't start. The students keep arriving.
"The problem with starting everything 15 minutes late," jokes Kate
Khatib, another Red Emma's collective founder, "is that people start
showing up 15 minutes late for everything."
By 6:15 p.m., more than 20 students have turned out for the two-hour
lecture, and the red-bearded Duda, in an engineer's cap, T-shirt, and
slacks, begins chronicling the history of urban architectural
development. The talk flows from city structure in the Middle Ages to
the 1860s "clearing" of the streets of Paris, to the 1968 riots and
present-day physical landscape of Baltimore. Inquiries arise about the
nature of private development and eminent domain, gated communities,
prisons, gentrification, ghetto containment, and highways that function
as de facto boundaries.
"Look at Martin Luther King Boulevard," Duda says. "You can walk across
at traffic lights�but it still cuts off West Baltimore from downtown and
the Inner Harbor."
The class is part of a summer pilot launch of Red Emma's Free School,
the latest project from the innovative team behind Red Emma's Bookstore
Coffeehouse in Mt. Vernon. The Free School offers no-tuition courses,
taught by volunteers with expertise in the subject area�Duda, for
example, is working toward a Ph.D. in intellectual history at Johns
Hopkins�and are open to anyone. Teachers, including poets, activists,
professionals, healing experts, bicycle mechanics, and bilinguals, teach
classes like "Gurlesque A Go-Go: A Bold Trend in Contemporary Poetry,"
"The Five Element Theory of Chinese Medicine," "Radical Geography,"
"Basic Bicycle Mechanics," and "Home Energy Audit�On a Budget!"
Most classes are offered at "2640," a two-year-old joint cultural arts
venture with St. John's United Methodist Church located at 2640 St. Paul
St., but that's about to change. Before class, Duda announces that Red
Emma's Free School has found a permanent home at 1323 N. Calvert St.
that will be ready for the fall semester. Two separate rooms, he
explains, with separate entrances, so classes may be offered simultaneously.
"A campus," Khatib says with a smile.
Another evening, two days after Duda's class, Red Emma's Bookstore
Coffeehouse bustles. The colorful space is jam-packed with books,
pamphlets, and posters, and overflowing with patrons. The free public
computer terminals are in steady use, customers sip Fair Trade coffee
and work on personal laptops, friends meet for vegan sandwiches, and
walk-ins stop by to peruse the shelves. At 8 p.m., a small audience
arrives for a screening of the Vietnam-era anti-war film, Winter Soldier.
A week later, a larger crowd gathers at 2640 for the next in Red Emma's
summer documentary series, Fresh, about alternatives to industrial
farming. Other recent events include a screening of Live Nude Girls
Unite!, an award-winning documentary about the organizing efforts of San
Francisco strippers; a slideshow by author Jeff Perry based on his
biography of turn-of-the-century Harlem activist Hubert Harrison; and
performances by experimental orchestra Second Nature and
singer-songwriter Kimya Dawson, who was featured on the Juno soundtrack.
Earlier this spring, Red Emma's hosted The City From Below, a three-day
national organizing conference. In September, it hosted the Radical
Bookfair Pavilion at the Baltimore Book Festival for the second straight
year, scheduling Ralph Nader, Bill Ayers, and Amiri Baraka, among others.
As economic conditions force for-profit and nonprofit enterprises
everywhere to make cuts or shut down, Red Emma's is expanding. Its
events, combined with the year-round poetry readings, book signings, art
openings, and concerts, mark the small bookstore-coffeehouse's five-year
evolution into a thriving lefty hub.
The Free School project is the latest innovation from Red Emma's, which
continues to thwart conventional capitalist wisdom and prove that
radical ideals haven't disappeared�at least not in Charm City.
"Red Emma's has become absolutely indispensable for both activists and
writers," says Dave Zirin, author of A People's History of Sports in the
United States and sports editor for The Nation. Zirin, who lives outside
of Washington, D.C., appeared at the Radical Bookfair Pavilion last
year. "Everyone I meet there is generous, collaborative, and proudly
nonsectarian," Zirin adds. "It's a store with a mission, and a mission
worth supporting."
Red Emma's history dates back to 2004, when Fells Point radical
bookstore Black Planet went under. Four employees�Duda, Khatib, Cullen
Nawalkowsky, and Andrew Byrne�teamed with a few other like-minded locals
and opened Red Emma's as a worker-owned and operated bookstore-coffeehouse.
"A great space, great rent, and a landlord who allowed us to do our
project," says Khatib, explaining how Red Emma's got off the ground. "We
came up with less than $10,000 to get started. No loans, no grants. And
we got a lot of stuff donated."
Red Emma's original model was as a traditional�if there is such a
thing�"infoshop," a storefront that serves to distribute anarchist,
progressive, leftist books, magazines, posters, DVDs, and T-shirts. It
took its name from Emma Goldman, one of the best-known U.S. anarchist
activists from the early 20th century.
On its website, Red Emma's defines itself as a collective in which "the
real management of the company is carried out in a directly democratic
and egalitarian manner."
Today, prospective collective members serve on a trial basis,
volunteering hours at the bookstore, attending organizational meetings,
and working at various events until, and if, they seek and are approved
for full-fledged collective member status.
"I think most of us thought there was at least a 50 percent chance we
wouldn't survive a year," says Khatib, who met Duda while earning her
master's degree at University of Amsterdam's School of Cultural Analysis
and also works for the collectively-run AK Press. Based in Oakland, AK
opened an office in Baltimore partly because of the groundwork laid by
Red Emma's.
Khatib stresses that a key to Red Emma's staying power was an early
commitment to creating a friendly local coffee shop vibe among the
political literature, making sure neighborhood residents of all walks of
life felt welcome. "We wanted foot traffic," she says. "That was
important to keeping us afloat."
Collective members identify three missions for Red Emma's: to be an
educational resource, as with the Free School; to create space in the
city for other collective, radical, artistic, and educational projects;
and to be a model and help other collective-minded folks get their own
ideas off the ground�as they have helped the annual Baltimore D.I.Y.
Fest and the collectively-run Baltimore Bicycle Works.
But, members stress, Red Emma's is not about proselytizing. "The Free
School, like 2640, is not intended to be a platform for Red Emma's to
espouse our beliefs but a platform for others," Khatib says. "Ideally,
it's intended as a resource for those who want to teach and those who
want to learn."
Red Emma's non-hierarchical model and anarchist philosophy are actually
based on values a lot of people share, says Towson professor Paul
Pojman, who has admired Red Emma's organization for years, and
volunteers with the Free School.
"Personal responsibility, local organization, non-hierarchical methods,"
Pojman says, are concepts most people support. "Anarchy is not against
order," he says. "It's against 'rule.' That's a big misconception."
Pojman plans to teach "Anarchism as Social Practice," with others at the
Free School this fall.
John Berndt, one of several collective owners of Waverly bookstore
Normals, who is also an experimental musician and founder of the
critically-acclaimed High Zero Festival, has performed several times at
2640. He describes Red Emma's evolution as "fascinating."
"I'm amazed by the cooperative spirit, intelligence, and reasonableness
of the people there�and the high-caliber, intelligent, multi-faceted
programs they present," he says. "And for them to collectively function
as a well-run business is remarkable."
Red Emma's list of allies now includes everyone from the Baltimore
Independent Media Center to the United Workers, which Red Emma's
supported in its successful campaign for higher wages for Camden Yards
employees.
The collective itself is growing too. Members and volunteers are an
eclectic group of college and grad students, nine-to-fivers, union
organizers, band roadies, and punks�those who work enough to have a
place to shower and something to eat, as Byrne puts it.
"One member works at OSHA," Byrne says, referencing the federal agency
that enforces health and safety regulations. "[Co-founder] Cullen
[Nawalkowsky] tours nationally as a DJ. We even had a ex-military drill
instructor. She was about five feet tall, but when she asked you to do
something behind the counter at the cafe, you jumped."
Red Emma's founders have enjoyed watching other collectively-run
businesses in Baltimore, like The Hexagon and Wham City, take root.
"There is this kind of unexpected 'good thing' happening," says Byrne.
Along the way, Red Emma's members have helped Wooden Shoe Books, a
decades-old Philadelphia infoshop, on their restructuring, and have also
advised Leaflet Collective in Pittsburgh and the new, worker-owned
Firestorm Cafe & Books in Asheville, NC.
But through all of its community-empowering, coalition-building, and
collective-consulting, Red Emma's remains, at heart, a
bookstore-coffeeshop. From its inception, the store has been a tourist
destination for youthful travelers, bookstore aficionados, and radical
activists.
"We've had people come in who knew Emma Goldman," says Khatib. "There
are a lot of old revolutionaries out there. We've had parents come in
with daughters they named after Emma Goldman who say they've heard about
the store and just had to stop in."
Khatib still loves "seeing people's eyes open" when they first enter the
cafe and see all the books and magazines that aren't on display at
Barnes & Noble. Her biggest joy comes from watching new people get
involved, she says, either in a Red Emma's project or their own endeavor.
"I like that people know us from all over, and come in when they're
traveling, and that more andmore authors call us if they're reading in
Philadelphia, New York, or D.C., and say they want to do something
here," Khatib says. "And that people from much larger metropolitan
areas, like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, view Baltimore as a
place where things are happening today."
The icing on the cake, Khatib says, is that even the local bureaucratic
establishment, such as the Baltimore Office of Promotion & Arts, which
contacted Red Emma's about hosting the Radical Bookfair Pavilion,
respects the work it's done.
"In that way," Khatib says, "it's kind of nice achieving status as a
cultural institution."
This article appeared in the October 2009 issue of Baltimore magazine
--
Dan Clore
New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
(Wait for the new edition: http://hplmythos.com/ )
Lord We�rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
"From the point of view of the defense of our society,
there only exists one danger -- that workers succeed in
speaking to each other about their condition and their
aspirations _without intermediaries_."
--Censor (Gianfranco Sanguinetti), _The Real Report on
the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy_